The Whitechapel Whirlwind: The Jack Kid Berg Story

By John Harding

Jack Kid Berg dominated boxing in the early 1930s like no other British-born boxer before or since. Born of immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, he grew up in the East End of London, gaining a fearsome reputation for scrapping in the streets of Whitechapel. Berg's American battles with Tony Canzoneri and Kid Chocolate gained him worldwide fame. His 1930 victory over Mushy Callahan made him world junior welterweight champion, and he won the British lightweight title at his first attempt in 1934. Old-timers recalled, "When you think Berg is going to slow down, he goes faster. He punched so fast he demoralized opponents rather than demolished them. No boxer was bolder and gamer." The Whitechapel Whirlwind features exclusive interviews with Berg in the years before his death in 1991, and makes deft use of eyewitness accounts, newspaper cartoons, statistics, and photos of Jack's 200-plus fights. Never a man to display false modesty, Berg is brutally frank about his wins, his losses, even his love life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785314773

John Harding

John Harding is one of Britain’s most versatile contemporary novelists. He is the author of five novels. Born in a small village in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, he was educated at the village school and read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His latest novel, The Girl Who Couldn’t Read (2014) is a sequel to Florence and Giles that can be read as a standalone novel by those who haven’t read the earlier book.

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First published by Pitch Publishing, 2018

Pitch Publishing

A2 Yeoman Gate

Yeoman Way

Durrington

BN13 3QZ

www.pitchpublishing.co.uk

© John Harding, 2018

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1 How it all began

  2 The fledgling fighter

  3 Prize fight debut (1923)

  4 Kid Berg at 14 (1923/24)

  5 Pride and pet of Premierland (1925)

  6 Harry Corbett: a tough option (1926)

  7 Putting on the style (1927)

  8 Chicago debut (1928)

  9 New York sensation (1929)

10 Champion of the world? (1930)

11 The roughest of the rough (1930)

12 A meeting with Kid Chocolate (1930)

13 The private life of a gladiator (1930)

14 Canzoneri’s revenge (1931)

15 The iron man melts (1931)

16 The film star weds (1932–33)

17 British lightweight champion (1934)

18 Second stardom (1934–36)

19 Battling in Brooklyn (1938–39)

20 The Peter Pan of boxing (1939–45)

Epilogue

The Last Word

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Cartoonists who drew Jack Berg

Jack Kid Berg’s fight record

Bibliography

Index

England’s Human Buzzsaw.

USA cartoon c1930

Acknowledgements

THE author’s acknowledgements are due to Louis Behr, Max Solomons, Harry, Judah and Moe Mizler, Morya Berg and Becky Cohen, Nat Fishman and Roy Segal; to Benny Caplan, Pat Butler, George Odwell and Johnny Cuthbert; to Gilbert Odd, Ralph Finn, Alby Day, Jack and Mary Powell; to Harry Mullan and Caroline Blackadder, Lew Pinkus, Jack Corner, Alex Steene and Rinze van der Meer; to David Carden, Steve Pyke and ‘Chummy’ Gaventa and, above all, to Ray Arcel; not to mention the many credited and uncredited boxing correspondents of the twenties, thirties and forties in both Britain and the United States.

Thank you to Stephenie and Tony Bergman and Alex Daley for help with illustrations dealing with Jack’s social life. A special thank you must go to Martin Sax for the use of his rare action and training pictures featuring Jack. The photograph of Jack with Tommy Farr in the plate section is by courtesy of the Sunday Times (Chris Smith). Acknowledgement is also due to the many illustrators and photographers whom the author and publisher have been unable to trace.

Introduction

Kid Berg, a Londoner, who carried on the Jimmy Wilde tradition of clean boxing and extraordinary courage, was one of the few little men whose name made news.

(Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Weekend)

JACK scours a battered, dog-eared Ring Record Book (circa 1956). He jabs his fist at it indignantly. ‘KO by him? Never! The referee stopped the fight! He stopped it! The guy didn’t knock me out. Where’s the pen?’ He reaches out for a tiny betting shop biro and alters the record. His finger travels on down the list of his fights, his lips moving soundlessly as he repeats the names like a litany. He stops again, jabs again. ‘That was an exhibition!’ Exasperated, he pushes the book away like he was shoving off a tired sparring partner. ‘I used to know the editor very well. Nat Fleischer. He was a good friend of mine. He wrote an article about me, about the Canzoneri fight, called it something like, The Greatest Fight I’ve Seen, something like that. Now one thing you’ve got to get clear when you write my story is that when I fought Canzoneri for the world’s title, the second fight, somebody – I’m not accusing anybody by name – but somebody doped my water! I never swallow water between rounds, you see, only gargle, take a quick swig and spit, but this time, I don’t know why.’

I first met Jack Kid Berg in 1986 when he was a 77-year-old spruce, a voluble force of nature. I was researching a book on the Arsenal player Alex James. James being a regular frequenter of West End nightclubs during the 1930s, I wanted to find someone who might have known him during that time. An old footballer mentioned a club in Leicester Square run by a boxer called Jack Bloomfield. Bloomfield had long since passed away, but a regular patron would have been Jack Berg. I have to confess that I had never heard of Berg.

I was told I could meet him at one of his regular haunts, the London Ex-Boxers Association meetings then held monthly at the Sobell Centre in Islington. I went along. It was an amiably chaotic occasion where the once-great and not-so-great members of the boxing fraternity gathered and chatted and swapped stories.

I was introduced to Berg who, when he heard I was writing a book, immediately said that he had a book, his own story, and that all he needed was a publisher. This turned out to be somewhat short of the truth, but I said I would look at the manuscript and see what my publisher thought. Alex James was mentioned briefly but Jack was adamant – his story would top any footballer’s tale.

My publisher at the time, Jeremy Robson, was a boxing enthusiast and was keen on Jack’s story. Thus began a year-long saga during which I was given a crash-course in boxing history in general and Jack ‘Kid’ Berg’s considerable part in it in particular.

His manuscript turned out to be a dog-eared collection of notes of little use. We would have to sit down (a very difficult exercise for Jack) and talk his story through, get it down on tape, and see if I could shape it into an autobiography. It was rapidly apparent that much more was needed by way of background and so a hybrid developed. I would write the narrative history and background and Jack would supply a running (very often literally running) commentary.

Unlike many ageing sports stars, Jack’s memory was remarkable. It seemed at times as though events of 30, 40 years before had only just occurred. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Jack Berg seemed at times to be simultaneously in two places at once – then and now. A newspaper report on a fight from 1930 would elicit small details that most other participants would have long since forgotten. A fight decision would be instantly challenged, a sportswriter cursed and rejected, an old girlfriend recalled in fond detail. At times, one half expected him to pick up the telephone and give her a call.

This was not the wandering mind of someone who had taken too much punishment to the cranium. It was a sharp, insistent sense of the immediate. It was also exhausting. Jack was never still. His great trainer and friend Ray Arcel once described him, as ‘Always moving, getting ready to go, to run.’

He was certainly always on the way to somewhere, and once there, immediately on the way back. I used to wonder at times if his impatience with the fleeting moment was a source of unhappiness to him, that he needed to keep the momentum going, break up the continuity, in order that the mundanities of everyday life didn’t weigh him down too heavily. But the sense of his own worth, of his unique place in sporting history, never let him down.

Back then, in the late 1980s, a great deal of the boxing world that he was familiar with still existed. Hurrying in and out of gymnasiums and promoters’ offices, picking up and spreading gossip, telling the latest Harry Levene joke, pulling the old tricks that never failed (the vigorous handshake that relieved you of your wrist watch, which he would politely return to you amid cackles of laughter), the casting of a caustic eye over boxers going through the never-ending process of losing weight, pounding muscles, sweating, skipping, sparring – this was his routine during the months we worked together.

We sat one afternoon in the St Thomas A’Becket gym on the Old Kent Road. It was crowded, the atmosphere close, no windows open and the sun streaming in on boxers, trainers and onlookers alike, all sweating hard. We were watching Dennis Andries preparing for a subsequently successful world title fight. The three-minute bell rang with deafening regularity like a burglar alarm on the blink. Jack pushed his trilby on to the back of his head and wiped his brow. A skipping rope whirred, snapping at the floor, whacketywhacketywhack, while Andries’ feet pounded, patacakepata-cakepat…

‘I loved to skip,’ Jack said. ‘My favourite exercise. I liked to move about, move around, didn’t stop in one place. I used to do a lot of movement.’ Andries seemed to fly, seemed suspended inside the strange illusion of a circle created by the whirring rope and Jack was impressed.

‘He works well, that’s the main thing. You’ve gotta keep it up, that technique. It’s American, that’s where he learned it. English fighters don’t do that, although Harry Mason could keep that up for ten minutes at a stretch and that’s hard. But Andries looks good. Let’s hope he can box as good as he skips.’

The three-minute bell clanged once again; the crowd moved across the big room to the training ring as Andries stepped up to spar, yet another contender for yet another title, an endless process.

Jack waved me over; he had no need to watch. ‘Take a look at him,’ he said. ‘See what you think. He drops his right arm low, too low. He’ll get caught one of these days.’

As Andries sparred, drawing applause from the onlookers, Jack Berg remained alone in the sunshine, seated on the bench surrounded by mirrors, indifferent to us all. Yet his presence somehow bestowed upon Andries, a tough but at that time unregarded son of a West Indian immigrant, the blessing of boxing’s past greats, linking him with the men in the faded photographs on the gym walls: men like Henry Cooper, Joe Bugner, Dick Richardson and Joe Erskine, and further back in time Tommy Farr, Jack London, Don Cockell, Randolph Turpin, Freddie Mills; Ernie Roderick, Jack Hood, Len Harvey, Bombardier Wells; Teddy Baldock, Johnny Cuthbert, Harry Mason and even Aschel Joseph and Andrew Jeptha.

For Jack was a unique link to modern professional boxing’s beginnings at the turn of the century. He was a child when the East End’s Wonderland arena was in its heyday, when Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis was a skinny novice at the Judean Club and when Pedlar Palmer was charming the bow-tied patrons at the Covent Garden National Sporting Club.

Indeed, at times during his career, he seemed almost to be driving against the prevailing current, as though he hankered to return to those gory days of the Victorian bare-knuckle prize rings as he brushed aside the civilised ‘school of science’ methods to come snarling out, ready to batter or be battered into submission, taking the physical encounter well beyond the point that some onlookers found acceptable.

Fight fans flocked to watch him because he instinctively understood the essence of boxing and its gut appeal: that boxing is a blood sport, a savage game but, despite the blood and the pain, always a game, proving that mankind can play at savages and, at the end, smile and embrace and acknowledge that what had happened was circumscribed, contained by rules and ritual and carried no sour overtones of revenge or hatred.

Later, in that same gym, we watched a young black novice boxer raising and lowering his legs, stretching his stomach muscles, silver beads of sweat standing out on his forehead like tiny jewels, like glittering beads of ice. Jack leaned close to me. ‘See those earrings? If I was boxing him, I’d get hold of them with my teeth and pull ’em! You have to do things like that in the ring. If you don’t, they’ll do them to you … thumbs in the throat, jabs in the eye. I’m losing my eyesight, you know. The doctor told me I’ve gotten maybe 20 years and I’ll lose them both, if I live that long!’ He laughed. ‘But I’ve told myself I’m going to live till I’m 115! I hate the thought of dying. It frightens me. So, I’m going to live till I’m 115, at least! They’ll all have passed away and I’ll still be here.’

For a time, his prediction seemed to be coming true as he continued to drive across London in his small red car with the same provocative bravado with which he once drove opponents around the ring, butting into traffic lanes he has no right to enter, frightening passengers, scattering pedestrians and jabbing the ribs of unsuspecting fellow motorists. ‘I could have been a motor-racing champ!’ he declared one night amid blaring horns, his car hurtling towards stationary tail-lights at a pedestrian crossing.

He’d interrupted our writing session to ask, ‘You want to go to a fight next week? It’s near London Airport somewhere. They want me to go but my wife doesn’t like to go any more. We’ll drive there.’ Once in the car, he smiled at me.

‘You nervous?’ he asked me. ‘Don’t be nervous. I’m the safest driver in Britain!’ as he slammed on the brakes and the car shuddered to a halt at a red light. ‘My wife won’t get into the car sometimes until I promise to drive slow!’ He laughed again, accelerating away from the crossing. ‘But I like speed. I’ve touched 100mph in this thing! You’re safe with me.’

Our destination was a small boxing promotion in the western suburbs of London. Jack was returning a favour to the promoter, Alex Steene. ‘He asks me to come along to his shows sometimes. It helps bring in the people. They still want to see me; they still know my name.’

En route to the boxing show, he played his favourite game. He pulled over at a bus stop to ask the way and offered a middle-aged fight fan a lift in return for directions. Jack then proceeded to tease his captive, challenging him to guess his identity. It was a game only the very old and famous can play, a secular resurrection as it were. For Jack ‘Kid’ Berg belonged to an era seemingly long since buried. As American trainer Ray Arcel, another miraculous survivor, puts it, ‘Jack Kid Berg walked with Dempsey, Sharkey, Loughran, Schmeling and Ross, with Canzoneri, Rosenbloom and McLarnin. He was a veteran when our grandfathers were boys, an inspiration to champions like Freddie Mills, Randolph Turpin, Tommy Farr, Tippy Larkin, Rocky Marciano and Terry Downes.

That he was still walking among us was just cause for astonishment and awe.

And as the fight fan clambered out of the car at the fight venue, flustered and confused, shouting out names at random – Micky Walker? Peter Kane? – Jack reached into an inside pocket to take out a signed photo of himself in his fighting prime. Supremely confident, he announced, ‘Ever heard of Jack Kid Berg?’ The middle-aged fight fan could only stand stock still, mouth open. The moment was a sweet one; almost 80 years old and Jack ‘Kid’ Berg is still stopping them in their tracks.

After such a moment of personal triumph, however, the rest of the evening was doomed to anti-climax. He was introduced to the crowd prior to the top of the bill fight; he charmed the long-legged girl who carried the round number cards during the breaks into giving him her phone number, but he was uneasy and restless, unable to sit at the ringside for more than a round or two at a time. Amid so much frenetic, physical activity, the urge to participate grows painful; boxing halls were purgatory to him now.

‘For him to live and breathe and stay healthy,’ Ray Arcel decided in 1930, ‘he has to have a variety of outlets. Snap those outlets shut, and he will die.’

And before the evening was half over he said, ‘Let’s go.’ Within minutes, we were back on the road, speeding home.

The phone rings. He snatches at it. ‘Hullo? Yes. Yes. I know. Okay, okay, bye.’ He slams the receiver down. ‘What was I saying? Oh yes, now when is this book going to be finished? Because it’s taking a hell of a time! I’ve been telling everyone that my book is being written and it’s getting embarrassing. I want to ring up a newspaper and see how much money they’ll offer ….’

‘But I’ve made a start,’ I say. ‘I’ll read some of it to you.’

Jack looks unimpressed; if a book could be pummelled into existence, it would take him a day or two. He stares gloomily at the pile of pages I have taken out. There is a pause. He sniffs, looks up at me and says, ‘Well, okay, go ahead and read. Let’s see what there is.’

Chapter One

How it all began

If England is to be the dumping ground for foreign ‘scum’ so well and good – but let all aliens be taught that England is a Christian country…

(Letter to the East London Observer,

February 1909)

FOR the many thousands of Jewish refugees who arrived in England at the turn of the century, the East End of London was a blessed refuge. For their sons and daughters a decade or more later, it was a ghetto, a prison without walls from which they wished only to escape.

Back in the 1980s, the escapees from that ghetto, drawn back by nostalgia for a fleeting visit, would have looked around bemused. They would have searched in vain for physical remnants of their past, to find only a few fading shop signs (Messrs Hackman, Cohen and Zangwill also having long since moved on) or grimy swirls of masonry suggesting the site of a synagogue, a music hall or a cinema. But more often they would have found simply gaps in walls, or alleyways that led to new estates, or bleak open spaces where once whole communities thrived.

For the Jewish East End 1back then was a broken shell in the process of being pieced together again for others to inhabit. Strangest of all to the returnee, the new inhabitants who moved here and there, in and out of workshops and houses – people who should have been so familiar that the returnee might have expected at any moment to be hailed from a window or slapped on the shoulder – were strangers. No one recognises the returnee; thus, he or she can walk about incognito, as if in a perfect disguise.

Ironically, disguise was a crucial factor in escaping from Eastern Europe. Names were disguises and names were changed, borrowed, altered, anglicised and adapted with great alacrity before the First World War, creating a maze of identities and false trails. Layer was added to layer of confusion, so that to trace the trail of immigrant families back beyond the docks to Eastern Europe from whence they came remains almost impossible.

Thus, Jack Berg’s forebears remain lost somewhere in the depths of Poland or Russia. The appearance of his immediate family out of the East is a subject of fruitless discussion and speculation, as it is for many of the thousands of Jewish descendants of the original immigrants. His parents were either Polish or Russian (family lore included some references to the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Nikolayev), but no one really knows for sure. Of his grandparents, there is only a fleeting memory and even that is shrouded in legend. Jack said in a recent interview, ‘My grandmother came to visit us from Canada. I can remember her sitting me on her knee. She went back on the Titanic.’

His parents were typical: young with children and penniless. Their progress was typical too: father becoming a tailor; mother bringing up seven children in never more than two rooms.

Judah Bergman Senior, Jack’s father, arrived first with friends (‘landsmen’ from his village) having been thrown off the ship upon which he had hoped to travel to the United States. Judah had made his way to Leman Street in east London, where he lodged at the Jewish Shelter. Eventually an employer selected him from amongst the crowd, took him to a cellar and stood him in front of a treadle machine. He learned his trade the hard way.

Within a year or so, he was earning enough money to be able to rent a two-room apartment above a fish shop in Cable Street. He sent for his wife Mildred and children Woolf (later changed to Willie) and Sarah, who made the hazardous sea journey from Odessa. On 28 June 1909, Jack was born (originally named Judah after his father) under the sign of Cancer the Crab. (‘A fish sign – what else, over a fish shop!’ Jack jokes.)

This confluence of sea creatures, according to his mother, accounted for his immense lung power, which gave him the ability to swim underwater for considerable lengths of time and gave him strength and powers of endurance well above the average. Jack insists that there was another factor in his favour:

Plus, I had a caul over my head at birth. That’s very rare. Only one child in a thousand, maybe even ten thousand, are born that way. It’s very lucky. You can see into the future and you’ll never drown. A sailor will pay a lot of money for that! And someone stole mine. I had it in a locket round my neck when I was a baby – it shrinks to the size of a sixpence.

A thief got into our house when my mother was out one day, turned the place upside down, and when my mother came home she found me under a pile of clothes under the cot. The caul they never found. But the luck remains. That never leaves you. My mother used to tell me that: she was a very superstitious woman.

And these few things – powerful lungs, a lucky caul – were all gifts bestowed upon him at birth. Apart, that is, from his Jewish identity. The Bergmans were part of the greatest mass migration of Jewish people in recorded history when, between the years 1901 and 1914, over one and a half million Jews left Eastern Europe – a people that had, after centuries of persecution, become a nation without nationhood, resigned to poverty, isolation and violence, but which, under threat of extinction through massacres and pogroms, had stirred and wrenched itself free at last from a centuries-old homeland.

The Jews had dared to suppose that there was somewhere else to go, a new world radically different from the one that had rejected them. Many were poor and starving, yet they travelled west to the United States, to Canada and to England, where the Jewish East End accepted upwards of 50,000 of them in ten years. They journeyed not so much in desperation but with a strength and determination that was to have a profound effect on Western