Battling Jack

Jack's father, Lionel Turpin, came from British Guiana to volunteer for the British Army during the Great War. He was wounded on the battlefields of France and invalided to Warwick, the first black man to settle in the area. Lionel married a local girl but his early death left her struggling against poverty to raise their three sons and two daughters in pre-Welfare State England. As young men, the excitement and gladiatorial glamour of the ring lured Jack and his brothers into professional boxing. From a homemade backstreet gymnasium, they punched their way into the record books and into the hearts of the British people. "Battling Jack" charts the remarkable life and times of the man who was once Britain's busiest featherweight. It offers a ringside seat at heroic battles and comic encounters as Turpin vividly recalls the sport, sex and slapstick of life in the now forbidden boxing booths of the travelling fairs. He takes us behind the scenes of a scandal that rocked the sporting world and into his confidence over the mystery that surrounds his younger brother's death by gunshot.Complete with previously unpublished photographs, this is a wonderfully narrated account of the life and times of a very singular man. It is also the history of the beginnings of a black presence in British boxing. Heart-rending, raw, honest and funny, "Battling Jack" is a story that had to be told.