Fighting Men of London
Fighting Men of London

Author: Alex Daley

Publisher: eBook Partnership

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1909626805

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Fighting Men of London explores the lives of seven former professional boxers who fought in the capital between the 1930s and 1960s. Set around a series of interviews with the fighters, it resurrects a golden age when boxing was as popular as soccer in Britain, and when leading fighters were working-class heroes. Dramatic, poignant, inspiring, and at times funny, the book covers such subjects as booth fighting, exploitation in boxing, East End poverty, World War II London, fame and success, prison life, encounters with the Kray twins, Great Train Robbers, and Britain's most infamous inmate, Charles Bronson. Fighting Men of London journeys through a lost era of smoky fight halls and ramshackle boxing arenas. Its subjects include 1950s boxing star Sammy McCarthy, Bethnal Green knockout specialist Ted Berry (who helped his father train the Kray twins), and Sid Nathan, one of Britain's last surviving 1930s boxers.

Fighting Men of London
Fighting Men of London

Author: Alex Daley

Publisher:

Published: 2018-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781801505444

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The compelling life stories of seven former professional boxers who fought between the 1930s and 1960s. This was a golden age when our top fighters were working-class heroes and boxing was as popular as football. It covers such subjects as booth fighting, exploitation in boxing, East End poverty, World War II London, crime and the Kray twins.

Fighting Men of the Civil War
Fighting Men of the Civil War

Author: William C. Davis

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780806130606

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Documents the everyday life of the common soldier during the Civil War, including information on what life was like for the soldiers in basic training, combat, and imprisonment.

Fighting for Britain
Fighting for Britain

Author: David Killingray

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1847010156

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During the Second World War over half-a-million African troops served with the British Army as combatants and non-combatants in campaigns in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Italy and Burma - the largest single movement of African men overseas since the slave trade. This account, based mainly on oral evidence and soldiers' letters, tells the story of the African experience of the war. It is a 'history from below' that describes how men were recruited for a war about which most knew very little. Army life exposed them to a range of new and startling experiences: new foods and forms of discipline, uniforms, machines and rifles, notions of industrial time, travel overseas, new languages and cultures, numeracy and literacy. What impact did service in the army have on African men and their families? What new skills did soldiers acquire and to what purposes were they put on their return? What was the social impact of overseas travel, and how did the broad umbrella of army welfare services change soldiers' expectations of civilian life? And what role if any did ex-servicemen play in post-war nationalist politics? In this book African soldiers describe in their own words what it was like to undergo army training, to travel on a vast ocean, to experience battle, and their hopes and disappointments on demobilisation. DAVID KILLINGRAY is Professor Emeritus of History, Goldsmiths, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Dirty Old London
Dirty Old London

Author: Lee Jackson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0300192053

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In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

Call the Fire Brigade!
Call the Fire Brigade!

Author: Allan Grice

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012-08-30

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1780574339

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Working as a fireman in London’s East End during the early 1970s was no easy ride. In the years before workplace health-and-safety legislation had started to exert its grip, Allan Grice had to cut his fire-and-rescue teeth without the advantages of a breathing apparatus for each member of his crew. Back then, the time-tested strategy was to ‘get in’ – to crawl below the intense heat and ‘eat’ the thick smoke – in order to locate a missing child or to halt a rapidly spreading inferno. In Call the Fire Brigade!, Grice recounts his most memorable experiences as a front-line member of the London Fire Brigade working the city’s East End, with its myriad commercial premises, brooding Thames-side warehouses, seedy tenements and colourful cosmopolitan community, ranging from prosperous manufacturers to down-and-out winos with their body-warming bonfires in derelict houses. Fires in factories, tenements and warehouses, and non-fire emergencies such as the Moorgate Tube disaster of 1975, are graphically described, while the elation of rescue, the sadness of being too late to save lives and the warm camaraderie of fire crews during some of the capital’s busiest peacetime years are vividly depicted.

Frontline
Frontline

Author: Anthony King

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0198719663

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The volume examines the experiences of professional Western combat soldiers' training and operations in Iraq, and seeks to explain the culture, motivations, and capabilities of the professional soldier in the twenty-first century.

Street Fighting Man
Street Fighting Man

Author: Paddy Monaghan

Publisher: Blake Publishing

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781782194255

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Paddy Monaghan was not immediately as intimidating as bare-knuckle boxers like Lenny McLean or Roy Shaw. But if anyone dared to underestimate this man, as many foolish opponents did, the full force of the hardest man in Ireland, a fine and ferocious fighting machine, would be unleashed. His unbroken record of 114 bare-knuckle fight wins is not only testimony to his exceptional strategic skill and fearsome punching ability, but also to his sheer determination and passion. Paddy Monaghan simply has something inside him that will not allow defeat. Life has been far from easy although the Monaghans were originally a wealthy family, by the time Paddy was born it had all been wasted away through fraud and gambling. A wiry youngster, Paddy left school with a reputation for fighting, but with no qualifications. Many years later, Paddy single-handedly taught himself how to read and write, beginning with books designed for children. Paddy, a staunch Muhammad Ali fan, displayed he same tenacity when he launched a one-man campaign to protest the stripping of Ali's boxing license in 1967. Paddy's actions came to the attention of the great man himself. and the next time Ali came to the UK, he went to meet Paddy at his council house in Abingdon. Two men who were socially worlds apart came together in a friendship based on mutual respect and admiration. Paddy Monaghan has an extraordinary story to tell. This remarkable autobiography gives a unique insight into Paddy's world of violence, a world he only ever entered in order to provide for his beloved wife and children. With Foreword by Muhammad Ali."