The Profession of Violence by John Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

have won the trophy. We couldn’t have that.’
    â€˜Ronnie was a fighter,’ says one of the men who trained him, ‘the hardest boy I’ve ever seen. To stop him you’d have had to kill him. Reggie was different. It was as if he had all the experience of an old boxer before he started. Just once in a lifetime you find a boy with everything to be a champion. Reggie had it.’
    In the East End a promising boxer was treated like a hopeful racehorse, and Charles’s friend and one-time great professional, Ted ‘Kid’ Berg, became their trainer-manager. Cannonball coached them; their brother Charlie sparred with them and they suddenly became the great white hopes of Vallance Road.
    The front bedroom was turned into a gymnasium for them, complete with a punch-bag anchored to the floor with a meat-hook (on which Charles gashed his foot one night when making an unobserved entry to the family home in stockinged feet). Violet gave them a high-protein diet. Every penny they could save went on boxing books, and they began training with total dedication. Some people found this worrying. They could allow themselves no slacking off. If one felt inclined to miss a training session,the other would notice. Having each other to live up to, they soon appeared fanatics. ‘I’ve never known boxers take it more serious than the twins. Never late. Whatever the weather they were out each morning at six for road work. They was in bed by ten each night, and absolutely no smoking or drinking. I never saw either of them out with a girl.’
    Soon they were in perfect condition with the punch of a pile-driver. Until sixteen, when they turned professional, they won every bout they fought. Father Hetherington blames boxing for much of the trouble of their middle teens. ‘Everything went wrong once the local papers published the twins’ photographs and wrote about them as super boxers when they were really two ordinary East End boys.’ But with their strange shared life of identical twins, they were far from ordinary, and their career as boxers started to disrupt their private lives. Ronnie had toughness and determination, but Reggie was patently the star, with the real career ahead of him. Soon after the twins turned professional, the street violence they were involved in mysteriously increased as well.
    The boy’s name was Harvey; he was sixteen, smartly dressed, worked as a clerk in the East End and lived with his family in Hackney. When the ambulance men picked him out of the alley off Mare Street where the gang had left him he was still conscious. He collapsed on the way to hospital and a doctor later testified in court that he had been hit hard in both eyes and on the nose, ‘had suffered multiple contusions about the neck and chin consistent with his being beaten with a length of bicycle chain’, and kicked thoroughly all over. It seemed a common enough case. In 1950 the wars between the local teenage gangs in Hackney were increasing. No one knew why, but the actual woundings had been growing more serious. There were rumours of guns, and the police were half expecting someone to be killed. But this new outbreak of violencewas puzzling. Nobody knew the leaders of the gangs, and nobody would talk.
    But this time there were witnesses: a nineteen-year-old girl and an insurance salesman who had seen the fight and could recognize the boys. They named the twins, and Harvey confirmed this to the police. It seemed as if the twins had finally slipped up.
    For years now they had kept their gang fights secret and nobody in the respectable world around them knew what was going on. Certainly few can have suspected their hidden need for violence – except possibly Aunt Rose. The only hint had come at the age of twelve when they were put on probation for firing an air rifle from a train. But this was something any boy might do and their discreet routine of violence left no evidence. Already