By Elliott West
“Boxing is the magic of men in combat, the magic of will, and skill, and pain, and the risking of everything so you can respect yourself for the rest of your life”.
F.X.Toole
Introduction
London has had a number of great sporting venues over the years and one of these was the little-known The Ring on the Blackfriars Road in Southwark. Once standing on the site of Palestra, The Ring was used from 1910 as a boxing stadium but the building itself dates back to 1783. Originally built to serve as a chapel and designed by the Reverend Rowland Hill, Hill chose the unusual circular design to prevent any corners from the devil from hiding in. Yet Hill’s prayers would only be answered for so long because decades later, Dick Burge, a former English Middleweight champion from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire was responsible for its conversion from a shabby warehouse to a rented boxing venue.
Crime doesn’t Pay
Dick Burge had retired from boxing in 1900 but by the time he lived on Wiltshire Road in Brixton, he was in debt. To try and remedy, he dipped his toe in a life of crime and got involved in a massive Liverpool bank fraud. A crime that involved cheque forgery and racecourse gambling. Dick was quickly caught after the scam was found out and he was arrested in October 1901, just a month after marrying his wife Bella. He was sentenced to ten years hard labour. However, eight years into his sentence, there was a riot in his prison and Dick who behaved well in prison, went out of his way to save the life of a prison guard. Thanks to this heroic act and good behaviour, Burge was released two years early and decided to reform his ways.
Dick and his wife with the help of some local homeless people, cleaned up the building and transformed it a boxing venue fit for purpose. The Ring opened on the 14th May 1910 and quickly became a major attraction with events four to five times a week. Dick and his wife also set up a soup kitchen in the building in the day in thanks for the homeless who helped clean it up. However just four years after The Ring opened, The Great War began and Burge enlisted in the First Surrey Rifles. Tragically he caught pneumonia in 1918 and died a few months after the war ended.
So popular was this former boxer that 2,000 mourners attended his funeral at St Marylebone Church. He was cremated in Golders Green. Yet this wasn’t the end of The Ring due to Dick asking his wife on his death bed to keep the business going. Bella had run the venue since her husband had gone away to war in 1915. She kept her promise, making her the first female boxing promoter. Bella who was born in New York and had come to London aged 4 with mother after the death of her father, was originally a dresser for the music hall performer Marie Lloyd. Bella was hands on when she ran the boxing ring, managing every aspect of it including throwing out the drunks. A lady who was dubbed Bella of Blackfriars.
So successful was The Ring under her watch that even the Prince of Wales attended a fight between Manchester’s Len Johnson and Birmingham’s Jack Hood in 1928. A prince who was given a rapturous reception by the crowd, only to be vilified later when he later abdicated the throne in 1936 as Edward VIII to marry the divorcee Wallis Simpson. In 1932, The Ring added wrestling to the bill and also the odd Shakespeare play performed by the local Bankside Players drama group.
Tragedy Strikes
By the late 1930s, The Ring started to experience financial difficulties and Bella was forced to pawn her jewellery and other valuables to pay the staff. However it wasn’t enough and in October 1940, the building took a direct hit from a German bomb in the Blitz. It flattened it to rubble and to this day you can still see the impact of the bomb beneath the railway bridge over Blackfriars Road. Bella later appeared on an early episode of This is Your Life and a book was written about her entitled ‘Bella of Blackfriars’ and one that was serialised in several newspapers.
Life after the Bomb
The Ring bomb site remained abandoned until the 1960s when a new office block was built there called Orbit House. This was the India’s Office library and archive but in 1998, the block was again in ruin and was eventually demolished and replaced by the bright and modern structure called ‘The Palestra’. Fittingly, Palestra is an ancient Greek term denoting a public arena for wrestling and is now the headquarters for Transport for London. It also the place where London cab drivers attend their verbal examinations to pass the infamous Knowledge test. Several reminders of Dick and Bella remain in the area with a mosaic of Bella embedded in the pavement half a mile away and The Ring pub on Ewer Street.
