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Fighting the Good Fight
The rise and fall of Ireland's great boxing hope, Jack Doyle
Only those whole lived through the nineteen-thirties can fully understand the poverty
of that era. A worldwide crisis was caused by what is generally known as the Wall Street Crash. The effects were exacerbated in this country by what dealers in black humour christened the Economic War. Eamon de Valera was then Taoiseach; in his wisdom he decided to take on Britain in a fiscal dispute.

 

He refused to pay money known as the annuities, due to Britain in the terms of the Treaty. The British government, to nobody’s great surprise, fought back; it put a
tariff on all imports from this country. This made trade between the two countries
almost impossible. The farmers were the most directly affected; the export of cattle came not so much to a full stop as to an empty stop. Agriculture in those days played a huge part in our economy. When the farmers had little money, most of the people had little money. Only God knew how some people existed - and there were time when even He must have wondered. Life ground to a halt and halted to a grind. Men took their cattle to the fair and had to bring them home again. Nobody wanted to buy them. I knew of a man who took two lovely heifer calves to Castle Island fair - alas, in vain. He was in the town at five o’clock in the morning - by midday he hadn’t got an offer.

 

He was by then low in body and in mind and in spirit. He left his two calves in the rail and cart and adjourned to a public house. When he came out, he had four calves - somebody had dumped two on him. It was an age when people hungered for heroes, for a sign that there were some on whom the gods had not turned their backs. Never were sporting heroes more revered and the demand seemed to create a supply.

 

Malcolm Campbell was breaking records on land and on water. Gordon Richards
was putting wings on horses. Don Bradman was bringing batting into a new dimension. In this country we had our heroes on the playing fields but we needed an icon of international status. The gods delivered him in the person of a young man from Cobh named Jack Doyle. He was born into a big working-class family and left school at fourteen.

 

He worked for a few years at labouring jobs but didn’t much fancy a future devoted
to honest toil. He betook himself to London and enlisted in the Irish Guards. At six foot three and fifteen stone he was a giant by the standards of the day. The
roped rectangle known as the boxing ring almost inevitably attracted him. He entered for a Novice Heavyweight tournament. He swept through it like a high tide levelling sandcastles.

 

The sub-world of pugilism took note. A smalltime promoter, Dan Sullivan, bought him out of the Army. Jack began his career when every city and big town in Britain housed a useful heavyweight or two. Dan Sullivan no doubt graded the queue shrewdly but it hardly seemed to matter: Jack knocked them all down like a woodman in a forest of young pine. There was no question of his fights being fixed: such fights do not end in Round One or Round Two. The reaction was enormous back in his country: Jack became a national hero in a few months. He got great space in the papers, especially in the infant Irish Press. Joe Sherwood was the Sports Editor - pugilism was his first love. Of course, the British too embraced him: he was their Irishman from folklore. An eminent English journalist called him a Greek god, though it is doubtful if he had ever seen a Greek God - or any kind of God.

 

Jack’s fame grew like the circles made by a stone dropped into a pond. Cars were
relatively few then; whenever Jack fought, the crowds got bigger - in time the old city
of London experienced the kind of traffic tangles that it had never known before. Between April 1932 and July 1933 the young man from Cobh devastated a string
of useful heavyweights like an irresistible force. Jack began to believe that he was infallible. When he was matched with Jack Petersen, he did most of his homework
in pubs and in hotel bars.

 

He should have known better. Petersen was powerful and skilful - and the
Heavyweight Championship of Britain was at stake. The echo of the bell had hardly faded before Doyle knew that he was in trouble. He took the easy way out: he felled Petersen with an outrageously low blow - and was disqualified. Back at home there was a mass outcry, led by the morning papers.
Once again the perfidious English had played a foul trick. It didn’t matter that Petersen was a native of Wales.

 

Jack declared that he couldn’t expect fair play on this side of the Atlantic. He hadn’t done too badly: he had earned a quarter of a million pounds in 1933 - and spent most of it. I doubt if even George Lee, RTE’s economist, could tell how much that is in today’s money. Jack decided to take his wares to the USA. Before he sailed from Cobh on the Washington, he addressed a huge crowd from the balcony of the Atlantic Hotel. He announced that he would come back with the World Championship and then marry a sweet Irish colleen. Then he sang “Ireland, I Love You, A Chusla Mo Chroidhe.”

 

There wasn’t a dry eye in the audience: some people wept out of emotion; others shed tears of uncontrollable laughter. Jack didn’t win the World Title, nor did he marry a sweet Irish colleen. In his only fight in America he lost to Buddy Baer. He came home with a not-so-sweet Mexican colleen named Maria Louisa Castaneda.
She was a member of the aristocracy and, though not yet twenty, was a well-established film star under the name Movita. She was a good singer; Jack had a pleasing voice. They filled theatres all over Britain.

 

Then came the war; the couple moved to Ireland and enjoyed similar success. During this period he had his last official fight. This was against Chris Cole, and honest journeyman from Mullingar. Over 23,000 paid in to Dalymount Park; even those who didn’t pay demanded their money back. Jack had spent the afternoon fortifying himself with brandy in the Clarence Hotel. The “fight” ended in Round One.

 

Nothing lasted long with Jack. Movita went back to America and completed a rather
bizarre double by marrying Marlon Brando. Jack in her absence lapsed into careless
ways. His last recorded fight was in a pub - in Ranelagh of all places. He had been extremely provoked by the District Justice awarded him two weeks in Mountjoy. Eventually he went back to London where he was now almost as unpopular as he had been before the war.

 

He did gigs in Irish pubs and worked for a while in Butty Sugrue’s Admiral Nelson. A series of articles about him in the Sunday People put a few pounds in his pocket. He attempted a tour of Ireland with only moderate success. His name meant nothing to the young generation. Many of his old admirers couldn’t attend his shows because they were dead. In those lean years he had a minder, a remarkable young woman from Kilkenny named Nancy Kehoe. She could have doubled for Sophia Loren, only that she was better looking and probably nicer too.

 

Eventually, like Movita, she couldn’t put up with Jack’s irresponsible ways. She gave up her job as a manageress in one of Lyons teahouses, changed her address - and never saw Jack again. Thenceforth he went down as a person as rapidly as he had risen as a pugilist. The well-dressed, well-spoken intelligent man became a sad unkempt wanderer. And he achieved a remarkable feat: he became barred from every pub in Shepherd’s Bush. He last oasis was the Hoop in Notting Hill. Eventually, he couldn’t pay the rent for his modest flat and took to sleeping rough.

 

A decent man from Mallow, a worker on the railway, gave him a roof over his head. One evening when he came home, he found Jack in a coma. He died that night in the small hours in St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. It was nine days before Christmas in the year of Our Lord, 1978. He might have been buried in a pauper’s grave but for an old friend of mine whom Jack had befriended in the good days in London. Joe Fay was a soldier of fortune who eventually became well known as a freelance photographer, mainly with the Evening Herald. Joe put the world around - and the boxing fraternity here and in Britain plus the good people of Cork gave him a funeral too good for most kings.

 

He is buried in his native place - and there is a Jack Doyle Room in the Commodore Hotel in Cobh. I wrote his obituary in the Irish Press. How good a boxer was Jack? Could he have been World Champion? The great middle weight Len Harvey trained with him in the famous Star and Garter in Windsor. He knew him well. He said that he had never known a man who could hit so hard. George Slack, Doyle’s regular sparring partner, agreed - but added that he had no concept of defence. Dan Sullivan sent his protégé to a famous academy in France - in vain. He worked hard there for a month but came back as rough as ever. His co-ordination was poor - there was nothing that could be done about it. About his courage, there could be no doubt.

 

Buddy Baer almost crippled him with a blow that was low even by American standards - Jack was down five times before the referee intervened. Jack’s poor co-ordination wasn’t his only flaw: he wasn’t a man for the long haul - he wouldn’t have endured the grind when necessary at the highest level. When I met Jack in Ireland in 1973, I took him to see my mother and father. They were delighted - and he was delighted that he was still a hero to them, forty years after his seasons in the sun. They and he belonged to an age of innocence that is gone forever.