By Nathan P Hunt
The history of professional wrestling in Britain is a rich and vibrant one, filled with an eclectic collection of characters and outstanding athletes. When most people speak about British wrestling's history, little seems to be acknowledged outside of the weekly World Of Sport program from ITV. Yet the independent scene of the time was a thriving and popular attraction, enjoying sold out venues, respectable paydays and star names who could compete and draw without the aid of the television platform. One of them is Sam Betts, who mostly wrestled under the name of Dwight J Ingleburgh. Born in Yorkshire and playing an American, Sam would work his way up the card to become a main eventer at events all over the country and some tours abroad. Instilled with a keen work ethic from an early age and with the sense to retain some stability for his family at home, he regularly worked full time day-jobs in addition to the dates he worked as a professional wrestler, but this did not impede his success on the wrestling scene. It was an absolute pleasure and honour to speak to Sam and hear his stories about not only his own career, but the history of the industry and the business in general at that time. Some people seem destined to perform in a wrestling ring, and with a reputation for being a great performer as well as a love for the business which lasts to this day, Sam is one of those people. It seemed that his early life prepared him for the rigors of a harsh but rewarding business and shaped the destiny of a young man who would become a staple of the UK's independent scene at a time, in post-war Britain, when live entertainment was at an apex of social focus and importance.
"I never met him, he'd already passed away by the time I came onto this earth, but my older sister remembered him very well. People would say that 'old George would fight anyone for two bob'. He ended up delivering coal from the pits. He had a horse and cart, and the miners would get granted their own coal from the pits as part of their wages, which was a ton per month, so he'd pick it up and deliver it to them. There was a particularly steep hill in between the pit he fetched it from and the village where we lived and people used to say that George would get behind the cart to help the old horse up the hill with it. He'd push his shoulder into it and help it get that weight up the hill.
"It was a tough life, you can't believe how hard it was. My parents were born in 1886, and I was the last child to come along in 1933. The next sister to me was 16 years older than me. We only had a two bedroomed house at the time in a little mining village on the outskirts of Barnsley called Kingston. There were no carpets on the floor in the house, no toilets in the house, so we had a little pot under the bed. But that's just the way life was. We had an outside toilet which we shared with another family and there was about ten of them too. But it was taken as the norm, we didn't know any different. The house had no hot water, we just had a tub with a little fire under it and we just heated our water in there. In the street where I lived it was always the washing day on the Monday, so someone would heat it up and do their washing in the hot water and then the next door neighbour would come along and use the same water to do theirs. At the end of the day, they'd jump in and have a bath. Everyone would always pitch in and help each other. If your next door neighbour was ill or anything like that, everyone would go to help her. If they were having babies they helped them. They'd help with the washing and help to make the bread etc. The comradarie was unbelievable, but it was the norm. You never saw any overweight people in those days, where I lived everyone was lean and muscular. It was probably a lot to do with their diet I imagine, because there was very little fried stuff and it was all cheap meats and stuff that they bought, so it was all stewed. The main thing that was really missing in those days was doctors. There was no NHS, and each doctor had a van that came round and people would give them about six pence per week. That was for the services that they had to give to you, but nobody, or hardly anybody, would ever call the doctor because you'd have to pay. People would just persevere and persevere. Now, people are getting treatments younger and we're all living longer, but in those days it was three score and ten; you know, 70 years, that was the life expectancy. Getting to 100 is almost common now. People just get treated now, whereas in those days people couldn't afford to get treated. I've had two spells in hospital and I have to say that the way I get treated in Barnsley Hospital is unbelievable. I can't sing their praises well enough. I have two daughters in the nursing service, the eldest went straight into it from school and she ended up as a staff nurse in the Intensive Care Unit. She's dealt with accidents as they come in, serious brain injuries and everything you could imagine; riding in ambulances and treating people as they get transferred from one hospital to another. Anyway she moved on from that and became a Pharmaceutical Representative, got her degree and now she's a Pharmaceutical Consultant. My youngest daughter still does it; she cares for old people at the local hospital, so I can't say enough about the NHS, it's just fantastic. The things they do are just over and above the call of duty. They are something special, those people. Nothing is too much or too dirty for them. The last time I was in hospital the poor fella in the next bed to mine used to mess his bed every day, but those nurses just got stuck in and cleaned him up and there was no cursing or sticking their noses in the air or anything like that, they just got stuck in and did it. They are something special, those people. My Mum, to help out, used to go and lay people out when they died [for the funeral directors]. She'd lay them out on a board in the house, wash them and dress them up and get them ready for the funeral. She also used to tell fortunes as well besides that. My dad was a hardworking miner. He was down in the pit from being 12 years old and he was still working there at 72, so 60 years my dad spent in the mine. I know that at 68, he was still working on the pit face with the young guys. When he used to get home he used to strip off, my mum used to wash him down, and his back was blue because it was tattooed from the dust from the mines. They'd cut themselves all the time on their backs etc, so the coal dust would get in the cuts and it made this blue kind of tattoo. But all the miners were like that. They used to work in these seams at the pit and some of them would be 18 inches deep, and they'd have to crawl down on their hands and knees. They took the pitch down and they'd have to weigh it by hand, and this was always 6 days a week. It wouldn't worry them; this was just life as it was in a mining village in the 1930s. Everybody lived like this and your neighbours were exactly the same as you. You see, in our area, I think it was in 1926, there was some closures of the pits in Lancashire, so a lot of the miners came over to work in Yorkshire and they never went back. Just one street from where I lived, there was one old lady who'd walked over from Wigan to Barnsley. She settled in the village where I lived, a lady called Nan Barrett, and she always still wore her Lancashire clogs. She raised her family over here.
"I followed my father into the pit at 14 years old. The drift mine where I worked was partner to Barnsley Main Colliery, which is where they would do the underground training. It was near to where I lived and they still have some of the pit-head gear there, erected as a memorial.
"I came there to do my underground training and I was down that mine on the 7th of May 1947 when there was an explosion, and about 12 people lost their lives. Thankfully I wasn't in the explosion area, I was in the gallery nearby, but we felt the blast and heard the explosion. It was a terrifying thing for a 14 year old. I detested the pit where we did our training, they'd had one of the biggest disasters in history, back when it was called The Oaks Colliery. They changed the name to Barnsley Main Colliery, but nothing else about it had changed. You could smell the gas as soon as you got into the cage to go down, but people didn't worry because this was the norm. For everybody, that was their life around this area.
"The pit I went to work at was a drift mine, which was about four miles from where I lived and there was no bus service in that area. I had to walk the four miles each way to get to work, but you'd do it in an hour. We'd probably half run there, but when they did start a bus service that went to the place, it took about a six or seven mile detour, so it wasn't worth it. We were better off walking so we'd all get together. About 4 o'clock to 4.30 in the morning, you'd start hearing all the clogs, clip-clopping down the street. It was a beautiful sound. I started work at 6 o'clock in the morning and I finished at 3.30 in the afternoon, and you all you had was a twenty minute break. That was just the way it was for any young man at the pits.
"When I was young, in our area at least, kids were always into fisticuffs. The coal miners would all be into boxing, wrestling and fighting, and even in the war years people would all go to the travelling fairgrounds that came round. They never stopped them during the war because it kept morale up amongst the locals. When I was ten years old, one of them came round with a boxing booth called Professor Bosco's. There was no wrestling on that particular booth, just boxing. He had his own lads come out and the local lads would challenge them, but the very first thing he did when he got the crowd gathered around was say 'I want two young lads to come up here and have a go with each other, and I'll give them half a crown apiece'. Now, half a crown was 25 pennies, and at my local chippy I could get a bag of chips for one penny, so that was a fantastic amount. So I was straight in, I couldn't get in there quick enough. They brought another young lad in and we knocked the smoke out of each other. We had big gloves on so we couldn't have really hurt each other and we got our half a crown apeice. After that, every time the fairground was there, I was up there. It was no different from when we were fighting and wrestling each other in the fields, it was no more violent than that. It was just a natural thing for a young, robust lad to do, so that's how that came about. Then I would box at the boys club, then started boxing at the youth club. Later, when I was 14 and I'd started working down the pit, I started going to Charlie Glover's boxing gym in Barnsley. Charlie Glover was Brian Glover's father and he was a top line professional. He taught lads the business and trained them in boxing. He started training wrestling at a later date, but it was just a natural thing for me to go and train at Charlie's. So I kept training there in boxing and I'd still go in on the fairgrounds until I was conscripted into the army. I got into the Irish Guard's boxing team and I fought for the regiment for the two years I was in. The boxers would get away with not doing some of the jobs and drills etc. that everyone else would have to do and you would also get some extra food. When you went training with the boxing team, they used to take you back to the cookhouse where you'd probably get a plate of handcut chips, which in 1951 were a real treat. Plus it was just extra food, so if you got onto a team like that, you were living well."
"One time, up on the noticeboard, a Major Clark was advertising for skiers to go over to Germany. They used to put some silly advertisements on there and you wouldn't know what it was and no-one would ever volunteer for anything in the army. So I put my name down for this ski-trip thing, and I don't even know what made me do it but anyhow, he was forming a ski team. They shipped us out to this place called Winterburg in Germany [a popular ski resort to this day] and they taught us all how to ski.
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"But no-one would usually volunteer for anything like that in the army because they all assumed it was a joke, so that's how I ended up being on the skiing team as well. It was fantastic up there and while we were in Winterburg we weren't staying in barracks, we were staying in a hotel and getting the best of food, sleeping in these big, fancy, comfy beds; I'd never stayed in a room as nice as that in my life!
"When I came out of the army, I naturally went back to training at Charlie Glover's. At first, it was just a little two room gym, but we moved from place to place. We went to one place behind a little pub, I think it was called the Sun Inn. At that time I was still just training in boxing, but then we started to move on from that and he started to teach us how to wrestle. Purely and simply, it came about because they abolished the entertainment tax in 1957. Before that it was worked out on each seat at shows, and in those days it wasn't as easy to run wrestling and make a profit because of this entertainment tax. Before they abolished it, running wrestling shows wasn't a viable business proposition, but then everyone got into the wrestling and started promoting. The problem was in those days, there were hardly any wrestlers about, so with Charlie being an old wrestler, he thought to teach us how to wrestle. We stayed at the Sun Inn for a while but then the landlord asked us to leave because while we were upstairs, jumping and going over our heads, it was banging about and disturbing the customers. They must have been nervous being sat down there with all that banging coming from upstairs. We moved to a gym in an allotment owned by Barnsley council. Because we were getting out and wrestling by this time, we started getting a name for ourselves and we were doing well, so people would start to come down to train with us, like Hans Streiger and guys from the gyms in other towns, like the Nuttall brothers from Stockport, so we got plenty of training. When we moved from there to another another place, behind the Prince William Pub, we were in a barn at the back of the pub. You had to climb up some steps and go to train up in the loft. Because everyone boxed in Barnsley, and hardly anyone wrestled, when people were coming to us wanting to learn how to wrestle Charlie would start getting me to teach them. One of the first was Bruno Elrington, (Frank, his real name was). Charlie gave me the job of training him to wrestle and he went on to become very famous."
Bruno appeared on World Of Sport regularly, even gaining a win over the much beloved Big Daddy. He also worked as an actor with such credits as 'The Nine Ages of Nakedness' (1969), 'The Touchables' (1968) and 'Boxer' (1965). He would open his own gym in Portsmouth many years later and would in turn go on to train other big names in British wrestling.
"Brian Glover and I were training there together. I was a couple of years older than him and we'd always trained at the gym together in boxing. Prior to that, I'd known Brian while we were growing up because we were kids together. Brian played for Barnsley Boys Football team, and he was a good football player. He was always a bright lad, so he went off to study at Sheffield University. When he came back, he went off to the army like I had done, and when he came out of the army he thought he'd 'get involved in this wrestling'. He'd tried a few jobs around building sites and things like that, then he packed that in and he got a job at the Barnsley Chronicle in the advertising department. He moved on from there to work at G.U.S., which was a big furniture shop in Barnsley and Charlie had managed to get me a job there as a debt collector."
Sam, Brian and a few others from the gym would regularly work dayjobs together, including worked on a building site with Pedro The Gypsy. (Gordon Allen) In a previous interview (which can be found here) Sam would say that "When the cement wagons arrived, with 10 tons of cement to be offloaded by hand, Pedro used to disappear, you could never find him."
"So, we worked together there and we ended being lifelong friends. Brian went on and did a course to become a teacher [in French and English at the school he had attended himself in Barnsley]. It was there that he met Barry Hines [a fellow teacher at the school] who wrote the book 'Kes', and Barry recommended Brian to Ken Loach, the director, to be in the film based on the book. He was really good in that, but it wasn't really acting, that was just Brian being Brian, but it set him off on the road to fame."
Brian would recall the experience in an interview about the film, and said "Ken Loach was improvising a fight with a load of kids, and he asked me to stop it like a teacher would. Well, I'd stopped a good few playground fights, and I had the confidence of being in the ring all those years, so I just grabbed the two kids who were fighting and banged their heads together."
"We all used to go out - myself, Brian, his wife Elaine and another couple of wrestlers with their wives. We'd meet up every week and just have a couple of drinks together. Brian was actually at our house not long before he died. His second wife [Tara Prem, the daughter of TV actor Bakhshi Prem] was a television producer and she really helped to get his acting career going. He did those adverts for the teabags and he went to America with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He did quite a bit and went on to become quite a big name, he did really well.
"Charlie didn't run any shows himself, but he would provide people for the promoters. Over in Manchester and around Lancashire, there was a promoter called Mike Landis, who I think lived in New Mills. He'd run shows around that area and in Derbyshire, Stockport, places like that, so Charlie would send us over to work for him. I wrestled my first ever match under the name of Al Sammy. Charlie had sent me over and for the first one, they put me on under that name. But I've had all sorts of names. Charlie Glover of course was 'The Red Devil' whenever he was wrestling, and I've even worked in his outfit under that name.
"In those early days we didn't wrestle all year round, but when we went on tour it would be every night of the week. To give you a bit of an idea of the schedule; Dominic Pye would run the shows on the pier at Blackpool and I'd wrestle for him on the central pier in the afternoon, then come back to Farnsworth, near Bolton, wrestle on the first bout of the evening show there. Then I'd keep my wrestling gear on, shoot into a club in Manchester and wrestle in the last match on the card there, so that was three bouts in one day. But that was how you made your money back then, it was just the nature of the business. If we went on a tour to anywhere abroad, it was a show every day, or at the very least in 30 days we'd work 29 shows. We once had a day off on a tour of Sweden and the reason we had that day off was that the King of Sweden had died. The last time I went over there we started in Malmo, which is all the way on the Danish side, in the September, so it was warm and we were just in our shirtsleeves there, and the last job was in a place called Kiruna, 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle. But obviously we stopped and worked in every town that we could in between, so it wasn't in one trip, but we worked our way across.
"Sometimes you'd go to a show and it would be all there, they'd have it all worked out and everyone would have wound themselves up before the show even went on. But other times they'd put a good old wrestling match on, and they'd look around and the crowd wouldn't be reacting that well, so the promoter would turn round and say 'Right, go out there and wind them all up a bit Sam', so I'd use some psychology. Sometimes what I would do is just watch the crowd in the first bout and pick out one person who I could tell was going to react, and I'd think 'I can get this one going', so immediately I sought them out. Then I'd focus on that one person, because then when I'd get that reaction from one, the rest would start joining in. I wouldn't have to do all the talking and stuff they do now, I'd just walk down to the ring, carrying myself like a big city gent, and the ones that I thought I could get going quickly, I'd literally sometimes just point my finger at them. I didn't have to say anything, just point my finger and it would get that one going, which would get all the crowd going. There was that kind of psychology in professional wrestling back then that they don't seem to have nowadays. The old timers were perfect at it, they knew how to work the crowd, so I'd watch them and learn from them, get some tips from them and get better at doing it myself. If you were working as a blue-eyes [known in American wrestling as a babyface] it was easy, you'd just go down to ringside and stop on the way to shake some hands, kiss a baby on the head, you know, get the crowd with you. I was a full-time professional, so I could work as a villain or a blue-eyes, whatever the promoter wanted. That's what they're missing now, because they don't tell a story. We used to tell them a story, right from the beginning.
"Bessie Braddock [a Labour Party Politician], who was the MP for Liverpool, was this little stout lady and they loved her in Liverpool. She always took her holidays at Scarborough and always went to the wrestling shows there. Don Robinson was the promoter and he would reserve a ringside seat for her. She was a darling, was Bessie. So we always made sure that I was in the corner where Bessie was sitting nearby, just so that I could get her going a little bit. You can bet that she hit me with that handbag quite a few times - it must have been the biggest handbag in the world, it was bigger than her! She'd bounce that thing off the back of my head... but she was a lovely lady. She always stayed for a fortnight there. I was wrestling in Scarborough for about ten years and she never missed a single show."
Throughout Bessie Braddock's exensive career she fought particularly hard for improvements for causes such as maternity, child welfare and youth crime. Harold Wilson was quoted as saying at her funeral that "She was born to fight for the people of the docks, of the slums, of the factories and in every part of the city where people needed help".
"Some of the guys came over here [from North America] who I'd work on shows with, like the ex-Mr Universe Ray Schaefer and Ski Hi Lee. I wrestled them both a lot and did two tours in India with Ski."
Robert E. Leedy, who wrestled as Ski Hi Lee (pronounced 'Sky High Lee') was born in 1921 in Canada and debuted at 19 years old. At 6'8" with a 54" chest & 87" reach, he would be a natural main event attraction. Touring his native Canada and throughout the United States, he shared the ring with the likes of Killer Kowalski & held two NWA Canadian Heavyweight Championships while working for Stu Hart at Stampede Wrestling. He had relocated to the UK from North America in the 1960s and would retire from wrestling in the 1970s.
"Ski was so tall that I had to help him out of the car by pulling his legs out, because otherwise he would get stuck. He was noted for his whiskey drinking. He could drink four or five bottles a day, and sometimes they say as many as seven! There was prohibition in Bombay, so the only way you could drink was to get this permit from the government. So you drank in what they called the Permit Room, & every time you had a drink there would be an officer sat there and he'd sign the book to say you'd had one. That was just a formality of course, you just basically took what you want because the prohibition officer was as corrupt as anything, but from what we saw it was kind of a way of life at that time in India, everyone would bend the rules for a bit of a back-hander. But the running joke was that when they were handing out these drinking licences to us all, that when it came to Ski, they had to give him two! [Laughs]. His party piece was to let people throw darts into his back. He'd stand there with his shirt down and just let people throw the darts into his back! He was a really tough guy, and at one time he lived like a millionaire because he'd been such a big star in the States and Canada, even flying in his own helicopter. He said that alimony took everything he had, his wife got everything. It was a sad day when he died. The drink might not have even been the cause of death, with the way he smoked. [The exact date and cause of Ski Hi Lee's death remain unknown.]
"The first time I was in India was in 1967. I was sent a letter by the promoter [Don Robinson] which came with two tickets - one for me and one for a fellow called Milton Reid, who wrestled as 'The Mighty Chang'.
"So I met him at the airport here and we travelled over together, and we were picked up in a taxi at the other end which takes us to the hotel we were staying at, which was always a four star hotel when we went out to India. We were big business over there and they always treated us like stars because in the eyes of the paying people, we were big stars. Well, we dropped our stuff off at the hotel and then they took us down to the outdoor stadium, which was this open cricket ground, and there was this great big cut-out of myself which was 30 foot high on the side of the stadium. Next to it is one of Milton Reid, 30 feet high and next to him was one of Ski Hi Lee, and then Klondike Bill. ['Klondike' Bill Soloweyko was a Canadian pro wrestler trained by Stu Hart in the famous Dungeon in Calgary. He began his career wrestling in Stu's local promotion, Stampede Wrestling before moving onto other territories such as some preliminary matches for WWF and then working as a ring technician for WCW.]
"That was the way that they did it over there, because there was 60-70 or so thousand people at some of those shows at the cricket grounds. We used to eat at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which was on a documentary recently where it was called the best hotel in India. We used to be taken to the Taj and get the full treatment, because when we would get there the promoters would tell us not to go to any cheap places, only ever the best places, because wrestlers really were stars there and they didn't want any association with anywhere that might give them a bad name. It was only the best hotels, all our laundry was done for us, all our food and bar bills were paid for us, absolutely everything. It was heaven. I have been all over the world, Europe, Argentina, New Zealand, but the most fascinating place I've been was India. Around every corner was something different, it's fantastic. The crowning jewel of that trip was when we went to Kashmir for two shows, which is up in the mountains. If there is a heaven on earth, it's Kashmir. To get up there we had to fly up in this plane and it circles around the mountainside, and we looked back down at the airport towards the landing strip and it looked the size of a tennis ball. We were thinking we didn't have a chance of landing there, but anyway we got down safely. When we came out there was all these Bollywood stars and really big names in India, and they were coming up to us wanting our autographs. Even the other fans there were more bothered about the wrestlers than the Indian stars.
"They make a lot of Hollywood films and TV shows there too, because of the scenery. One person there was [Hervé Villechaize, who played] Tattoo on Fantasy Island, and that whole crew were filming there. Anyway, they have these big house-boats on the river, and all the wealthier Indians take holidays up there because it's colder, and they stay in these houseboats. The hotel where I was staying had this boat so they'd take me on a tour down the river, and they'd make you a meal while you were on it and show you around the lakes. There would be kingfishers flying around and they'd land on the sides of the boat. Every morning we'd go down and take a little tour, and sit on the waterfront and get fresh trout for our breakfast. The only problem was that the area had been in conflict for years and we could actually hear the gunfire from them shooting over the border, because it was a disputed area [between India and Pakistan]. The wrestling show was being held in a Sikh army barracks (I worked in a lot of strange places), and there were about 15-20,000 people at the show. I was wrestling Darra Singh's brother, Randhawa Singh, which meant that when I got in there, the crowd decided that they didn't like me and they started to climb over and were storming the ring. These Sikhs who were living in the barracks seemed to all be tall, about six foot and over, and all skinny, so they all surrounded me. They backed us up right to the guard room to get me away from the locals, and I was stuck in there with this other Indian wrestler who I think had his wife with him. The locals were all outside, trying to get in. It must have been about 10 o'clock when they got me in there and at about 2 o'clock they were still trying to get in. So I said to this other bloke, who was another big Sikh, 'What do we do to get out?'. He just looked at me and said 'Aim for the head Sam'. Anyway thankfully the skies opened and it started throwing the rain down, so the crowd all dispersed pretty quickly after that."
Sam would return to India for another tour in 1975, as well as enjoying some other tours to places such as Sweden, Germany and Singapore, but for the majority of his career would stay at home in the UK so that he could continue to work full time and stay home with his family. However, when between jobs, or when the moeny when too good to refuse, he would accept tours and got to have some interesting experiences whether at home or abroad.
"One time, we were on a flight back from Malaysia, I was sat on the plane with Mighty Chang. The pilot invited us into the flightdeck, and Chang was excited because he'd never seen one. Anyway, it turns out the pilot has a problem: His girlfriend had thrown him out and moved her new boyfriend into his flat. He was a little timid guy and wanted to get the stuff out of his flat, so he asked Chang to help him move house. Chang just turns round and says 'Of course, no problem' and that he'd move some stuff for him. Well lo and behold, as soon as we get out of customs the pilot was there waiting with a rent-a-van. We jumped in the van and the pilot lived nearby, so we drove up to the flat and knocked on the door. The boyfriend answers and was obviously shocked to see Chang and myself there. The pilot is stood behind us and he says that he's there to get his stuff. The girl and the boyfriend immediately both just started picking stuff up and helping us get it down to the van, they couldn't get rid of us quick enough! [Laughs.] He paid us £50 just for that.
"The funniest man in the world to work for was a man called Dennis Hayes. He was a Barnsley man originally and he used to promote boxing. In the 1950s, at the end of the war they were selling off all the army surplus so he bought a lot of sports equipment they'd used for their boxers and he made a fortune. He bought himself a nice house in Gloucester, a beautiful place - five bedrooms, all en-suite, everything you could want. He was running an event at the football ground and wanted some wrestlers, so he took us down there and we did the show, then we went out for some beer and food afterwards. He says to us all "I know what you Barnsley lads are like, but my wife is a very gentle woman so I don't want any mention of hanky-panky or any swearing in front of her. Is that understood?". So we all said 'yes of course, Dennis' and we set off to his house. We get there and we were all impressed by this massive house. We stepped through the door and heard this little voice call down "Is that you Dennis?" to which he replied "Yes Phyllis darling. Would you come down here and make the Barnsley lads a cup of tea?" At that moment this woman appears at the bannister at the top of the stairs in an old dressing gown with rags in her hair, and she shouts down "You can tell those Barnsley lads that they can make their own FUCKING tea!" [Laughs.] Then she disappeared. The next morning she was all glammed up and cooked us all breakfast. We ended up all becoming pretty good friends with her and she told us that any time we were in the area we were welcome to stay. I ended up taking her up on it when I was working nearby and one time I took Ski Hi Lee down. Dennis wore a wig and when I knocked at the door he answered without it. We went inside and Ski asks me "Who is that guy, Sam?", so I told him that it was Dennis, who we would be working for. When Dennis came back into the lounge, he had his wig on and he asks what we'd like to drink. We tell him and he walks off again and Ski turns to me and says "Well who the hell was that guy then?" [Laughs.] Another time when we were down there for two or three days, we went swimming in the afternoon & Dennis was determined to put his wig on. He takes this paste, like glue, which he spreads all over to keep it on his head, puts the wig on and then starts putting hairspray on! When we get there he asks us to walk down the steps when we first get in the pool, because if he just dived in the wig would come straight off and he didn't want to be the only one who didn't jump in. Well anyway, we couldn't resist so we all get to the edge of the pool, looked at each other and all just dived in. This left Dennis on the side, so he jumped in as well. We all swam to the other side and Dennis pulls himself up and asks "is it still on?" It was hanging down like the tail on Davey Crockett's hat! Dennis was so funny.
"All of the promoters I had worked for were democratic, they were nice people and that's the reason people jumped over. When our side started getting stronger and the older established workers for Joint Promotions started coming out into the rest of the circuit, they were amazed at the difference in the dressing room. Eric Taylor, Farmer Johnny Allen, Dennis Mitchell, Mike Marino and more left Joint Promotions and were all surprised that there was a good, friendly atmosphere in the dressing room, whereas in theirs apparently everything was very secretive and paranoid. That was another reason that I never wanted to go and work for them, because all you heard about it was bad. Plus, I think it was in 1968 or 1969, I think I'd made something like £3,000, and in those days you could buy a Volkswagen for about £500. "When we used to get jobs down in London, the main promoter we'd work through was Tony Scarlo. He had some good halls down in London, like the York Hall in Bethnall Green. He'd usually find you about four jobs in the week, so you'd go down and stay and you could always get another few jobs on the side to fill it out and make some more money. When I was going down to work for Tony Scarlo, he would pay me something like £10 per job, and then he'd give you about ten shillings for your night out. I lived in a council estate in Barnsley and the rent for the house was about £2.50 per week, so for one night's work I'd made enough for a month's rent. I once wrestled in this nighclub in Camden Town which turned out to be part of the Kray organisation, so the place was full of bloody gangsters. Anyway, we got paid and got home alright, but I never took that job on again. "Now, there was a villain in the wrestling game, a south Yorkshire lad from Doncaster, by the name of Peter Rann. Peter was a diabolical villain in wrestling and real life, he was involved with Rachman."
Perec 'Peter' Rachman was a landlord in Notting Hill, London in the 1950s and early 1960s, who became so notorious for his exploitation of his tenants that the term "Rachmanism" was coined and entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for the exploitation and intimidation of tenants. His story has been the basis of many characters in pop culture, in songs, movies and literature.
"He was always in the news, but Peter [Rann] would find you work to do for him. So if you were going down for a week and only had the four jobs from Tony, Peter would get you some work for him. You'd also speak to Bert Assirati, because Bert used to run some doors, so he might be able to book you in for a couple of jobs."
Assirati had a reputation as a proficient shooter and for being stiff in the ring. It is said that many promoters were reluctant to book him for fear of him double-crossing his opponents and changing the intended match outcome. Assirati controversially quit Joint Promotions while he was Heavyweight champion in 1956 but would buy a ticket to one of their events the following year, where he publicly challenged Lou Thesz.
"Also, when you were working down in London, there would be local businessmen waiting at the dressing room to ask any of the guys if they wanted a bit of work. Sometimes they needed some strong lads to fill in for a couple of days so they'd think to ask us. Some of them just wanted some big, tough looking fellas, and being pretty stocky and tall I fit the bill for them. So you could pick up maybe another three or four jobs and then before you know it you have seven full days of work in one way or another. Peter Rann used to say to me "Come and just stay down here Sam, you can work with me and make yourself some real money. Get yourself out of Barnsley". Well Peter ended up moving out of London and ended up in Blackpool because things got too rough even for him. You used to get some shady characters around the shows there. [The same was true in Manchester], you used to get some real villains round there, some right bloody ones. I knew a lot of them. You'd get to know them because they liked to be seen with people like us, it was a part of their business to maintain their image and be seen as tough guys, I suppose. They used to treat us very well. They all had stakes in the clubs, so they'd be there every night anyway and obviously they'd have all their own doormen on so they'd just relax, enjoy the shows and want us to stay around afterwards.
"All of the promoters that I worked for, who had the independent promotions, always treated me very well. That was one of the reasons that I never worked for Joint Promotions. Sometimes on a Sunday morning we would travel over to go and train in George de Relwyskow's gym."
George, the son of the olympic wrestler of the same name, was a highly successful promoter who was part of the Joint Promotions umbrella, which was similar to the set-up of the NWA in North America. Essentially a conglomerate of promoters who would schedule their own contracted wrestlers on a circuit which was controlled by the group, they also had exclusive control over the televised wrestling output on ITV's World Of Sport program, the only national showcase of British wrestling talent.
"George would say to me "You want to come and work for us, Sam", but I would say "I've been fine doing what I'm doing, George". They were dictators who dominated their men; you could only work for them and them alone. If they could only give you so many jobs per week, then that's all you had. You had to work just for them. In the competition who I worked for, which was probably about 150 promoters over the years, I was never, ever short of work. I used to stick with the jobs where I could pick out what I wanted to do, so that I could just let them know the dates I could or couldn't work. But I might get up to four different offers for one day from different promoters and have to choose one job, so obviously I picked out the ones that were most convenient for me. If there was one in my area, I'd take that one or if it was outside the area, I'd try to find some more shows near there or other work nearby. That's the way it was on the outside of Joint Promotions and that's another reason I didn't ever work for them. "I worked for Max Crabtree when they first started 20th Century Promotions, which he ran with his brother, Brian and Norman Berry. Norman Berry had also been the Editor In Chief of the wrestling newspaper ran by Norman Morell, who had been in charge of all the other promoters, he was a big-timer.
Morell was a former Olympic wrestler who was on the comittee that created the infamous Lord Mountevans Rules of wrestling. He would later become a promoter in Yorkshire before becoming a founding member of Joint Promotions. Norman Berry had worked alongside Morell for years and it sent a shockwave through the country's wrestling industry when he split away and became a founding member of an opposition group to Joint Promotions, the Wrestling Federation of Great Britain. This was designed to be a similar alliance of promoters and included his own company, 20th Century Promotions. Ultimately this new independent allegiance would fail to steal the spotlight away from the existing cartel, but the promotion itself would enjoy success for many years.
"When Norman Berry broke away from Joint Promotions, I came and worked for him. Everything was alright when Norman was in charge, you got your money when he promised and he paid you well. Now when Norman died and Max Crabtree took over completely, the wages immediately started coming down. Max was invited to go into business with Norman Morell. Max said to me "Norman wants to meet you, Sam", so I drove over to his office to have this meeting and Max came with me. I didn't like that atmosphere from the very first second. Before I even went in, Max had been telling me how to act in front of him. I was thinking 'who exactly am I going to see here?' His office was in the Chambers in Bradford, so we climbed the stairs and Norman Morell was sat there. No friendly greeting, no handshake, no warmth in his voice, none whatsoever. It was like speaking to a grey robot. He gives me all the spiel and I just said "I'll think about it and get back to you". I never looked back, not once. I made a good living by doing it the way I wanted.
"Every January they run a show in Barnsley [billed as 'American Wrestling Live'] and I haven't missed it for the last five years. They have a different style of wrestling; they cater for the kids. Now when the kids go, they bring their parents to the show. Now last year it was snowing and freezing cold in January, but with how popular it has become they still got about 600 people in there at £10 a time, and everyone loves it. It keeps people coming because the kids love that kind of wrestling. Things evolve over the years and this is what people expect now. People don't expect our kind of wrestling, they don't want it. Ours was more physical, you really went for it with the holds and strikes, but obviously it's not about that now. [You got people who] complained that people were too stiff in the ring, but that's just the way we all worked, apart from people like Big Daddy [Shirley Crabtree]. We all tried to keep ourselves in shape for the most part, because we needed to if we wanted to have good matches, but obviously Big Daddy brought in the circus element, he wasn't there to have the best matches... Max [Crabtree] was a world class promoter and he was a good fella, he created Big Daddy and marketed it right..."
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"Everyone wanted to come out and see the wrestling because it was a fantastic night out. They all shouted and bawled and roared. You'd get all the young ladies wanting some participation, so they'd be hitting us with handbags and umbrellas and even stumping out their cigarettes on some of us; it was basically a safety valve, an outlet for all the frustration and emotion that they couldn't let out at home. So when they went back to the kids at home, all bawling and misbehaving, they went away happy because they'd got all their frustration out and had a great night out. We used to get them really going at it, but obviously that was our job, to get them all riled up. "People really appreciated their wrestling back then, and they knew wrestling. Especially when we went over into Lancashire, around Bolton and Farnworth areas, it was the worst place in the world to wrestle [in some ways] because they knew their wrestling inside out. Any of these show-holds that actually don't mean anything at all, you couldn't get away with using any of those there. Say if you went to put an arm-hook on someone, one of those Bolton lads would straight away start shouting 'put a bar on it!' because they knew from learning real wrestling that to really lock them, you'd put a bar on the hold to make it secure with your other hand. Then the next thing is that when you've got something on someone, they'd start telling them how to get out of it. You couldn't get away with anything there. They were born into it around that area and they learned from some real professionals, so there were some really tough guys in those crowds. When we were in the business you had to have some kind of legitimate background. You had to know how to really put a hold on and how to get out of it. When you got in that ring, you had to be ready in case there were any ring-jumpers from the audience and you had to be able to handle them. Some of these guys now, they don't have a clue about that, they wouldn't know how to wrestle their way out of a paper bag. They're performers and great actors, but I admire what some of those Americans can do. Some of the stuff they do now is fantastic. Big Daddy couldn't get off the floor, he had to help himself up on the ropes but nowadays you have guys bigger than him doing dropkicks. Big Daddy couldn't get off his hands and knees on his own, while these guys are flying around the ring, so that's one big difference. I've watched some of the holds they do and, you know, some of them do incorporate some freestyle wrestling and it might not be our style, but some of those suplexes and moves are excellent and they have to be fit to do it. It's not my style of wrestling at all, but when I watch them I think that the way they perform some of those acrobatics is just really out of this world."
Sam Betts still has an obvious love for the wrestling business. He is a regular at live events in his local area as well as at the wrestlers reunions and shares information, photos and stories through social media. There is so much more that we did not have time to cover in a single interview, but hopefully I will be able to expand on this in the future. A celebrated career which proves that sometimes it's better to be your own boss than to follow the more travelled road, Sam's is an incredible story and it was an honour and pleasure to speak with him.
Sam Betts has Mighty Chang in a headlock during one of their tours together.
The history of professional wrestling in Britain is a rich and vibrant one, filled with an eclectic collection of characters and outstanding athletes. When most people speak about British wrestling's history, little seems to be acknowledged outside of the weekly World Of Sport program from ITV. Yet the independent scene of the time was a thriving and popular attraction, enjoying sold out venues, respectable paydays and star names who could compete and draw without the aid of the television platform. One of them is Sam Betts, who mostly wrestled under the name of Dwight J Ingleburgh. Born in Yorkshire and playing an American, Sam would work his way up the card to become a main eventer at events all over the country and some tours abroad. Instilled with a keen work ethic from an early age and with the sense to retain some stability for his family at home, he regularly worked full time day-jobs in addition to the dates he worked as a professional wrestler, but this did not impede his success on the wrestling scene. It was an absolute pleasure and honour to speak to Sam and hear his stories about not only his own career, but the history of the industry and the business in general at that time. Some people seem destined to perform in a wrestling ring, and with a reputation for being a great performer as well as a love for the business which lasts to this day, Sam is one of those people. It seemed that his early life prepared him for the rigors of a harsh but rewarding business and shaped the destiny of a young man who would become a staple of the UK's independent scene at a time, in post-war Britain, when live entertainment was at an apex of social focus and importance.
"My grandfather, George Betts, was born around Georgian times, but I'm not 100% sure of the dates. He was a pugilist and he would just come out and fight anybody. I've got a picture of him somewhere, and promoters used to call him the Russian Bear.
George Betts (Center), with Sam's Father, William Betts (Right) & a family friend
"I followed my father into the pit at 14 years old. The drift mine where I worked was partner to Barnsley Main Colliery, which is where they would do the underground training. It was near to where I lived and they still have some of the pit-head gear there, erected as a memorial.
"I came there to do my underground training and I was down that mine on the 7th of May 1947 when there was an explosion, and about 12 people lost their lives. Thankfully I wasn't in the explosion area, I was in the gallery nearby, but we felt the blast and heard the explosion. It was a terrifying thing for a 14 year old. I detested the pit where we did our training, they'd had one of the biggest disasters in history, back when it was called The Oaks Colliery. They changed the name to Barnsley Main Colliery, but nothing else about it had changed. You could smell the gas as soon as you got into the cage to go down, but people didn't worry because this was the norm. For everybody, that was their life around this area.
"The pit I went to work at was a drift mine, which was about four miles from where I lived and there was no bus service in that area. I had to walk the four miles each way to get to work, but you'd do it in an hour. We'd probably half run there, but when they did start a bus service that went to the place, it took about a six or seven mile detour, so it wasn't worth it. We were better off walking so we'd all get together. About 4 o'clock to 4.30 in the morning, you'd start hearing all the clogs, clip-clopping down the street. It was a beautiful sound. I started work at 6 o'clock in the morning and I finished at 3.30 in the afternoon, and you all you had was a twenty minute break. That was just the way it was for any young man at the pits.
Sam during his service with the Irish Guards
Winterburg as it looked at that time.
Bruno Elrington
Bruno appeared on World Of Sport regularly, even gaining a win over the much beloved Big Daddy. He also worked as an actor with such credits as 'The Nine Ages of Nakedness' (1969), 'The Touchables' (1968) and 'Boxer' (1965). He would open his own gym in Portsmouth many years later and would in turn go on to train other big names in British wrestling.
"Brian Glover and I were training there together. I was a couple of years older than him and we'd always trained at the gym together in boxing. Prior to that, I'd known Brian while we were growing up because we were kids together. Brian played for Barnsley Boys Football team, and he was a good football player. He was always a bright lad, so he went off to study at Sheffield University. When he came back, he went off to the army like I had done, and when he came out of the army he thought he'd 'get involved in this wrestling'. He'd tried a few jobs around building sites and things like that, then he packed that in and he got a job at the Barnsley Chronicle in the advertising department. He moved on from there to work at G.U.S., which was a big furniture shop in Barnsley and Charlie had managed to get me a job there as a debt collector."
Sam, Brian and a few others from the gym would regularly work dayjobs together, including worked on a building site with Pedro The Gypsy. (Gordon Allen) In a previous interview (which can be found here) Sam would say that "When the cement wagons arrived, with 10 tons of cement to be offloaded by hand, Pedro used to disappear, you could never find him."
"So, we worked together there and we ended being lifelong friends. Brian went on and did a course to become a teacher [in French and English at the school he had attended himself in Barnsley]. It was there that he met Barry Hines [a fellow teacher at the school] who wrote the book 'Kes', and Barry recommended Brian to Ken Loach, the director, to be in the film based on the book. He was really good in that, but it wasn't really acting, that was just Brian being Brian, but it set him off on the road to fame."
Brian Glover
Brian would recall the experience in an interview about the film, and said "Ken Loach was improvising a fight with a load of kids, and he asked me to stop it like a teacher would. Well, I'd stopped a good few playground fights, and I had the confidence of being in the ring all those years, so I just grabbed the two kids who were fighting and banged their heads together."
"We all used to go out - myself, Brian, his wife Elaine and another couple of wrestlers with their wives. We'd meet up every week and just have a couple of drinks together. Brian was actually at our house not long before he died. His second wife [Tara Prem, the daughter of TV actor Bakhshi Prem] was a television producer and she really helped to get his acting career going. He did those adverts for the teabags and he went to America with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He did quite a bit and went on to become quite a big name, he did really well.
Two photos of Charlie along with some of the trainees at his gyms (Charlie pictured in white shirt & tie, while Sam appears in each photo in his 'USA' jogging suit).
"In the meantime, this other gym comes up, which was at the Junction Hotel in Cemetary Road in Barnsley. It was set up in a set of garages at the back of the pub, and we went down to look at them with the landlord and picked the space that we wanted, which was basically four rooms. It was quite run down and the stairs had fallen through, so we got a few of the lads to do it up, build some stairs and renovate the upstairs etc. We ended up with two rooms upstairs; one was for wrestling and one for boxing, with the rooms downstairs for a changing room and shower, and the one next to that was for weightlifting. That's where we ended up staying right until we all packed it in and then they pulled it down for redevelopment."Charlie didn't run any shows himself, but he would provide people for the promoters. Over in Manchester and around Lancashire, there was a promoter called Mike Landis, who I think lived in New Mills. He'd run shows around that area and in Derbyshire, Stockport, places like that, so Charlie would send us over to work for him. I wrestled my first ever match under the name of Al Sammy. Charlie had sent me over and for the first one, they put me on under that name. But I've had all sorts of names. Charlie Glover of course was 'The Red Devil' whenever he was wrestling, and I've even worked in his outfit under that name.
Sam in his 'Red Devil' attire.
"When there was no wrestling over the summer, I'd go and work at Butlins camps as security. While I was there, I met Jack Atherton, who was a promoter with Billy Riley, and he heard that I wrestled and took a look at me and asked if I wanted to go and work for him. He wanted me for a few jobs starting after the holiday season, so I turned up to a show to work for him and he had me on the bill as Bill Dunne. I was working on the top of the bill straight away, and he put me in with some of the top stars of the day, but sometimes I didn't know my bloody name! It seemed like almost every show, I had a different name. It was only when I came back over to work a lot of shows in Yorkshire that I got the name that I stuck with, which must have been in about 1958. There was about ten of us that were wrestling out of the same gym in Barnsley, and obviously we had to fill the bill out.
They would come up with names and characters out of necessity to add some diversity to the cards they worked on, so that not everyone would be billed as being from the same place. Brian would become Leon Arras - the man from Paris.
"Brian would come up with the names, and at the time Dwight D. Eisenhower [34th President of the USA] and J. Edgar Hoover [the first ever Director of the FBI] were always in the news. It seemed like those names were always in the newspaper for one thing or another, so Brian came up with the name Dwight J Ingleburgh. The worst thing about it was learning how to spell it! Oh, it was a nightmare.
Event poster showing Sam (as Dwight J Ingleburgh) Vs Brian Glover (as Leon Arras).
"Sometimes you'd go to a show and it would be all there, they'd have it all worked out and everyone would have wound themselves up before the show even went on. But other times they'd put a good old wrestling match on, and they'd look around and the crowd wouldn't be reacting that well, so the promoter would turn round and say 'Right, go out there and wind them all up a bit Sam', so I'd use some psychology. Sometimes what I would do is just watch the crowd in the first bout and pick out one person who I could tell was going to react, and I'd think 'I can get this one going', so immediately I sought them out. Then I'd focus on that one person, because then when I'd get that reaction from one, the rest would start joining in. I wouldn't have to do all the talking and stuff they do now, I'd just walk down to the ring, carrying myself like a big city gent, and the ones that I thought I could get going quickly, I'd literally sometimes just point my finger at them. I didn't have to say anything, just point my finger and it would get that one going, which would get all the crowd going. There was that kind of psychology in professional wrestling back then that they don't seem to have nowadays. The old timers were perfect at it, they knew how to work the crowd, so I'd watch them and learn from them, get some tips from them and get better at doing it myself. If you were working as a blue-eyes [known in American wrestling as a babyface] it was easy, you'd just go down to ringside and stop on the way to shake some hands, kiss a baby on the head, you know, get the crowd with you. I was a full-time professional, so I could work as a villain or a blue-eyes, whatever the promoter wanted. That's what they're missing now, because they don't tell a story. We used to tell them a story, right from the beginning.
"Bessie Braddock [a Labour Party Politician], who was the MP for Liverpool, was this little stout lady and they loved her in Liverpool. She always took her holidays at Scarborough and always went to the wrestling shows there. Don Robinson was the promoter and he would reserve a ringside seat for her. She was a darling, was Bessie. So we always made sure that I was in the corner where Bessie was sitting nearby, just so that I could get her going a little bit. You can bet that she hit me with that handbag quite a few times - it must have been the biggest handbag in the world, it was bigger than her! She'd bounce that thing off the back of my head... but she was a lovely lady. She always stayed for a fortnight there. I was wrestling in Scarborough for about ten years and she never missed a single show."
Throughout Bessie Braddock's exensive career she fought particularly hard for improvements for causes such as maternity, child welfare and youth crime. Harold Wilson was quoted as saying at her funeral that "She was born to fight for the people of the docks, of the slums, of the factories and in every part of the city where people needed help".
Statue of Bessie Braddock in Liverpool's Lime Street Rail Station.
"Some of the guys came over here [from North America] who I'd work on shows with, like the ex-Mr Universe Ray Schaefer and Ski Hi Lee. I wrestled them both a lot and did two tours in India with Ski."
Ski Hi Lee displays his size and strength.
"Ski was so tall that I had to help him out of the car by pulling his legs out, because otherwise he would get stuck. He was noted for his whiskey drinking. He could drink four or five bottles a day, and sometimes they say as many as seven! There was prohibition in Bombay, so the only way you could drink was to get this permit from the government. So you drank in what they called the Permit Room, & every time you had a drink there would be an officer sat there and he'd sign the book to say you'd had one. That was just a formality of course, you just basically took what you want because the prohibition officer was as corrupt as anything, but from what we saw it was kind of a way of life at that time in India, everyone would bend the rules for a bit of a back-hander. But the running joke was that when they were handing out these drinking licences to us all, that when it came to Ski, they had to give him two! [Laughs]. His party piece was to let people throw darts into his back. He'd stand there with his shirt down and just let people throw the darts into his back! He was a really tough guy, and at one time he lived like a millionaire because he'd been such a big star in the States and Canada, even flying in his own helicopter. He said that alimony took everything he had, his wife got everything. It was a sad day when he died. The drink might not have even been the cause of death, with the way he smoked. [The exact date and cause of Ski Hi Lee's death remain unknown.]
"The first time I was in India was in 1967. I was sent a letter by the promoter [Don Robinson] which came with two tickets - one for me and one for a fellow called Milton Reid, who wrestled as 'The Mighty Chang'.
Milton Reid (aka Mighty Chang)
As an actor, Reid was largely known for playing henchmen & similar roles. Most notably, he appeared in two James Bond films - as Dr. No's Guard in 'Dr. No' (1962) and as Sandor, Roger Moore's opponent in a roof top fight in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' (1977). He also appeared in the original (non-Eon Productions) Bond film 'Casino Royale' (1967) where he had a bit part as a temple guard. Reid also tried out for the role of Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964). He actually challenged fellow wrestler Harold "Tosh Togo" Sakata to a match where the outcome would decide who would get the role, but as he had already appeared in 'Dr. No' the producers decided on Sakata, and the match never took place. He would become a TV regular for adverts, horror films, sketch shows and even some British sex films. In 1979, he returned to India to live with his mother and sister and allegedly died of a heart attack in 1987. His death is shrouded in mystery due to conflicting dates of death and because he died in relative obscurity in India. No death certificate was ever recorded."So I met him at the airport here and we travelled over together, and we were picked up in a taxi at the other end which takes us to the hotel we were staying at, which was always a four star hotel when we went out to India. We were big business over there and they always treated us like stars because in the eyes of the paying people, we were big stars. Well, we dropped our stuff off at the hotel and then they took us down to the outdoor stadium, which was this open cricket ground, and there was this great big cut-out of myself which was 30 foot high on the side of the stadium. Next to it is one of Milton Reid, 30 feet high and next to him was one of Ski Hi Lee, and then Klondike Bill. ['Klondike' Bill Soloweyko was a Canadian pro wrestler trained by Stu Hart in the famous Dungeon in Calgary. He began his career wrestling in Stu's local promotion, Stampede Wrestling before moving onto other territories such as some preliminary matches for WWF and then working as a ring technician for WCW.]
Sam in action in India.
Sam posing with some locals on his 1975 tour of India.
"They make a lot of Hollywood films and TV shows there too, because of the scenery. One person there was [Hervé Villechaize, who played] Tattoo on Fantasy Island, and that whole crew were filming there. Anyway, they have these big house-boats on the river, and all the wealthier Indians take holidays up there because it's colder, and they stay in these houseboats. The hotel where I was staying had this boat so they'd take me on a tour down the river, and they'd make you a meal while you were on it and show you around the lakes. There would be kingfishers flying around and they'd land on the sides of the boat. Every morning we'd go down and take a little tour, and sit on the waterfront and get fresh trout for our breakfast. The only problem was that the area had been in conflict for years and we could actually hear the gunfire from them shooting over the border, because it was a disputed area [between India and Pakistan]. The wrestling show was being held in a Sikh army barracks (I worked in a lot of strange places), and there were about 15-20,000 people at the show. I was wrestling Darra Singh's brother, Randhawa Singh, which meant that when I got in there, the crowd decided that they didn't like me and they started to climb over and were storming the ring. These Sikhs who were living in the barracks seemed to all be tall, about six foot and over, and all skinny, so they all surrounded me. They backed us up right to the guard room to get me away from the locals, and I was stuck in there with this other Indian wrestler who I think had his wife with him. The locals were all outside, trying to get in. It must have been about 10 o'clock when they got me in there and at about 2 o'clock they were still trying to get in. So I said to this other bloke, who was another big Sikh, 'What do we do to get out?'. He just looked at me and said 'Aim for the head Sam'. Anyway thankfully the skies opened and it started throwing the rain down, so the crowd all dispersed pretty quickly after that."
Sam recieves trophies and meets the fans on tour in India.
Sam would return to India for another tour in 1975, as well as enjoying some other tours to places such as Sweden, Germany and Singapore, but for the majority of his career would stay at home in the UK so that he could continue to work full time and stay home with his family. However, when between jobs, or when the moeny when too good to refuse, he would accept tours and got to have some interesting experiences whether at home or abroad.
"One time, we were on a flight back from Malaysia, I was sat on the plane with Mighty Chang. The pilot invited us into the flightdeck, and Chang was excited because he'd never seen one. Anyway, it turns out the pilot has a problem: His girlfriend had thrown him out and moved her new boyfriend into his flat. He was a little timid guy and wanted to get the stuff out of his flat, so he asked Chang to help him move house. Chang just turns round and says 'Of course, no problem' and that he'd move some stuff for him. Well lo and behold, as soon as we get out of customs the pilot was there waiting with a rent-a-van. We jumped in the van and the pilot lived nearby, so we drove up to the flat and knocked on the door. The boyfriend answers and was obviously shocked to see Chang and myself there. The pilot is stood behind us and he says that he's there to get his stuff. The girl and the boyfriend immediately both just started picking stuff up and helping us get it down to the van, they couldn't get rid of us quick enough! [Laughs.] He paid us £50 just for that.
"The funniest man in the world to work for was a man called Dennis Hayes. He was a Barnsley man originally and he used to promote boxing. In the 1950s, at the end of the war they were selling off all the army surplus so he bought a lot of sports equipment they'd used for their boxers and he made a fortune. He bought himself a nice house in Gloucester, a beautiful place - five bedrooms, all en-suite, everything you could want. He was running an event at the football ground and wanted some wrestlers, so he took us down there and we did the show, then we went out for some beer and food afterwards. He says to us all "I know what you Barnsley lads are like, but my wife is a very gentle woman so I don't want any mention of hanky-panky or any swearing in front of her. Is that understood?". So we all said 'yes of course, Dennis' and we set off to his house. We get there and we were all impressed by this massive house. We stepped through the door and heard this little voice call down "Is that you Dennis?" to which he replied "Yes Phyllis darling. Would you come down here and make the Barnsley lads a cup of tea?" At that moment this woman appears at the bannister at the top of the stairs in an old dressing gown with rags in her hair, and she shouts down "You can tell those Barnsley lads that they can make their own FUCKING tea!" [Laughs.] Then she disappeared. The next morning she was all glammed up and cooked us all breakfast. We ended up all becoming pretty good friends with her and she told us that any time we were in the area we were welcome to stay. I ended up taking her up on it when I was working nearby and one time I took Ski Hi Lee down. Dennis wore a wig and when I knocked at the door he answered without it. We went inside and Ski asks me "Who is that guy, Sam?", so I told him that it was Dennis, who we would be working for. When Dennis came back into the lounge, he had his wig on and he asks what we'd like to drink. We tell him and he walks off again and Ski turns to me and says "Well who the hell was that guy then?" [Laughs.] Another time when we were down there for two or three days, we went swimming in the afternoon & Dennis was determined to put his wig on. He takes this paste, like glue, which he spreads all over to keep it on his head, puts the wig on and then starts putting hairspray on! When we get there he asks us to walk down the steps when we first get in the pool, because if he just dived in the wig would come straight off and he didn't want to be the only one who didn't jump in. Well anyway, we couldn't resist so we all get to the edge of the pool, looked at each other and all just dived in. This left Dennis on the side, so he jumped in as well. We all swam to the other side and Dennis pulls himself up and asks "is it still on?" It was hanging down like the tail on Davey Crockett's hat! Dennis was so funny.
"All of the promoters I had worked for were democratic, they were nice people and that's the reason people jumped over. When our side started getting stronger and the older established workers for Joint Promotions started coming out into the rest of the circuit, they were amazed at the difference in the dressing room. Eric Taylor, Farmer Johnny Allen, Dennis Mitchell, Mike Marino and more left Joint Promotions and were all surprised that there was a good, friendly atmosphere in the dressing room, whereas in theirs apparently everything was very secretive and paranoid. That was another reason that I never wanted to go and work for them, because all you heard about it was bad. Plus, I think it was in 1968 or 1969, I think I'd made something like £3,000, and in those days you could buy a Volkswagen for about £500. "When we used to get jobs down in London, the main promoter we'd work through was Tony Scarlo. He had some good halls down in London, like the York Hall in Bethnall Green. He'd usually find you about four jobs in the week, so you'd go down and stay and you could always get another few jobs on the side to fill it out and make some more money. When I was going down to work for Tony Scarlo, he would pay me something like £10 per job, and then he'd give you about ten shillings for your night out. I lived in a council estate in Barnsley and the rent for the house was about £2.50 per week, so for one night's work I'd made enough for a month's rent. I once wrestled in this nighclub in Camden Town which turned out to be part of the Kray organisation, so the place was full of bloody gangsters. Anyway, we got paid and got home alright, but I never took that job on again. "Now, there was a villain in the wrestling game, a south Yorkshire lad from Doncaster, by the name of Peter Rann. Peter was a diabolical villain in wrestling and real life, he was involved with Rachman."
Perec 'Peter' Rachman was a landlord in Notting Hill, London in the 1950s and early 1960s, who became so notorious for his exploitation of his tenants that the term "Rachmanism" was coined and entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a synonym for the exploitation and intimidation of tenants. His story has been the basis of many characters in pop culture, in songs, movies and literature.
"He was always in the news, but Peter [Rann] would find you work to do for him. So if you were going down for a week and only had the four jobs from Tony, Peter would get you some work for him. You'd also speak to Bert Assirati, because Bert used to run some doors, so he might be able to book you in for a couple of jobs."
Bert Assirati.
Assirati had a reputation as a proficient shooter and for being stiff in the ring. It is said that many promoters were reluctant to book him for fear of him double-crossing his opponents and changing the intended match outcome. Assirati controversially quit Joint Promotions while he was Heavyweight champion in 1956 but would buy a ticket to one of their events the following year, where he publicly challenged Lou Thesz.
"Also, when you were working down in London, there would be local businessmen waiting at the dressing room to ask any of the guys if they wanted a bit of work. Sometimes they needed some strong lads to fill in for a couple of days so they'd think to ask us. Some of them just wanted some big, tough looking fellas, and being pretty stocky and tall I fit the bill for them. So you could pick up maybe another three or four jobs and then before you know it you have seven full days of work in one way or another. Peter Rann used to say to me "Come and just stay down here Sam, you can work with me and make yourself some real money. Get yourself out of Barnsley". Well Peter ended up moving out of London and ended up in Blackpool because things got too rough even for him. You used to get some shady characters around the shows there. [The same was true in Manchester], you used to get some real villains round there, some right bloody ones. I knew a lot of them. You'd get to know them because they liked to be seen with people like us, it was a part of their business to maintain their image and be seen as tough guys, I suppose. They used to treat us very well. They all had stakes in the clubs, so they'd be there every night anyway and obviously they'd have all their own doormen on so they'd just relax, enjoy the shows and want us to stay around afterwards.
George de Relwyskow Jr.
George, the son of the olympic wrestler of the same name, was a highly successful promoter who was part of the Joint Promotions umbrella, which was similar to the set-up of the NWA in North America. Essentially a conglomerate of promoters who would schedule their own contracted wrestlers on a circuit which was controlled by the group, they also had exclusive control over the televised wrestling output on ITV's World Of Sport program, the only national showcase of British wrestling talent.
"George would say to me "You want to come and work for us, Sam", but I would say "I've been fine doing what I'm doing, George". They were dictators who dominated their men; you could only work for them and them alone. If they could only give you so many jobs per week, then that's all you had. You had to work just for them. In the competition who I worked for, which was probably about 150 promoters over the years, I was never, ever short of work. I used to stick with the jobs where I could pick out what I wanted to do, so that I could just let them know the dates I could or couldn't work. But I might get up to four different offers for one day from different promoters and have to choose one job, so obviously I picked out the ones that were most convenient for me. If there was one in my area, I'd take that one or if it was outside the area, I'd try to find some more shows near there or other work nearby. That's the way it was on the outside of Joint Promotions and that's another reason I didn't ever work for them. "I worked for Max Crabtree when they first started 20th Century Promotions, which he ran with his brother, Brian and Norman Berry. Norman Berry had also been the Editor In Chief of the wrestling newspaper ran by Norman Morell, who had been in charge of all the other promoters, he was a big-timer.
Morell was a former Olympic wrestler who was on the comittee that created the infamous Lord Mountevans Rules of wrestling. He would later become a promoter in Yorkshire before becoming a founding member of Joint Promotions. Norman Berry had worked alongside Morell for years and it sent a shockwave through the country's wrestling industry when he split away and became a founding member of an opposition group to Joint Promotions, the Wrestling Federation of Great Britain. This was designed to be a similar alliance of promoters and included his own company, 20th Century Promotions. Ultimately this new independent allegiance would fail to steal the spotlight away from the existing cartel, but the promotion itself would enjoy success for many years.
"When Norman Berry broke away from Joint Promotions, I came and worked for him. Everything was alright when Norman was in charge, you got your money when he promised and he paid you well. Now when Norman died and Max Crabtree took over completely, the wages immediately started coming down. Max was invited to go into business with Norman Morell. Max said to me "Norman wants to meet you, Sam", so I drove over to his office to have this meeting and Max came with me. I didn't like that atmosphere from the very first second. Before I even went in, Max had been telling me how to act in front of him. I was thinking 'who exactly am I going to see here?' His office was in the Chambers in Bradford, so we climbed the stairs and Norman Morell was sat there. No friendly greeting, no handshake, no warmth in his voice, none whatsoever. It was like speaking to a grey robot. He gives me all the spiel and I just said "I'll think about it and get back to you". I never looked back, not once. I made a good living by doing it the way I wanted.
Sam Betts (Right) with fellow trainee from Charlie Glover's gym, Jack Land.
"Every January they run a show in Barnsley [billed as 'American Wrestling Live'] and I haven't missed it for the last five years. They have a different style of wrestling; they cater for the kids. Now when the kids go, they bring their parents to the show. Now last year it was snowing and freezing cold in January, but with how popular it has become they still got about 600 people in there at £10 a time, and everyone loves it. It keeps people coming because the kids love that kind of wrestling. Things evolve over the years and this is what people expect now. People don't expect our kind of wrestling, they don't want it. Ours was more physical, you really went for it with the holds and strikes, but obviously it's not about that now. [You got people who] complained that people were too stiff in the ring, but that's just the way we all worked, apart from people like Big Daddy [Shirley Crabtree]. We all tried to keep ourselves in shape for the most part, because we needed to if we wanted to have good matches, but obviously Big Daddy brought in the circus element, he wasn't there to have the best matches... Max [Crabtree] was a world class promoter and he was a good fella, he created Big Daddy and marketed it right..."
Sam in action early on in his career.
"I don't think it will ever get back to the way it was. Pretty much every hall was jam-packed full, from the smallest little village halls to the biggest ones like the old York Hall, Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Grove Stadium in Glasgow, the one in Birmingham - the Embassy in Sparkbrook, the Eldorado Stadium in Edinburgh. Some of those venues would hold at least 2,000 people and they were always jam-packed full.
Free Trade Hall in Manchester (now a Radisson Hotel).
"Everyone wanted to come out and see the wrestling because it was a fantastic night out. They all shouted and bawled and roared. You'd get all the young ladies wanting some participation, so they'd be hitting us with handbags and umbrellas and even stumping out their cigarettes on some of us; it was basically a safety valve, an outlet for all the frustration and emotion that they couldn't let out at home. So when they went back to the kids at home, all bawling and misbehaving, they went away happy because they'd got all their frustration out and had a great night out. We used to get them really going at it, but obviously that was our job, to get them all riled up. "People really appreciated their wrestling back then, and they knew wrestling. Especially when we went over into Lancashire, around Bolton and Farnworth areas, it was the worst place in the world to wrestle [in some ways] because they knew their wrestling inside out. Any of these show-holds that actually don't mean anything at all, you couldn't get away with using any of those there. Say if you went to put an arm-hook on someone, one of those Bolton lads would straight away start shouting 'put a bar on it!' because they knew from learning real wrestling that to really lock them, you'd put a bar on the hold to make it secure with your other hand. Then the next thing is that when you've got something on someone, they'd start telling them how to get out of it. You couldn't get away with anything there. They were born into it around that area and they learned from some real professionals, so there were some really tough guys in those crowds. When we were in the business you had to have some kind of legitimate background. You had to know how to really put a hold on and how to get out of it. When you got in that ring, you had to be ready in case there were any ring-jumpers from the audience and you had to be able to handle them. Some of these guys now, they don't have a clue about that, they wouldn't know how to wrestle their way out of a paper bag. They're performers and great actors, but I admire what some of those Americans can do. Some of the stuff they do now is fantastic. Big Daddy couldn't get off the floor, he had to help himself up on the ropes but nowadays you have guys bigger than him doing dropkicks. Big Daddy couldn't get off his hands and knees on his own, while these guys are flying around the ring, so that's one big difference. I've watched some of the holds they do and, you know, some of them do incorporate some freestyle wrestling and it might not be our style, but some of those suplexes and moves are excellent and they have to be fit to do it. It's not my style of wrestling at all, but when I watch them I think that the way they perform some of those acrobatics is just really out of this world."
Sam Betts still has an obvious love for the wrestling business. He is a regular at live events in his local area as well as at the wrestlers reunions and shares information, photos and stories through social media. There is so much more that we did not have time to cover in a single interview, but hopefully I will be able to expand on this in the future. A celebrated career which proves that sometimes it's better to be your own boss than to follow the more travelled road, Sam's is an incredible story and it was an honour and pleasure to speak with him.
Sam with fans and wrestlers at a live event in 2015.
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