The title
Bartley Gorman was the undefeated King of the Gypsies, and the most feared bare-knuckle fighter Britain has ever produced. In the dangerous world of bare-knuckle boxing, few names carry the same weight.
He stood six foot one, with hands like steel traps, a thick Staffordshire accent, and eyes that told the stories of a hundred fights. He was known far and wide by his title, and he wore it with a mixture of pride and burden.
The price of the crown
Bartley told much of his own story on camera, and some of it was brutal. In one interview he recounted the ambush when he fought Bob Gaskin, and the massacre on St Leger day, when he was attacked so savagely that he nearly lost his leg and was lucky to escape with his life.
Those were not the only times men came for him. As he got older the call-outs grew more frequent, and so did the attempts by old foes to get their revenge. But Bartley had an equaliser. The Furys were his cousins, and they were part of his breed.
John Fury fought professionally under the name "Gypsy John Fury", and Bartley rated him the best man among the English Travellers of his era. By Bartley's own account, he once headed to a fair in Coventry with the Furys to defend his title against a London bare-knuckle fighter, and that trip very nearly ended with his head blown off. Another time a fellow Traveller called him out and tried to stove his head in with a kettle iron, and Big John Fury was there.
Big Ginge
Not every story about Bartley starts with a feud. One story, given to Enquirer 2.0 and retold with a little creative licence, comes from a weekend in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, some time in the 1970s.
Bartley was in the Market Tavern with his friends, washing down the week's dust with good ale. Across town, a man known only as Ginge was working his way through the pubs. He was over six foot five and more than twenty-five stone, a non-Traveller from Derbyshire way who was working in the Potteries. In only a few weeks he had built a reputation for bashing up local hardmen, snatching drinks and spoiling nights out.
When Ginge walked into the Market Tavern the room went quiet, and when he snatched a pint from a startled drinker at the bar, Bartley spoke up. "Oi, big man. Why not come share a drink rather than taking another's? There's plenty here."
Nobody had spoken to Ginge like that. He asked who Bartley was. Bartley told him his name, and that he believed in a fair share and fair play. Ginge liked the sound of fair play, and he offered an old-fashioned bare-knuckle fight in the beer garden, just the two of them. Bartley agreed, on one condition: keep it clean and fair, and the loser buys the winner's drinks all night.
Under the bulbs of the beer garden the crowd made a ring. Bartley's first jab landed flush and barely moved the big man, and Ginge's first hammer blow glanced off Bartley's head and onto his shoulder hard enough to shake him to his core. He could fight, then. But when Ginge tried to crush him in a bear hug, Bartley met him with a headbutt that the outlaw Henry Francis would have been proud of.
Back and forth they went. Ginge had the size and the power, and Bartley had the technique, the stamina and the experience. In the end one decisive punch put the bully on the ground. Bartley offered him a hand up, and the two of them walked back into the pub together, where the pints were already being poured. Nothing more was heard of Big Ginge. He went home to Derbyshire as if his spirit had been broken, and the legend of Bartley Gorman spread through Hanley like wildfire.
His brother's funeral
According to Bartley's own book, King of the Gypsies, the most brutal fight of his life did not come in a field, or at a fairground, or in some arranged grudge match. It came on the day he buried his own brother.
A hundred and eighty cars followed the coffin, and the hardest men in England came to pay their respects. It should have been a day when old scores were left alone. At the wake the drink was flowing and tempers were up, and a rival family started running their mouths. Then a fellow Traveller stepped forward and hit Bartley flush, with a fist like a mallet and a five-thousand-pound diamond ring on the hand.
Bartley was forty-six years old. Still wearing his dead brother's suit.
He could have walked away, and most men would have. Bartley took off the jacket, folded it carefully, stripped to the waist, and fought for his title.
There were no gloves, no rounds and no referee. For twenty minutes the two men fought bare-knuckle. The ring opened up Bartley's eye and half his face swelled black, but he kept coming. Then he picked his man up and put him straight through a wooden pillar, breaking two of his ribs. In Bartley's corner stood his cousin, Big John Fury, the father of Tyson Fury.
Still undefeated
By the time the police moved in, the other man had already had enough and was on his way to hospital. Bartley Gorman was still standing, and still undefeated.
It did not finish clean. Security would not touch it, and the police knew what it could become. That night it took a truce to stop a full-scale Traveller war breaking out.
That was the life that came with the title. Ambushes, call-outs, and a fight at his own brother's wake at forty-six. He met every one of them head on, and he stayed the undefeated King of the Gypsies.