Did you meet the Leamington Licker?

By the age of 17 “Randy” had already won the Amateur Boxing Association’s junior welterweight championship. Here, at 18, he’d just beaten all other contenders to take the middleweight titles at both junior and adult levels - the only boxer ever allowed to enter both competitions in the same year. Two years on from this home visit, Randolph’s older brother Dick would become the first black man allowed to fight for a British title.

That was in June, 1948, when a real or unspoken colour bar was lifted and Dick - who’d just become the Empire champion - went on to win the British middleweight title at Birmingham’s Villa Park.

As most local people know, there were three boxing Turpin brothers, British champion Dick, Midlands featherweight champion Jackie and Randolph, who became world champion in 1951. There were also two non-fighting sisters, Joan and Kathy.

The family’s Guyanese father Lionel had been gassed during the First World War and sent to Britain for treatment. He met their white mother, Beattie Whitehouse, when she nursed him at the old Chest Hospital in Hertford Hill, close to what used to be Hatton asylum.

Randolph was only a few months old when his father died, leading to Beattie moving the family from Willes Road in Leamington back to her home town of Warwick.

In this 1946 picture, taken at the boys’ club when it was in Adelaide Road, Randolph’s world title victory against Sugar Ray Robinson is still five years away.

Seated next to Randolph is fellow club member Michael Stack, who also went on to become a professional fighter - as did many other former sparring partners of the man they called the Leamington Licker - because nobody could beat him.

Milverton man David Bradshaw knew the Turpin family well and, along with middle brother Jackie, set up the successful Warwick Racing Club boxing gym in 1990.

Mr Bradshaw, aged 72, has been able to fill in most of the names of the young lads in the boys’ club photograph but he is appealing for help from older Courier readers to fill in a few gaps.

He said: “A lot of professional boxers came from this area - as a boy I spent some time in the ring myself before realising at the age of 13 that I wasn’t good enough. I found I was all right giving it out - but didn’t like taking it.”

n If you can supply any of the missing names contact Mr Bradshaw on 426019.