Lonsdale's Belt

Boxing's Most Coveted Prize

John Harding

• Publisher: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785312540
• Year: 2016

For more than 100 years the Lonsdale Belt, first awarded in 1909 by the legendary National Sporting Club and since 1936 by the British Boxing Board of Control, has encircled the waists of all the great names in British boxing history: Freddie Welsh and Ted "Kid" Lewis; Benny Lynch and Jimmy Wilde; Freddie Mills, Randolph Turpin, and Terry Downes; Henry Cooper, Barry McGuigan, Lennox Lewis, and Joe Calzaghe. Drawing upon a wealth of sources—interviews and reminiscences, boxing-board minutes and programs, contemporary magazines and newspapers, even archive film, sports historian John Harding tells the absorbing and fascinating story of the belt's origins and development and how the system the belt represents has continued to provide an unambiguous measure of excellence in the chaotic and often murky world of British professional boxing.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Mike Costello
• The Origins of the Boxing Belt
• A Belting Good Idea
• The Belts are Established
• Peerless Jim and the East End Kid
• The Digger and the Bombardier
• A Golden Era
• Cochrane’s Heavyweight Follies
• Not So Roaring Twenties
• Boxing Politics and the Colour Bar
• Dickson’s Yankee Invasion
• The Rise of the Regions
• The End of the NSC
• The Board Takes Over
• Freddie Mills and the Rise of Solomons
• Before the TV Age
• Jewels in Solomons’s Crown
• A Communications Revolution
• Legends of the Sixties
• Levene Supreme
• Black is Beautiful
• Heavyweight Odyssey
• Grass Roots Revival
• Warren Butts In
• Simply the Best of Times, Simply the Worst
• The 1990s. A Daunting Decade: Part One
• The 1990s. A Daunting Decade: Part Two
• A Century of Belts: Part One
• A Century of Belts: Part Two
• Old Traditions; New Horizons
• The Glittering Prize
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photographs