Wrestliana Read online

  So, I couldn’t put it off any longer. With every page I turned, I felt further away from my subject. I needed to see some Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling close up. It was time to get physical.

  Or, at least, to watch someone else getting physical.

  I needed to make contact.

  Years before I began seriously researching William, I had done the easy thing and Googled him. Apart from scanned in copies of Wrestliana, there wasn’t a great deal to be found online. One man was responsible for most of what appeared there: Roger Robson.

  An article by him on the Whitehaven News website under the headline ‘William Litt was the very first’ was the thing that snagged me. It began by saying, ‘Anyone interested in the history of Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling knows the name of William Litt.’

  Roger Robson had been in touch with Bill and Margaret Hartley, and was able to sketch out most of the details of William’s life. He’d also come to his own conclusions on William’s character: ‘egocentric’ was the word. William, he said, boasted about his wrestling career, expressed opinions on all subjects and flaunted his education.

  Roger Robson’s interest in William went deep enough to read Henry & Mary. It was, he wrote dryly, ‘not the most entertaining novel’, but the parts of it about wrestling were ‘fascinating’.

  Anyone interested in what’s happening today in Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling knows the name of Roger Robson.

  Figure 10. Roger, just after winning at Grasmere. I would cast him as James Bond over Roger Moore, wouldn’t you?

  He took over from ‘Clicker’ as the Cumberland News’ C&WW correspondent, and continued for thirty-seven years.

  He writes from experience. In 1970, Roger was 12 Stone Champion at Grasmere Sports.

  I started to come across Roger’s name almost daily when I seriously began researching William. He ran the website of the Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling Association – reporting on what seemed like every single match that took place. There were often photos credited to a Jill Robson.

  If William was the author of Wrestliana, the book on C&WW, then Roger – it turned out – was the author of the other book. His book was called Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling: A Documentary History.*

  It was clear that Roger Robson was the man to ask, if I wanted to see some wrestling first hand – or even to do some.

  On the website of the Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling Association,† I found Roger’s email address, and put together a message introducing myself.

  I hoped Roger Robson would at least be curious to hear from William’s great-great-great grandson.

  All I needed to do was work up enough courage to press send.

  After a day or two, I did.

  I began by introducing myself, and describing the book I was trying to write, and then I asked if Roger could put me in touch with a wrestler or a coach. ‘Is there anyone in London I can speak to about it?’

  Roger replied, promptly and definitively, ‘I know of no-one in London with any knowledge of C&W wrestling’.

  This made me think: from alpaca farming in Albania to the Zoroastrian zodiac, you can find someone who knows about most things in London. C&WW was amazingly local if that were true. (Turns out it was.)

  Roger continued, ‘Another problem is that the indoor training at the academies tends to finish at the end of March, when the hour changes and all the farm lads who wrestle are working overtime on tractors’.

  He said that, if I wanted to see anything, I better get up to Cumberland by the end of the month. On Saturday the 28th was the Academy Shield – the biggest club event of the year.

  Roger sent me some details – a poster that had obviously been put together in Microsoft Word. The event was to start prompt at 7.30 in Bootle Station Village Hall. That was Bootle – Bootle the village, not the used-as-a-comedy-name suburb of Liverpool. (When I mentioned this to a friend from the North West, he said ‘Bootle! That’s proper West Cumbria.’) There were to be five teams competing, from Waberthwaite, Kendal, Milnthorpe, Carlisle and Rothbury (in Northumberland). For the younger wrestlers, competition would be by age – Under 9, 12 and 16 years. For the grown-ups, by weight – Under 8, 10 and 12 stones, then All Weights.

  There would be a raffle. There would be a Pie & Pea Supper for £4, but Wrestlers ate for free.

  After wrestling, I hoped.

  I checked with Bill and Margaret Hartley that it was okay for me to stay with them, then wrote back to tell Roger I was coming. I booked my train ticket.

  When I arrived at Carlisle, Bill Hartley was there at the station to greet me. He looked unchanged since I’d seen him on the trip with my father in 2009. Spruce, dressed in tweed. ‘How was your journey?’ he asked.

  ‘Very good,’ I said.

  It wasn’t exactly true. I had made lots of notes about what I saw about the window, as the train made its way along the grey coast.

  I’d seen a sports store and gym, beside a large car park. Wind shaped woods. Chickens under the trampoline in a garden with green sheds. Joggers crossing a heath. The sea. Rocky beaches and distant Scottish hills. Hard headlands. Unfussy waves.

  Making notes is what I do when I’m really nervous.

  I was worrying about the evening. Ever since I’d booked to travel, my anxiety had been increasing. Would I be welcome? Would they make me hand out a prize or make a speech? Would they force me to wrestle?

  Bill might be amused at seeing me in the ring. Although as a younger man he never wrestled, he did become a black belt in judo, and he enjoys – in his gentle Cumbrian accent – pointing out the similarities between an inside hope and an uchi mata.

  Figure 11. Bill in his judo kit. Cast him as a Bond villain, don’t you think? Great shadow.

  Over another of Margaret’s generous dinners, I found out more about the Hartleys.

  For much of his working life, Bill was a building surveyor, sometimes discovering five hundred foot mineshafts beneath living rooms. But his vocation came from his grandfather – a joiner – who had once said of his own sons, ‘I’ve got three lads and isn’t yan of them could knock a nail in a turnip.’

  His grandson, though, was early on apprenticed to John Gill, cabinetmaker and undertaker. (‘I quite like making coffins,’ says Bill, ‘it were alright.’)

  Alongside the surveying, Bill made dozens of Georgian-style chests of drawers and tables. As I’d already seen, he’d furnished their bungalow, and was still making exquisite walking sticks with handles shaped like the heads of hares. He gave me one of these, a gift for my father.

  Of William and himself, Bill says, ‘I were born in the wrong time – I shoulda been alongside him; I’dah been alright.’

  With a fine mixture of affection and exasperation, Bill and Margaret’s daughter, Jane, later told me a story to sum up her father:

  The family television had broken – it wouldn’t work unless the ON button was constantly pressed in. Rather than call an electrician, Bill went into this workshop and came out half an hour later with something a lot like a wooden backscratcher, only with an extended finger rather than a curved set of nails at the end. This he set up at an angle, so that it pressed the ON switch in, and thus the TV was fixed.

  If Bill would feel more at home in 1810, Margaret is quite happy to live in the present – because the internet is where she can make discoveries and connections. She is a comfortable, comforting presence, slow moving and slow speaking. But mention the past, and everything turns quicksilver. However much I have found out about William, I know that Margaret can zip around the past as rapidly as Google Earth around the present. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘well, you know, of course, they were related – only they didn’t know it.’ And then she will give a little hum of inconclusiveness – there is always more for her to find out, too, and she’s glad of that.

  That evening, Bill Hartley drove me down to Bootle. We passed the Sellafield Nuclear Power station, brightly lit up against the sea.

  We arr
ived in the dark. We’d only made one wrong turn.

  Bootle Village Hall reminded me of Ampthill Scout Hut, where I used to do Cubs, and where – on the warm asphalt roof – I shared my first cigarette with Andrew Money, a stolen from his mum’s handbag Embassy Mild.

  The Hall was grey, low, with a floor space about the size of a tennis court. There was a disabled access ramp from the car park, a row of rectangular double-glazed windows then a row of square windows above them. It was surrounded by fields but had a playground out back with swings and a slide.

  Bootle Village Hall was the opposite of glamorous.

  I wanted what happened there not to be an embarrassment.

  I didn’t want to wrestle.

  Just inside the door was a small foldout table with ice-cream tubs on it containing notes and change – I’d anticipated this, or something like it. I’d done a lot of anticipating.

  I’d anticipated the smell of fried, unhealthy food, the smell you often get in British sports venues.

  I could smell boiling potatoes.

  I’d anticipated being disappointed more people weren’t there, and that the sport wasn’t more successful.

  The hall was packed.

  I’d anticipated feeling out of place, Southern, weak, slow, confused and brainy-but-in-a-useless way.

  Yep – spot on.

  If I say ‘the Hall was full of people’, it’ll sound like I’m not describing anything at all. What I mean is, it wasn’t full of young or old or middle-aged people. It was full of all of the above. Grandparents gave tips to grandchildren, dads coached sons and daughters.

  Bill nodded to a few people he seemed to know. I recognized Tom Harrington, former world Champion and MBE, from a photograph in Roger Robson’s book.

  I managed to introduce myself to Roger, but I could tell he was preoccupied by what was to come. One of the teams hadn’t showed, so all his neat knockout tables of Wrestler A vs. Wrestler B were useless.

  He went up behind some tables on a wide stage. Next to him was Jill Scott, who ran the C&WW Association. Bill and I found seats in the second row.

  I looked about me, wondering who was going to invite me to try the wrestling. All four sides of the room, around the edge of the mats, were crowded. The people were chatting. There was excitement but no hype. Something was going to happen, they knew that. But they didn’t seem to expect it to be anything they hadn’t seen before. They were like parents waiting before a Year Three assembly.

  The wrestling started.

  I was excited. I had been looking forward to seeing this for months. But to begin with I had a strange doubleness to my vision. I’d read so much about wrestling by Georgian and Victorian writers, particularly William, that I almost expected to be transported back in time. Who were these spiky haired children sloping out onto the mats, beneath bright fluorescent lights? Why weren’t the wrestlers whiskery men in homemade clothes? Everything Wrestliana described seemed, on the surface, out of date. William had never seen the Nike swoosh on a pair of shorts. He’d never seen shorts. And he’d certainly never seen boys competing against, and often losing to, girls.

  At first, with the children chucking one another around, the wrestling was fun. But as the ages and weights went up, it became thrilling. The double vision went. I forgot all I’d read. This was happening, and happening right there.

  As a spectator, I’d never been closer to any sport. Not only close enough to see it and hear it, but close enough to smell it. (When I later asked Roger’s wife, Jill, if she felt she’d missed out by not attending, she said, ‘Well, I didn’t miss the B.O.’) I could see the huge effort involved. I could hear gristle in the grappling, and bones clicking in the falls. Neck sinews stood out like tree roots, white faces turned pink.

  I flashed back to boarding school, The Other Boy, force, spit, losing. I remembered losing fights. That feeling of being squashed by someone else’s not quite so squashy flesh. Blood in the cheeks and sometimes in the mouth. I didn’t want that again. But maybe I had to face it.

  If I was going to do some wrestling myself, to find out what William was on about, this was what I’d be up against. This was how much effort I would have to put in. There weren’t any injuries, but backs flew twisting through the air and shoulders landed with a crunch. A man about my age, a grey haired ex-champion I recognized from Roger’s book as Alun Jones, made a good show but lost. I could tell that the falls hurt him more than the youngsters, although he didn’t want to let on. One wrestler got kneed in the nuts accidentally. Every male in the room winced at this – we knew what that was like, that feeling of being obscurely diminished for the next few hours. The young man came and sat on the corner of the canvas-covered mat, almost on my feet. His breath was ragged. Bill asked, ‘Are you alright, lad?’ The wrestler nodded. That was it as far as suffering went. No great show.

  With William’s descriptions of the various throws and chips in my head, I tried to understand what I was seeing.

  I couldn’t.

  Everything happened too fast. At most, I could figure out the basics of what was going on. Well, he seems to be getting the best of him, oh no, now he’s on his arse. The subtleties of footwork – chips and clicks – eluded me. I could spot the buttocks.

  The rules of C&WW are simple: First wrestler to touch the ground with their knee or shoulder or any part of their body that isn’t their foot loses. If there’s any doubt, and the umpire and assistants can’t make up their minds, the fall is called a ‘dogfall’ and wrestled again.

  It’s best of three falls. If a wrestler wins the first two, there is no third.

  Because C&WW starts with the wrestlers already locked together, tight in a double bear-hug, there’s never any of that awkward faffing around you get in judo or karate. No cagey bit where the opponents try to grab a hank of collar. Instead, the wrestling is all action. Some falls take less than a second.

  The easiest way to understand what’s going on, in slow motion, is to picture doing it yourself.

  So, imagine you are about to wrestle.

  You and the other wrestler are called onto the mats, you shake hands and the umpire then orders you to ‘Take hold’.

  You, you and your opponent, standing very close, both stretch your right arm forwards – below the other’s left armpit, around their left flank. (In taking hold, the left arm is always above the right.) Your left hand also goes behind him, meeting up with your right hand just below his shoulder blades. But your left arm goes round naturally, as if hugging the other wrestler, whereas your right forearm is twisted as if you were looking at a wristwatch. This is so your fingers can fit together. The fingers of both your hands are formed into hooks, into J’s, which interlock, an inverted S. If you break hold even for a moment, you will lose the fall. When the umpire is satisfied neither you nor the other wrestler has gained an unfair advantage in taking hold, they step back and call out, ‘Wrestle!’

  Whilst this was all going on, time after time, I was afraid of two things. Firstly, that Roger Robson would introduce me over the speakers, and I’d suddenly have the whole room looking at me – here’s a living descendant of the famous William Litt, let’s give him a big Bootle welcome! Secondly, I was scared that, right after this, the obvious thing for Roger Robson to say was, ‘Why don’t we see if the lad can wrestle?’

  This didn’t happen. A few people noticed me. I saw Tom Harrington looking questioningly in my direction, and perhaps asking the man next to him who the hell I was.

  Some other glances came my way. Some of the heavyweights looked at me as they left the mat. I couldn’t help but imagine how I seemed to a man who had just wrestled and won – sitting in my grey coat, bearded, scribbling in a black notebook. Probably like a weakling who’s never been properly tested. Like a man who took one look at the world and got scared, and ran away into words. Like a London intellectual who’s going to look down on anyone not similarly brainy (for which read ‘up himself’). Like an easy victim.

  But this was my pa
ranoia.

  For the most part, me being there made not one bit of difference to the evening.

  Rothbury won.

  I managed a chat with Roger after the prizes were awarded. He was pleased. It had gone well. There had been some high quality throws from the younger wrestlers.

  ‘Do you know why they put the nuclear power station at Sellafield?’ he asked, unconnectedly.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Because it’s as far from London as you can get.’

  I didn’t mention Scotland. I knew he was talking about something else.

  *

  I returned to London the next day.

  Safely back home, I wanted to see more wrestling. Most of all, I wanted to see what C&WW was up against.

  Like most people of my age, if you say the word ‘wrestling’ to me, I think of the TV star all-in wrestlers of the 1970s – Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks.

  Simon Garfield has written a brilliant book about the rise and fall of the professional version of the sport, in its British version. He confidently titled it The Wrestling, because (in the UK) only this type of wrestling deserves the definite article.‡

  But for anyone under thirty, say ‘wrestling’ and what they’re likely to think of isn’t C&WW, or Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy, but WWE.

  WWE (World Wide Entertainment) is what WWF (World Wrestling Federation) became when it lost a legal battle (over the letters WWF) to the World Wildlife Fund. The Ecological Panda laid out Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Ultimate Warrior, John Cena et al.