John Scarrott’s travelling funfair has become a regular sight across Northamptonshire during the last three decades and is at Sixfields in Northampton until Sunday. But its roots can be traced back to South Wales where the present proprietor’s great grandfather ran a boxing booth . . . HE may never have been taught to read or write but that didn’t stop the first John Scarrott from becoming a succe
ss launching promising boxers on to fame and fortune on the professional circuit. Born in Newport, the son of a travelling showman, John recalled his long career taking his boxing booth around the mining valleys in the 19th century in Fifty Years Of Boxing In South Wales. His story was serialised in the South Wales Echo and Express in 1936, when he was 69, and he was described as, ‘one of the best-known showmen in the country.’
In his time he saw bare knuckle and glove fighters and some of the most famous boxers in the history of the roped square. John began fighting in other showmen’s booths before starting a booth of his own at the tender age of 21. His wife, Priscilla, wasn’t happy about the idea but was soon won over. As a youngster, John became fascinated by boxing. He saw his first bare knuckle fight before he was 10 years old and when he couldn’t afford the 3d to get into one booth he sneaked in under the canvas. When he was fighting, the opponents that used to scare him most were mountain fighters, the name given to miners who were bare knuckle fighters.
“They used to come to the fairgrounds from the collieries with their gangs with them, most of ’em half drunk and the very sight of them was enough to freeze the heart of a bull terrier,” he said. "If they heard that there was a well-known champion in a boxing booth at a particular fair they’d walk 50 miles to have a go at him. And they’d often bring their crowd with them. Very often when you were boxing one of them and you were backing before his punches watching out for a chance to get in the K.O., you’d get a punch from behind from one of his pals.”
John would take his boxing booth around some of the roughest areas in the valleys at that time.In the late 1800s there was a riot in the booth over a shilling which was given in a collection for one of the fighters and then taken out by somebody else.“Before you could say Jack Robinson everybody was fighting through and through and my booth was on the floor.“Men were hitting other men and not knowing who they were hitting or why,” he said. John said the most remarkable bare knuckle fight he ever saw was in 1876 when he was a boy and took place between two rival booth proprietors, Welsh champion William Samuels and a Scottish man who was knocked out but went on to fight another 25 or 26 rounds when he was revived. Swansea-born Samuels, who John believed was the greatest fighter of his time in the country, was also a weightlifter and an acrobat.His wife also got in the act, giving displays of weight lifting, lifting two 56lb weights with her hair. She would also allow her husband to break large stone on her chest with a sledgehammer. In those politically incorrect days, John and the boxers from his booth befriended a young man who was very small but muscular. He started off singing, dancing and playing the mouth organ for the crowd but eventually, because he looked Japanese, they painted him yellow, shaved off his hair except for a lock on top of his head and called him Yuko Sako, the Japanese strangler. He became a good boxer and eventually John was able to offer a pound to any man his size that would fight him for three rounds.On another occasion, one of the fighters Arthur Butcher punched a challenger over the ropes and out of the tent, leaving a big hole in the canvas. Boxers to come out of John Scarrott’s booth included Jim Driscoll, who went on to become feather-weight champion of Great Britain, Tom Thomas, the son of a Rhondda farmer who became middle-weight champion of Great Britain, Fred Welsh, light-weight champion of Great Britain and the world and Percy Jones, who won the British fly-weight title in 1914. Jimmy Wilde, who became fly-weight champion of the world despite being just 5ft 21/2ins tall and weighing around 7st in his prime, started his boxing career in John’s booth when he was a teenager, But his size was deceptive and one night he knocked out 23 men, of all shapes and sizes, in just four hours. As well as boxers, John once employed an Italian strongman called Montano, who used to do remarkable weightlifting feats. He would lift a 186lb dumb-bell in one hand and would offer a member of the audience 5 to do the same. He was also a wrestler, but his biggest ever challenge was to have a cannon lifted on to his shoulders and fired. John Scarrott also raised thousands of pounds for charity, on one occasion holding a benefit night for the widow and children of a man killed in a coal pit and another fund raising money for soldiers coming home from the First World War.
