SPECTATOR SPORT
Under the hammer
Frank Keating
THE APPARENT shortage of spare dash to be spent on fripperies seems not to have bothered those obsessive collectors of sporting memorabilia. Saleroom jamborees at record prices are two a penny these days, and there is another biggie next Monday when Sotheby's put over 500 lots under the hammer at Kent's cricket headquarters at the St Lawrence ground in Canterbury. Cricket and golf items predominate, but the headlines will be reserved for the prices fetched by boxing's Lonsdale Belts won by Henry Cooper and Randolph Turpin.
Secretaries of new golf clubs will doubt- less be riffling through the old prints, tar- nished trophies and hickory shafts at view- ing tomorrow (Sunday) to find some appro- priate junk to fill their empty glass cases. There are no end of Wisdens in the cricket sale, and lots of mostly nondescript books, ancient and modern. Sotheby's reckon a bat, signed and apparently used by Sir Jack Hobbs in a charity match in the 1930s, should fetch up to £350, and another 'said to be one with which Frank Woolley scored a century' — is valued at £400.
Most interesting cricketania are the two decently sized oils on canvas by Cecil Beat- on. I doubt that the old boy was interested in cricket, and the suspicion increases on seeing 'The Run Out', for the batsman is palpably in, and, anyway, the wicket-keeper has obviously long dropped the bail, which lies forlornly on the crease even as the gauntlets have just disturbed the bails. 'Fast Bowling' is a Toynbee pastiche and far more active and lively. They expect £3,000 for it, and double for the dodgy run-out.
Of the boxing belts, the most romantic (valued at up to £15,000) is one presented in 1881 to Jem Mace, 'the Swaffham Gypsy' and all-England champion, who bridged the gap between bare knuckles and gloves. But the most sentimental will be the Lonsdale Belts of Cooper and Turpin.
Henry, of course, is a Lloyd's 'name', although he insists it is not penury that forces him to sell his prizes — 'I'm not skint, if that's what you think,' he said last week. Cooper is the only man to have won outright three of these marvellously worked trophies since they were instituted by the Earl of Lonsdale in 1909. Each British champion in certain weight divisions is awarded one to hold as long as he is champ; if he wins three title fights on the trot in the same division, the belt becomes his property. The endearing Cooper's unique trio could fetch him over £70,000 on Monday — a lot of loot, but an awful lot of blood and sweat was spilled in winning them.
Most poignant of all, however, is Lot 65 — engraved in gold laurel leaves as 'the sole property of Randy Turpin who has won the light heavyweight championship of Great Britain three times'. Turpin, pound for pound, was possibly Britain's finest ever professional boxer. In 1958, he retired hav- ing earned a phenomenal £300,000 in the ring. Who spent the bulk of it, nobody says. But eight years later, working as a cook in a backstreet transport café in Leamington, he committed suicide in his attic bedroom, after pinning a note to his wife on the door: Having to carry the can for the £17,000 to the Inland Revenue. They will say my mind dis- turbed but it is not. Lonsdale Belt is yours. As long as you keep it you have part of me.
Don't ever sell.
His wife sold it for £3,000. In 1974, it went at Christie's for £10,000. On Monday, at Canterbury, 'estimate on request'.
Previous page
