I have been collecting photos and records of boxers for 50 years now and the purpose of this site is to share the photos with anyone who is interested and to record the images of sportsmen who have now passed into history.
My interest has been in any fighters who have been champions of their own country and challengers or contenders for British, British Empire (Commonwealth), European and World titles from around 1880 when gloved fighting really started and the mid 1980s when boxing started to become somewhat farcical and difficult to follow with four or five different World champions at each weight. That is no disrespect to the boxers of the last 35 years but a comment aimed at the various organisations who have set themselves up to run the sport.
I have acquired my information from many different sources over the years and it is not my intention to publish pictures owned, researched and discovered by others and where a photo is not from my own collection I have accredited the individual or organisation to whom I believe credit should belong. The quality of the photos varies. Many are original photos, some signed and I also have a lot of good quality copies of originals and then there are magazine and newspaper pictures which I have copied myself.
Over the years I have amassed nearly 12,000 different photos and having now pruned them down to remove doubles, action shots and poorer quality ones am left with around 6000. It is my main intention to add pictures to those on other sites. I have started with a hundred photos and I hope to add more on a regular basis. Although many pictures are reproduced on other sites it is my hope that I will be able to add images of fighters whose photos do not appear anywhere else on the internet.
I hope to add basic details of each fighter when I can but this information can be found elsewhere and it is so time consuming adding the photos .
Thanks for help over the years should go to friends too numerous to mention but in particular to Barry Hugman, Derek O'Dell, Bill Matthews and Larry Braysher and posthumously to Ron Olver, Fred Snelling , Harry Mullan, Tom Holder, Gilbert Odd, Vic Hardwicke, Johnny Sharpe, Tom Crome, Owen Hughes and Norman Jones.
I would also like to thank Bronwyn Palmer, Simon Dimmick and Iain Sutherland for their help with setting up this site.
In April 2012 I was forced through no fault of my own to completely reconstruct the site and I'm hugely indebted to Michael White of Cura365 and to Ffion and Eleanor White for their tremendous help in not only saving the site but improving and rejuvenating it.
Recently I had difficulty with my site appearing on the internet and I'm indebted to Roberto Garcia (Malaga) for his expertise and ability to sort the problems out for me. Rob is an expert in websites and web hosting and I would be pleased to recommend his services to anyone with a website.
There are several very fine boxing sites on the internet and among those I have visited are:-
The Arnold Thomas Collection (part of the National Library of Australia)
Should anyone want to see a particular boxer I will try to add a picture if I have one and should anyone have any comments, queries or complaints about the site I can be contacted via the Contact Us page of this site.
David G Roake
