Jack Kid Berg
When you think about it, it makes perfect material for a musical: working class kid, boxing his way out of poverty to become champion of the world.
It’s not Rocky, it’s the story of Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, the Whitechapel Whirlwind. But it could be any of a number of Jewish East End fighters, all the way back to Daniel Mendoza.
The opera, The Whitechapel Whirlwind, was composed by Jack’s cousin, Howard Fredrics, a lecturer in music technology at Kingston University. He drew on old tapes of Berg talking, in a his mid-Atlantic drawl, to decide how his singing voice would have sounded.
A preview of The Whitechapel Whirlwind took place at the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre last month, and Frederics hopes it might be taken up by the English National Opera. “When I learned about my cousin’s life it seemed an incredible story and to naturally lend itself to opera,” says the writer.
One of the earliest champions was Daniel Mendoza. Go to Paradise Row in Bethnal Green and you’ll see a blue plaque to his memory. Mendoza the Jew, as he was dubbed, came from the days before differing weights, limited-round bouts and boxing gloves. There was a host of Jewish pugilists here at the end of the 18th century: Aby Belasco, Barney ‘Star of the East’ Aaron, Lazarus the Jew Boy and Ikey Pig, but Mendoza was the greatest of the lot.
He was bareknuckle champion of England from 1794
to 1795: with fights lasting until one of the combatants was battered into submission, long reigns as champion weren’t common. Mendoza was the great-great-grandfather of Peter Sellers, who paid homage by hanging portraits of Mendoza in the backgrounds of several of his films.
Mendoza was been an acquaintance of the Prince of Wales, riding to Windsor Castle to meet George III … it was the first time the King had ever spoken to a Jew. But he lost a fortune and ended in debtor’s prison.
It was at lighter weights that Jewish fighters won their later fame. Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis was born Gershon Mendeloff in Whitechapel in 1894, and was world welterweight champion between 1915 and 1916. Lewis fought 279 bouts from 1909 to 1929.
Lewis’s naivety led him into trouble after he retired. Bizarrely, Oswald Mosley hired him to train his Blackshirts. The story goes that the boxer eventually confronted Mosley, asking if it was true he was an anti-Semite. In the (possibly apocryphal) version, Mosley admitted the truth, and Lewis knocked him and two of his bodyguards to the floor.
Lewis trained at Premierland, a boxing gym off the Commercial Road. The Aldgate gym was to the training ground of another two world champions. Teddy Baldock was a bantamweight, who in 1927 defeated Archie Bell in London to claim the vacant British and World titles. The third Premierland star was another Jewish East Ender: Jack ‘Kid’ Berg.
By now, Jewish boxers dominated on both sides of the Atlantic. Abe Attell, nicknamed The Little Hebrew, from San Francisco, was world featherweight champion. The US produced Rueven ‘Ruby’ Goldstein from New York, Battling Levinsky, Maxie Rosenbloom and Benny Leonard. Britain produced Harry Mizler, Joe Samuels and many more.
Ironically, Kid Berg wasn’t a real contender when he travelled to America to take on Pedro Amador for the welterweight world title on 31 May 1928. The fighter, born Judah Bergman in Whitechapel in 1909, was there to make up the numbers.
But he ignored the script and knocked Amador down. It was the start of a successful run for Berg, going on to defeat all the big fighters in his weight: Tony Canzoneri, Kid Chocolate and Mizler. Berg, who started in the ring at 15, defeated American Mushy Callahan to win the world title in 1930.
His machine gun punching style led to the nickname ‘Whirlwind’. In one story, Berg knocked down an opponent, who was promptly replaced by his identical twin brother! The Kid knocked him out too.
The East End boy now had a celebrity lifestyle. He had an affair with screen goddess Mae West and was pals with the infamous Jack Spot. The Jewish gangster, who ruled the East End until the 1950s, was a contemporary of Berg’s, born in the same street in Whitechapel.
Berg had a long career. Between 1924 and 1945 he fought 192 bouts (and possibly more) before a well-earned retirement. He moved back to Britain in later life, and died in 1991, at the age of 82.
This was a generation of Jewish fighters with star quality: their fight out of poverty an inspiration to those around them. ‘They were the Beckhams of their time. They had the trappings of wealth and were real working class heroes,’ says Mizler’s nephew Tony. Berg’s sister, Marie Stephany, remembers him as ‘a modest and gentle man’; it was only later that she realised ‘what an icon he was, not just to the Jewish community, but to the whole of Britain’.
But why are there no Jewish boxing stars now? Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis’s son Morton has a theory. ‘Nowadays most young Jews can earn more money with their brains.’ In the old days boxing was one of the few routes out. ‘If you didn’t fight, you didn’t eat,’ says Lewis.