A tribute to the life and ring career of Welsh heavyweight legend Tommy Farr

You won’t find many households with a picture of Winston Churchill on the mantlepiece in Tonypandy, South Wales. For it was here, to this once fiercely proud mining town, that Churchill deployed the British army to quash an uprising by striking miners in 1910 when he was home secretary.

The Tonypandy Riots occupy a proud place in the history of the British working class and an ignoble one in the history of the country’s ruling class. They also put paid to the cult of Winston Churchill, a man twisted by hatred of those who refused to know their place in the perverse hierarchy of human worth that consumed his being.

In 1913, just three years after the riots, a child was born in Tonypandy who would grow up to become one of the most illustrious fighters that Wales and Britain ever produced. His name was Tommy Farr.

The ‘Tonypandy Terror’ was a child of flesh and blood whose character was forged by abject poverty and the bitter legacy of the 1910 riots. The son of a bare knuckle fighter, Farr’s education in the ‘art’ of fighting began as a child with the organised bare knuckle fights he himself participated in against his peers in large ditches specially dug in the slag heaps that punctuated the town. The small change he received from the men spectating at these…