[BITList] Making a fist of it

[John Feltham]

To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2010-08-31



Wells,  William Thomas  [called Bombardier Billy Wells]  (1887-1967), boxer, was born on 31 August 1887 at 250 Cable Street, Stepney, London, the eldest of five brothers, and one of nine children of the musician William Thomas Wells (b. 1862) and his wife, Emily Rhoda Farrier (b. 1867), a laundress. Both parents came from waterside families and the significance of music and sport in their lives was considerable. He attended Broad Street elementary school, Shadwell, until about 1901.

Billy Wells was a reluctant boxer. East End board schools were keen on competitive football and swimming, and he shone at both. However, the local university settlement club in Broad Street, where his father taught fife and drums, encouraged boxing through the amateur London federation of working boys' clubs for 14- to 18- year-olds. A tall lad weighing 10 stones was uncommon and the gymnastics instructor pushed amiable Billy into the ring to represent the club. The annual federation championships were keenly contested and he never won a title.

In 1906, at the age of eighteen, Wells relinquished the messenger-boy jobs which he held after leaving school to join the Royal Artillery as a gunner. He was posted to Rawalpindi, where he found that boxing was the sport among the 80,000 strong British garrison of India, and he won his divisional heavyweight championship (Quetta, 1908), and the prestigious All India title at Poona and Lucknow in succeeding years. Wells, now promoted bombardier, was training full-time and prompted by his civilian coach, Jim Maloney, a former world title contender, bought himself out of the army in 1910 to return to Britain, already tipped as a boxing prospect. Maloney followed to manage Wells's professional boxing career, and between them they earned prolifically as boxing lifted off as a spectator sport in the USA, France, and Britain. Boxing's increased takings were led by heavyweights as 'white hopes' were sought to beat the first black world champion of that division, Jack Johnson, who reigned from 1908 to 1915.

On 24 April 1911, in his eighth professional contest, Wells won the British title and the first heavyweight Lonsdale belt, defeating the title-holder, Iron Hague, at the National Sporting Club in Covent Garden. Thereafter he drew packed houses as hero on the music hall circuit. Matched with Johnson for the world title in London in October 1911, religious opponents of excessive prize money and inter-racial contests, led by the Baptist minister Frederick Brotherton Meyer, caused the fight to be blocked. Subsequently, Wells twice travelled to New York city (June 1912 and March 1913), where on both occasions he lost decisively. Between trips to the USA, Wells married sixteen-year-old Ellen Kilroy, daughter of Luke Kilroy, a publican, on 7 September 1912. They had five children before parting.

Bombardier Wells held the British heavyweight boxing championship for eight years between 1911 and 1919 and he defended the title fourteen times. He was an exciting boxer; of his forty-eight professional contests only two went the distance, then set at twenty rounds. His straight left followed by a right cross was exquisite to watch, and his matches turned suddenly, often against the bookmakers' odds.

Wells joined up for military service in May 1915, was promoted to sergeant, and in 1917 went to France, where he organized physical training. After demobilization he resumed his boxing career, but lost his British heavyweight title against Joe Beckett on 27 February 1919. He retired from the ring after defeat by Jack Bloomfield in October 1922 but made a brief comeback between November 1924 and April 1925, when he finally retired. Shortly after his title victory in 1911 he published Modern Boxing: a Practical Guide to Present-Day Methods, which went through eight editions.

Wells's extraordinary popularity between 1910 and 1922 rested partly upon his own physical prowess and partly on three converging social trends. Sport, particularly football and boxing, had rapidly become the pastime of everyman; an extended range of personalities covered in the press allowed women a refracted interest in boxing; and in a decade of advancing democracy the Bombardier epitomized the common people. He died at his home, The Studio, 1b Florence Road, Ealing, London, on 11 June 1967 and was cremated at Ruislip.

Stan Shipley 

Sources  S. Shipley, Bombardier Billy Wells (1993) + Thomson's Weekly News (17 April-11 Sept 1920) + Boxing News (16 June 1967) + Boxing News (23 Aug 1991) + Ring Boxing Encyclopedia and Record Book (1968), 332 + private information (2004) + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives  FILM BFI NFTVA, news footage + BFI NFTVA, performance footage + BFI NFTVA, sports footage
Likenesses  photographs, 1911-45, Hult. Arch. · photograph, 1922, Hult. Arch. [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in Boxing (10 Aug 1912)
Wealth at death  £773: administration with will, 18 Jan 1968, CGPLA Eng. & Wales