Remembrance Sunday special on the boxers who joined up at the start of the Great War...

By Miles Templeton

I noticed on the BBC News website on Friday an interesting piece about a project that is being co-ordinated by the Imperial War Museum to commemorate those who fought in the Great War. It states:

“This Armistice Day, the Imperial War Museum is hoping to keep alive their memories - and those of millions more who fought in World War One - by publishing 100 portraits of people who served in the war. It will continue to publish additional portraits every weekday until August 2014, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. Nigel Steel, historian at the Imperial War Museum says the project - called Faces of the First World War - will help reconnect people with the 1914-18 generation.”

One of the first 100 faces the Imperial War Museum has uncovered is that of Pat O’Keefe, three times British middleweight and light-heavyweight champion. This BBC article has inspired me to write about the boxers who joined up, as part of Kitchener’s Army, right at the beginning of the war.

We at boxinghistory.org.uk would like to play our part, not only in publicising the Imperial War Museum project, but also to try to locate the photographs of every known boxer who fought in the Great War so we can share them online through our Flickr account.

The photograph accompanying this article shows, from left to right, Dick Burge (the ex-British middleweight title claimant and manager of The Ring, Blackfriars), Ernest Barry (five times world sculling champion) and the aforementioned Pat O’Keefe, British middleweight champion in 1906 and 1914-16, and British light-heavyweight champion 1918-19. Happily, all three men survived the war.

In the September 19th 1914 edition of the sport's trade paper Boxing there appeared, for the first time, a feature entitled ‘War Items’, which referred to a number of prominent fighters who had joined the cause. The following notes, penned in a style evocative of the period, are direct quotes from this article.

Continue reading:

http://bit.ly/sVMcl6

Great credit to all those who paid the ultimate price for their Country..

It's a shame these days how people don't really respect their flags anymore......

Your Country should be a part of you...

RIP..to those who lost their lives..

Great thing to do, Alex/Miles. I'll move this to the boxing vault later on.

A nice touch to post this.

Really highlights the innocence and naivety of those signing up in the first wave of the Great War.