by Nigel Benn
The cushiest number I ever had in the Army was when I became an RP (regimental policeman).
The camp nick was always full. When I was there it was empty. I’d give them a hard time and enjoy it. A squaddie’s idea of a good night out was 15 pints of beer and a good scrap, but they knew if they went to jail with me in charge, they’d get mauled. Some of the men would go really wild. We had a Geordie battalion and some of them lived for drink. One drop of Newcastle Brown and they’d be anybody’s. It took me a while to understand their accent but I really got on with those guys, much better than with the Cockneys.
I happily confess to the fact that I enjoyed bashing blokes about if they got in trouble. It was a great power kick and also the only way to win their respect and keep the jails empty. I’d make them mark time with a heavy artillery Wombat shell. I told one soldier who was particularly lairy to stand against a wall while holding the shell in both hands and then gradually squat down, kicking out his legs in turn. Once he was down, I cracked a broom handle across his legs.
I really used to give it to them. I had power. If people hated me for it, I didn’t care. I knew I was getting out of the Army soon. When they were under my control, the detainees had to march to dinner with me and I would make them perform mundane tasks like picking up litter. When the RSM wasn’t in camp, I was in charge and that felt really great.
The job itself was a doddle. As the RP you only had to keep order in camp, so there was lots of free time and you were excused from normal duties and exercises which other soldiers had to do. I was also able to sneak women into my bedroom because now I was in the privileged position of having a room to myself and not having to share with other squaddies. Furthermore, there was nobody to arrest me unless I did something seriously wrong.
For about six months of my posting, I had an Irish girlfriend called Karen. She was a fiery lass, the way I liked them. I met her at a camp disco but hadn’t realised until I became an RP that all women allowed in camp had to be vetted. Some of them had been around for nearly ten years and we had all sorts of nicknames for some of these old pot-boilers. One group from Coleraine were known as the Coleraine Commandos. They used to think I looked like Leroy from Fame. Karen was nice looking but some of them, well, you had to be really under the weather or pull a sack over their head before you did anything. Fortunately, I could break the rules and my social life flourished.
However, there was another side to socialising with women, a much more dangerous and sinister aspect. Vetting was not just a formality but an essential safeguard. There had been a number of instances where women had lured soldiers off base and then left them to the mercy of IRA killers. I could have been a victim myself. On one date, I met a girl off base and suddenly broke into a sweat, thinking, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know this girl at all. I know nothing of her background. Am I being set up?’ I walked away from our tryst. You just never knew.
It’s always the silly things that catch you out in life. While I avoided detection when sneaking women into my room, I was unceremoniously ‘sacked’ from my cushy number over a daft prank. I ‘borrowed’ a pair of military handcuffs and took them out of camp on a visit to England. On arrival at Heathrow Airport, I chained my mate to some railings. I don’t know why I did it, for a laugh I guess. He was locked up in the pouring rain and left there for an hour, while I toured the periphery roads.
The story of this dastardly deed got back to camp fairly quickly — in fact, all was revealed before my return. The RSM, who is God when it comes to anything like this, ordered an inventory to be taken. If anything is missing you answer to him and if it can’t be accounted for, ass gets kicked. My brother John telephoned me in London and I was ordered to return the handcuffs immediately. On my return, I was relieved of my duties as an RP and sent back to Z Company.
I left the Army in January 1985 with some misgivings and an excellent reference. I’d served four years and 265 days. The CO personally gave me a glowing report. He said I had been a fine soldier and that I had excelled in the field of sport. He described me as a natural athlete, good at rugby and boxing and said my conduct had been exemplary. I had good motivation and was an asset to the regiment. My departure, he emphasised at the bottom of the reference, would be a sad loss to the battalion. His words of praise, which most of my friends thought applied to somebody else, worked a treat in getting me a job in a security firm.
I came out of the Army a man. In spite of that, there were problems adjusting to civilian life. At first I went back to Mum and Dad’s to sort things out and decide what I wanted do. But civvy life was not what I expected and I became depressed. While it had been good leaving the Army, I wasn’t aware of the tremendous impact it had made on me. After all, I had spent nearly a quarter of my life as a soldier.
I had never wanted to make the Army a career but it was difficult leaving my mates and the security of the regiment. All of a sudden, I was deprived of the comradeship of guys who’d been around me for almost five years. I was on my own. It was going to be difficult taking that big step back to suburbia.
Habits die hard. With my training in Northern Ireland etched into my memory, I was always up and alert early in the morning. It took me about three months to come back down to some form of normality. Every morning I would be checking my car, feeling under the wheel arches, looking everywhere. In fact, I am still in the habit of doing this. Even now I keep alert in case someone is following me and I still observe precautions like not stopping too close to another car, to allow enough room to drive off in the event of an emergency.
Although the Army offered a good life and very good experience, I needed something else. However successful my boxing career had been, I had no plans to continue fighting after I left. It had served a very useful purpose and that was now at an end.
The best consolation prize for me after leaving the Army was returning to Mary. We could now be together on a permanent basis. We moved into a flat in Stanley Road, Ilford. I got engaged to her at 21 but both parents were against us committing ourselves at such a young age. She was intelligent and fun to be with, although we would argue over stupid things. While living with Mary, I suffered from my enduring problem — my inability to keep my dick in my pants. I was still partying and trying to find girls without realising I already had the best girl on the planet.
My love affair with uniforms had not ended. I simply exchanged my army fatigues for the regulation grey of a security company. One of the first sites I guarded was a green field at Roding in Redbridge. It was being developed into Roding Hospital. I never believed that, years later, I would be going there for private treatment after defending my WBC super-middleweight title against Henry Wharton. The hours I worked there were long and tedious, up to 15 hours a day.
At Redbridge, various checkpoints were positioned around the site and I had to walk to each of them at given times during my shift and clock-on with a key. As a short-cut, I ripped off all the checkpoints from their posts, labelled them and then clocked on, one after the other without having to walk around. Having done that, I suddenly came to the worrying conclusion that I needed to be Speedy Gonzales and faster than Superman to have done the rounds so quickly. Fortunately, my clocking-on had not registered the time and I got away with it, unlike my friend who was caught half asleep with his feet up on the table and wearing no uniform. He was instantly sacked.
There was no shortage of security work for someone who had served in Northern Ireland and I kept changing jobs in the hope of finding one that I would really like. The only job I got turned down for was at Liberty’s in the West End of London.
For several weeks I worked as a store detective at Woolworth’s in their Dalston branch and made the terrible mistake of accusing an innocent man of shoplifting. I saw a guy put what I thought was an object in his shoe. I’d been watching him for a long time because his actions had aroused my suspicion. But when I had apprehended him, the terrible truth dawned on me that I’d made a mistake. He was rightly furious.<
br />
‘You’re a blood brother, man,’ he protested. ‘No, I never took nothing. I could take you to court, man. What the fuck are you doing?’ I felt really bad and wondered what the hell was I doing. But then everyone can make mistakes.
Working long and staggered shifts took its toll on me. I was always knackered, always falling asleep and matters were coming to a head with Mary. We were quarrelling too much and too often. Sometimes I came home dog tired at 8.00am. Mary had been studying for an economics degree and our lifestyle was being messed up by the hours I worked. I was getting cheesed off with my job and my life. After the Army, I wanted some red-carpet treatment, not to be part of a slave labour brigade. I also decided that I would not be making a career in security. I had enjoyed being back in uniform, it felt like being back in the Army, but the last thing I wanted was to be a security guard for the rest of my life and have nothing to show for it.
With all this going on and my insecurities regarding Mary becoming worse, I reached a turning point in my life. It came about as a result of a security van being short of a guard. I was asked to stand in. That meant riding in the back of an armoured transit van with responsibility for over £½ million in cash. Can you imagine the temptation of sitting on that amount of loot while being paid peanuts and realising that you would never amass such a fortune guarding it? I thought ‘Oh, mate, I really need this, don’t I?’ I could feel it. ‘Look at this lovely money. God, wouldn’t I like it to be my money. Should I try to take it?’
A little bit of rationalisation crept in as I toyed with the thought of acquiring this fortune. The money was bound to be insured so who would I be hurting? Certainly not the security firm, nor the people for whom it was destined. So why not?
I had a mate who knew all about these things. If I needed anybody to help me it would be him. With that, I began working on my blueprint for robbing the security van of £½ million.
At that time, I owned a beige Triumph car and used it for doing a recce of the van’s journey. I knew that the van driver would not be informed of his route until he was about to set off with the money. That procedure was introduced to make it difficult for an insider to tip off accomplices planning to rob the vehicle. Obviously, I wasn’t the first to be tempted.
My role in this robbery would be to pass over the money after a gun was held to my head. I had friends who could provide us with shooters so that was no problem either. By the time I had everything lined up to execute the plan, however, I began to have second thoughts. All the brainwashing from Dad about being honest and leading a decent life started to nag at me. On the other hand, everything had been prepared for me to go ahead with the plan and, with luck, live the life of Riley after its successful completion. But what if it all went wrong? Eight to ten years behind bars would take away my youth for ever. And what about Mary?
I bottled out. When it came to doing it and everything was in place — I had only to name the date — I couldn’t go through with it. This was not how I wanted to live my life. I decided then that I wanted to make an honest living. I didn’t want a criminal record. My parents wanted to be proud of me and I did not want to disappoint them. That’s what they had strived for all their lives and one moment of madness like this could have ruined everything.
That still left me with a problem. I did not want to continue with the long hours and little pay as a security guard. My life was going nowhere. The urge to do something different was bringing me closer to my destiny — fighting. West Ham boxing club beckoned but before I became seriously involved as an amateur, I took part in a prize fight at Lacy Ladies in Seven Kings, east London, which I used to think was the best soul club in England.
I had never been to a prize fight before, nor had it ever occurred to me to attempt prize fighting. My opponent was a guy called Lloyd who thought he was the English version of Marvin Hagler. Wrong — I was! The purse was £150, the biggest I had ever got. People used to go there to settle their differences. I had gone there only to watch but then thought it might be a good way to earn some cash. Lloyd was their local boy and had already dispatched several challengers. ‘Any more challengers?’ he asked cockily.
Lloyd was in his late 30s and when I stepped into the makeshift ring, wearing just my jeans, he told me he was going to beat me up. I had nothing to lose and he didn’t frighten me but he tried to laugh at me. He had seen big guys come and go and gave me lots of mouth. The audience were busily exchanging bets — some were actually backing me — or watching Lloyd attempt a psychological victory before punching me to the ground, or so he thought. I murdered him. I did two rounds with him and knocked him out. He said I was lucky. I said, ‘Ta-ta,’ took the money and left.
6
LOST GOLD
West Ham Amateur Boxing Club in east London was a famous breeding ground for boxers. Loads of the big names came from that stable, including my trainer Jimmy Tibbs. I first went there for social reasons when I was still living with Mary. Roy Andre was my sparring partner and Mark Kaylor, the British and Commonwealth Middleweight champion whom Jimmy had trained, had just left. It was probably one of the best amateur boxing clubs around at the time. It had produced people like Terry Spinks (British Featherweight Champion and Olympic Gold Medallist), Ron Barton (British Light Heavyweight Champion), and Billy Walker.
When I joined, I had to see Dave Woodward and was put into the ring to show the club members what I could do. I said nothing about my army experience, letting them decide if I was good enough. I enjoyed watching them try to figure me out. There was no doubt they were impressed with my performance but you could see them thinking they had a rough diamond here.
Dave Woodward became my trainer but although I only wanted to fight on an amateur basis, everything was leading up to me becoming professional. Not least because I was beating everybody I fought.
Against club predictions, I beat my sparring partner Roy Andre. He had knocked me down once during the fight, blacking me out — the only time it had ever happened to me. But I got up again and everyone thought I had slipped. Sure I slipped, on to his right hand! From there I put everything I had into the fight and stopped him in the second or third round.
My most traumatic fight in amateur boxing was against Rod Douglas. That was the first time I had ever lost a fight. He was a really powerful guy and we punched each other from pillar to post. When he beat me, I cried my eyes out for a year. I couldn’t handle defeat, not after my record.
Although I had lost on points against Douglas, I considered myself the better fighter. Both of us had been on the amateur circuit and had won all our other fights. I had to make 10st 6lb which was a pretty hard thing to do. Sometimes all you could eat at night was a lemon to drain you out. Rod Douglas was the more experienced boxer and I felt there was some favouritism shown towards him. However, that didn’t lessen the depression I felt at losing. Like me, he came from the East End of London but he had been fighting as an amateur since he was 13.
After the fight, I was quite sore and felt like giving in. If I couldn’t beat him there was not much point in carrying on. I was in such bad shape I couldn’t even eat properly. Soon after the fight, Mary bought us some fish and chips but the inside of my mouth was all cut up and my tongue was slit at both sides. Each time I tried to eat chips, salt entered my wounds and trying to eat became unbearable. All I could do was gingerly roll some of the food around in my mouth.
For a whole year, my brother Dermot mercilessly needled me about losing the fight. He even called me Rod. ‘Go on, Rod,’ he would say, trying to wind me up further. Losing to Rod Douglas was so devastating that it nearly spelt the end of my boxing career. I wanted to retire. That was it. I never wanted to box again. Then, because of all the riling from Mark, combined with the grit and determination which had been instilled into me in the Army, I renewed my efforts and began training like a champion. I decided I would beat Douglas and settle the score.
Meanwhile, on the home front, Mary and I were having difficulties with our relatio
nship. My immaturity was much to blame and although I may have deserved it, I was annihilated when Mary called it a day. She did it in such a normal and controlled manner that I couldn’t believe what was happening. Looking back on it now I can see why our parents were against us getting engaged. We were too young and had our own insecurities and problems to sort out before entering into a mature and adult relationship. Love alone, and there was plenty of that, would not make things work for us.
I really lost it when we broke up. After that, any time I saw Mary at a club or disco, my heart would skip a beat. It took more than a year to get over her. She was such a decent girl but she couldn’t cope with my paranoia and insecurities. Of course, the fact that she ended the relationship only served to increase my nightmare and I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
While this drama was unfolding, my younger brother Anthony was going out with a girl called Joanne Crowley, a very pretty girl, whom I was told had an older sister called Sharron. I was keen to see what she looked like and we met outside The Plough pub in Ilford. It was May 1985, three months before Sharron’s seventeenth birthday. I thought she was really attractive and nice and we met up again at Bentley’s nightclub in Canning Town. After that, we began dating almost immediately.
As with the other girls who had been special in my life, my relationship with Sharron blossomed. For the first six months we could hardly let go of one another. We were so close and loving. Times were hard. I had no job and very little money and I was training as a fighter and had quit the flat which Mary and I shared. Even so, there was laughter in our lives.
Just five weeks after we met, Sharron told me she was pregnant. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Let’s go for it.’