St Johns Church in Dudley is home to the famous Tipton Slasher. His grave has just been refurbished and a new Tipton Slasher trail launched. We call in to find out more.
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00:00So Bill, do you want to get one end?
00:02Yes, you want to set that clutch.
00:07And we'd like to...
00:09It's been restored back to its original marble.
00:12So without further ado, here's the new stove.
00:16Hey!
00:26Hello, my name's Robert Hazel.
00:28I'm the chairman of the Tipton Town Libraries Local History Group.
00:31We're here at St John's and we've just unveiled the Tipton Heritage Centre
00:36and the newly restored grave.
00:39Tipton Slasher, he was a bare knuckle fighter from Tipton
00:42who was champion of England from 1850 to 1857.
00:46And there's loads of stories about him.
00:48I mean, first off, we're here at St John's in Dudley.
00:51How come he wasn't buried in Tipton, Robert?
00:53Well, when he had his last fight against Tom Sayers,
00:56he decided to bet everything.
00:58He always was very confident in his ability.
01:01So he put everything he owned, including his pub, the champion of England,
01:05and he lost to a much younger man over ten rounds.
01:09So he ended up with just £22, which was a whip round from the crowd.
01:14When he died, he was penniless.
01:17And his wife had died a few months before, was buried in Cades Hill.
01:21So that's why the story is that he's buried in Dudley and not Tipton.
01:25And what was his pub called?
01:27The champion of England, and it was in Sponline, West Brom.
01:30Oh, okay. And is that building still there?
01:33No. No, it's one that's gone.
01:35Well, he did have a couple of pubs in Wolverhampton as well.
01:39I'm not sure whether they are still there.
01:41Oh, do you know what they were called?
01:42No.
01:43No? Interesting.
01:44Yeah, it seems his family were Republicans.
01:47There was a bit of a family trait, wasn't there? A lot of them had pubs.
01:49Yeah, well, Chris Smith, who's the only one who's got the definitive family tree of the Slashers.
01:54When you look, of the Perry, sorry.
01:56When you look on that, 80% of his family were publicans.
02:01Yeah.
02:02And all worked on the canals.
02:03Yeah.
02:04And this trail, it takes in kind of all the local landmarks, doesn't it, really?
02:08Yeah, we tried to be six local landmarks, so it's easy to do.
02:13You can do it on foot or in the car.
02:15And you can download it as well to your phone.
02:18Yeah.
02:19And it's just six sides of local interest, including the statue in Tipton, the fountain, the boxing club.
02:26And, of course, it ends at St John's, where he's finally laid to rest.
02:31Now, you've brought some old pictures along.
02:33And there's one that's from an old TV show.
02:35Did I recognise Pat? What's his name?
02:37Pat Roach.
02:38Pat Roach, yeah.
02:39Pat Roach.
02:40That was from a thing made by Central in the 80s called Geed to Mama.
02:44Yeah.
02:45And it was a reenactment of his last fight against Tom Sayers.
02:47Oh, right.
02:48Where was Tom Sayers from?
02:49He was from London.
02:50Okay.
02:51Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:52And it's interesting because Tom Sayers, this town is in Highgate Cemetery.
02:57Ah.
02:58And it's a massive, massive, like, mausoleum.
03:00Yeah.
03:01And it's got a statue of his dog at the end of it.
03:05Yeah.
03:06And it was one of the most regularly visited graves of that time.
03:10Oh, wow.
03:11And the story is that he had the dog on because he loved the dog more than he loved his wife.
03:16Yeah.
03:17Oh, God.
03:18And what's this story about him winning an ape in a competition that I was listed to?
03:22Yeah, he had an ape and he used to use it to spar with.
03:26I mean, he won it as a prize.
03:27He won it, yeah.
03:28A lot of prize.
03:29Um, but during his lifetime he won donkeys, bags of sand, all sorts of different things.
03:34Yeah.
03:35And this ape, it ended up stuffed in a pub, didn't it?
03:37Yeah, it was stuffed in a pub when he went to a couple of pubs in Tipton.
03:41Yeah.
03:42Um, and there's some nice old photographs that you can still see of it sometimes.
03:46Yeah.
03:47Great.
03:48So why is it important that we've refurbished this stone and we're keeping these stories
03:52going, Robert?
03:53Come on.
03:54I'm putting you on the spot.
03:55The important thing is he's a local legend.
03:58It's somebody to aspire to, really, because it proves that you can come from working class
04:04background and become champion of England.
04:07But the nearest person we've probably got to him now is Tyson Fury, who, his life is
04:13probably a bit like the Slashers, really.
04:15But it's just important to know that, especially the kids, to have this civic pride and be proud
04:21of where they come from.
04:22And that's one thing our local history group likes to do, is to collect things in and put
04:28them out in such a way, like a local history day or a leaflet, that makes it accessible
04:33to everybody, really.
04:34Well, thank you for everyone involved, Robert.
04:36And thank you for all your hard work.
04:38It looks fantastic.
04:39Thank you, sir.
04:41So, you know, at the height of his fame, was he quite wealthy in relative terms?
04:45Well, when he first won the champion of England, well, he fought somebody called Charles Freeman,
04:49who was known as the American Giant.
04:52And he lost to Charles Freeman, but they became really good friends.
04:56And they went on a tour of the country.
04:59And they were playing, like, theatres.
05:00Yeah.
05:01So, they'd spar, then they'd come out.
05:04And he earned loads of money from that.
05:07So, he did go from his time on the canal.
05:10I thought it was rags to riches to ruins.
05:12Yeah.
05:13And then he bet it all.
05:14And then he bet it all.
05:15But the one thing that's really nice about the tale, and it's the tale we like to tell,
05:20it's things that people don't know.
05:22Is that he had a waxwork at Madame Tussauds, which a lot of people didn't know that.
05:27And when he was in London, he met Charles Dickens and Thackeray, quite a lot of writers.
05:34And it's thought that the boxing things in Dickens' novels were stories that had come from the slasher.
05:41Oh, okay.
05:42Because he used to go up to all the best parties in London because of his good looks.
05:47The women always used to fancy him.
05:49And then the fellas used to like to take the mic out of his black country accent.
05:53And that never changes anywhere you go, does it really?
05:55For Dickens novels, but in the newspaper, they were like serialised, weren't they?
05:59Yeah, yeah.
06:00Does anything exist for him, like the boxing gloves or anything?
06:04Well, he never had boxing gloves because he was very naughty.
06:06Oh yeah, well, say the training equipment.
06:08A couple, there are only two things, and I think Chris was telling me about them.
06:12He had a cuckoo clock that was a prize.
06:15Well, that's out there.
06:16And there's a watch, a fob watch belonging to him.
06:19Because he came up on eBay a few years ago.
06:22I don't know which it went for, I bailed out.
06:25Don't look at it, don't look at it.
06:27So, they're still on there.
06:29And Chris did a lot of work researching his family tree really as well.
06:33And he found direct descendants in America and Australia as well.
06:39And again, we're here today.
06:42Thanks to Chris, to Tom Langley who did the first book,
06:46Robert Davies who did a book as well.
06:48Everybody who's researched it really, because that enables me to do what I do,
06:54if you know what I mean, because the work's already been done.