Seven, eight, nine, 10 … the Belgian referee stopped counting and, spreading his arms wide to signal the end of the fight, he stared down sympathetically at the prone figure lying on the canvas. The British boxer and war hero Frank Dove’s Olympic career was over after less than five minutes of action at the Celebration Hall in Antwerp, cut down by a sledgehammer right hander to the jaw from Denmark’s Søren Petersen.
Just a handful of fans and officials were scattered around the ring on that warm August afternoon more than a hundred years ago to witness a quarter-final bout in the heavyweight competition.
Dove was out cold for several minutes as the flustered referee and officials struggled to find a stretcher to carry him out of the ring and then had to use smelling salts to bring him round. Dove was just a few weeks short of his 23rd birthday, and British hopes had been high for him to claim a medal at the 1920 Games. After all, he was a decent light-heavyweight and had not only captured the varsity title earlier that same year but had also been cutting a swathe through the divisional ABA ranks.
But Britain was short of heavyweights, so they dragooned Dove into the Olympic team for Belgium. Only nine boxers entered the heavyweight competition – three of them British – and Dove got a bye in the first round and went straight into the quarters. Which is where his luck ran out a minute or so into the second round. Londoner Ron Rawson went on to win the gold medal, stopping Petersen in the final.
Despite Britain’s boxers winning two gold medals, a silver and three bronze, their efforts were deemed a disaster and the Daily Herald headlined their report “Our Boxing Failures” and decried our efforts while also suggesting “the fact remains that the much-despised foreigner is coming to the forefront as an artist with his fists”.
Their reporter was aghast that Dove had been beaten, writing: “Dove was the terror of the amateur championships when he won the catchweight prize for cadets. He skittled his rivals in double quick time, but Petersen did the trick to such an extent during the second round that Dove was ‘out’ for a considerable period. Petersen must have a peach of a punch. Dove is, or was, a near champion.”
I came across Dove while discovering the story of Harry Edward, Britain’s first black Olympic medallist, whose lost memoir I’ve edited and is published this month. Dove and Edward were the only black members of the Great Britain team in the 1920 Games.
Unlike Edward, Dove was born in Britain, in the City of London, at the tail end of the 19th century, the son of a hugely wealthy trader from Sierra Leone who rose to be head of the bar in Freetown. Dove Sr used his riches to ensure his children were properly educated, so Frank was duly dispatched to Cranleigh public school, where he was among the first black pupils. He excelled at almost everything and became a regular in the cricket and football XIs and part of the hugely successful Cranleigh gymnastics team.
It wasn’t until he went up to Oxford, to Merton college, that he began to box and realised that his athleticism, speed and build made him an ideal light heavyweight.
The first world war interrupted everything and in 1916 he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps, firstly as a dispatch rider and then as a tank driver, taking part in the first ever tank battle, at Cambrai in 1917. On the fourth day of the battle his tank took a direct hit, killing four of his crew and wounding three. As the only member of the crew unharmed, he stayed with his injured crew until help arrived, before jumping back into his tank and single-handedly trying to manoeuvre it back into the battle. But minutes later a nearby tank was hit by another German shell and he was badly wounded. For this exhibition of courage he was awarded the Military Medal.
The profoundly humble Dove didn’t even mention the story to his family and the African Telegraph wrote that he was “so modest that we have been unable to obtain from him any particulars of his heroic deed”. When the war ended he returned to Oxford to complete his law studies and found time to pursue his boxing, winning his blue, and become the British varsity champion in 1920.
Called to the bar in 1923, he became a successful barrister, working in London and west Africa, but continued to box into his 50s. His prowess was recorded that same year by the writer JG Bohun Lynch in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, whilst reviewing Dove’s win at a London inter‑hospitals event. “I remember seeing Dove box for Oxford and he then struck me as about the best middleweight (he won the heavies but he was little more than a middleweight) I had seen at either university. He is magnificently built, quick, very hard hitting and he has that great length of arm which is often the heritage of men of African blood.”
Dove won several regional ABA titles and his great claim to fame was a bruising encounter at the semi‑finals of the National ABA Championships of 1931, in London, where, in the words of the Daily Mirror, “he put up a great fight” with a 19-year-old Jack Petersen, who eventually got the better of him and went on to win the final. Petersen would become British and Empire heavyweight champion and one of the best British boxers of his era.
Dove married in 1919 and had three children, one of whom, Anthony, became a professional boxer in the 1950s. Frank’s sister Evelyn had the real family claim to fame, becoming a hugely successful cabaret star and the first black female singer to appear on BBC Radio and the first to have her own series on television. It was suggested her risqué stage costumes caused her Victorian father to disown her.
Dove thrived as a barrister, rowed successfully for clubs on the south coast and continued to pursue his love of boxing – both fighting and officiating – and became secretary of both Brighton and then Battersea amateur boxing clubs. During the second world war he was a second lieutenant in the Pioneer Corps. Always a hugely popular figure on the amateur boxing circuit, he famously knocked out Battersea heavyweight Eddie Hearn (no relation) in a divisional tournament in south London, at the age of 50.
He died aged 59, a few days after a freakish road accident in Wolverhampton, when the brakes on his Jaguar apparently locked and he ploughed head-on into a tree en route to a reunion of his old tank corps buddies in Wales.
Dove may not have the boxing belts and trophies to his name, but he was a genuine Olympian and a true champion nonetheless.
Harry Edward’s lost memoir When I Passed the Statue of Liberty I Became Black, edited by Neil Duncanson, is published on 20 February by Yale University Press
