Mexborough and Swinton Times December 28, 1928

Maker of Champions
An Old Bareknuckle Fighter
Harry Crossley’s Manager

Mr William Bridgewater, the man who made Roland Todd a British champion, and now believes he is making Crossley also a champion, has had as wide and interesting all round experience in sport, surely, as any man in South Yorkshire.

Mr Bridgewater was born at Parkgate but spent his childhood in the Black Country, in the neighbourhood of Birmingham; but the chief part of his career has been spent in South Yorkshire.

Boxing – in the days when bareknuckle fighting was the classic method – football and boxing promotion have been Mr Bridgewater’s chief interest. In earlier days he play football with Rawmarsh, Doncaster Rovers – the old club – Parkgate Rangers, Gainsborough Trinity, Sheffield United; and on several occasions returned at a Sheffield in the InterCity matches with London and Glasgow. He also played a great deal of football in Lancashire.

A knee injury put a stop to his footballing; but apart from that he always had a leaning towards the boxing game. He started his career in a more primitive age, when men fought with bare knuckles and the triumph of “mind over matter” and not been consummated in this branch of sport.

In those days men learn to hit with the knuckle part of the hand; the old hands who still remembered those days still exploit their knowledge of the greater potency of hitting knuckle foremost even now that men fight with gloves on. Boxes today often carry the sign of the trade in their hands: in the old days they carried them vastly more markedly. In fact Mr Bridgewater recalls, they “pickled” their hands to make the skin hard: if they didn’t their hands puffed up and soon became useless through hitting an opponent. That was a hard school in which to learn the boxing game!

Even after the knee injury which stopped his football career Mr Bridgewater kept an active connection with the game: for a time he was associated with Sheffield United chiefly as a prospector for players. His first ‘capture’for the club was Walter (“Cock”) Bennett, the Mexborough man, whose transfer fee was a moderate sum of £40.

Another injury – to the rich this time – stop Mr Bridgewater’s appearance in the ring, at least as a fighter, and he probably turns the role of promoter. He promoted bouts at Doncaster’s far back as 30 years ago. But the path of the boxing promoter was by no means a smooth one then. Mr Bridgewater remembers the difficulty had in overcoming the protests of the killjoys, as he calls them of the Doncaster Council, who considered the ring as the special prerogative of the Evil One.

But Mr Bridgewater persevered and one of the most interesting of his earlier protégés was “Iron” Hague, Mexborough’s one and only English champion to date. He matched him for the “pitmen’s Championship of Yorkshire” with Dick Parkes of Goldthorpe – the original articles of the match, which took part at the Doncaster Drill Hall are among Mr Bridgewater’s more interesting relics of a historic past.

The distance was twenty two-minutes rounds, with one this minute rests. Mr. Bridgewater later put of Hague for more important matches; but for an illness he would have, had Hague at the top of the tree before he was twenty years of age. After the illness Hague appeared fit and Mr. Bridgewater gave him a try-out against Charlie Nook, a Londoner; but Hague was “Nocked” out That, however, as all Mexoro’ now knows, was but a temporary check and two more matches served to bring Hague again into the front rank and provide a stepping stone to the ultimate triumph: heavyweight champion of England

Mr. Bridgewater has devoted himself more and more to training, management and promotion in recent years. He has proved himself, not, only to South Yorkshire but to all England — including the National Sporting Club—as a man who knows a potential champion when he sees him in the raw. Roland Todd at once jumps to the mind, though that is now a closed chapter in the history of boxing. Mr. Bridgewater has now at Doncaster a “school” of lads of exceeding promise, from among whom will surely spring in the next year or two men of the first water in their respective grades The most important of them at the moment, of course, is Harry Crossley. Mr. Bridgewater’s opinion on Mexborough’s hope is this:

“I will get him through with ordinary luck. I consider he has the best prospect of all the contenders for any championship of England.”

And that’s that! We all hope his judgement, once more is sound; and we have confidence in that judgement.

Mr. Bridgewater knows how to get the best out of men who know how to look after themselves and Crossley is one of these. His experience of the old bareknuckle days is of inestimable service to the students of the more scientific age.

“I generally lead off by telling a lad to deliver his blow with knuckles in advance of his,” he says. But “judgement of distance the greatest point in boxing.”

Anything that Mr Bridgewater says about boxing must be listened to with respect, he gets results – and those results are due to his shrewd judgement almost at first glance at the raw material; and to the “schooling” they get in his gymnasium, where boxing still is a craft in which men use brain more than road.