Not So Much a Transgression as a Confession

On Wednesday, December 18, 1968, I was sitting at my desk in the sports department of The New Zealand Herald on Wyndham Street in Auckland, typing my boxing column on an old Remington standard, when the assistant editor, Noel Chappell, handed me a handwritten letter. It had been posted the day before by a H.E. Harwood, of 177 Kitchener Street, Pukekohe, a town south of Auckland, between the shore of Manukau Harbour and the mouth of the Waikato River. It was signed “Beachcomber and Tropical Tramp”. For all that, the letter’s contents were breathtaking.

What had inspired Mr Harwood to write to the Herald was my article about the death of former world heavyweight boxing champion Jess Willard, a story which had appeared in the Herald on December 17. Willard died in Los Angeles, aged 86, on December 15, from congestive heart failure following a stroke. On the Monday Brian Humberstone, my sports editor, had handed me the Associated Press story about Willard’s death, asking me to write my own angle on his passing.

My knowledge of, and interest in, Willard had not long been greatly heightened by reading a review in the October 7, 1968, Sports Illustrated of the opening at the Alvin Theatre on Broadway of Howard Sackler’s play The Great White Hope, in which James Earl Jones played Jack Johnson (he also had the role in the 1970 movie of the same name). Sports Illustrated said, “many still believe [Johnson] agreed to take a dive [against Willard] at Havana, in return for having a Mann Act conviction quashed”. Essentially, my own take on Willard’s death was that the truth of what had happened on April 5, 1915, at the Oriental Park Racetrack in Havana, would go to Willard’s grave with him. And so it did.

Harold Edward Harwood, however, was in no doubt that Johnson had thrown the fight. He wrote, “Your article in today’s Herald regarding the famous heavyweight contest in Havana … brings back many nostalgic memories to me. At that time I was 26 years old and was working for the United Fruit Company of Boston, Massachusetts, at Banes in central Cuba, between Havana and Santiago. I was a keen fight fan in those days and had a ringside seat at that fight … I have no hesitation whatever in saying that in my opinion and that of many of my pals that fight was ‘rigged’. On three occasions at least, especially in the 12th round, Jack had Willard wide open and groggy, but he deliberately backed away.

“Jack was the most scientific boxer I have ever seen, and I saw most of the top notchers in those days – Tommy Burns, etc. Those were the days of [Ahmed] Madrali, the ‘Terrible Turk’ and other famous wrestlers. Jack Johnson toured the music halls and variety shows after he had retired and I have never in my life seen such a magnificent physique on any man.”

To that point of Mr Harwood’s letter I was in complete awe. My Herald story had fleshed out a man who had actually been there, right there at ringside, 53 years earlier (which, admittedly, seemed like an eon to a 20-year-old back then). And he was living a mere hour and a half’s drive away from me. There was no telephone number for a H.E. Harwood in Pukekohe, but if I could track down this “Beachcomber and Tropical Tramp”, what a story it would make. And so topical, too, with plans announced for a movie of The Great White Hope and with Willard’s passing.

To my lasting regret, I hesitated. I did so because what Mr Harwood added to his letter seemed just too incredible to believe. That one man - a man living in faraway New Zealand - could have done all the things that he said he did struck me as not merely verging on the Walter Mitty, but outdoing the Walter Mitty by a good stretch. It was astonishing enough to unearth someone, just 54 miles away, who had actually been at the Johnson-Willard title fight in Havana in 1915. But the rest of it … well, to a young, untravelled journalist, it appeared to cross the boundary of credibility.

Mr Harwood went on to say that he believed he was possibly the only one man in New Zealand, or, at the outside, to be one of a very few, to have met Vladimir Lenin. This was when, said Mr Harwood, Lenin “was living in a garret over a warehouse in Houndsditch [in the East End] of London, early in 1911”. We had no such research resources such as Google or Wikipedia in 1968, they were still more than 30 years in the future for me. Nowadays it’s easy to find out that Lenin did make a fifth visit to London, but not until November 1911, when he stayed at 6 Oakley Square off Crowndale Road, north of Euston Station and some distance from Houndsditch.

Perhaps Mr Harwood was getting confused, after 57 years, with the “Peter the Painter” affair, during which Mr Harwood and other bank clerks had “tried to ‘see the show’ during the lunch hour, but [we] were turned away by the police”. In the wake of the Houndsditch Murders in December 1910, the following month police and army laid a six-hour siege to 100 Sidney Street in Stepney, to flush out two Latvian radicals. Then Home Secretary Winston Churchill was there, according to Mr Harlow, dressed “in top hat and frock coat crouched behind a pillar box”.

Being at ringside in Havana for one of the most controversial bouts in world boxing history, meeting Lenin, being close enough to the famous Sidney Street siege to see how Churchill was dressed … it all seemed a bit too much for me. A bit too fanciful. So in the end I stored Mr Harwood’s letter safely away and never made an effort to find him and interview the “Beachcomber and Tropical Tramp”. And now, more than 53 years later, I find myself seriously regretting not having done so.

My regrets led me to considering, when the opportunity emerged earlier this year, to submit a story based on Mr Harwood’s letter to “Margin Releases: Typewriter Tales of Transgression”, before other commitments got in the way. Still, while my story might have involved “self-inflicted pain”, it would have been more about a confession than a transgression.

Armed as I am now with access to ancestry.com, I have come to the conclusion that Mr Harwood was telling the truth. I know that Harold Edward Harwood was born in Bristol, England, on May 13, 1889, and died in Pukekohe in 1971. I also know he was, as he said, a bank clerk and an accountant, but was working in Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, at the time of the 1911 census of England and Wales. He was working for the Massachusetts-headquartered United Fruit Company in Central America when he registered for US World War I duty on June 4, 1917. Indeed, he had returned to England from Jamaica around that time. He was still living in England at the time of the 1939 census, so presumably he settled in New Zealand sometime after World War II. Yes, regrets, I have a few …