Jock McAvoy

Jock “The Rochdale Thunderbolt” McAvoy, born Joseph Patrick Bamford, English, boxed as a middleweight and later as a light-heavyweight, and for long spells, he looked like the sort of fighter who could knock over a brick wall and then ask for another one. Born in Burnley, Lancashire, on 20 November 1908 and billed throughout as a Rochdale man, McAvoy fought orthodox, stood around 5ft 10in with a reach listed at roughly 72.8 inches, and compiled one of the fiercest ledgers in British boxing: 147 professional contests between 1927 and 1945, winning 132, losing 14, drawing 1, with 88 knockouts. He took the ring name “Jock McAvoy” to keep his boxing from his mother in the early days, and the name stuck because it sounded like trouble and, more importantly, the fighting matched it. When you read that record properly, you see a man who did not build slowly through gentle matchmaking. He fought constantly, fought everywhere, and he fought in an era when a boxer’s education was conducted with the clock running and the blood already warm.

His professional debut came on 6 November 1927 at Royton, where he stopped Billy Longworth in the second round of a scheduled six. That is as Northern as boxing gets: local grounds, short-notice heroes, and the understanding that if you can punch, you will be brought back. McAvoy was brought back again and again, sometimes within weeks, working his way through the regional circuit in places like Royton, Rochdale, Morecambe and Manchester, often over long distances by the standards of the day, ten, twelve, fifteen rounds, with the aim not simply to win but to wear the other man down until the finish became inevitable. By 1931, he was already collecting official recognition, taking the BBBofC Northern Area middleweight title in Manchester when Joe Lowther’s corner retired him. The rhythm of his early career explains the fighter he became: relentless activity, long fights, hard men, and a style built on pressure and a battering ram right hand rather than decorative footwork.

The leap from regional terror to national champion came on 10 April 1933 in Manchester, when McAvoy took both the British and British Empire middleweight titles from Len Harvey over 15 rounds on points. It was a defining British fight, a champion with real class against a challenger with real spite, and McAvoy’s victory began the reign that anchored his reputation, holding the British Empire middleweight championship from 1933 to 1939. He was not content to sit at home collecting domestic defences either. In January 1935, he went to Paris to challenge Marcel Thil and lost a fifteen-round decision, his bid for the European middleweight crown derailed by a champion of genuine class. The defeat did not blunt him; it merely redirected him, and later that year McAvoy travelled to the United States and produced the sort of result that should have rewritten his career trajectory overnight. At Madison Square Garden in December 1935, he faced Ed “Babe” Risko, the reigning world middleweight champion, in a non-title bout and stopped him in the first round after dropping him repeatedly. It was the kind of performance that leaves promoters suddenly fascinated by anything except giving the visitor the title shot he has just earned.

If the middleweight route was being blocked, McAvoy simply grew heavier and went looking for trouble elsewhere. In March 1936, he challenged John Henry Lewis for the NBA world light-heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden and lost over fifteen rounds on points, beaten by a champion of real craft and experience. He then returned to Britain and immediately did something that tells you everything about his appetite, challenging Jack Petersen for the British and British Empire heavyweight titles in April 1936, giving away natural size to a man who belonged in the division. Petersen won the fifteen-round decision, and it confirmed what most suspected: that McAvoy was a serious fighter at any weight, but not a natural heavyweight against a champion who could hit like a heavyweight should. Even so, he kept hunting belts that mattered. In April 1937, he took the British light-heavyweight title from Eddie Phillips with a fourteenth-round knockout at Wembley’s Empire Pool, a finish late enough to show stamina and late enough to show he carried his power deep into championship rounds.

The Harvey rivalry returned at light-heavyweight, and it returned with crowds that belonged to another age. McAvoy lost the British light-heavyweight title back to Len Harvey at Harringay Arena in April 1938, then met him again at White City Stadium in July 1939, with Harvey winning a fifteen-round decision in a bout billed at the time as a major “world” contest under British sanctioning. McAvoy’s later career also intersected with Freddie Mills, a future world champion at light-heavyweight who beat him on points and then, in the rematch, forced him to retire when McAvoy could not continue with a back injury. He carried on into the mid-1940s before closing the books in 1945, his legacy already fixed: a long-reigning Empire middleweight champion, a British champion at middleweight and light-heavyweight, and one of the most prolific knockout men Britain has produced. After boxing, he suffered polio in 1951 and lived thereafter using a wheelchair. McAvoy died on 20 November 1971, his 63rd birthday, by suicide from an overdose of barbiturates, a blunt and unhappy ending that sits in stark contrast to the brutal certainty he carried in the ring.