Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, Trevor Brooking, Virginia Wade, Brendon Foster. What have these people all got in common? For those of you feigning vainly that you are too young to remember, they were all famous sports people performing at the top of their international game in the 1970s in football, tennis and athletics. So who has heard of Jeoff Thompson, Jerome Atkinson and Vic Charles? Or Eddie Cox and our author, Ralph Robb? What significance do these names have? They were all very successful British international karate fighters competing at the same time as the favourites mentioned about, but unfortunately, they are not household names. The only famous British martial artist I can recall from the seventies is Brian Jacks, the Judo Olympian, but probably only because he was so popular in Superstars.

This is what Ralph Robb’s book is concerned with. This is not a martial arts travelogue, as enjoyable as they are to read, or a ‘year I decided to do a martial art because I want to write a book’ but the story of a genuine competition star who was fighting in Britain’s golden age of karate, the seventies and early eighties. He was also a member of the most successful club in England at the time, the tough and uncompromising YMCA karate club based in Wolverhampton. In this book we read about the harsh training, lives and uncompromising approach to karate that won this group of men a plethora of national and international titles, who at the same time did not have the sponsorship and salaries of the footballer or the following of the Olympian but nevertheless, trained just as hard to gain their victories. Oh yes, the majority of them were black so they also had the National Front and 1970s racism to contend with as well.

Ralph Robb opens his memoirs strongly with the sentence, “The big guy had a knife.” and through Ralph Robb’s pen, we learn of the young teenager who often had to fight on the street on a regular basis. Yet through the guidance of karate, he grew into a resourceful and hard-working young man. He is extremely modest in his descriptions of the hard training sessions they subjected themselves to, and some of his descriptions of his karate colleagues are equally eloquent as he describes his instructor Eddie Cox, “with his dark skin and broad features he looked like a sawn-off version of a young George Foreman.”

However, this book isn’t just about karate as we get a fascinating insight as to what it was like to be working class, young and black in 1970s Britain. Robb describes vividly his fear and loathing of the skinheads that live at the top of his high rise flat, the relationships he has with the men he worked with at the factory and the violence he encounters working as a doorman to earn extra money. It is here that Robb’s memoirs take on such significance as he has experiences of actual, bone crunching violence that in his time, mirrors that experienced on the competition arena. The men at the YMCA karate club were really, really hard as we hear about his instructor’s idea of the peaceful warrior; “Eddie Cox and the rest of the black belts had interpreted the Wado ethos as: there is nothing as peaceful as a man who is laid out unconscious.”

This book is very good reading, not just for the karate enthusiast who wants to know more about the time when Britain reigned supreme in the world of karate (we actually won the world championships from the Japanese in 1975), but anyone who wants to know more about a man’s relationship to violence.

Author Profile: Lesley Jackson

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Lesley Jackson, black belt and Taekwondo teacher is deputy Editor of Martial Edge.

Also by Lesley Jackson:

• Bond Babes, Bikinis and Martial Arts
• Strictly Baby Fight Club
• Sneaking under the Wire