Seven, eight, nine, 10… the Belgian referee stopped counting and spread his arms wide to signal the end of the fight and stared sympathetically at the prone figure lying on the canvas. British boxer and war hero Frank Dove’s Olympic career was over after less than five minutes of action in Antwerp’s Celebration Hall, when he was felled by a right-handed sledgehammer to the jaw of Dane Søren Petersen.
Only 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 quarterfinal bout in the heavyweight competition.
Related: The remarkable story of Harry Edward: Britain’s first black Olympian
Dove was cold for several minutes while the nervous referee and referees struggled to find a stretcher to carry him out of the ring and then had to use smelling salts to revive him. Dove was just a few weeks away from his 23rd birthday, and British hopes were high that he would claim a medal at the 1920 Games. After all, he was quite a light-heavyweight, and not only had he captured the varsity title earlier that same year , but had also made his way through the division’s ABA ranks.
But Britain was short on heavyweights, so they drafted Dove onto the Olympic team for Belgium. Only nine boxers entered the heavyweight competition – three of them British – and Dove received a bye in the first round and went straight into the quarter-finals. That’s where his luck ran out about a minute into the second round. Londoner Ron Rawson went on to win the gold medal, stopping Petersen in the final.
Despite the British boxers winning two gold, one silver and three bronze medals, their efforts were deemed a disaster and the Daily Herald headlined their report ‘Our Boxing Failures’ and criticized our efforts, while also suggesting ‘the fact remains that the much despised foreigner to come to the fore as an artist with his fists.”
Their reporter was stunned that Dove had been defeated, writing: “Dove was the terror of the amateur championships when he won the cadet catchweight award. He defeated his rivals in double-fast time, but Petersen did so well in the second round that Dove was out for a significant period. Petersen must have a real punch. Dove is, or was, an almost champion.”
I came across Dove when I discovered the story of Harry Edward, Britain’s first black Olympic medalist, whose lost memoir I edited and is being published this month. Dove and Edward were the only black members of the Great Britain team at the 1920 Games.
Unlike Edward, Dove was born in Britain, in the City of London, in the late 19th century, the son of a hugely wealthy Sierra Leonean merchant who rose to become head of the bar in Freetown. Dove senior used his wealth to ensure his children received a good education, so Frank was sent to Cranleigh public school, where he was one of the first black pupils. He excelled at almost everything and became a regular in the cricket and football XIs and was part of the hugely successful Cranleigh gymnastics team.
It wasn’t until he went to Oxford, Merton College, that he took up boxing and realized that his athleticism, speed and physique made him an ideal light heavyweight.
The First World War interrupted everything and in 1916 he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps, first as an expeditionary driver and then as a tank driver, where he took part in the very first tank battle, at Cambrai in 1917. On the fourth day of the battle his tank received a direct hit , which killed four of its crew and injured three. Being the only member of the crew unharmed, he remained with his wounded crew until help arrived, before jumping back into his tank and attempting to single-handedly maneuver it back into the battle. But minutes later, a nearby tank was hit by another German shell and he was seriously injured. For this show of courage he received the Military Medal.
The very humble Duif did not even tell the story to his family and the African Telegraph wrote that he was “so modest that we have been unable to obtain any details of his heroic deed from him”. When the war ended, he returned to Oxford to complete his law degree and found time to continue his boxing, winning his blue and becoming the British varsity champion in 1920.
He was called to the bar in 1923 and became a successful attorney. He worked in London and West Africa, but continued boxing into his 50s. His prowess was captured by the writer JG Bohun Lynch in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News that same year, discussing Dove’s victory at an inter-hospital event in London. “I remember seeing Dove Box before Oxford and he struck me as about the best middleweight (he won the heavyweights, but he was little more than a middleweight) I had seen at either university. He is magnificently built, fast, can hit very hard and has that great arm length that is often the inheritance of men of African blood.”
Dove won several regional ABA titles and his big claim to fame was a nail-biting encounter at the semi-finals of the 1931 National ABA Championships 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 prevailed and won the final. Petersen would become the heavyweight champion of Britain and the Empire and one of the best British boxers of his time.
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, becoming a hugely successful cabaret star and the first black singer to appear on BBC Radio and the first to have her own series on television. It was suggested that her risqué stage costumes caused her Victorian father to disown her.
Dove flourished as a lawyer, rowing successfully for south coast clubs and continued to pursue his love of boxing – both fighting and officiating – becoming secretary of both the Brighton and Battersea amateur boxing clubs. During World War II he was a second lieutenant in the Pioneer Corps. He was always a hugely popular figure on the amateur boxing circuit and, aged 50, defeated Battersea heavyweight Eddie Hearn (no relation) in a divisional tournament in south London.
He died aged 59, a few days after a freak road accident in Wolverhampton when the brakes on his Jaguar apparently locked and he plowed head-on into a tree on the way to a reunion of his old tank corps friends in Wales.
Dove may not have boxing belts and trophies to his name, but he was a true Olympian and a true champion nonetheless.
The Lost Memoirs of Harry Edward As I passed the Statue of Liberty, I blacked outedited by Neil Duncanson, will be published on February 20 by Yale University Press