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BritWres at carnivals, fetes & festivals


Arthur B. Funky

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On my 12th birthday (will be 29 years ago tomorrow by coincidence) we went to Nottingham Goose Fair for the day and went to the boxing/wrestling booth.

The usual challenges to "punters" was made, and the wrestling one resulted in the bloke from the crowd taking a pasting for a few minutes but then making a big comeback resulting in the heel powdering out and fleeing back through the curtain.

"Well, I've never seen that before!" exclaimed the MC.

"I'll bet you fookin 'ave!" an unconvinced patron bellowed from the side.

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I fuckin' bet he had too!! :D:D

Bulldog Bash (Hells Angels MC annual party) was always a good laugh for the wrestling shows on a Saturday.  The Yellow Chopper in Margam, Wales was also good for a while ... 

A few tales from those days stick in my brain.

For another time though ... 

 

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Nothing particularly exciting, but I remember travelling to a Hammerlock show with Doug Williams, as I usually did, but earlier in the afternoon, he was working on a show at a fair in Faversham, Kent. The other wrestlers on the show were Tom Thumb (Neil Evans, who was also the promoter of the wrestling portion of the fair), Johnny Kidd and Blondie Barratt. The ring was outdoors but the wrestlers (and myself, I wasn't doing anything on the show) were inside a small marquee to get changed in. My two vivid memories of that day were that Blondie had just bought his first ever mobile phone (it was around 1995) and wouldn't stop going on about it. Then, towards the end of the afternoon, it rang......and it was a wrong number! I've never seen anyone look so crestfallen! My other memory was that there was a bed of nails in the marquee that was being used by another act. He let me lie down on it, and I soon discovered that, due to the physics of a few hundred nails placed at even intervals, it really didn't hurt at all.

My other experience of working at an outdoor fair was a year or so later. I can't remember the town but it would have been in Kent again. I was acting as MC (again, I think we were doing this in the early afternoon and another show nearby in the evening). It was the hottest day of the year, probably somewhere between 28-30 C, and rather than a marquee, we had the ring van to get changed in! The ring van, of course, was a metal box with no windows, so it was like an oven! And then of course, while the wrestlers were all in trunks, old twatface here was dressed in a full suit and dicky bow! It was not a comfortable experience!

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God, mentioning a marquee brought back vivid memories of an awful day doing some fair around Wigan for GPW. A bunch of us had slept in the old FutureShock gym the night before rather than get a hotel so woke up freezing my bollocks off after a horrendous night of sleep to go do an open air fair in the pissing rain. Not the life of glamour I'd hoped for after watching WWE on the telly.

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My two lasting memories of that day are every single wrestler that tried to climb the turnbuckles falling on their arse because it was so wet, and riding the ghost train with Joey Hayes.

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About 22 years ago I went to the Worthing Festival and there was a Premier Promotions ring set up almost in the middle of the Steyne. I was instantly, at the age of around 14, fascinated by this tiny ring which didn't look big enough for the wrestlers. I had never watched anything other than the american wrestling on TV so smaller rings were just not a thing. I hung around to see some guys wrestle and not knowing the UK style at the time found it rather boring.

My friend who like me loved american wrestling had been to see PP a couple of times at the Pavilion and said I should go just to see Jonny Storm and Doug Williams but I was stupid and said it wasn't for me based on what I saw at this tiny little festival.

It would take a couple of years for me to finally go to a proper Premier Promotions show and the ring was bigger, not as big as a WWE ring, and the wrestling quality was much better. I loved going to see PP at the time and getting a BritWres fix from a traditional company. They still do shows here but on a smaller schedule but I still remember how stupid I was as a teenager and turning down British Wrestling and seeing some of the generational talent on the south coast at the time due to the influence of the exhibition bouts I saw in Steyne Gardens on a grey summers day.

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