Profits grew steadily each year and in the mid 1920s Vernon Sangster and his father moved the operation thirty miles to Liverpool. In the 1930s, with the business of football pools making the family rich, there were two major relocations: Vernon, now married to Peggy, bought West Lodge; and Vernons Pools set up their new headquarters in the north-eastern suburb of Liverpool, Aintree, home of the world’s most famous steeplechase, the Grand National.
Robert was born on 23 May 1936. He was to be an only child and sole heir to a sprawling business which would, before he was out of school, employ six thousand people. Under the umbrella of Vernon Industries there were factories making products to help Britain’s war effort, factories making kitchen and domestic products, factories making plastics, factories making children’s toys. And all the time the great ‘cash cow’ of the football pools increased the vast and diverse fortune of Vernon Sangster.
He was a nice man, rather quiet, but immensely well-liked by both his peers and employees. He was extremely generous to charities, a trait inherited by his son. Vernon was not given to ostentation in any form, and usually had lunch with his wife in a private businessmen’s club in Liverpool. He was, however, obsessed by sports, choosing for Robert’s godfather Dr Joe Graham, a British Boxing Board of Control official fight doctor. He also ensured that Robert was taught the game of golf at a very young age under the tutelage of one of England’s finest players, his friend Henry Cotton, three times winner of the Open Championship and, belatedly, a Knight of the Realm.
Vernon, who played off a handicap of twelve and would one day be elected to membership of the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews, was of course a member of Royal Liverpool Golf Club. He and his wife played the daunting 7000 yards of Hoylake a couple of times a week. This was no ordinary golf club. Royal Liverpool is redolent with legend. Here it was that one of the finest amateurs of all time, Mr Harold Hilton, a local member and the only man who had ever held both the US and British Amateur Championships in the same year, won the 1897 Open beating the five-times professional winner James Braid. Here too the immortal Edwardian golfer James Taylor won the first of his five Open Championships by eight shots in 1913. Also it was at Hoylake that the great American Walter Hagen won the second of his four Open Championships, in 1924, playing the last nine holes in 36, despite visiting three bunkers. Bobby Jones sailed into Liverpool in 1930 and nearly blew his Grand Slam – with a seven at the par-five eighth hole, right at the bottom of the Sangster garden – in the last round of the Open Championship at Royal Liverpool. Ultimately he won by two strokes, but to the end of his life he always said: ‘I’ll never forget Hoylake.’
In the 1967 Open Championship here, in mild conditions, only 19 of the 370 rounds played were under 70. The winner was the Argentinian Roberto de Vicenzo who finished on 278. The holder, Jack Nicklaus, failed by two shots to shoot the 67 which would have given him a tie. Afterwards he stood alone, memorably, outside the Victorian clubhouse, and he gazed out towards the far-distant eighth hole at the end of the formidable links, and he shook his head in disbelief. It is one thing for a local businessman to play off twelve on a well-watered park golf course, but quite another to be able to score like that over Hoylake. Both Vernon and Peggy Sangster became Captains of the Club in 1975, the year their only son set off on his mission to revolutionize The Sport of Kings.
As the Second World War drew to its close and Robert Sangster attained the age of eight, he was sent as a weekly border to the nearby Leas School which was also situated with panoramic views across the golf course. Unsurprisingly he swiftly came to love sports and, by the time he left for public school, Repton (founded 1577), he was a very reasonable cricketer, an enthusiastic rugby player and, at thirteen, a pretty long hitter of a golf ball. But what he could really do was box. Dr Joe Graham had seen to that, having personally shown his godson at a very young age the basics of the straight left, the jab, the hook and the uppercut. Robert even knew how to throw combinations, knew how to shift his weight, to move to the left away from a ‘southpaw’. Above all, he knew how to punch correctly, how to take the impact.
He had accompanied Joe on trips to London. At the age of eleven he had seen the British heavyweight champion Bruce Woodcock suffer a broken jaw at the hands of the American Joe Baksi. Engraved on his memory is the post-fight scene in the dressing room, where the badly hurt Woodcock sat with a white towel over his head, muttering over and over to his manager: ‘I’m sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down.’
In 1951 he watched the brilliant British Middleweight Champion Randolph Turpin beat Sugar Ray Robinson for the world title at London’s Earls Court Stadium. A few years later he was ringside with his godfather at Liverpool Stadium when the British Middleweight Champion Johnny Sullivan entered the ring first for his title fight with Pat McAteer of Birkenhead, and insisted on occupying Pat’s traditional corner. He can still recall the sound and the fury of the packed ranks of the dockers at this affront to their hero; the uproar in the stadium as the referee spun a coin and then led the arrogant ex-booth fighter Sullivan to the opposite corner. ‘No one,’ says Robert, ‘I promise you, no one who was there could ever forget the eruption of joy from that crowd when Pat knocked Sullivan out. I flew out of my seat with my arms in the air.’
He also remembers to this day nearly every punch thrown in the ‘toughest fight I ever saw’, when Dennis Powell fought George Walker for the vacant British cruiserweight crown at Liverpool Stadium on 26 March 1953. He sat behind Dr Joe while the two grim, determined contestants fought it out.
Walker, felled in the first round by a right hook, took an eight count. In the fourth Powell was down for nine from a momentous right from Walker. Then they both went down together, Powell for ‘six’, Walker rising immediately. In the seventh Walker lost his gum shield, Powell’s eye was cut, Walker’s left eye was closing and still they went at it, with thunderous punches.
By the eighth round Walker could see only through his right eye. In the ninth they were considering stopping the fight in favour of Walker, so badly was Powell’s eye bleeding. But the referee let it go on, through a murderous tenth and through the eleventh, with George Walker, fighting for his life, now being hit too often for anyone’s taste. His eye was so badly injured, his chief second Dave Edgar refused to let him come up for the twelfth round. He called the referee over and asked him to stop it. George Walker was heartbroken, begging for a chance, for just one more round. But Edgar was having none of it, and neither was the ref. They named Powell the winner and Robert remembers watching George Walker, sitting on his stool, devastated, alone, as we all must be at such times. ‘I thought then, as I think now,’ says Robert, ‘what a man’. (George Walker was to make and lose a gigantic fortune as Chairman of Brent Walker, owners of bookmakers William Hill, in the late 1980s.)
Whenever he was home from school Robert attended the big fights at Liverpool Stadium. He saw all of the top British fighters of the 1950s: Freddie Mills, Dave Charnley, Terry Downes, Jack Gardner. Dr Joe even took him down to London, to the promoter Jack Solomons’s gymnasium in Windmill Street, off Piccadilly. There the trainers taught him to spar. He used to hold the padded gloves for Freddie Mills to swing at, and he learned to move them quickly, listening to Freddie tell him, ‘Watch my eyes, Bobby, watch carefully, that’s how you read a fighter, that’s how you know when the punches are coming.’
Robert loved to watch Freddie Mills, and he was not yet fourteen years old when Dr Joe took him down to London to watch his hero defend the world cruiserweight championship against the American Joey Maxim. ‘It was’, recalls Robert, ‘the worse night of my life thus far.’ Maxim knocked Freddie out in round ten. He also knocked out three of his front teeth and Mills never fought again. But he still turned up to spar with Robert at Windmill Street.
This involvement with the sport of professional boxing was not absolutely what one might have expected from a young gentleman of Robert’s social standing. But Vernon Sangster was not some old lord crusting around the battlements wondering why the devil his son could not show a decent interest in something less violent, like hunting or shooting. Vernon Sangster was a man of the
