Dick Turpin.

About Dick Turpin

Lionel "Dick" Turpin was an English middleweight boxer. He was British and Commonwealth middleweight champion, reputedly being the first black fighter to win a British boxing title. He was elder brother and trainer of the more famous Randolph Turpin, who became world middleweight champion after beating Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951.. Dick Turpin's father, Lionel Turpin Senior, had emigrated from British Guiana and settled in Leamington Spa, where he worked in a foundry. He died young from injuries sustained during the First World War, leaving his wife Beatrice to raise five children. The family's boxing tradition extended across three brothers: Jack competed as a featherweight, Dick as a middleweight, and Randolph went on to become world champion. Dick's historic victory over Vince Hawkins on 28 June 1948 was notable not only for the title it secured but for the barriers it broke: he became the first black fighter to win a British boxing title in the modern era, in a period when racial discrimination remained widespread in British sport and society. Despite his own championship credentials, Dick devoted much of his later boxing life to training and managing Randolph, accompanying him to New York for the Sugar Ray Robinson fight in 1951.