Randolph Turpin

Randolph Adolphus Turpin (7 June 1928 – 17 May 1966), better known as Randolph Turpin, and in the United States also as Randy Turpin, was an English boxer who was considered by some to be Europe's best middleweight boxer of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1951 he became world middleweight champion when he defeated Sugar Ray Robinson. Turpin was inducted into the International Boxing Hall Of Fame in 2001.

Biography

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to a black father Lionel who was born in British Guyana in 1886, and died within a year of Randolph's birth, having never recovered from injuries suffered in a gas attack during the battle of the Somme, leaving his mother Beatrice (née Whitehouse, 1904–1974), to raise four children. He started, like his brother Dick, to be trained in the art of boxing at Leamington Boys' Club.

Turpin turned professional in London in 1946, soon after his 18th birthday. Trained by his elder brother Dick, who himself was a successful middleweight, Randolph knocked out Gordon Griffiths in his first bout. Turpin put together a string of 16 wins in a row, all over the United Kingdom, until drawing with Mark Hart over six rounds in his last bout of 1947.