Hygiene-obsessed Joe Bloom maintained pristine standards at his famous West End gym
WHEN you think of an old-time gym what do you imagine? Floors, walls and windows thick with grime, dilapidated equipment and a rickety, blood-stained ring? Go back 60 years or more and that’s probably a fair portrayal of a typical British boxing gym. But there was one notable exception.
The Cambridge gym at 9 Earlham Street, off Cambridge Circus, in London’s West End was a bastion of neatness and cleanliness thanks to its eccentric owner, Joe Bloom. “You’d be skipping and he’d be going round sprinkling disinfectant on the floor,” Teddy Lewis, a talented feather and lightweight of the 1940s and ‘50s, once told me. “Woe betide anyone who dropped even a small piece of paper on the floor of Joe’s beloved gym,” recalled Boxing News ‘Old Timers’ doyen Ron Olver.
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