Lew Yates was built like a tank: short, but broad and thickset, with powerful shoulders and legs like tree trunks. He was a northern powerhouse who could fight, and as a northerner working the doors down south he needed every bit of it. In the 1970s he found himself on the door of the Room at the Top in Ilford, Essex, a venue for trendy partygoers and top faces from Essex and London. One night he told the wrong table to drink up. This film tells that story, and the one that brought him south in the first place, from Yates's own book, Wild Thing.
The Room at the Top
That night Essex's most feared firm were in: the Blundells, headed by two brothers, Eddie and Billy. Billy, the hotter-headed of the two, was there, and Yates clocked the group straight away, drinking champagne from flutes and sneering at the doormen. He was not impressed by flash suits, cash or reputations. As he worked his way through the crowd asking punters to drink up, he came to their table. Drink up, time to go.
What happened next happened fast. Billy hit him with a sharp shot on the chin. Yates came straight back at him. Then a heavy glass came from the side and split his head open. With blood pouring down his face, according to the book, he went through them like a wrecking ball. Billy got out with a couple of his men. The rest did not.
The next morning the warnings started. Billy was a serious man, connected and respected, and there would likely be comebacks. Calls were made on both sides to cool things down. Yates listened, and went back to work. To him it was just another pub fight.
St Helens
He was a proud fighting man from St Helens, a hard rugby town in the North West with Liverpool on its doorstep. He started boxing young, at the Britannia and Low House clubs, and loved all of it: the skipping, the bags, the sparring. Outside the ring he stood apart for his strength and his refusal to take a backward step.
Life was good: boxing, the door, a young family. Then a name reached him. Roy Shaw had put out an open challenge to every hard man in the country. Yates read it and accepted without hesitating. That, the film says, is what really brought him to London. But first there was the Essex firm to deal with.
The handshake, and the men who did not shake
A week after the fight, Billy walked into the club on his own, went straight up to Yates and put his hand out. Fair play, he said, you gave as good as you got. Yates shook it. It had been a punch-up, and it was done.
Not everyone in the firm agreed. Three men in particular had been humiliated by a northern doorman in their local club: a tall, wiry Scot with a boxing background known as the Mad Jock, and two giant enforcers. The Mad Jock came to the club first, on a night when Yates was not on the door, and made his threats loudly enough to be sure they got back. A few days later he came again, shadow-boxing at the entrance and offering Yates out in front of the queue. Yates rushed him, and all that height and boxing background counted for nothing.
A week later one of the enforcers turned up, six foot seven and very sure of himself. Yates put him down with one punch, and that was the end of it. No more threats, no more visits. As the film puts it, it had all come down to a group of men who could not stand being told what to do by a northerner who did not know their names and did not care about their reputations.
Roy Shaw, 1981
The door work was never the reason Yates came south. It was always about Shaw, the most feared unlicensed fighter in the country. In the 1970s Shaw had come out of prison, aligned himself with Joey Pyle and entered unlicensed fighting. In 1975 he faced Donnie "the Bull" Adams, and the fight made his name. Shaw recalls in the film that it lasted only seconds.
In 1981 Shaw finally took on the northerner who had pursued him for years. Ray Hill, himself an active fighter on the circuit at the time, watched it. By his account, Yates was pushing Shaw around in the first two rounds. Shaw cut Yates's eye, and in the third round the referee stopped the fight on the cut. Hill calls it a bad decision, and says there was uproar in the ring. Shaw won, but Hill says the rematch never happened, because Shaw did not want to know.
Two warriors
Lew Yates and Roy Shaw have both since died after living to good ages, and Billy Blundell, a top face and Essex businessman, has also passed away. The film is candid about its source. Like most books, the narrator says, Wild Thing will contain some embellishment, but he has it from good sources that Yates was the real deal. In the book Yates says that he and Billy became good friends afterwards.