Almanac Boxing – ‘Diamond in the Dust Heap’, Episode 2: The Fighting Barkles

 

 

Herb Barkle was born in Kingaroy in the South Burnett district of Queensland on 16 May 1906. The Barkles came from Cornish tin–mining stock. Herb’s great-grandparents Frank and Mary Barkle and their five-year-old son Francis, migrated to the remote settlement of Brisbane, arriving in January 1853. They were seeking a land-owning life above ground. Herb’s forebears on the maternal side were Bowmans from Ayrshire in Scotland.

A key character in Herb’s story is his father, James (Jim) Barkle. Jim was an extraordinary figure who lived from 1876 to 1959. He fathered thirteen children (that survived infancy) across two marriages; the last of them was born in 1957 when Jim was 81 years old.

The saga of Herb’s career as a fighter really begins with the death of Herb’s grandfather (and Jim’s dad), Francis, a bullock driver (the olden days version of a ‘truckie’), on 30 June 1881 in Goondiwindi. According to family lore, Francis died following a fist fight outside a pub. Goondiwindi would have been a mighty primitive outpost in 1881. Francis’s death certificate shows that he died, at the age of 30, of a ‘rupture’. An alternative family theory is that the rupture may have been the result of a fall from a roof, since Francis had been a carpenter, as well as a bullocky. However, most descendants subscribe to the ‘died in a fight’ theory.

The circumstances of Francis’s death may have sparked in the next generation of the family a fierce determination to learn how to look after themselves with their fists. Jim’s brother Frank (Herb’s uncle) became amateur heavyweight champion of Queensland in 1901 and fought unsuccessfully for the State’s professional heavyweight title in 1908.

Jim Barkle was born under a bullock wagon in a dry creek bed in Laidley, Queensland on 18 July 1876. Midwifery was not a readily available service in rural Queensland at that point in history and the infant Jim was delivered by his maternal grandmother, Mrs Bowman.

Jim, one of four siblings, was a couple of weeks shy of turning five when his father died. In accordance with the necessities of the times (before social security, and with a serious deficit in the ratio of women to men in colonial Queensland), his mother Elizabeth re-married four months later and went on to bear eight more children with her new husband. Jim grew up in a spartan world in which the fittest survived.

Jim went to school for only six months before he was sent out to work, picking up potatoes. According to one of his children, he worked from that day until the day he died.

In the late 1890s, while in his early twenties, Jim made an impact as a boxer on the Queensland scene, along with his brother Frank who was two years older. The fighting of those times would have been raw and dangerous – the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were only formulated in London in 1865, and bareknuckle contests still predominated in the late 1800s. It’s unlikely there was much in the way of boxing equipment, including gloves, in rural Queensland in the 1890s. By the time Jim married Lillian Pittman from Laidley on 8 July 1901, ten days before his 25th birthday, his occupation was ‘trainer’. This was noted on his marriage certificate. His training activities encompassed boxing and horse-racing. Lillian was 18 years old on her wedding day.

Jim and Lillian had seven children altogether, although two of them died in infancy. The four surviving sons – Cecil, Herbie, Ivan James (Jimmy) and Ronald Robert (Bobby) – were all schooled in the fistic arts by their father from an early age, and all became boxers. Only daughter Myrtle avoided the ring.

Jim would have applied harsh training regimes. He was not averse to administering corporal punishment to his boys. There are accounts of him throwing a young Herbie and a friend into a muddy creek bed after they somehow got the cattle herd bogged in the creek that ran through the farm. Herb’s brother Jimmy reminisced with his children about his dread of being ‘kicked up the bum’ by his father if he didn’t complete his assigned farm work.

The boys rarely attended school and finished their formal education when they were in about Grade 4.

From the late 1930s onward, Jim’s sons Cecil, Jimmy and Bobby bought out their father’s Kingaroy farming properties and established themselves as pioneers of peanut-growing in the South Burnett district. They were hard-working, straight-laced, family-oriented folk – temperamentally very different from their flamboyant father. In the early 1960s, the four Barkle brothers were described in their local newspaper as “the boys who put the punch into peanuts”.

A couple of accounts of Cecil’s boxing exploits have survived in faded newspaper clippings which probably relate to amateur contests in the South Burnett. The clippings don’t tell us the name of the newspaper they were from, but they were probably in the South Burnett Times.

“In the final of the bantamweight division, between Cecil Barkle, 8.6 and M. Freshwater, 8.4 the latter, after a very decent showing, took the count for six, in the second round, while in the third round his seconds threw in the towel.

The last contest of the night was the final of the featherweight division, between Victorsen and C. Barkle. Five seconds after the start Barkle landed two blows, which sent Victorsen to the floor for the full count.”

Jimmy (junior) was handy in the ring too, although he was described in a eulogy delivered at his funeral in 1997 as “renowned for the amount of blood that flowed from his nose during every bout”. Once Jimmy started dating his wife-to-be Doreen, she insisted he give up the fighting game as she couldn’t stand the bleeding noses.

Bobby became a leading boxing trainer. He played an important role in developing Aboriginal boxing talent in the South Burnett. Bobby was so accomplished as a trainer that he was a coach of the gold medal winning Australian team at the Perth Empire Games in 1962. (More on this later, in Episode  25.)

 

Read all of the episodes of Diamond in the Dust Heap HERE

 

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