\n The film was a 30-minute colour documentary made in four days at Salisbury Fair in October 1976 – it won an award for the best short documentary at the Adelaide International Film Festival.\n<\/p>\n
\n The director of the film, Graham Moore, said that the film was essentially a portrait of Mrs Esther McKeowen, the legendary lady boxing booth owner who died in 1999 aged 101.\n<\/p>\n
\n Indeed, the McKeowen family had run boxing and wrestling booths for generations and the boxing booth was a great favourite at Salisbury Fair for many years.\n<\/p>\n
\n The McKeowen family boxing booth at Salisbury Fair.(Image: Supplied)\n<\/p>\n
\n It was Mrs McKeowen who made the claim that she had “discovered” Freddie Mills, who became world light-heavyweight champion from 1948 to 1950.\n<\/p>\n
\n In 1965, Mills was found dead from a gunshot wound in what was said to be “mysterious circumstances”.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was found in his car parked behind his club in London.\n<\/p>\n
\n Freddie Mills boxed at Salisbury Fair as did our local legends Charlie Plumb and Tommy Churchill.\n<\/p>\n
\n It is said that you got 10 shillings to box, 10 shillings a round for bouts lasting three or four rounds, and \u00a33 for a knockout.\n<\/p>\n
\n You also got a share of the \u2018nobbins\u2019 – proceeds from passing round the hat.\n<\/p>\n
\n The film also includes a Salisbury man called Stan Grigg.\n<\/p>\n
\n Stan won the RAF lightweight boxing title in 1947 and was employed as assistant manager of the EMI social club in Salisbury.\n<\/p>\n
\n Fight For Your Life was chosen for Adelaide by the British Council\u2019s film selection panel.\n<\/p>\n
\n It was made by Dawn Promotions and was also shown at a film festival in the United States but I am unable to say if it was ever shown commercially.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The film was a 30-minute colour documentary made in four days at Salisbury Fair in October 1976 –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-205854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-boxing","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}