Cliff Curvis

Cliff Curvis was a Welsh welterweight who went on to win the Lord Lonsdale belt as well as the Commonwealth title. Born in Swansea on 19 November 1927, he turned professional on 26 August 1944, while still a teenager, and fought until March 1953. He died on 22 April 2009, aged 81. His professional record stands at 55 fights, 42 wins, 12 losses and 1 draw, with 12 wins by knockout.

Curvis was a Welsh southpaw in the old sense of the term: awkward by stance alone, and then more awkward again once he found his rhythm. He liked to stand just off-centre, touch with the right hand, and bring the straight left in behind it when an opponent’s feet were set. He was not built around a single punch. He was built around angles, persistence, and the ability to keep winning minutes when the crowd had stopped being patient.

The early years were the hard Welsh circuit of the period, with fights turning up wherever the business was, and Curvis learned quickly because he had to. He was winning regularly by the end of 1945 and 1946, boxing in places as varied as Swansea, Cardiff, Brighton, London and Liverpool, taking long lists of seasoned professionals and outworking them over eight and ten. There were bumps even then—disqualifications and stoppage defeats appear on the record—but the important thing was that he kept coming back, kept fighting, and kept moving into better company.

By 1950, he was established as a proper welterweight, and the calendar starts to read like a man being manoeuvred towards titles. He beat the veteran Ernie Roderick on points, took out Harry Bos, and was winning ten-rounders against men with serious ledgers. He also met championship class. In September 1950, he went fifteen rounds with Eddie Thomas in Swansea and lost on points, and two months earlier, he had been outpointed by Charles Humez at Porthcawl, two results that told you where he stood, and what he still needed to find.

The rivalry that framed his title run was with Wally Thom. In July 1951, in Liverpool, Curvis was disqualified against Thom, a messy ending to a fight that mattered because it was bound up with the British welterweight picture. Curvis didn’t sulk. He beat Stan Reypens on points at Earls Court, then knocked out Billy Rattray in two at Ayr, and he kept himself in line. The defining night came on 24 July 1952 at The Stadium in Liverpool, when he got Thom again and, this time, stopped him in the ninth of a scheduled 15-round bout to win the British and Commonwealth welterweight titles. It was a champion’s finish, not a lucky one: the kind that comes after a man has been made to reset all night and finally runs out of answers.

Curvis’s last phase was fought on the road and at the deeper end. He beat Danny Womber and Emmanuel Clavel and carried the Commonwealth title into December 1952, travelling to Johannesburg and losing a fifteen-round decision to Gerald Dreyer. He boxed once more, in Paris on 22 March 1953, against Gilbert Lavoine for the vacant European welterweight title, and the fight ended with Curvis disqualified in the tenth. That proved to be his last bout, closing a career that ran long on hard rounds and hard travel, and that peaked with the night he took the British and Commonwealth titles the old way—by beating the man who already had them.