On 13th January 1921 his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, a great boxing fan, greatly honoured Harry with his company at the Wilde-Herman fight at the Royal Albert Hall. Earlier that evening, they’d dined together with friends at St James’s Palace. Together they watched Pete Harman beat Jimmy Wilde in the 17th round.
It was a significant event for Harry, not just because of his royal companion, but because prejudices that surrounded boxing, as recently as the 1914-18 Great War, had meant that a tournament in aid of the Hero Boxers’ Fund in the midst of war was officially declined by the Albert Hall ‘because pugilism was not the sort of thing to be associated with a building erected to the memory of Prince Albert!’
“The war had by then swept men’s minds clean of the last cobwebs of snobbery and humbug left over from the Victorian era. The insult to boxers as men, and to boxing as a manly and honourable sport, implied by that war-time refusal to stage a boxing match for charity in the Albert hall, was wiped out.”
The Prince would join Harry for boxing events at the Albert Hall on several further occasions. Including in 1927, and the Baldock-Brown fight in 1931 when Prince George joined them too.
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