“Ted” Lewis

“Ted” Lewis. London. Exhibit Supply Co., Chicago, 1921.

The boxer Ted “Kid” Lewis (1894–1970) was born in London’s East End as Gershon Mendeloff. Having trained at the Judaean Social & Athletic Club in Whitechapel, he became a professional boxer in 1909. Following a tour of Australia in 1914, he lived in the United States for a number of years. By 1924 he had, at various points, held the British and European featherweight titles, the European and World welterweight titles and the British and European middleweight titles. His reputation took something of a dent in the early 1930s when he worked for Oswald Mosley’s security team and stood for Mosley’s New Party in Stepney, Whitechapel and St. George’s in the 1931 general election. The two men soon fell out over Mosley’s antisemitism, however. Lewis helped fund the 43 Group of former Jewish servicemen who, in the late 1940s, took on Mosley’s resurgent fascist movement. The fact that he later tried his hand at (at least) a dozen different commercial ventures suggests that he was not a born businessman. When a biography of Lewis by his son was published in 1990, one reviewer wrote that it portrayed its object “as a superb boxer and a lovable simpleton, his generosity outside a ring as great as his prowess in it”. Lewis spent his final years in Nightingale House, a care home in Clapham (southwest London), where a blue plaque in his honour was unveiled in 2003.