Who would have thought I’d choose a pugilist, a boxer, to write about - boxing is such an anathema to me! However, the person I’ve chosen, Scottish boxing champion James ‘Tancy’ Lee (1882-1941) continues to be identified as a family hero during family history contacts. When I first made contact with Bill Tully, a younger first cousin of my decades deceased father, he asked “Have you come across ‘Tancy’ Lee in your research?” Bill, born in 1928 in Leith, had known Tancy and shared stories of him with me. A Sydneysider Lee descendant, contacting me through ancestry, also highlighted the connection with Tancy Lee, sending me a photograph he had come across in going through old photographs in his mother’s collection. Just in the last month I’ve been contacted by someone who shares my Lee great, great grandparents, who introduced herself asking ‘have you heard of Tancy Lee? I’m his great granddaughter…. ‘ James ‘Tancy’ Lee (1882 – 1941), a first cousin of my grandfather, James Lee, also born in 1882, was the first Scot to be an outright winner of the Lonsdale Belt, the oldest championship event in boxing. Tancy's Lonsdale belt 9ct gold enamel sold at auction for 19000 UK pounds in 2005. Inducted into the Scottish Boxing Hall of Fame in 2008, the highs during Tancy’s boxing career were substantial – he not only won the Lonsdale belt, according to thefightcity.com… “his stoppage of the legendary Jimmy Wilde in round 17 led to him taking the British, European and world flyweight titles, …he also holds wins over Charlie Hardcastle, Danny Morgan and Young Joe Brooks and won European and Lonsdale titles at featherweight.” A Google search includes many entries for Tancy, including a Wikipedia entry which provides a detailed list of his achievements.
Tancy also trained and mentored the sons of his sister Ellen Lee, who became Olympic medal winners for boxing - George McKenzie (bronze bantamweight medal, Antwerp Olympics 1920) and James McKenzie (silver flyweight medal, Paris Olympics, 1924). A memorable film of Tancy training others in 1924 can be found on in the British Pathe film archives…. https://www.britishpathe.com/video/tancey-lee-aka-tancy-lee/query/belts The swings and round abouts in Tancy’s boxing career can be found in many reports on the internet. Tancy also experienced swings and roundabouts in his personal life. His father, James Lee, died of tuberculosis in 1891, when Tancy was nine years old. His first wife, Jeannie, mother of his six children died of Spanish Influenza aged 28 in 1918. Two of their six children died in infancy, and very sadly, Tancy was tragically killed when hit by a bus in Edinburgh in 1941, aged 59. Tancy may have been a ‘bit of a villain’! Enlisted as a ‘boy’ soldier in the Royal Scots, at age 15/16 he appears to have ‘gone AWOL’ on the 12th June 1899, resulting in a listing in the UK Military Deserters records on ancestry.com, a record which will forever haunt his family historians. I suspect that, being small at 5’2” and having lost his father at 9 yrs, Tancy may have been drawn to, his uncles may have encouraged him to, learn to box in order to protect himself. Irish Catholic families and community in Leith appeared to work together to raise their young people—there are many examples of this having happened to young family members in his generation of the Lee family. The boxing community in Leith, in particular Tancy’s role as trainer and mentor, would also have provided role modelling and structure for his Olympic boxing medal winning nephews George and James McKenzie, whose mother Ellen Lee died when they were children. Tancy was tiny, courageous and appears to have been a loving father and uncle who contributed to the welfare of his community. He participated in a sport renowned for risk taking and drama and seemed to have survived this over an extended period of time. A family and local hero, he does appear to have been a ‘national living treasure’ in Scotland. The tradition of boxing has not been handed down to my generation, though my brother John drily commented when I asked him, that our father did try to get him to take lessons, to no avail. Bill Tully also said it did not appeal to him, despite efforts to get him to learn boxing in Leith as a child. Initially I thought Tancy may have meant ‘tiny’ as in ‘teensy’…. but apparently it can mean ‘Immortal’. Perhaps, Tancy having made it into the Scottish Boxing Hall of Fame, Pathe Film Archives and Wikipedia symbolizes immortality in some way! Beverley Lee November 2022 Tancy Lee Entry in Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tancy_Lee Pathe Film Archives https://www.britishpathe.com/video/tancey-lee-aka-tancy-lee/query/belts 'Tancy Lee - The Famous Scot' - The Referee (Australian paper) - includes a poem - https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/129355032 |
The Journey ...An 'occasional blog' recording elements of my renewed family history journey. This is the second wave in my 'family history' journey. The first lasted from 2010 to 2014. with intermittent bursts since then. It's time to revisit, to share more stories, to edit, to tackle uncertainties... Categories
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