The beauty of our lively forum is when one topic borrows another and from the Baldwin-Assirati project I want to elaborate a topic that interests me enormously.
Bernard correctly emphasised that in the 1950s Norman Morrell was the top dog, and seemingly the unofficial, but very real, President of Joint Promotions. For Norman, control of all the British titles titles was very precious.
Dale Martin were also interested in the titles. They just had to sit and accept that they would have none, part of being 1953 JP newbies.
Once the balance of JP power had swung dramatically in Dale Martin's favour in approx 1961, Dale Martin redressed the title imbalance, claiming control of nearly all of them through the sixties. Dale Martin wanted the titles all right and claimed them as soon as they had the power.
My interest through all this is working out just how, why and when this very dramatic and visible Southwards powershift occurred. So far I've linked it to the tv contract - which we know little about but which I do suspect Mick McManus was at the epicentre of. My reasoning? His self-bestowal of 173 tv appearances. Renewed plaudits to Hack for being the driving force at Wrestling Heritage in creating the painstakingly compiled and magnificent lists of wrestlers' tv appearances, a hierarchy that has been pored over by thousands of site visitors.
As usual, I love to analyse the lists and try and make deductions from them. If I am right, we can examine McManus's early tv work to see when his power took off.
1955 - Zero appearances
1956 - just one
1957 - one
1958 - three
1959 - Zero
1960 - one
1961 - eight
1962 - eight
1963 - eight.
Quite a striking result. McManus jumped from a total of six tv appearances in the first six tv years to a remarkably regular eight appearances a year. At that time, he probably thought eight would be the most that he could reasonably claim. With Absolute power, he would later disregard even the eight barrier.
I am so glad 1961 is the first eighter; otherwise we might have been led to believe his rise was due to the Pallo feud which started mid-1962.
From this very clear evidence, we can surmise that something radically changed within Joint Promotions in 1960.
I wonder what?
1960 was also the year Paul Lincoln Promotions and Dr Death took off. Could there possibly be a connection?
Not to forget 26 May 1947 versus Al Lipton on the fledgling BBC