From the moment I started digging into British wrestling history, the Seymour Hall has been a curiosity. The more i've dug, the more questions I have. Even within London, it seemed to operate on its own wavelength. So, will share some items here and hopefully I can get a better understanding of what was going on there.
PS I like the title of this thread. It reminds me of my mother who always referred to a Seymour Blouse.
Amazing but not difficult to see the bill written by someone seeing the world from his own navel.
Halifax doesn't need a county in his mindset because he's from there so everyone should know where it is.
Then the other two Yorkshiremen get specifics. (Mind you, with TO HEX having to do with witchcraft I wonder whether this was just a handy place to bill The Catweazle from?)
Then Kwango just gets West Africa: like a country or city would all be too much work.
This is the dreadful ignorant sloppiness that typified late seventies DM programmes.
Still, a good Saturday night out with seven bouts - though Logan v the lightweight is also rather odd. Looks like Max had no idea who this "South Londoner" was - surely his surname gave a little clue where this Shamrock could have been billed more internationally from?
We knock those years, but not out of malice. It's just that this lazy sloppiness could easily have been overcome and the whole would have been more serious. No pride in their work.
After my chunky 32-page programmes I showed above, I bet the inside of the 1978 one was superficially awful - yet sold at a high price?
Amazing that for Mal Kirk, they list the county as well as the town, and for Catweazle they list the actual area of Doncaster, which is not that big of a place! Why not just put "Doncaster"!
Pretty sure this is the last DM show at Seymour Hall, March 1978. After this there was a handful independent shows during the rest of the year. Don't see any results after '78.
Given the Marble Arch location, the bills probably didn’t need to be as good as they were: A lot of those casual visitors wouldn’t have known their Kwango from their Kowalski.
i do agree that the ticket prices accounted for everything with undiscerning but well-heeled spectators.
I assume that they were 'sold shows' so the sponsors (and there were dozens of them) were paying for the wrestlers up front. So they could add extra guys to the bill to give them a payday. The charity portion would come from the profit of the gate receipts.
The tag team tournaments were obviously popular but 14 wrestlers on the bill must have an effect on profit on the gate money
Found a couple more from this era. Absolutely no prizes for guessing there were tag team tournaments on both shows, including everybody's favourites, The Oddbods:
I'm surprised to see the Cottage Homes link surviving until at least 1976. By then wrestling was another world.
The Cottage Homes were still going strong sponsoring shows at Seymour Hall until at least 1976.
Here's another one and can you believe it? Another tag team tournament.
Jumping ahead a few years and we start to see Seymour Hall shows advertised in The Wrestler magazine. This had to be something to do with the Cottage Homes sponsorship, as apart from RAH & occasionally Nottingham, very rarely were actual shows advertised in the magazine. Does anyone know any more about this?
Left is 1968, right is 1970.
Thanks for these uploads, Ost. I for one am certainly enjoying them.
You can sense the care that has gone into making each bout, as well as the balance of the overall bill.
So this is Ski Hi Lee before he was snaffled up by Paul Lincoln. The international locations of the wrestlers made it all so glamorous, and let's face it, they are all pretty valid (let's not go there with Mike Marino, Main Mask might be reading.)
Soon after they would realise that Tibor and Peter shouldn't appear on the same bill, a bit unsmilingly samey.
On the left, March 1960, on the right, almost a year later. Things are ticking along nicely.
A good mixture of names including foreign stars like Zebra Kid and Sky Hi Lee.
EDIT: Going to add this 1962 card in here also, Sky Hi Lee still here, so it can't have been long after this he went across to Paul Lincoln:
A pair of shows from November 1959. I guess they hadn't settled on a regular MC at this point:
I'm going to skip along to November 1959 (as that's the next lot of stuff I have). By this time Seymour Hall is firmly established (again) as a DM "in conjunction with" Norman Morrell. And the programmes have their own unique front cover. Was this part of the deal made with the Hall? Harry Geogheghan is still reffing too. The newspaper proof was a neat find, i'm assuming the advertisement ran in all of those papers? Seems a lot.
I vaguely recall that the Cottage Homes man was called Donald Cave, but a google brings nothing. I nearly went there for a show once, but it wasn't to be. Certainly seems to be a Peculiar as a venue, in a realm of its own.
I've got these programmes, the heaviest imaginable, thick glossy paper, but all ads, no text. Forking out for these you'd have felt seriously shafted.
it looks an interesting venue the arched roof would be great for acoustics so the atmosphere should have been pretty good. I would think between the balcony, downstairs and standing around 1500-2000 would be the capacity, a decent crowd .
Here's one from March 18, 1974. ANOTHER tag team tournament. Did you attend these shows Anglo? Who were the Cottage Homes?
Thanks Anglo! I have questions about that era too.