Welcome back to another deep dive. So today we're
tackling a phrase that for a lot of you listening
probably brings up a very specific image. Oh,
for sure. If I say all in wrestling, you're picturing
a huge stadium, right? Yeah. Fireworks, 80 ,000
people. The whole modern spectacle. And that's
a fair connection to make. It really is. But
and this is why I just love this stuff. That
phrase has a much older, much weirder origin
story. We are not talking about Wembley in 2024.
We're going back. way back we're going back nearly
a century we're in the 1930s the lost world of
british wrestling exactly and all in in the 30s
it wasn't a marketing buzzword it was a legal
definition almost a distinct style of fighting
that was frankly chaotic It sounds like a movie
script. I mean, we're going to trace how British
wrestling went from this like stiff, formal Olympic
sport to a total spectacle with mud and weapons.
And then it got banned. Banned by a judge who
literally said this is not a sport. And then,
and this is my favorite part, it had to be saved
by an admiral. A literal admiral of the fleet.
It's an absolutely wild ride. But to get the
chaos, you have to understand what all in actually
was. It was a hybrid, right? Kind of a Frankenstein's
monster of wrestling styles. That's a great way
to put it. It took catch -as -catch -can, you
know, that really gritty submission -based style
from Northern England. From Lancashire, yeah.
Right. And it injected it with American -style
showmanship. So you take a legit painful sport
and you just sprinkle some glitter on it. And
some gunpowder. But the key thing, the thing
that made people nervous was that it was billed
as no holds barred. Which in the 1930s sounds
incredibly dangerous. Well, yeah. And that danger,
whether it was real or, you know, manufactured,
is why it took off. But let's back up for a second.
The before times. Right. Before the 30s, the
big style in the UK was Greco -Roman. The Olympic
style. No leg grabs, all upper body. Correct.
Lots of clenching. Very technical. But, I mean,
if you don't know what you're watching, it can
be. A bit boring. A bit of a stalemate, yeah.
Two big guys leaning on each other. And by the
time World War I was over, the audience for that
had just vanished. So there's this vacuum in
British sport. And entertainment abhors a vacuum.
Precisely. And the spark came from the U .S.
The Americans had already figured out that, you
know, pure competitive wrestling is a tough sell.
So they introduced the work. The showmanship.
the gimmicks, free determined outcomes. All of
it. And British promoters saw that and thought,
we need that energy. But they adapted it. And
that's where switching to Catch's Catch Can was
so important. Because Catch is a totally different
animal from Greco. Oh, completely. Catch came
from the coal miners, the mill workers. You can
grab legs. You can twist joints. It's dynamic.
If Greco was a chess match. Catch is a fist fight.
Perfect analogy. And for a crowd, it looks so
much more impactful. You get big throws, dramatic
submissions. So you mix that gritty northern
style with American theater. And you've got a
business model. You do. And the talent was already
there. You just had to go to Lancashire and find
guys who were tough. And that brings us to the...
architects of this whole thing. Sir Athol Oakley.
What a name. Sir Athol Oakley and Henry Erslinger.
Now Oakley was a legitimate amateur wrestler
but he was also a showman and he insisted his
whole life that his all -in promotion was 100
% legitimate sport. Yeah but he also conveniently
won a tournament to become the first British
heavyweight champion. Yeah funny how that works
out the promoter always seems to get the belt.
Oldest trick in the book. But hey, it worked.
It worked like crazy. And Oakley understood you
needed characters. You needed heroes and villains.
Your roster names from this time are just, they're
incredible. You had Black Butcher Johnson. Very
subtle. And Norman the Butcher. Apparently it
was a good time to be a butcher in wrestling.
I guess so. But my favorite is... College boy.
Just college boy. That's it. You could see the
whole story. The rough working class butcher
versus the, you know, the educated snob from
a good family. It's brilliant. It's pure archetypal
storytelling. And people ate it up. The business
just exploded. At its peak, there were over 40
regular venues in London alone. 40. That's a
show in every neighborhood every night of the
week. It was a mania. But here's the problem.
that creates a huge supply and demand issue.
You run out of butchers and college boys. You
run out of skilled wrestlers, period. You can't
fill 40 venues a week with top -tier talent,
so the quality of the actual wrestling just plummets.
And the wrestling gets bad. You have to distract
the audience, you turn up the violence, you turn
up the spectacle. The descent into mayhem begins.
This is where All In really earns its name. They
started introducing weapons. Chair shots became
a thing. In the 1930s. I think most people assume
that's like a 90s invention. Nope. It goes way
back. And it wasn't just chairs. It was the whole
environment. They introduced women wrestlers,
which was hugely scandalous. And the mud. The
mud wrestling. Why? I mean, just why? Pure spectacle.
Imagine it. Black Butcher Johnson sliding around
in a ring full of mud, swinging a chair. It completely
removes any pretense of this being a sport. It's
a carnival sideshow. So you've got this image
of stiff upper lip, 1930s Britain, tea and crumpets.
Right. But on a Friday night, thousands of people
are crammed into a smoky hall watching two guys
try to drown each other in mud. It's a total
rejection of polite society. But, you know, you
can only poke polite society for so long before
it bites back. The authorities finally stepped
in. They did. The backlash from churches, newspapers,
local councils. It was huge. But the final nail
in the coffin came from the courts. The 1938
ruling. Yep. Justice Charles of the King's Bench
Division. He presided over a case and just flat
out declared that all in wrestling was, quote,
not a sport. Wow. That's a death sentence. Legally.
It is, because once it's not a sport, it's just
public disorder. The London County Council immediately
used that ruling to ban professional wrestling
entirely. So the biggest market in the country,
gone. Overnight, gone. And the dominoes fell.
Permits were pulled everywhere, even in places
like Johannesburg. By the time World War II starts,
the whole business is in ruins. So the war ends,
things start to get back to normal. People are
looking for entertainment. The promoters must
have tried to bring it back. They tried in 1947.
But the stink was still there. The press just
jumped on it saying, oh, it's that fake, violent,
mud wrestling nonsense again. They needed a total
rebrand. They needed legitimacy. And this is
where the story gets so strange and honestly
so British. They formed a committee. Not just
any committee, though. No, they brought in Admiral
Lord Mountevans. An admiral to save wrestling.
A respected naval hero. A man of discipline.
We've got a problem with these wrestlers. Get
me the admiral. And look who else was on it.
Commander Campbell, a regular on a highbrow radio
show called The Brain's Trust. A member of parliament,
Maurice Webb. and an Olympic wrestler, Norman
Morrell. An admiral, an MP, and a radio star
walk into a wrestling ring. It sounds like a
joke, but it was genius. Wrestling was seen as
dirty and low class, so to clean it up, you brought
in the most respectable people you can possibly
find. So what did they actually do? They created
the Mount Evans rules. And if you've ever seen
that classic British wrestling from the 70s and
80s, the world of sports stuff, you were watching
the Mount Evans rules in action. The biggest
change was... Rounds. Like boxing. Exactly. Before,
it was just a chaotic free -for -all. Mounted
vans introduced a structure, three -minute rounds,
rest periods, public warnings for rule -breaking.
Ah, so the first public warning thing comes from
this. It does. It's naval discipline applied
to grappling. It gives the referee power, and
it creates drama. The bad guy can cheat, get
a warning, and the crowd gets invested. It turns
the chaos into a story. And most importantly,
they killed the name. They had to. All in was
a toxic brand. It meant mud and riots. The committee
disowned it. They rebranded the style as modern
freestyle. Sounds very clean, very respectable.
That was the point. They banned the weapons,
banned the mud, and enforced these strict sporting
rules. But you can't just kill a word, can you?
The public doesn't just forget. No. And for decades,
even though the promoters called it modern freestyle,
the press and the public kept calling it... all
-in, but the meaning changed. It became derogatory.
An insult. If you called it all -in, you were
saying it was fake. You were saying it was lowbrow.
Yeah, you were looking down on it. And that's
where you get that amazing Monty Python sketch.
All -in cricket. It's perfect. You have cricketers,
but they're in a ring beating each other up with
their bats. That sketch tells you everything
you need to know about what the term all -in
came to mean in the British psyche. It meant
the complete breakdown of rules and fair play.
And it was even reinforced in like high culture.
Roland Barthes, the French philosopher, wrote
that famous essay on wrestling. In mythologies,
yeah, a brilliant piece of writing. But he was
writing about French wrestling, le catch. But
when it got translated into English. The translators
looked for an equivalent and they landed on all
in wrestling. So even in academic circles, the
term became associated with this predetermined
theatrical spectacle. So to wrap it all up. You
go from the boredom of Greco -Roman to the anarchic
explosion of All In, the crash, the ban, and
then this very formal resurrection by an admiral.
It's the perfect illustration of that eternal
tension in wrestling. It's always a war between
sport and spectacle. When they lean too hard
into spectacle in the 30s, the weapons, the mud,
the whole thing just collapsed on itself. But
without any spectacle, it's just two guys in
singlets and nobody watches. The Mount Evans
era found the balance. They made the rules part
of the show. Which, and this is a final thought
to leave people with, brings us back to where
we started. The modern all -in shows. Right.
I mean, when you look at modern wrestling, what
is it? It's spectacle. It's weapons. It's drama.
It's pyrotechnics. It is basically everything
Seraphil Oakley was trying to do in 1930, just
with a much bigger budget. That's a really great
point. The chaotic, anything -goes style of the
1930s. That's kind of what won in the end. That's
what wrestling became all over the world. So
maybe Oakley wasn't just some chaotic promoter.
Maybe he was just, I don't know, 60 years ahead
of his time. Or maybe he just needed an admiral
to tell him when to take a five -minute break.
That too. Structure is everything. Thanks for
listening to this deep dive. We'll see you next
time.