After defeating Yorkshire’s Bruce Woodcock in November 1950, Gardner was crowned British heavyweight champion, a title he held for two years, and later added the European title.<\/p>\n
In 1952, Gardner lost his belt in a rematch with Welshman Williams and shortly afterwards he retired from the sport at the age of 25.<\/p>\n
A year later, Gardner made a triumphant return to the sport with five consecutive victories and beat Williams in their third and final battle in 1955 to set up a shot at regaining the British heavyweight crown.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Gardner suffered a knee injury in training, meaning the fight with Don Cockell was cancelled. Gardner never got another crack at the title.<\/p>\n
Following his second retirement from boxing in 1956, with a record of 28 wins – 23 by knockout – and six losses from 34 fights, Gardner turned his hand to farming at his Leicestershire smallholding and poultry farm.<\/p>\n
“When he won the [British heavyweight] title, it gave him the money to buy the farm,” Jackalyn said.<\/p>\n
“Neither of my parents had any experience of farming so they must have woken up the next morning and thought ‘what have we done?’<\/p>\n
“But the farmers around him were incredibly helpful. A farmer lent dad his bull – that was so generous.<\/p>\n
“He did have chickens but his main occupation was a dairy farmer. He was a very grounded man, he didn’t have high aspirations.<\/p>\n
“What he was doing on the farm was exactly what he wanted to do.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After defeating Yorkshire’s Bruce Woodcock in November 1950, Gardner was crowned British heavyweight champion, a title he held…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[1935,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-378162","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115101889052380508","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}