Sam Rabin

Sam Rabin was equally at home on the wrestling mat as he was at his artist’s easel, sculpturing, teaching art, acting, or singing. The son of two Russian-Jewish exiles, Rabin was born Samuel Rabinovitch in the Cheetham area of Manchester. At the age of 11 he won a scholarship to the Manchester Municipal School of Art, despite his ambition to become the strongest man in the world at that early age. He became the youngest person ever to attend the college, where one of his fellow students was the famous Manchester painter L. S. Lowry. Rabin then studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1921-24, and then in Paris in 1925. Whilst at the Slade, nearby was the Holborn Stadium and Backfriars Ring, where he could follow his other pursuits of wrestling, and occasionally boxing. In 1925, the year he also studied in Paris, Rabin reached the middleweight final at the British Amateur Wrestling Championships, only to lose to Edgar Bacon. Rabin was selected for the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics where he won a bronze medal.

In the same year that he appeared in the Amsterdam Games, Rabin was part of a group of sculptors, including Henry Moore, who created stonework for the headquarters of the London Underground. In 1930, Rabin stood 27m (90ft) above London’s Fleet Street to produce two sculptures on the façade of the Daily Telegraph building.

Knowing he was going to struggle to fund his art ambitions, Rabin turned to professional wrestling and fought in the early-1930s under the names as “Rabin the Cat” and “Sam Radnor – the Hebrew Jew”. He also had a spell in the movies, and in 1933 wrestled with Charles Laughton (as Henry VIII) in “The Private Life of Henry VIII”. He also played the part of the Jewish bare-knuckle boxer Daniel Mendoza in the film “Scarlet Pimpernel”.

During World War II, Rabin entertained troops by singing at British Army camps. After the War, he sang regularly on the BBC radio programme “Time for Music” with the London Studio Players. Rabin gave up singing and sculpturing to concentrate on drawing, with the boxing ring and its characters as the subject of most of his pieces. In 1949 Rabin became a teacher of drawing at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art in London and his pupils included painter Tom Keating (famous for producing fake works), fashion designer Mary Quant, and Op-artist Bridget Riley. Rabin became disillusioned with what he was doing at Goldsmiths’, however, and in 1965 moved to the Bournemouth College of Art for the next 20 years, and from 1985, until shortly before his death in 1991, he worked at the Poole Art Centre.