Percy Slim

John Slim won the 1905 German Gymnastic Society freestyle featherweight title and was the English champion in 1905 and 1907. He also won the National Cumberland and Westmorland title in the latter of those years. At the 1908 London Olympics, Slim won the freestyle featherweight silver medal, losing only to the American George Dole in the final. After the Olympics, Slim, who had been an instructor at the Hammersmith Amateur Wrestling Club, retired from wrestling and moved to Germany, where he was responsible for introducing boxing into the country and was the boxing tutor to the Prussian Royal princes and the Kaiser’s son at Potsdam. Slim’s brother Howard was also in Germany at the same time, working as a racehorse trainer. Upon the outbreak of the War the two siblings made a daring escape from Germany, leaving all their goods behind and arriving back in England almost penniless.

After the war John Slim returned to the Cologne area of Germany and acted as a boxing instructor, manager and promoter and was a good friend of the Commonwealth heavyweight champion Larry Gains who spent a lot of time in Germany in the 1920s. Slim later returned to Britain and ran a public house in the Lambeth area of London.