48 The Times Magazineallum Hancock is a boxer from
Eckington, a small town just south
of Sheffield on the Derbyshire-
Yorkshire border. He is 29 years
old, 6ft 3in tall and has a perfect
record at professional level: ten
fights, ten wins, one knockout. In
person he is modest and gently
spoken but knows there is no point
in pretending that, under the right
circumstances, he is anything other than
dangerous. “I’m tall. I’ve got long, powerful
shots. I’ve got a good straight jab. My work
rate is relentless. My speed, my timing, my
reflexes... Everything’s on point,” he says
calmly, without bravado. “When I fight,
I feel like I’m in tune.”
Violence has dominated Hancock’s life for
a very long time. When he unpacks himself it
is there, discernible at every stage and every
age. There is the violence he unleashes on
opponents in the boxing ring. There is the
violence he had, from adolescence onwards,
visited upon others in an altogether more
free-range capacity. And there is the violence
he suffered as a boy one winter’s day when
he was raped, aged ten, in some scrubland
less than 20 yards from his house. This trauma
remained buried at his core for years, like the
hard, immovable final piece of a Russian doll.
“Speaking out was never even a question,” he
says. “I just couldn’t do it.”
In some ways, Hancock is an outlier. He is
unique in that he is the only active professional
in world boxing to admit to being a victim
of rape. He is also one of the vanishingly
small percentage of men – one study last year
suggests it could be around 4 per cent – who
report the sexual abuse they have suffered to
the police, even if it takes them decades.
In so many other ways, though, his
experience is typical of the numberless men and
boys who have silently endured similar trauma.
For years he was consumed by feelings of shame
and confusion and, underpinning everything, a
constant, nagging fear that he would somehow
give himself away and inadvertently betray his
secret. Today, Hancock is open – sometimes
painfully open – and warm. But for years,
he would shy away from any kind of social
intimacy. “I’d be paranoid that if I get too
close to anyone, they’re going to start to guess.
That maybe I’d been through something.”
At the gym he would train to exhaustion
in the hope of finding sleep, but still endure
nightmares – “Horrendous, nights from hell”- and wake up shattered and spent. A former
girlfriend once sneaked up on him while
he was showering and playfully slapped his
backside, only for him to instinctively grab
her and start screaming, ready to defend
himself. “I just flipped out,” he says. “She
didn’t have a clue why. She didn’t know what
was going on with me.”
And time, rather than being a healer,
simply made things worse. “The older I got,
the harder it was getting. I could no longer
live with it,” he says. By his mid-twenties,
Hancock came to believe that there were only
two possible options open to him. The first
was to kill the person who had raped him.
The second was to kill himself. These were
not just fantasies. Hancock was, for a period of
his life, more than capable of enacting violent
revenge on those who had wronged him. And
like too many young men, he was also more
than capable of ending his own life. “I was
extremely self-destructive,” he says. “It was
either going to be me or him.”
How did Hancock arrive at this point?
And how was he able to pull himself back?
To answer these questions, we first need to
understand that Hancock grew up on what
was “probably the poorest” of Eckington’s
three council estates. His family was tight-knit
and loving: his dad was a scaffolder – “a
proper working bloke” – and his mum was
the “sweetest woman in the world”.
From as early as he could remember,
though, Hancock was aware that he did not fit
in with the other boys on their estate. Rather
than being drawn to their listless kerbside
world of kickabouts and stolen cigarettes,
Hancock and his younger brother would
spend entire days exploring the woodland,
valleys and fields that surrounded Eckington.
“We were forever making dens, making
rope swings, going river jumping,” he says.
“We never wanted to knock about in gangs.
We didn’t find any fun or joy in what the
other boys were up to. Knocking about outside
shops. Smoking. Drinking. That kind of thing.”
The problem for Hancock was that his lack
of interest in these other local boys – often
much older boys – made him stand out. From
the age of eight or nine he’d be targeted by a
particular group on his estate. If Hancock was
on his bike, they would chase him and take his
bike. If he and his brother had made a rope
swing, these boys would cut it down. He and
his brother would put up a fight knowing they
had no chance of winning. “Anything we did,
they would have to ruin it.”
Over time, this bullying became more
violent and more systematic, with an emphasis
on terror and humiliation. Hancock would
regularly find himself ambushed. At a nearby
BMX track, he was beaten up, pinned to
the ground and stripped naked. “They threw
my clothes into this bog and then started
whipping me with sticks,” he says. “Then they
played piggy in the middle with me and my
wet clothes. Every time I’d jump up to try and
grab them, I’d get a dig in my stomach and it
would wind the life out of me.”
On another occasion, Hancock was forced
inside a manhole and then urinated on. A
regular form of torture involved these boyslocking Hancock inside an abandoned garage
and hurling glass bottles against the metal
door. “They’d strip me naked and lock me
inside, and they wouldn’t let me out until I
stopped crying,” he says. “If I didn’t bump into
them, it was a good day. If I didn’t bump into
them for a week, it was a good week.”
Chief among Hancock’s tormentors
was a teenager called Jason Lyttle. He kept
birds of prey and would buy dead baby chicks
with which to feed them. Sometimes, says
Hancock, Lyttle would decapitate these chicks
and then flick the blood at him, shouting that
his raptors would soon swoop down on him
in a frenzy.
But, unable to abandon his younger brother
and unwilling to see himself branded a “grass”
by telling his parents everything, Hancock
absorbed these punishments with a ten-year-
old’s stoicism. Sometimes he would rage at the
boys doing this to him. “I’d be on the floor, I’d
be doing my best to get my breath back, and
I’d always say, ‘I’ll get you back when I’m
older. I’ll get you back when I’m older.’ But
they’d just laugh. They’d say, ‘Ooh, watch out,
it’s Hitman Hancock! It’s Hitman Hancock!’”
One day, in January 2001, Hancock was
alone, building a den in an overgrown patch
of land not far from his house. He was
approached by Lyttle, who offered to help him.
Immediately, Hancock sensed that something
was not right. “I had nothing for him to take,”
he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is he
being so nice?’ I knew there was a catch.
I just didn’t know what it was.”C
PREVIOUS SPREAD: JAMES GLOSSOP, © IAN HODGSON/ DAILY MAIL/SOLO SYNDICATION. THIS SPREAD: JAMES GLOSSOP
Hancock in Sheffield