Panther Pleasants - Wrestling in Hitler’s Shadow
Wrestling has been, for too much of its existence, an industry without historians. When researching topics for this blog, and in the three years I spent working on my upcoming book Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling (due out in a matter of weeks - watch this space!), the paucity of information or first-hand sources has been a constant source of frustration. My aim with this blog has always been to cast lights on some of wrestling’s outer fringes and lesser known figures - the world doesn’t need more weekly RAW recaps or lists of Top Ten Wrestlers You Never Knew Wrestled For ECW, after all - but, more often than not, what seems like a promising avenue for research soon reveals itself to be a historiographical cul-de-sac.
There are happier times, sure - my research into The Great Antonio revealing, through no small personal expense and countless diversions, the long overlooked career of double-amputee wrestler Mr. Wonder, was a particularly fruitful piece of work, and I’ve already documented how a biography of Aleister Crowley unexpectedly provided me with answers to a long-standing question about the continuation of professional wrestling in London during World War 2, and led me to the story of South Africa’s Masked Marvel, a strong candidate for the worst person in wrestling history.
But for every success there are a thousand failures and abandoned ideas. Recently, efforts to research some of the lesser known figures in the history of British women’s wrestling have stalled due to the near complete lack of footage (women’s wrestling never being permitted on the airwaves for World of Sport) and how infrequently their names trouble the historical record. One of my pet theories, of a lost connection between Lucha Libre and French wrestling, got an airing during my appearance on the Must See Matches podcast and resulted in some illuminating suggestions on that podcast’s Discord, but has yet to result in enough concrete evidence to knuckle down and get to writing. Other examples are endless, and especially when dealing with wrestling outside of the Anglosphere, or of the comparatively well-documented wrestling scenes of Mexico or Japan. Outside of my own work it’s always invigorating to see others uncovering some gems from wrestling’s past - just during the week I began writing this, Phil Lions, an incomparable custodian of European wrestling history, shared promo photos of the 1959 masked French wrestler Fantomas and his 1930s skeletal precursor The Mysterious Ghost, and Voices Of Wrestling’s Lance Larson made a compelling case for the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame candidacy of collar-and-elbow wrestler Homer Lane, a fight-fixing con-man who warrants a walk-on part in Kayfabe, but who Larson convincingly argues could be credited with greater influence than our current understanding of wrestling’s history perhaps affords him.
Wrestling history is full of these blind alleys. Intriguing names on advertised cards, who seemingly never appear again. Photographs of matches in far-flung locations that never made tape, and left but scant details - Giant Haystacks vs. Andre The Giant in Australia, anyone? - stories hinted at and alluded to in magazine or newspaper coverage, but where every search for broader context eludes me'; the mention, in a newspaper article that survives only in Rachel Hackenschmidt’s scrapbook, of a “Mrs. Hackenschmidt” several years before she and George had met - a mistake or newspaper columnist’s invention, or evidence of a prior marriage that otherwise survives nowhere else? I’m almost certain it’s the former, but it’s a line of inquiry of interest to perhaps myself and nobody else, so I won’t exactly be holding my breath for any corroborating research.
Like so many others, the subject of today’s post, despite a long and seemingly profitable career, rarely saw his in-ring exploits make headlines. Scouring the British Newspaper Archives for instances of his ring name, he appears only six times across thirty years - and then only once in an account of a match he wrestled, a 1939 defeat at the hands of Hungarian wrestler Steve Szalay in King’s Lynn. In 1955, we’re told that our subject was unable to compete, and that Peter Rann substituted for him against the French wrestler Andre Dubarry.
As an aside, Peter Rann had a reputation even by the standards of British wrestling at the time as a no-nonsense hard man, a reputation that surely came in handy when he and his friend and fellow wrestler Norbert Rondel went into business together as debt collectors for a notorious London slumlord. Rondel, who wrestled as Vladimir Waldberg, seemingly spent as much time behind bars as in the ring, and rubbed shoulders with the peculiar mix of aristocracy, celebrity and organised crime that seemed to typify London in the 1960s. He is certainly a candidate for a future post on this blog.
But back to the subject for today. You may have noticed that I specifically said that his ring name barely troubled the newspapers, and that’s because in the years between the two articles I mentioned, he did plenty to keep his name in the news.
This, then, is the story of Panther Pleasants.
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Reginald Eric Pleasants, known as Eric, was born in the village of Saxlingham in Norfolk, on 17th May 1913. Or, perhaps, 17th May 1910 or 1911. Or 1915. All four dates appear on official documentation or censuses, but the likelihood is that 1913 is correct. It’s a fittingly ambiguous, murky start in life for the man who would become known as The Panther.
Pleasants’ early childhood was typical of the time, divided between school, farm work, a spot of poaching, and a fanatical love of sports.
The young Pleasants was infatuated with what was then called “physical culture”, and took up weight-lifting and boxing while still in school, excelling enough to earn trophies and medals as a schoolboy athlete. That love of exercise, body-building, and combat sports would follow him throughout his life.
Boxing was, for a time, the love of Pleasants’ life, and after dropping out of an electrician’s apprenticeship and being pushed to leave the village of his birth - in his telling, across two autobiographies, the result of a dalliance with a landowner’s daughter - he pursued it as a career. He shared the ring with notables of the time, like famed Norwich boxer Arthur “Ginger” Sadd, and earned his keep working in a fairground boxing booth, fighting all-comers from punters in the crowd. The fairground and carnival became a familiar home for Pleasants, as he took up additional work as a strongman, where he first adopted the name “Panther Pleasants”, with an act where he would balance a full-sized piano on his chest while his glamorous assistants climbed on top of the instrument.
After a time spent studying to become a physical education instructor at Loughborough University, and working as a redcoat at Butlins holiday camp in Skegness, pursuit of further fame and fortune in the boxing ring took Pleasants to London in the late 1930s. That wasn’t the only passion he carried with him to the capital from his Norfolk home, however. The 1930s had been a miserable time for British farmers - the country was still suffering from the previous century’s “Great Depression” of British Agriculture, the result of a succession of poor harvests, and an influx of cheap imported grain from the United States, from which the United Kingdom wouldn’t fully recover until after the Second World War. In East Anglia, since at least 1933, when Norfolk and Suffolk both experienced mass lay-offs of farmhands and labourers thanks to an ongoing dispute over paying tithes - an archaic and obscure law allowed the Church of England to tax farmers, regardless of their religious persuasion, per acre of land, and in those times of depression the Church exploited that privilege at every opportunity - the British Union of Fascists had been rabble-rousing and starting fights, trying to win the support of disenfranchised workers, while cosying up with the aristocrats and land-owners who already shared a fair amount of common ideological ground with the odious Oswald Moseley’s blackshirts.
In 1938, as war with Germany began to seem unavoidable, and agricultural prices continued to plummet, the B.U.F. embarked on a “Peace Campaign” to once again drum up support in Norfolk and Suffolk, with the aid of avoiding war and, once that became impossible, of negotiating peace with Nazi Germany. The far-right hoped to stoke discontent, and to step into the void left by the failings of government to address the concerns of working people, and one young man swept up by their rhetoric was Eric Pleasants.
In later life, Pleasants occasionally claimed that what drew him to the British Union of Fascists was his inherent pacifism, that it was their message of peace and avoidance of another World War that drew him into their orbit. That interviews he gave suggest that he joined the B.U.F. in 1936 at the latest, at least two years before their concerted Peace Campaign, and that he gladly took work as one of Moseley’s violent thugs, casts considerable doubt on those claims. By 1939, however, Pleasants claimed to believe that the B.U.F. had become little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Nazi Party, and handed in his blackshirt, the same year that the Lynn Advertiser finds him wrestling Steve Szalay to a submission loss.
Eric Pleasants had made the move from boxing to its sister sport of wrestling while in London, when the onset of headaches and problems with his vision prompted him to visit a doctor, who advised that he was risking brain damage or permanent injury if he continued boxing.
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If Eric Pleasants’ 1956 ghost-written autobiography is to be believed, he discovered All-In Wrestling at a gymnasium named Astras Kostas in Soho’s Dean Street - I struggled for some time trying to ascertain whether this gym even existed, as I could find no evidence of it. Thankfully, while writing this, and looking into the wrestler Saxon Elliot (mentioned shortly hereafter), I discovered a poster from a mid-1930s event in Birmingham, in which Elliot wrestles “The Fighting Greek” Costas Astroes. That itself is a mis-spelling of Costas Astreos, the stage name of a Cypriot wrestler fighting out of London throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, who wrestled most of the stars of the era, and in his retirement owned a series of hotels and restaurants in Manchester and Blackpool. So it would seem that Pleasants’ ghost-writer got his wires crossed, and accredited Pleasants’ first wrestling encounter to a Greek wrestler who goes unnamed, while giving a mangled version of that wrestler’s name to the gym!
There, he tried his luck against a burly Greek wrestler who, in one of the more believable elements of this part of the Eric Pleasants story, took liberties on the young grappler with a series of dirty moves and torture holds, looking to test his mettle and dissuade him from penetrating wrestler’s inner sanctums if he wasn’t physically tough enough. In this version of events, young Eric managed to hold his own and, with no hard feelings between them, is permitted to train with the wrestlers at the gym - this being 1956, there’s not even the slightest allusion to All-In Wrestling being a work.
Pleasants’ ghost-writer rattles off a list of wrestlers who were apparently regulars in this Dean Street gym, among the many nameless “Russians, Poles and Greeks” he populates it with. The names he mentions are Anaconda - most likely Harry Anaconda, a masked super-heavyweight star of the time, who started out as the faux-Swedish “Margerich Anaconda” and who wrestled the legendary Bert Assirati on a 1946 BBC broadcast - the popular London wrestler of the 1930s Saxon Elliot, and a couple of names that raise eyebrows. The first is “Earl McKeroly” - my assumption is that the name was recorded incorrectly by the writer, and was intended to be Earl McCready, the Canadian heavyweight wrestler who spent much of the 1930s wrestling in the UK, who wrestled Harry Anaconda on TV, bested Danny Hodge as an amateur wrestler, and in December 1938 defeated former Patrick W. Reed blog subject Johannes Van Der Walt in a match for the British Empire Championship; in later life, he would go on to be a marquee star for Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Finally, there is “Jim Lanalos”, supposedly heavyweight champion of the world - one can only assume that this is Jim Londos, though given his limited time spent in the UK, and largely thwarted efforts to set up a promotional base in London (as covered briefly in the aforementioned post on Van Der Walt), it seems extremely unlikely that American wrestling’s greatest draw would be slumming it training a 5’4” ex-boxer from Norwich in London at the height of his fame. Here, I suspect an unreliable narrator at play, and not for the last time in this story - Pleasants’ experiences in a London wrestling gym do not appear in his second, posthumously published memoir.
Whatever the truth of his training, Eric Pleasants became a pro-wrestler, and by most accounts a pretty decent one, albeit with only moderate success. If his career did begin in London, he was soon back to his old stomping grounds, as the majority of his documented matches took place in Norwich and further north, presumably supplemented by his continuing work as a strongman, which he claims now took him away from small fairgrounds and to circuses and music halls, in the manner of countless wrestlers and performers of decades prior. It’s difficult to ascertain the truth of his claims to strongman stardom, as they do not appear to have troubled either the newspapers, or any of the advertising material in any of the circus or entertainment archives I have access to.
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Eric Pleasants’ wrestling career was cut short by the outbreak of World War 2. Wanting no part of the conflict, he fled to Jersey, in the Channel Islands as a conscientious objector - a fact left out of his first book, which chose to handwave away the existence of Pleasants’ wife, and to claim that he missed a boat back to England because he slept in after bedding a local girl, an explanation that Eric and his co-writer (more on him later) perhaps assumed would be more palatable to contemporary readers than admitting to what would then still have been sneered upon as shirking his patriotic duty. Given how Pleasants would spend the last years of the war, I daresay it’s an overabundance of caution at play.
The truth is more likely that Pleasants came to Jersey with the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, where he found work, as many immigrant labourers to Jersey do, in the potato fields, while wrestling in hotel function rooms and parish halls at the weekends. There were dark clouds on the horizon, however, and he could scarcely have found a worse place to try and escape the horrors of war. Less than two months after Eric Pleasants had arrived, and with no meaningful resistance from the British government, the Channel Islands came under the jackboot of Nazi occupation.
Already developing a reputation as a stubborn, difficult worker who struggled to follow orders from the Jersey farmers who employed him, Pleasants fared even worse when it was rank-and-file Nazis barking the orders. He claims that, in early 1941, his first wife left him for a German official, and he was forced to move into shared lodgings, with amongst others, fellow professional wrestler Martin Max Schultz. Schultz’s story after the war is a sad one - at Belle Vue, Manchester, on April 10th 1946, during a match against Leo Lightbody, Schultz hit his head on the floor and broke his neck. Two days later, he was dead.
Working with his housemates, chiefly his running buddy John Leister, Eric Pleasants embarked on a career of petty crime and black marketeering, which eventually landed him in Jersey’s Gloucester Street jail on at least four occasions. There, he may have met fellow inmate Eddie Chapman, one of the war’s most fascinating characters. Chapman was a career criminal and expert safecracker, who was already behind bars in Jersey when the Nazis arrived, the result of a botched robbery after arriving on the island while fleeing from an arrest warrant in Scotland. Eddie Chapman was one of the most peculiar breed of fantasist and bullshit artist - that whose real life is so extraordinary and unique that it’s difficult to understand why he would feel the need to make up stories at all; transferred from Jersey to a German prison, Chapman offered his services to the Germans as a spy, and was secretly parachuted into England, where he sought the British Secret Service and began working as a double agent, codenamed Agent Zig-Zag. In later life, he returned to a life of crime; everything from nobbling greyhound races and petty theft to an elaborate plan to kidnap the Sultan of Morocco, acquired enough wealth to purchase an Irish castle and trade in valuable antiques, and for a time became the Daily Telegraph’s “crime correspondent”. Chapman was so convincing to his German spymasters that, while secretly working for the British, he became the only UK national to be awarded the Iron Cross - last year, some 25 years since his death, one last Eddie Chapman con was uncovered, as it turned out he had sold at least three replicas of that medal, alleging each to have been the genuine article.
If you’re wondering why I have alluded so often to the ghost-writer of Eric Pleasants’ first book, it’s because Eddie Chapman was that ghost-writer. Many of the tall tales and exaggerations therein, and the contradictions with his later statements, read very much like the product of Chapman’s fertile imagination far more than of Pleasants’ usual “Boy’s Own Adventure” brand of macho posturing, and I would be tempted to place the blame at the once Agent Zig-Zag’s feet. Typically, Eddie Chapman even inserts himself into the narrative, as a key part of Eric Pleasants’ Jersey criminal career, showing him the finer points of safecracking during a bank job - that story appears nowhere in Pleasants’ own writings, and there’s no indication that the two knew each other prior to their time in prison, or that Chapman writing Pleasants’ first book for him was anything more than a quick cash grab for both men.
Eddie Chapman had form in that regard - throughout his own tellings of events, he placed fellow prisoner Tony Faramus at the heart of the narrative; a criminal co-conspirator and prison chum, whose life the Nazis held over Chapman as a threat to force him to do their bidding. Like Eric Pleasants, Tony Faramus had two autobiographies - one ghost-written in 1953, and one by his own hand in 1990 - and the first, which supports Eddie Chapman’s version of events, shared an author with Chapman’s first ghost-written memoir. In Faramus’ own words, he denied ever having worked closely with Chapman, describing him simply as “a man in prison at the same time I was”.
Unlike his prison-mates Chapman and Pleasants, Tony Faramus was a Jersey-man, and the fact that he survived the war and was able to release his memoirs at all is little short of a miracle - transferred from Jersey to a succession of French and German prisons, interment camps, and concentration camps, surviving the brutality of the Buchenwald concentration camp only to be transferred to the somehow even greater horror of Mauthausen, where he remained until the camp was liberated at the end of the war. A small and somewhat frail man even before imprisonment, Faramus survived bouts of pneumonia, gangrene, diptheria, malnutrition, abuse and torture at the hands of his Nazi captors, and surgery performed without anaesthetic by Nazi doctors, and after being rescued from that Hell on Earth had suffered the complete collapse of one lung from tuberculosis, and required the complete removal of eight ribs. Tortured by PTSD and the memories of all that he had seen, Faramus bounced between prison and hospital, usually sleeping rough in-between, but eventually emigrated to America in 1964 where, improbably, he found work as Clark Gable’s butler, and took small parts in a number of films. He returned to England in the 1970s, where he became an active hunt saboteur, a noble cause that saw him imprisoned for the final time, at the age of 69, one year before his death. Here was a man who didn’t need the reflected glory of Eddie Chapman, or the braggadocio of Eric Pleasants, to add colour to the story of his life.
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After a number of spells in Jersey’s prison, Eric Pleasants was deported to Fort d’Hauteville Prison in Dijon, in occupied France. In his own words and the Chapman-penned memoir, Pleasants claimed that he was sentenced to two years hard labour for a valiant effort to escape Jersey - the surviving documentation doesn’t support that version of events, and it’s far more likely that it was the result of one of a number of charges resulting from handling and concealing stolen goods. Pleasants also claimed a successful escape from Dijon, but the dates simply do not add up - it’s another tall story, in the grand project of painting Eric Pleasants as as a noble anti-war hero yearning to be free.
What happens next is understandably murky. The two books that bear Pleasants’ name contradict one another, and neither match up particularly well with the surviving documentation - while it’s likely that, having seen out his term in Fort d’Hauteville, Pleasants was deported back to Jersey only to be deported once again as an “undesirable”, this time to Germany, there’s no paperwork that definitively places Eric Pleasants in Kreuzberg interment camp, his most likely destination.
Whether the tales Pleasants spins of prison gang hierarchies and his treatment at the hands of Nazi prison guards at Kreuzberg is true or not, what we can know for certain is that, by mid-1944 he was transferred again, this time to the Marlag and Milag Nord Camp, a Luftwaffe-run camp for Naval prisoners. In his books, Pleasants claims that he was transferred there for being a troublemaker, while other accounts suggest that it was a case of mistaken identity, as he had fallen in with a group of merchant seamen in Kreuzberg, and the Germans assumed that Pleasants was a naval man himself.
In May 1944, the tides of war were turning very much against Nazi Germany, and they were desperate for anything that might revive their ailing fortunes. They turned to a dormant idea first hatched by the odious John Amery - the son of an English MP in Churchill’s cabinet, Amery was a national embarrassment; besotted with fascism, he fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, published pro-Nazi propaganda and racist screeds, and spent the war years cosying up to the Nazis and trying to encourage the British to side with Nazi Germany in a war against “Bolshevism”. Amery’s dream was of a British legion marching in step with the SS, and strove to recruit prisoners of war from the Commonwealth into what he called the British Legion of St. George. It was a dismal failure and, by 1943, was removed from Amery’s hands and taken over by the Waffen-SS, who rechristened Amery’s legion to the British Free Corps. As for Amery himself, he was in Italy in 1944, where, dressed in the uniform of the fascist paramilitary Muti Legion, he was captured by Allied forces, and taken into custody by - pull a mid-century pop culture name out of a hat - Alan Whicker, the globetrotting future broadcasting legend of Whicker’s World fame who would himself ultimately settle down in Jersey. John Amery was executed for high treason in December 1945, by hangman Albert Pierrepoint.
Amery might have been out of the picture, but with a shortage of manpower to contend with, and starting to enlist underage Hitler Youth teenagers and elderly World War 1 veterans out of desperation, in 1944 the Nazis found the British Free Corps to be a useful proposition, and once again began recruiting from prisoner of war camps. They issued pamphlets, and gave lectures on the shared culture of Britain and Germany, and the threat that both countries faced from “international Bolshevism”. One of the volunteers to sign up was Eric Pleasants.
Some of Pleasants’ contemporaries in the British Free Corps, like the repugnant Thomas Cooper, were dyed-in-the-wool Nazis all too happy to pledge allegiance to Hitler, some were ordinary fascists who bought the line about opposing Communism, and others were simple opportunists who saw donning a Nazi uniform as a ticket to relative freedom. Eric Pleasants always argued that he fell into the latter category, though knowing that he had once been a card-carrying member of the British Union of Fascists, seeing photographs of this English wrestler in SS garb remain chilling.
The British Free Corps uniform has something of the uncanny about it. At first glance, it is no different to the SS uniform, with swastika and eagle emblem, but on closer inspection, you notice the Union Jack badge, and the three lions adorning the collar. Having lived in Jersey, which still bears the all-too visible scars of Nazi occupation, it reminds me of photographs of Nazi soldiers in full uniform chatting to a Jersey honourary policeman in traditional English bobby garb, or a parade of Nazi soldiers marching past such mundanely British sights as Boots, Marks & Spencers, or Natwest bank - it feels utterly wrong, like something from the most lurid of alternate history fantasies.
As all members of the British Free Corps were instructed to adopt false identities, Eric Pleasants became Erich Doran, and was sent to train, ready to fight on the Eastern Front. Throughout his version of events, Pleasants insists he had no loyalty to Germany, and that he had no intention to fight, decrying violence and war in all of its forms - a difficult stance to reconcile with books full of his gleeful accounts of murder and grotesque acts of violence, often at his own hand. Luckily for Pleasants, he was never called to the front, as his reputation as a boxer and wrestler saw him pulled away from the battle lines, and towards the officer’s mess, where he put on boxing exhibitions, often with the boxer Max Schmeling, who had his own complicated and precarious relationship with the Nazi establishment following his failure to defeat Joe Louis for the heavyweight title.
Eric Pleasants may have never served on the frontlines for Nazi Germany, but he, of his own volition, wore their uniform, entertained their top brass, and fought in their propaganda exercises. He even married an SS secretary. It’s impossible to know how far he would have gone, had he been called upon to serve.
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The war ended without Eric Pleasants seeing conflict, and he found himself stranded in Berlin as the Russian army arrived. His books tell of escape attempts, disguises, and hiding out in the sewers, and it’s impossible to verify how much, if any, of his stories from this time are true.
What we do know is that Eric Pleasants adopted yet another false name, this time Hans Sandau, in tribute to his strongman hero Eugen Sandow, and returned to a world he was all-too familiar with, as a touring circus strongman. As Hans Sandau, he managed to hide in plain sight for two years, while also having a good sideline in selling old Nazi memorabilia to American soldiers - he also claimed in his memoir to have smuggled people between the Russian and American controlled zones of Germany, though it’s difficult to shake the suspicion that this is another instance of Pleasants trying to add a heroic flair to a life story that it’s otherwise hard to muster any sympathy for.
Hiding in plain sight as Hans Sandau could only work for so long - in 1947, suspicions over his identity led to his arrest by the Russian state police, and on discovering that he was English, the assumption that he was engaged in espionage against the Soviet Union saw him sentenced to 25 years hard labour in a Siberian gulag. After yet another round of prison transfers, he ended up in the Inta labour camp, where he was put to work in the coal mines. This period of his life forms the bulk of both of Pleasants’ autobiographies, though particularly the first, where his time as an adjunct to the SS amounts to just one short chapter.
There’s no way of knowing how much of Pleasants’ account of Gulag life are accurate, and I won’t dwell on them here - he tells stories of corruption, violence, and all manner of degradation, but they are at least consistent across his two accounts, so there may well be a fair bit of truth to them.
Eric Pleasants didn’t serve his full 25 year term. Following the death of Stalin, political prisoners in the Soviet Union became a political hot potato, and rumours of two Englishmen held in Siberian gulags - Pleasants, and Bill Piddington, who had been arrested in Dresden after the war - led to a concerted effort by the British government to negotiate their release. The last time Eric Pleasants’ name had been in the newspapers, it was when his old running buddy John Leister was arrested and tried for aiding the enemy as a member of the British Free Corps, with Eric Pleasants listed as one of his Nazi co-conspirators still at large. Now, almost a decade later, there was no mention of Pleasants’ Nazi past, simply a plea to bring our boys home.
On 10th July 1954, Eric Pleasants returned to England, and to his mother’s home in Norfolk. His return was greeted by the press, and gleefully celebrated in newsreel footage that makes no mention of his time in SS uniform. The world had moved on, there was a new geopolitical enemy at large, and Eric Pleasants was now a voice against the evils of Communism, Nazi past be damned. In that respect, it’s a depressingly familiar story. His crimes were forgiven - unlike other British Free Corps members, Pleasants was never tried, and was pardoned for all crimes, with the quiet understanding that his ordeal in Russia meant that he had already served his time.
Eric Pleasants returned to professional wrestling and music hall posing routines, and his name on occasion troubled the newspapers, his Nazi past either an amusing footnote or overlooked entirely. You were more likely to find a “remember Panther Pleasants?” light touch - like the 1964 Sunday Mirror report that finds him working as a bodyguard for Swedish speedway racer Ove Fundin - than any consideration of his morality, even as his Eddie Chapman-penned memoirs were serialised in the News Of The World.
Panther Pleasants hung up his wrestling boots sometime in the early 1960s, and found work as a security guard, masseur, and martial arts instructor. In 1987, he was the subject of an episode of BBC’s Open Space series of documentaries, not for his past, but for his “fighting spirit” in overcoming a heart attack and stroke that had briefly left him paralysed. The angle was that he was a strong-man whose willpower could overpower physical ailments, and he was described in press coverage as having spent the war “in a German POW camp”. He continued teaching martial arts and self-defence until at least 1988, where press coverage finds him teaching the elderly to use walking sticks to fend off attackers, and died ten years later in 1998, remembered as a local eccentric, often seen cycling with kendo equipment and his walking stick strapped to his back, rather than as a shameful relic of an odious political project.
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Who knows how much of Eric Pleasants’ story is true, or how much of his stated motivations can be trusted or believed? Throughout his public statements and writings, he insisted that he was never driven by anything more than opportunism and a desire to avoid war, but there’s a pattern that follows throughout his story - it’s not difficult to draw a line from youthful membership in the British Union of Fascists to donning the SS uniform of the British Free Corps, and it’s telling that every time Pleasants decries the horrors of war, his examples are always the actions of the Allies, never quite bringing himself to denounce fascist and Nazi atrocities in the same breath that he attacks the Allied bombing of Dresden, or the actions of Russian soldiers in Germany. The one example he gives, in his posthumous memoir Hitler’s Bastard, of inspirational war-time bravery is, likewise, not plucked from the annals of Allied military victories, but the rescue of Mussolini from prison.
According to the Channel Islands’ Frank Falla Archive, Eric Pleasants said of his life, “I have no apology and no regrets”.
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This is, primarily, a wrestling blog, and so the temptation is to try and tidy this story up nicely with a wrestling story - some account of Pleasants competing after the war, maybe - but they’re few and far between. Perhaps, then, I close with a suggestion that the experience of wrestling gave Eric Pleasants ample experience in duplicity, in living dual lives, and in hiding the truth of his work. That being able to slip into the identity of The Panther, of his occasional ring name Bobby Gardner, or later that of Hans Sandau, meant it came just as easily to step into the role of Erich Doran, his British Free Corps pseudonym. But that would be dishonest in itself, an attempt to tie up a messy, complicated, and often distressing and unsettling story with a neat little narrative bow, and real biography doesn’t follow those rules. The truth is that Eric Pleasants was a self-centred violent bully, adept at nothing more than embellishing his part in history, and justifying actions and decisions that most of us would find completely beyond the pale - he sold himself as a pacifist, while donning a uniform worn by those responsible for the most horrific mass murder in history. He was a traitor and a coward, rehabilitated by the vagaries of public opinion and political necessity. He also just happened to have been a professional wrestler.
