“THIS WAS a time when men would travel across oceans for opportunities.” Dan Marner, 2022.
There are an estimated 3million bodies interred in Calvary Cemetery, New York. There, you’ll find burial plots belonging to mayors of New York, senators, notable organised crime figures, famous entertainers, multiple Hall of Fame baseball players and Olympic gold medallists. It’s the largest cemetery in all of the United States, and with headstones of all shapes and sizes swamping patches of grass as far as the eye can see, it is bleak and overwhelming.
Buried in Plot J, Grave 3, lies Charles ‘Charley’ Marner (born 1870), under the grave paid for by a James Curran. You probably haven’t heard much of Marner – mistakenly called Miner for periods of his life in the United States – but his journey through professional boxing was one of chance and risk, experiencing moments at the very pinnacle of the sport before meeting his violent, untimely demise on the streets on Manhattan.
Although now entombed in Queens, it was thousands of miles away in Greenock, a Scottish port town in Inverclyde famed for its shipbuilding, where Marner had been born. His family’s story was permeated with extreme poverty, as were many local families of that time, sometimes housing up to 20 relatives under one leaky roof. Children scurried
