IN BLACK AND WHITE

George Albert Francis, devoted husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather, as well as maker of fighting men, from six-rounder stalwarts to world champions, was a character who represented British boxing, both amateur and professional, at its very best.

Born in the summer of 1928, in the squalor of Camden Town and dying this spring, by his own hand, "of a broken heart" as his oldest son Billy put it at a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners, including former world middleweight champions Terry Downes and Alan Minter, George was acknowledged as "one of the great boxing trainers of the modern era" in a full length obituary in The Times.

A few months earlier, the same newspaper had run a similarly generous notice on the death of the American trainer Eddie Futch. At George's funeral at St Dominic's Priory, north London, boxing writer Colin Hart, first paying tribute to George's life long battle on behalf of black boxers, brought half smiles to sad faces as he suggested that up there right now, Eddie and George were probably sharpening St Peter's left jab.

Happy moments with George are not just what Colin and I, and champions he made like Frank Bruno, John Conteh, Bunny Johnson, Bunny Sterling, Clinton McKenzie and Cornelius Boza Edwards, will continue to treasure. Hopefully, so will his family.

Danny Francis is George's youngest son following the death, through cancer, of Simon which, together with the passing of George's beloved wife Joan, brought the 73-year-old devoted family man to such unimaginable despair that he hanged himself when there still seemed much to live for.

Danny told me: "Our family have been so touched and supported by the presence of so many friends and admires of George at the funeral and well over 400 letters. To take just one example, we had a marvellous letter from Barry McGuigan, who also attended the funeral, who personally chose Dad to wrap his hands for the fight in which he took the world featherweight title from [Eusebio] Pedroza.

"Of course you saw that Frank Bruno, who Dad trained to win the world heavyweight title from Oliver McCall, joined the family in carrying the coffin from the church. Frank has been fantastic, always keeping in touch with Dad in recent years, phoning him once a week without fail. They were due to meet the weekend after Dad died."

As Danny talked I remembered George Francis's delighted face, just behind Frank Bruno's shoulder, the night of 2 September 1995 at Wembley Arena, in the midst of the celebrations that the world heavyweight title, or at least the WBC version, had returned to this country. "All right, Neil?" called out George unnecessarily, "not bad for a couple of London lads."

Later he said: "Frank had to pull everything out to keep in there for the last two rounds. I was bollocking him in the corner before the 11th, effing and blinding a bit, but he took all McCall had to hand out with sheer guts. When it came to the last round I told him that he had just three minutes to fulfil all his life's dreams - mine too, I guess. Old Frank, bless him, just said: 'No problem.' Then I gave him a thump on the head and he went out and did the job."

Working with Bruno right through to the second, one-sided Mike Tyson defeat in March 1996, was a vital business partnership for Francis, a former Covent Garden market porter, as he reached his sixties. On one of the many occasions we chatted casually together in gyms he admitted: "Frank is my pension." And crossed his fingers. Months later, he said simply: "Frank saw me right, never doubted he would."

For all his cheery smile and almost unique capacity to relate to young fighters during the sweat and toil of training, George was a private man compared with the archetypal "we can destroy the world" delivery of managers and trainers whose comments seem modelled on scripts from B movies. "Big talk is cheap," he used to say "cheap and nasty. And boxing has enough critics without any of us making it look worse."

When I first met George, around 1970, or about eight years before a 17-year-old Bruno turned up at the Wellington gym and asked to spar, the Francis name was most prominently linked with Bunny Sterling, the Jamaican born middleweight he was to manage to British, Commonwealth and European titles. When Bunny wept openly at his mentor's funeral, whispering "it's the end of an era", it was an echo of George's belief that: "Bunny was special to me both as a boxer and a man. He fought in a different era, and comparisons can be misleading, but I believe if he was boxing in the Ô90s he'd be supreme."

Well before Sterling's 11 year, 57-fight career came to a close in 1977, and he moved into business, I found myself drawn into personal chats with George as he guided, or attempted to, the mercurial, extraordinarily talented light-heavyweight John Conteh. Perhaps because Francis learned that I had then become a widower, bringing up two sons on my own, he chose to talk about his own desperately hard childhood and the brutality of both his father and step-father - matters he never publicly revealed until Trainer of Champions, the book he wrote with Graeme Fife, appeared in 1998.

Booze was what brought misery to young George's life as his father, who was to die at 34, regularly beat both his wife and his son when he was in his cups. George started to tell me about it one day when he turned down the offer of a beer in the Wellington pub and wanted to explain why he was a teatotaller as well as a non-smoker.

At first, when he said "my old man was a right bastard", looking straight at me, wavy haired, rugged sun-tanned face, I waited for a grin to show he was joking. "I mean it, he was an evil, drunken bully who would hit me for any reason, or no reason, when I was only six or seven. Far worse, when he was drunk, he used to knock my poor mother about when she tried to protect me."

When George's father, a street bookmaker, died of tuberculosis, the traumatised son was just eight, having been hospitalised for six months following a road accident when he was only four. "Stands to reason," said George with a bleak smile, "that I should become a fighter and teach people to fight when my old man hit me and beat me so often."

The pent-up violence was to explode some years later, George admitted, when he found that his stepfather, another hard drinking street bookie, had also been beating up his mother. "This time," said George, "I found him, I beat him up and them deliberately broke his arm so he couldn't do it no more." You shivered and then learned from Francis's auto-biography, that when he was only 15, living in a squalid rented room, he tried to gas himself but was saved by a policeman checking on the wartime blackout.

Exchanging happier memories of being "kids in the blitz" I remembered once starting to hum a tune from a half-forgotten black and white film. "I know that," said George immediately, "that was sung by my idol Paul Robeson in the film Sanders of the River." Not only did George admire Robeson's singing and acting but he also respected the black star's campaigning for racial equality. He explained that one of his best pals as a kid had been someone known as "Darkie Frank", that his very first pro fighter had been Lennie Gibbs, who is black, and that Lennie had introduced him to his first pro champion, Bunny Sterling.

International referee Harry Gibbs, watching George win an impromptu scrap in the London docks, was the man who persuaded him to train regularly as an amateur at St Pancras and, more important, channelled the raw strength into boxing technique. When George used to work so hard for his family at Covent Garden market, he got nick-named "Greedy Bastard" and then had GB painted on his barrow because, he said, it stood for "Good Boy". Now I wonder whether he ever knew that the day Harry Gibbs was awarded the OBE he came back to his office in the docks to find a poster reading "Old Big 'Ead".

The apple of George's eye, when it came to innate ability and the willingness to train was John Conteh "the best all-round boxer-fighter I ever trained, solid punch, big heart, unquenchable thirst to learn, charisma, a personality that vibrated out of him".

The charisma is still there today, I thought, as John greeted fellow mourners at George's funeral with warm hugs, accompanied by his handsome family, wife Veronica, golfer son James and mathematics student daughter Joanna. John, now 51, deserves so much credit for the battle he fought and won against drink and drugs. But George was always there for him, so concerned, even taking me aside on the eve of a world title fight against Mate Parlov to see whether I could persuade his fast living tiger to take out a mortgage.

"Yeah, Dad's fighters were like family to him," says Danny Francis "but I guess that's very much the way I think about them, especially Frank and Bunny. All of them, at one time or another, seemed to be dropping in for meals or just a cup of tea when my mum was alive and Dad had been out running with them and diving into the Highgate pond, whatever the weather."

Gently, as if he was talking to that cheery band of warriors from the past, Danny recalled the final evening of his father's life. "My brother Billy was away in the States and my sister lives in South Africa so it was just my wife June and I that Dad was visiting most evenings.

"This time he stayed on after dinner until 10.30, just talking quietly. And when he told us how much he loved us, and how proud he was of us all, well there was nothing very different about that because he was always saying it and we would say how much we loved him. But then he left us and we know it was only an hour later that it was over because he left a note, dated and timed."

Ironically, added Danny, his father had seemed to be getting back a little into sports training in recent months. "He'd been watching four young trainers doing their work at a Highgate fitness club and they all got talking together and asked Dad to train them."

Out of this contact George, who had a wide range of friends in show business, as do his sons, met Sam Mendes film producer partner of the actress Kate Winslet. Now Danny Francis tells me there are plans to make a one hour film documentary of the turbulent but essentially triumphant life and times of his father. George Francis in Black and White would do for me as a working title.

NEIL ALLEN, former boxing correspondent of The Times and the London Evening Standard, is a contributor to the New York Times.