Jack Dormer

Jack Dormer, who has died aged 76, was an outstanding amateur boxer and coach at both local and national level.

It was a mark of the huge respect with which the young Jack Dormer was held as an amateur boxer that in the early 1960s the Glasgow professional middleweight and 1956 Olympic Games 72kg bronze medallist, John "Cowboy" McCormack, specifically requested that Dormer join his training camp as a sparring partner.

Maryhill-born McCormack was preparing for his succesful October 1961 bid to win the European middleweight title at the expense of Dutchman Harko Kokomeyer and his selection of the Falkirk Woodside amateur star Mr Dormer was no accident.

The latter was in the middle of a brilliant domestic and international amateur boxing career that saw him fight in more than 540 bouts and box for Scotland at weights ranging from welterweight to lightheavyweight.

His amateur boxing career encompassed a headline-grabbing run of 16 consecutive stoppage wins – although the technically adept and pugilistically gifted Mr Dormer was no mere slugger.

Jack Dormer was born into a family of six brothers and sisters raised in the tough Stirlingshire coalmining district whose villages such as Plean, Fallin and Sauchie, produced many outstanding Scottish ringmen, such as Plean's British flyweight champion Frankie Jones, who subsequently became the only Lonsdale Belt winner to serve as a Beefeater at the Tower of London.

After a brief ring comeback in 1972, aged 34, Mr Dormer embarked on an even more illustrious career as an outstanding boxing coach with both the Bannockburn ABC and Scotland.

Although his most renowned ring protege was Stirling's outstanding and accomplished internationalist, Jamie Coyle, who dominated both local and international welter and light-middleweight boxing in the early 1990s, there were other outstanding beneficiaries of Mr Dormer's peerless tactical ring corner wisdom.

Under Mr Dormer's tutelage featherweight Frankie Kerr won Gaelic Games gold and his younger sibling, middleweight Ryan, also had a succesful amateur and pro career.

Again, when the history of female boxing in Scotland comes to be written the record will show that it was Mr Dormer who trained and seconded Stirling insurance worker April Graham when the female lightweight became one of the first two women ever to box in a competitive boxing match in Scotland.

A man endowed with a natural respect for all his fellows, Mr Dormer also was noted for playing host to and training many boxers from Scotland's travelling community, including accomplished fighters like heavyweight Barry McFadden and the boxing McMenemy brothers, Tom and Steven.

What makes Mr Dormer's overall achievements all the more significant is that this catalogue of outstanding success was notched up against the backdrop of the fact the local authority denied Dormer a permanent home for his gym, forcing him to move the Bannockburn club from venue to venue, including Bannockburn High School and St Modan's in Stirling –where Mr Dormer pioneered boxercise classes for pupils.

But Mr Dormer was much more than a dedicated boxing coach, former boxing internationalist and women's boxing pioneer.

He also combined a penchant for beneficial youth work with the young people of Stirlingshire and beyond with a hugely attractive persona that made him extremely popular in boxing circles and beyond.

He was also a loving husband and father to his wife, Bozena, and to his children, John and Kasia, and his two grandchildren.