‘Cops and clobbers’: an attempted “knock-out for politics” between inter-war Britain and Germany

In a series of reciprocal visits in 1935 and 1936, police officers from Nottingham in England, and Stuttgart in Germany faced-off in a series of boxing competitions, drawing crowds of thousands. With a detailed examination of the circumstances surrounding these exchanges and the details of each event, the story of this local attempt at using sport to foster peace in the run-up to the outbreak of the Second World War is detailed in its entirety for the first time. Using contemporary newspaper sources, secondary material, personal recollections and unprecedented access to the Stuttgart Police archives, this article looks at both perspectives of the encounters. The result is the discovery of the only known image of the Swastika flag flying alongside the Union flag on the UK mainland, on the Nottingham County Hotel, from October 1936.