Nipper Read
British police officer
Leonard Ernest "Nipper" Read (31 March 1925 – 7 April 2020) was a British police officer and boxing administrator.
Early life
Leonard Ernest Read was born in Nottingham on 31 March 1925, the son of Leonard Read Snr., who worked for a leather company, and his wife Ida (née Morris). His mother died when he was four and he was sent to live with her brother. After their father remarried, Leonard and his two sisters and brother returned to live with their father and stepmother.
Read did well in school, always being one of the top three pupils in junior and senior school. He played the lead role in a school production of David Copperfield. He also learned to box, winning his first medal in 1937. He later joined the Grundy boxing club, where he was nicknamed "Nipper". Read had hoped to attend Nottingham High School and passed the entrance exam, but his father could not afford the uniform and fees for books. He left school at 14 and later in life regretted not being able to stretch himself academically.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17489803. VIAF identifies the subject as 91346474. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2020 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nipper Read” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.