The Goldsmiths art teacher who won Olympic bronze

A Goldsmiths art teacher who included Mary Quant among his pupils lived an extraordinary double life – as an Olympic medal-winning wrestler.

Artist Samuel Rabin taught at Goldsmiths from the 1940s to the 1960s with Quant and abstract painter Bridget Riley among those in his classes.

But before this Rabin was one of the biggest names in British wrestling and as an amateur won a bronze medal in the middleweight division of the free-style wrestling at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam.

Rabin was truly a renaissance man-meets-superman: a skilled artist, sculptor, musician and teacher as well as a brilliant athlete.

Born Samuel Rabinovitch to parents who were Jewish Russian exiles, his artistic talent was spotted at an early age. In 1914 he won a scholarship to the Manchester Municipal School of Art at just 11 years old – the youngest person ever to attend the prestigious school at which LS Lowry also studied.

His formal education continued at the Slade before he spent time in Paris working as a sculptor. All this time he continued competing as an amateur wrestler and boxer – getting called up to the Great Britain squad for the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) notes that Rabin was a man of “awesome physical strength”. He certainly displayed this on the mat at the games: despite losing to Canada’s Donald Stockton Rabin claimed the bronze medal after winning his next two matches against the USA’s Ralph Hammonds and South Africa’s Anton Praeg.

While he was earning his sporting spurs Rabin was also progressing as a professional artist. In the 1920s he was commissioned to produce two public sculptures which still stand in London – at the former Transport for London headquarters and the former Daily Telegraph offices in Fleet Street.

But despite this early success Rabin found professional work hard to come by. So in 1932 he turned professional grappler. The ODNB notes that, with his name now shortened to Rabin, he “quickly became a favourite with the press and public, fighting all over Britain as Rabin the Cat and Sam Radnor the Hebrew Jew”.

His performances in the ring remarkably led to Rabin being cast in two Alexander Korda films – as wrestler in The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933 and prize-fighter Daniel Mendoza in 1934’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. In another connection to the University of London, the real-life Mendoza (1764-1836) was buried in the grounds of what is now Queen Mary.

During the Second World War Rabin, who was a talented baritone, performed with the British Army’s Classical Music Group. In 1946 he auditioned for La Scala's conductor, Victor de Sabata.

In 1949 Rabin came to teach at what was then Goldsmiths' College of Art. The ODNB says: “He was an outstanding teacher of drawing, renowned among his students and colleagues for his commanding presence and disciplined classes and for demonstrating the principles of drawing.”

Students included Quant, Riley and Sue Ashworth – who along with her husband Frank has worked for English Heritage producing the organisation’s Blue Plaques for the last three decades.

Earlier this year Sue remembered Rabin, saying: “Our life drawing teacher Sam Rabin specialised in drawing wrestlers, I think he’d been one himself. He was a very powerful, silent man. An authority. He would come and sit on our donkey [the traditional benches used by artists] and say, in his northern accent: ‘All you have to worry about are the pose and the proportion’.”

Rabin left Goldsmiths in 1965, dissatisfied because teaching was moving away from the figurative tradition.

Read more about Samuel Rabin on the ODNB website – which can be accessed for free if you have a valid local authority library card.