The Salford Matador is still making a killing

Dear readers — Salford’s best-known triumphs include, in no particular order: luring the BBC up north; forming a compelling visual backdrop for the Smiths’ most famous photo; the existence of Paul Scholes’ right foot. But when we talk about Salford, who’s talking about Frank Evans, the 81-year-old matador born there and who now divides his time between Seville and Worsley? Whatever your views on bullfighting, we probably should be: after all, Frank is an anomaly, one of a negligible number of Brits to ever achieve this most senior status of fighter. 

When our latest hire Ophira joined us back in October, she asked you what you’d like her to write about - all of those who responded did so unanimously: Frank Evans. You’ve got to write about him. Today, your wish is our command. That’s under today’s briefing.

It’s been great to have so many of you logging into our snazzy new website — so many, in fact, that it semi-crashed yesterday. We’re sorry about that, it should all be working now. If you head to www.manchestermill.co.uk and put your e-mail in, you’ll be able to see our back catalogue and leave a comment (if you’re a member). Any issues, just contact us on info@millmediaco.uk.

Your briefing

🍝 Our story about the business rates agents who attempted to scam Carmelo and Chiara Signorelli, owners of the Sicilian restaurant Bar Etna in Altrincham, out of more than £4,000 has been covered on BBC Rip Off Britain. Rateable Value Experts, a Manchester-based scam business who have now been suspended by the Valuation Office Agency, claimed the Signorellis wouldn’t have to pay any of their business rates bill to Trafford Council, locked them in a binding contract and chased the money aggressively when the Signorellis refused to pay. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Carmelo told them over the phone once. “This is too specific for my level of comprehension of English.” Watch the full episode here.

🏊 Over the summer, Jack Dulhanty made the case for a Manchester lido, arguing that the city centre would be “carnage” and south Manchester gets too much already. It seems city planners have been thinking the same, as there are suggestions that we just might get a lido in east Manchester. Redevelopment plans have emerged for Holt Town, a light-industrial area on the edge of Ancoats, Miles Platting and Beswick, a little further east than New Islington. Next Wednesday, Manchester City Council’s executive committee will be asked to approve the plans to build 4,500 homes, 15 acres of green space and a lido, noting that if the council votes to recommend it, this will be a “material consideration” for the decision-makers on the planning authority. What do you think of regeneration expanding further eastwards? And is east Manchester the best place for an open air swim? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Quick hits

👮 The Independent Office for Police Conduct confirmed yesterday that the investigation continues into the four Greater Manchester Police officers accused of failing to disclose evidence that could have supported Andrew Malkinson’s innocence.

🚌 We understand TfGM has begun talks with transport workers over improving its parental policies. Know more about this? Get in touch.

The Salford Matador is still making a killing

Frank Evans was born in Salford bang in the middle of WWII. By the age of 15, he was working at his father’s butcher shop in Seedley. Perhaps this general climate of gore and weekly trips to the slaughterhouse contributed to Frank’s fascination with the altogether un-Salfordian art of bullfighting, though inevitably there were other factors at play. He saw his first bullfight at the age of 19 while attending a wedding in Granada, and he liked it. Still, he says, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what made him want to take up the art. Perhaps it was the influence of his father, a man with a life as unexpected as his own — a working-class butcher turned soldier during the war, who would eventually become the Mayor of Salford. As a soldier, his father fought in Gibraltar, making regular trips to Spain along Churchill’s fresh-built arterial road, and afterwards he spoke often and highly of the beautiful country to Frank. “So there’s a bit of a seed that is sewn,” Frank says. “A fascination for that word, ‘Spain’, and what it meant.”

This fascination led Frank on a peculiar path to becoming what he is now — the last of the English matadors. In Salford he’s an anomaly. In Spain he’s a tourist attraction, fighting under the name ‘El Inglés’: The Englishman. His road to the title was an odd and jaunty one: He moved to Majorca on a whim after contacting Vincent Charles Haycock, a former British bullfighter, who invited Frank over to be trained by him only to meet with him once and never again. Following this, Frank moved around Spain, spending more time waitering and window cleaning than actually bullfighting, until eventually he returned to Salford, saving enough money to return to Spain a year later and dedicate himself to the craft. Now 81, and with the faded glamour of an octogenarian gangster, Frank is one of few Brits ever to achieve this most senior status of fighter, ranking 63rd out of all 10,000 bullfighters back in 2003. Frank divides his time between two homes, one in Seville and one in Worsley, the latter of which I meet him in today. It’s a white and contradictory house, with two bull heads on the wall, and multiple cats on the sofa.

When I first took my role as a writer at The Mill, three different readers got in touch with me suggesting that I interview Frank, and nobody suggested anything else. I found myself intrigued, if a little torn. I eat meat, but I don’t believe in hurting or killing animals for the sake of culture – a contradictory viewpoint too, admittedly, and one that Frank and I oddly enough seem to share. “Morally, I struggle with the kill,” he says. “I love the fighting bull, it’s the most beautiful of all the creatures.”

It’s difficult to say for sure if the creatures feel similarly towards Frank. At one point in our conversation he jokes about one of his taxidermied bull heads falling on him and taking his life from beyond the grave. Over the course of his almost 60-year career, he’s been gored by bulls six times: in 1984 he sustained a perforated buttock in Ciudad Rodrigo, and in Mexico a bull took out his entire saphenous vein. He’s broken both thumbs and had to have the tops of multiple fingers sewn back on. “Little, minor injuries that really are a bugger,” he explains. Most recently, in 2023 he was kicked in the face by a young bull while practicing, and now has a permanent metal plate under his eye socket as a result. Still he remains unfettered. “There are a million people in the local cemetery who’d love to have my eye problem,” he told The Spectator the next year.

It was a rugby injury, however, that almost led to the premature ending of Frank’s career. He cut his coleta – a symbolic snipping of a matador’s pigtail to indicate retirement – back in 2005, after damaging his knee to the point of requiring a new one. “I knew within 10 days I’d made a mistake,” he says. Three years, one titanium knee, and an unrelated quadruple heart bypass later, Frank was back in the bull ring. Now in his eighties, Frank takes special precautions in order to remain fighting fit. Every morning, he runs up and down the staircase in his house – be that in Worsley or Seville – to the tune of 100 steps. Every other day, he does 50-metre sprints on a hill round the corner, at least when he’s back in Salford. “And I do stretches,” he says, “just to make sure that I’m fitter than the bull. Or at least I think I am.”

And all this despite the fact that bullfighting is not a sport. In Spain a bullfight is considered to be a cultural event, and an art. As Frank explains, a sporting competition typically has competitors of approximately equal weight or size, and with the income in doubt. In a sport, if there are two sides, then both should have an equal chance of victory. “Bullfighting is not like that,” Frank says. “The bull is sent into the bull ring to be killed. And he will be killed. If he kills me, someone else will come out, and if he kills everybody, they’ll kill him in the slaughterhouse.”

However, Frank takes issue with the manner in which the bulls’ lives are inevitably taken. This is something he currently wants to have changed. In a bullfight, the aim of the final act is to kill the bull swiftly, with a sword between the shoulderblades and through the heart. Ideally, the bull dies almost instantly. “That’s what we want to do,” says Frank. “That’s what we sometimes do.” The reality is not so clear cut. It’s not uncommon for kills to go wrong and for the bull to suffer even more than the fight necessitates. Frank chalks this down to fear on the matador’s part. The rules of bullfighting state that a fighter must kill the bull while they are facing each other, the bull with its head down, the matador reaching over the head and stabbing it between the withers. “So it’s a fear of being caught while you’re killing it,” Frank explains. “More fighters have been killed while killing than any other way.”

Frank is now an advocate for putting an end to the kill. There are currently rare exceptions in bullfighting, during fights in which a bull has performed particularly well, that the president of the fight will grant the bull an indulto (literally a ‘pardon’, though the crime isn’t clear), and the bull will be allowed to live. In these circumstances, the matador simulates the kill by placing a hand between the withers – a symbolic kill – or otherwise the kill is simulated using banderillas: the small darts used in the first act of bullfighting, that still cause pain. The last two bullfights Frank has participated in have been kill-less fights and, according to Frank, the crowds have been just as big, and stadiums just as full. “You do everything except kill it,” he says, “and any blood that gets spilled is gonna be mine.” However, these fights have been unofficial — with younger bulls than is customary, and with the bullfighters not permitted to wear the traditional Suit of Lights.

Bullfighting without killing and even entirely without bloodshed has already existed for years. In Spain, Texas, Portugal, and France, other forms of fighting exist that either simulate the violence or do away with it altogether — though many anti-bullfighting groups insist that bloodless bullfighting is still abusive towards the animals, as they are often exhausted and terrified as a result. Frank has come up against these animal rights activists time and again over the course of his career — he’s received multiple death threats, and once the local post office intercepted a parcel bomb intended for him. He’s not a fan of such groups, and seems to find them tiresome. “I find that talking to animal rights associations is like talking to the wall,” he says. “But talking to the bullfighting authorities is like talking to the other wall.”

What would he like to say to either? First to the activists, and particularly to the meat-eating public, he thinks it should be known that the bulls are treated kindly (up until the fight, at least), and live a good life. The average bull raised purely for meat is raised entirely in captivity, he reminds me, and slaughtered when he is between 12 and 22 months old. Fighting bulls, on the other hand, are raised on large ranches. They spend the first year of their lives with their mothers. They are only sent to the bullring once they are at least four years old. After it has been killed or severely injured in the ring, a bull will be sent to the slaughterhouse, and then to the butchers.

But that’s not all he has to say to the activists. “You’re talking about something that is part of the Spanish constitution,” Frank says. “It’s in the law. If you want to change it, you have to go to their parliament and get the law changed.” He points out that activists have been trying to get bullfighting banned in Spain for over 100 years, unsuccessfully. The popularity of fights have dwindled massively, and bullfighting is now banned in Argentina, Cuba, and Canada, and were briefly banned for a two-year period in Mexico City, though they returned last year. But in Spain, he asserts, banning the sport will be very difficult, whereas altering it to remove the kill could be a very real possibility. “Had [activists] tried to get it modified rather than banned,” he says, “they would have been successful.” Now Frank himself is in talks with politicians in Spain about putting a motion into parliament, to allow them to stage a formal bullfight with a symbolic kill, and without the cutting of the morillo — the muscle of the bull’s neck which is stabbed in the first act of bullfighting in order to lower the head.

And what would he like to say to the other wall — Spain’s Bullfighters Union? “Problem is I’m English in a Spanish activity,” he tells me. “There’s not much weight to what I say.” But while he receives a lot of backlash from Spanish matadors for his support of symbolic killing, he also claims that there’s many who agree with him. Bullfighting’s popularity has been consistently dropping since the 80s, and a 2010 poll suggested that 42% of Spaniards would like to impose a ban. Frank insists that if the format of the fight isn’t changed in the near future, then bullfighting will soon come to an end. “Because it’s not humane,” he says. “Even without the kill, it’s not a very nice thing anyway.”

It’s hard to imagine what Frank’s community in Salford must make of his success in a field so far removed from their everyday lives. He tells me not to mention what gym he goes to, as the managers are concerned about being targeted by animal rights activists. But when we go there together people recognise him instantly, and show him off to their friends as The Salford Matador, a character in the neighbourhood who, against all odds, still seems to command respect. Frank has kept one foot in the city his entire life — his insatiable fascination with Spain has never quite unstuck him from the fabric of Salford, and while his bizarre profession renders him a perpetual novelty both in the country he lives in and the country he loves, judging from his response to the gym-goers, perhaps that’s how he likes it.