10 Greats From The Golden Age Of British Wrestling
8. Count Bartelli
Geoff Conliffe began his pre-war career as the masked Count Bartelli and wrestled almost undefeated until his unmasking in 1966 by his former pupil and tag partner Kendo Nagasaki. Unusually, he then managed to build a solid second career without his mask and continued in the ring until he retired in 1986, 50 years after his debut.
The barrel-chested Bartelli was renowned as an excellent technical wrestler and a bridge between the first, Edwardian heyday of wrestling (he was trained by legendary greats like Billy Riley) and the glory days of the '60s, '70s and '80s.