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192 pages

English

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The story of bare-knuckle prize fighting between Tom Sayers and John Heenan which gripped England and the USA in 1860. The fighters, their handlers and the spectators avoided police to watch the contest which was held in the Hampshire countryside. Both men were hugely popular with their own countries and 10,000 people turned out to watch the funeral of Sayers five years later. Manson captures perfectly the robust flavour of the Victorian era and the sport that defined it.

Sujets

Boxing

Xian de Boxing

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Publié par	Sportsbooks
Date de parution	02 octobre 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781907524110
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CONTENTS
Title page
Acknowledgements
Names
Chapter 1 A short journey…
Chapter 2 … and a long one
Chapter 3 Brighton to London
Chapter 4 West Troy to Benicia
Chapter 5 English Fists
Chapter 6 American Fists
Chapter 7 The Champion
Chapter 8 The Challenger
Chapter 9 John Bull and Brother Jonathan
Chapter 10 Set-up
Chapter 11 In Training
Chapter 12 Build-up
Chapter 13 London Bridge
Chapter 14 Crescendo
Chapter 15 English Echoes
Chapter 16 American Echoes
Chapter 17 Diminuendo
Endnotes
Bibliography
Plates
Index of fighters, their friends and enemies
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I OWE a debt to a number of people, without whose assistance this book would be a lesser work.
Alan Collinson, a direct descendant of Tom Sayers, helped me greatly by lending me his copy of Tom Langley’s brief biography of his ancestor – not an easy work to get hold of. He was also able to give me some family memories of Tom Sayers which contributed usefully to my understanding of my subject.
Boxing writer Tris Dixon was most generous in sharing his knowledge of the big fight, and in pointing me in the direction of some very useful sources.
Also of great assistance was Bare Fists author Bob Mee, whose knowledge of the bare-knuckle prize ring is matchless. He was able to help with queries which might otherwise have gone unanswered.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I could not be more grateful to Elliott Gorn, author of The Manly Art – probably the most scholarly work yet written on the bare-knuckle era. My Chapter 6 simply could not have been written without him, and this book would unquestionably have been the poorer.
Further American assistance was offered by martial arts expert Frank Allen, co-author of Classical Northern Wu Style Tai Ji Quan and The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang . In Kung Fu Magazine , Frank has himself contributed usefully to the literature of the bare-knuckle prize ring.
No individual helped me more than Brighton historian Roy Grant, without whom my account of the early years of Tom Sayers would be thin and colourless. The assistance which Roy gave me went beyond anything I might reasonably have expected.
Another vital source of information on Tom Sayers was the Camden Local Studies & Archives Centre, the staff of which were singularly helpful. My account of the domestic life of Tom Sayers in London depended crucially on their input.
The association of Tom Sayers with neighbouring Islington was much slighter, but still required some research. In this context, a small but significant contribution was made by Martin Banham of Islington Local History Centre.
Honourable mention has also been earned by Gad’s Hill School’s Press and PR Manager Sarah Garratt. In going out of her way to answer just one query, she saved me from making a fool of myself in the very first paragraph.
I made one invaluable visit to Brighton Museum to check up on one or two facts about the early life of Tom Sayers, and the staff there could not have been more helpful.
The same may be said of the staff of the National Archives at Kew, where the collection of materials relating to the Sayers–Heenan fight is a must for anyone interested in the subject.
Finally, and most importantly – though they would all say that they are only doing their job – the staffs of the British Library at St Pancras and its Newspaper division at Colindale were my most vital helpers, whether they knew it or not. My most valuable research was done at these two places. We should never forget what a wonderful resource the British Library is.
Iain Manson 2008
NAMES
The true name of a prize fighter is not always easy to establish. Some boxers, like Yankee Sullivan, used a number of aliases in order to stay ahead of the authorities, while others simply preferred to fight under a nom de guerre : Bill Bainge fought as Bill Benjamin, Tom Winter chose the more upbeat Tom Spring, and so on. I have drawn attention to the pseudonym in some instances, but not in all.
One case worthy of mention is that of the first formal opponent of Tom Sayers. Whether his surname was Couch or Crouch is impossible now to determine; both names were used.
Even where we know what to call a man, we may still be unsure of how to write his name. Many prize fighters, like Tom Sayers himself, were illiterate, and would therefore have been unable to offer any assistance on the matter. Where one name can be spelled a number of different ways, there is seldom any unanimity over which is correct. Thus we have Stevenson or Stephenson, Humphries or Humphreys, and a number of others. You can take your pick of how to spell Macdonald or Molineaux.
I have for the most part been content to abide by majority opinion, but there are two exceptions. Harry Paulson’s name is usually given as Poulson, but I prefer to use the version that he himself favoured. Most importantly of all, there is the name of one of my two principal characters: John Camel Heenan insisted that ‘Carmel’ was an erroneous spelling of his middle name, and as in the case of Paulson, I think it perverse to ignore the wishes of the name’s owner.
CHAPTER 1
A SHORT JOURNEY…
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15th, 1865. The final monthly instalment of Our Mutual Friend is now on sale, and its author is at Gad’s Hill Place, the house which he had coveted as a boy and which the success of his writing has finally enabled him to buy. To the north lies the Thames and to the south the Medway, presently home to a vessel that Alice might have seen in the Wonderland which she entered through a rabbit-hole four months ago: Brunel’s Great Eastern is five times the size of any other ship afloat. As he works on his weekly, All the Year Round , Dickens no doubt reflects sadly on the death three days previously of Mrs Gaskell, one of its finest contributors. It was for this publication that he once commissioned a report on the prize fight between Tom Sayers of England and America’s John Camel Heenan.
At work that same day in the office of the South-Eastern Railway Company is Samuel Smiles, author of Self-Help , one of the defining documents of Victorian sensibility. Mr Smiles is company secretary, and his mind surely strays from time to time back to the dreadful accident which befell one of South-Eastern’s trains at Staplehurst in June. Charles Dickens was among the survivors.
Dickens had not, however, in spite of his original intention, been on either of the trains which Mr Smiles had arranged for Sayers, Heenan and their supporters in April 1860. William Makepeace Thackeray, on the other hand, quite possibly had. We cannot be sure, for he could never subsequently make up his own mind: the event, for all its éclat, had after all been neither legal nor, still more serious, respectable. But he may well have been present, and he was almost certainly responsible for the mock epic, The Combat of Sayerius and Heenanus , which appeared in the next issue of Punch . On November 15th, 1865, however, Thackeray is responsible for nothing at all, for the very good reason that he has, for almost two years, been lying under the neatly trimmed grass of Kensal Green Cemetery.
Equally dead is Lord Palmerston, who has only recently taken up permanent residence in Westminster Abbey. At the time of the fight he was prime minister, and his evident sympathy with the disreputable pugilists and their still more disreputable followers was, like so much of Palmerston’s life, something of a scandal in polite society. It was even rumoured that he had been one of the passengers conveyed to Farnborough that day by Smiles’s railway, but that is certainly false. So, sadly, is the oft-repeated tale that his death, less than a month before the day in question and just two days before his eighty-first birthday, occurred on a billiard table in the arms of a parlourmaid. Palmerston was, however, beyond doubt a tremendous rake, one of whose amorous exploits caused him to be cited in a divorce case when he was seventy-nine.
With prostitution rife, and twelve the age of consent, it was a good time for rich dirty old men. Palmerston would have loved, had he only known her and had she only given him the chance, Adah Isaacs Menken. Actress (of sorts), poet (ditto), virtuoso seducer of the famous, Miss Menken has attributes of Jackie Kennedy, Madonna and even Maria Callas. On November 15th, 1865 she is appearing in London in Henry Brougham’s play The Child of the Sun at Astley’s Amphitheatre, the scene of her extraordinary 1864 triumph in the title role of Mazeppa , the part which had earned her the soubriquet of the Naked Lady.
Six years earlier, in her native America, she had married (bigamously) one of the men who was to fight at Farnborough, the redoubtable John Camel Heenan, commonly known as The Benicia Boy. Now retired from the ring, Heenan has chosen to sit out the Civil War in England. The old South is no more, slavery has ended, Abraham Lincoln has died in his hour of triumph, and Jack Heenan has missed it all. On November 15th, 1865 he is at Shrewsbury races in furtherance of his trade as a bookie. Many people think he should be in London, for Tom Sayers is in London. And this is Tom’s day.

London was dirty. London stank. It stank mostly of horses, of which there were tens of thousands, but also of sewage – though matters had improved somewhat since the Great Stink of 1858 when the stench from the city’s biggest sewer, the Thames, made people sick and disrupted the business of Parliament. And London smoked. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , by 1864 country people going there would talk of going to the Smoke, for the city could be detected from a great distance by the dirty yellow pall which overhung it.
With great frequency, the pall would descend onto the streets, seeming to transform the city into its own ghost. Nathaniel Hawthorne described the scene one day in December 1857: