Continuing our series documenting the history of British boxing, Boxing News reflects on the early days of gloved contests.
IN APRIL 1874, a tournament took place in a dancehall on the Stretford Road, in Manchester, between two locals, Billy McLeod and Tom Scattergood. The fight was to be to a finish, and after it had lasted about an hour and a half, and 33 rounds had been fought, the police broke into the building and the crowd, numbering around 300, tried to flee.
Forty-seven of them were arrested, including both boxers. They were all summoned to appear before the City Police Court the following day. The newspaper report provides an interesting snapshot of the sorts of people who usually attended boxing matches at this time.
A large proportion of them were tradespeople of one sort and another, including a potato dealer, a greengrocer, a tailor, three licensed victuallers and quite a few butchers. There were two clerks, mechanics, warehousemen, a chemist and even a gymnast. All of them were male.
The police were unable to prove that a prize fight had been taking place, as the magistrates took the view that, whilst the police were quite justified in bringing the matter forward for investigation, the men were not setting out to hurt one another as they were wearing gloves.
They were therefore engaged in a sparring match, and not a prize fight. The prisoners were all discharged. The situation, as far as the law was concerned, seemed to be as clear as mud, and this would remain the case for the next 40-odd years until 1911, when a much more prominent court case attempted to rule on the matter once and for all.
Gradually, the professionals appear to have learnt how to adapt to the changing nature of the sport. Some of the old tactics and tricks used within the Prize Ring started to disappear and the younger boxers, many of whom had learnt their trade in the competition events, fought the longer glove contests in keeping with the spirit of the new rules. Evidence of this can be seen when, on 1 February 1877, Hugh Burns and Jem Goode, two London fighters, fought a 35-round contest at MacDonald’s Music Hall on Hoxton High Street.
At the end of the contest, the referee awarded a draw to the general satisfaction of the large crowd. Bell’s Life reported that the two men “were bent upon trying the question of superiority with the gloves, and who certainly carried out their intention in as fair and manly a style as could be wished, adhering scrupulously to the now prevailing custom of boxing three minutes each round, with a minute interval between.
Just before 8pm then entrance was pretty well blocked, the admission fee being cheerfully disbursed, and no-one to our knowledge complained of want of value for the same”.
Sporting Life commented that it was “one of the most exciting and well-contested glove contests that it has ever been our lot to witness. The arrangements were in the hands of a competent person, and everything passed off in the most quiet and orderly manner”. There appear to have been no knockdowns during the entire 35 rounds that the bout lasted, and it was a genuinely close encounter.
Goode was in action again later that year when, on 26 October, he met Mickey Rees of Spitalfields at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in Clerkenwell. Bell’s Life stated that, “It is now nearly five years since an encounter for so large a stake has taken place in England, either with or without the gloves, and as the glories of the Prize Ring have, without doubt, departed for ever, glove contests are more than likely to become an institution in this country, if not spoiled by the rough element”.
This contest was also drawn, after 29 rounds, when the police invaded the hall and put a stop to proceedings. With the ‘rough element’ still playing their part at ringside, and with the police still interfering with the sport, it is no wonder that promoters tried to find ways of cleaning up the sport. One of the first methods they tried was to gentrify it.
On 12 March 1878 George Rooke, an Irishman domiciled in America, met Denny Harrington of Shoreditch, in one of the first major international contests fought under the Queensberry Rules, at the Royal Surrey Gardens Theatre, Camberwell. The event was promoted by Professor Ned Donnelly, an ex-prize fighter, and an instructor at the London Athletic Club.
The Sporting Life report is candid in describing the lengths taken by Donnelly to ensure that the contest would attract only the very best of patrons and it paints a vivid picture of this early attempt at gentrification.
“Denny Harrington and George Rooke boxed for a £100 cup under the rules framed for amateur competitions by the Marquis of Queensberry, but which have been adapted to suit the circumstances of professional boxing. According to the conditions of this match all rounds last an equal time, viz., three minutes, with intervals of one minute time.
“Arrangements had been made for securing the comfort of visitors on this occasion, and with prices of admissions to the gardens being fixed at the fairly high figures of 10s. and a sovereign, it was hoped that the rough element would be absent. Strenuous efforts have been made by the right sort of people to reinstate boxing in its proper position amongst manly sports, and this last match will go far towards so desirable an object. In all the matches that have been brought off since the Goode and Rees affair, there has been every element of success, but unfortunately, the great ‘unwashed’ admirers of the noble art have made themselves unduly prominent.
“Respectable people who would willingly pay a sovereign to see a good set-to, have been deterred from patronising the match by reports of the lawlessness which has obtained on the outside of the theatres and halls. Yesterday the manager of the Surrey Gardens, in order to satisfy the police officials of the real character of the event for which he had let the hall, submitted to their inspection the gloves which were to be used in the evening.
“We are informed that with reference to this, and with future boxing matches, there is not likely to be any interference from the police authorities, so long as they are conducted in an orderly manner”.
Around 300 people attended the weigh-in and over one thousand turned up on the night. The whole affair passed off most satisfactorily and Harrington won by a sixth-round knockout.
In another important contest, three weeks later, Sporting Life reported how similar arrangements were put into effect at the Cambridge Heath Skating Rink, Hackney. “Boxing may be said to have come nobly through the trial given it during the last six months by the sporting public, who are admirers of skills and strength, but haters of brutality and ruffianism. Well-wishers of the sport saw that but one element was wanting to secure the patronage of the respectable portion of the public, and that was to keep out the roughs”.
Attempting to make the sport more respectable in this way may have produced a short-term improvement to the way boxing was perceived but, ultimately, it could not be sustained, for professional boxing was cutting itself off from its roots.
Unlike the participants of cricket, golf and tennis, boxers tended to come from the lower levels of society and, unless boxing welcomed such people at the turnstiles, then it could never hope to succeed. In seeking to exclude the roughs, the pickpockets and the troublemakers, promoters such as Donnelly were also alienating the working man. Boxing needed the support of the working classes, for like football, it is, and always has been, a working man’s sport.
Public houses were the first places to regularly stage professional boxing. The first competitions on record, those won by Bat Mullins in 1871, took place, as we have read, at the Jolly Butchers in Camden Town and at the Garden Arms in Leicester Square. Other notable pubs that regularly provided fistic entertainment of this type were the Griffin and the Five Ink Horns, both in Shoreditch, the White Bear in Bermondsey, and the Bluecoat Boy in Spitalfields.
Very often these establishments were managed by ex-fighters, as there has always been a strong connection between boxing and the licensing trade, and this was especially true during the Victorian era. Ted Napper, the fighter who went 25 rounds with Charlie Davis for the English 148lbs championship in 1873, became the licensee at the Five Ink Horns and later at the Hop and Malt Exchange on Borough High Street, where five contests for the English Championship took place between 1889 and 1891.
The busiest public house for boxing during this period was the Blue Anchor in Shoreditch. Between 1879 and 1898 it played host to a series of important championship competitions that had, amongst their winners, Toff Wall, Jim Kendrick, Jem Smith and Sam Baxter, all of whom were amongst the elite of the early championship claimants. The landlord was a boxing man, Bill Richardson, and he entrusted the running of his competitions to Tom Symonds, who inherited the tenancy when Richardson died in 1886.
Many ex-fighters formed their own clubs once they had retired, as they wished to pass on their skills as trainers, and most operated, initially, from a public house. The most successful of them soon outgrew these premises, as they were not big enough to accommodate their burgeoning clientele, and so they sought out a larger place in which they could expand. Known as ‘Schools of Arms’, many of these establishments doubled up as ‘small hall’ venues, a place where boxers could not only train, but also box competitively in competition bouts.
Bob Habbijam’s West End School of Arms was the most famous of these. Habbijam had won two 140lbs competitions himself in 1876/77 and he had excellent credentials, becoming London’s leading trainer and a regular promoter throughout his stay at his well-known establishment on Newman Street, just off Oxford Street.
John Fleming, later the general manager at the National Sporting Club, practically learnt the game at Habbijam’s. He “sat on the hard benches where there was so little room between the ring and the wall that practically every seat was a ringside seat, and watched the youngsters from Bethnal Green, Mile End, Paddington and Walworth. Bob knew every facet and every trick of the game since the early days of scientific boxing and he lived all his active life among fighters in Seven Dials.
Habbijam’s was exactly what its name indicated, a school for beginners, amateurs who had ideas about taking the game up professionally and who hoped to be discovered. They fought for purses of five to 25 pounds, mostly on a winner-takes-all basis. At Habbijam’s.
They might have been seen by anybody. The wealthy patrons of the Pelican Club and, later, of the National Sporting Club, did not deem it below their dignity to watch the sport there on the off-nights of the more important rings. Many a young coster-monger or soldier on leave was snapped up there by a backer, and paid for leaving his barrow or bought out of the army”.
A similar club, also with a good reputation, was the Lambeth School of Arms, Paradise Street, Lambeth. In the 1880s, Lambeth was anything but a paradise, and to the poverty-stricken youngsters housed in the nearby slums, the School of Arms was a haven, providing the means to get fit, a place to learn to fight, and, if you were good enough, a place to earn a few extra shillings with your fists.
The ‘Lammy’ kept young lads off the streets and away from petty crime. The place was situated “in a narrow and dingy thoroughfare where the mud stood two inches high. The same muddy ground formed the floor of the School of Arms, a low-roofed shed, measuring about forty feet by forty.
A boarded patch in the middle was the sixteen-foot ring, surrounded by wooden forms of the roughest kind. Squeezed into these, so that every man’s head was pressed against the knees of the man behind him, sat the spectators who were lucky enough to get a seat; the standing room was wherever you could find any room to stand.
This entertainment cost a sovereign for admission, sit or stand, but that charge included the unspeakable stench which pervaded the place. The only means of ventilation was a skylight, and that had mostly to be kept closed lest the small army of street arabs, who were squatting on the roof, slip through and settle on the rafters from where it would be practically impossible to remove them. Stationed on the roof was therefore a costermonger whose duty it was to pelt the would-be intruders with flowerpots”.
From such a place came the likes of Bill Natty, Chesterfield Goode and Ted Pritchard, all great champions of this era, as will be seen.
