593. The Fight of the Century

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Way down in Merry England, the home of Johnny Bull, where the English drink their glasses, they drink them brimming full.

Saying, here's to Merry England, likewise our Britons brave, the champions we are, o'er the land and o'er the wave.

Way down in Merry England, all in the bloom of spring, where English burley champion stood stripped off in the ring, to fight that noble heenan, the gallant son of Troy, to try his British muscle on the bold Benicia boy.

Two heavy flags were hoisted that floated o'er the ring.

On one there was a tiger already for a spring, on the other was an eagle, a gallant bird she was, for she had a bunch of thunderbolts and held them in her claws.

Oh, the pennies they were tossed and their melee did begin, their bets on Sayers and Heenan two on one came rushing in.

They fought like noble heroes till one received a blow, which caused a crimson tide from young Heenan's nose to flow.

The first blood for Johnny Bull, Old England shouts for joy.

But the following cheers arose for the bold Benisha boy.

The tiger rose within him like lightning in his eye, saying, Smile away, Old England, but Johnny, mind your eye.

So that's the beginning of a lovely poem.

It's the beginning?

Yes, it's the beginning song.

How long does it go on for?

It goes on for much, it goes on for 42 rounds.

It's a poem poem called Heenan and Sayers, and it was by Mrs.

Elwood Nickerson, written in, we don't know, about 1860, 61,

in New England.

And this poem is celebrating the fight of the century, the clash between Tom Sayers and John Heenan on the 17th of April 1860.

Tom, are you a great boxing aficionado?

Not hugely.

But as you will know, I am a fan of British muscle because I've actually just come from the gym where I've been toning my British muscle.

Oh, that's a nice image.

So I feel absolutely prepped and ready for this.

Good.

I mean, one thing I am, well, at least I used to be a fan of, was going off to fields in Hampshire to engage in illegal activities.

Oh, my word.

Oh, no.

So as name checked by Jarvis Cocker in

his famous song Sorted for Ease and Whiz.

Right.

This is a lovely image.

And reading about this fight, which takes place illegally in a field in Hampshire, I couldn't help but think about how,

you know, how the traditions of Merry England run deep.

So people, you know, in the 90s weren't gathering to watch boxing matches, but they were gathering to celebrate.

To go to raves.

Going to raves.

So there's kind of deep continuities, aren't there?

Riki.

Well, I didn't expect

that angle to be the angle of choice.

Well, I've introduced British muscle in ease and whiz.

So we thought we would

dig into the story behind this extraordinary clash between Tom Sayers and John Heenan.

What it tells us about Britain, America, Britishness, sport.

It's about sport above all, isn't it?

It's about...

But it's about what sport means.

But also in the long run, how it comes to be tamed and codified and in a way made kind of posher, as we will see.

Yes, I think that's true.

And we are joined by very much a friend of the rest is history.

So listeners who heard our episode on Orwell will remember him.

He is Professor Robert Coles, Emeritus Professor at De Montfort University and author of the brilliant book, This Sporting Life, Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 to 1960, in which this fight

plays a kind of lead role as a whole chapter about this fight.

Rob, welcome back to the rest of this history.

Thank you.

Great to be back.

So what's going on?

You have, let's set the scene.

It's very early in the morning.

It's the 17th of April, 1860.

It's a Tuesday.

It's in the middle of nowhere.

A field in Hampshire.

All of these people have gathered to to watch these two men knock seven bells out of one another.

What is the story behind all this?

Yeah, if you want to know what's going on in this field in Hampshire in 1860, what you don't do is read Mrs.

Nickerson's poem, because

it's quite clear that she's not been within a thousand miles of this

fight, which took place the year before.

It's billed across the Atlantic as the first international heavyweight championship.

It's been talked about for 12 months before, and it will be talked about for 40, 50 years afterwards.

Generally speaking, journalists and others called it the fight of the century.

In many ways, it was really none of those things.

The American, the Irish American, who'd come across to do his business, John Camel Heenan, had only had one professional fight in his life, which he'd lost.

So he was a novice, really.

His claim to be there was he had a talent for violence.

And

I don't know if you've seen the wonderful Scorsese film Gangs of New York, but Heenan had operated within those gangs as a minder, as an enforcer, as a

publican by day and a hard man by night.

So he was just a hard case who was chancing his luck against the English champion.

The English champion was a very different kettle of fish.

Tom Sayers was an out-and-out professional.

He'd been fighting since he was 16, born in Brighton, born in the Lanes in Brighton, started fighting at 16 up on the downs on the race courses, what the press called casual wagers, you know, five minutes done in a corner, money changes hands.

In his 20s, Sayers had moved to London and where he had plied his trade as a bricklayer in Camden.

Camden was new then, the railway was coming, and Tom did his work there.

He also did part-time fighting and amassed enough money to become a publican.

The laurel tree in Bayham Road, Camden, was his pub.

And he got married and he had children.

And in 1850, aged 24, he had his first out and out professional fight.

By the time he's facing Heenan in that field seven o'clock in the morning April 1860 he'd had 14 fights of which he'd lost only one.

So what are they there to do?

Well what they're there to do is the most awful thing it would seem possible to imagine.

They were there to inflict such injuries on each other with their bare hands that one of them was going to be incapable of standing up or at any rate coming to the center of the ring the scratch mark and standing up in that position that's what they were there to do behind this fight really was the new york press and the london press in new york we had a newspaper a sporting newspaper called porter's spirit of the times and they thought in heenan they had had someone who could relieve the English of their own championship.

In Tom Sayers, Bell's Life, which was the leading sporting newspaper, Bells thought they had a man who could restore the prize ring to some kind of honour and respectability, which it had lost in the 1850s and 40s.

In the event, both newspapers were wrong, as we shall see.

So, anyway, Heenan makes it to London, December 1859, and the two men meet at Owen Swift's public house, the horseshoe, in Titchbourne Street.

If I can just jump in, Owen Swift, he's

a fighter himself

who has killed people in the ring.

Is that right?

Yeah, Swift has killed three men in the ring, the last one being Brighton Bill.

And he spent his time before magistrates and always got away with it.

Rob, how does he get away with it?

Well, the legal legal position of fighting was very unclear.

Judges absolutely detested it and wanted it finished with.

But magistrates found it a lot easier to turn a blind eye.

And as we know, the police in the middle of the 19th century were not organised or as well informed as they might be.

And are magistrates turning a blind eye to it because they are fans, because they're enthusiasts because they think that it's an expression of British manliness or what's the reason?

I don't think so

Tom.

I think the reason they're turning a blind eye is although fights are strictly speaking a breach of the peace and they're very nervous about disorder, stopping one would probably be more disorderly.

Oh, I see, right.

And more breach of a peace.

But above all else, of course, you've got aristocratic patronage.

And if you're a, you know, if you're a local country vicar who's also a magistrate, stepping in to stop a fight where there are lords and dukes and gentlemen,

you wouldn't last long.

So magistrates turned the blind eye, judges pressed for it to be stopped.

At law, fighting was odd.

Mainly it was a breach of the peace, or it could be common assault, or it could be riot, or worse still, it could be manslaughter.

And as the century wore on, more and more cases for manslaughter were brought to court, but nothing much happened.

I've actually got some boring figures here, which I once spent my time counting.

Out of 30 tried at the old Bailey for manslaughter in the ring between 1856 and 1975,

out of the 30 men, 13 were acquitted and 17 were convicted, but all of them got less than six months in jail.

If you're a carter or a labourer, you tend to get convicted.

If you're an old Etonian schoolboy and you've just killed a fellow student, as did happen to Lord Shaftesbury's youngest brother in the 1820s, who was killed in a 60-round fight, you get let off.

So that is like the one in Tom Brown's school days with, what's it, slugger?

Slugger somebody.

Slugger somebody has a fight behind the gym school.

Slugger.

Slugger.

Slugger, that's right.

Slugger Williams fights Tom.

Thomas Hughes, who wrote it, knew exactly what he was writing about when he did that.

Sorry, we took you off feast, didn't we, by getting into this?

So they've met for the first time at Swift's pub, the two contestants, Heenan and Sayers.

And Sayers, exactly.

And so the fight is going to happen, but at this point, nobody knows when and where it will happen.

Which again is like raves, isn't it?

That people know something's going to happen, but they don't quite know how to get there and people are waiting to be texted the number and the address and places like that so it's a bit like that exactly it's a one that's a great analogy actually a rave it's exactly that tom it's a rave everyone's turning up at london bridge at 4 a.m on the morning of the fight and nobody knows where the fight's going to happen but they're all buying a ticket for farmborough and rob when you say everyone I mean, you really do mean everyone.

So Dickens' friend, people say Lord Palmerston's going.

Yeah, Yeah, the Prince of Wales.

What is the class of person who is who is going down on this train to this boxing match?

Because it's secret, no one knows where it is.

But of course, everyone does know where it is.

Let's just say reports are rather mixed and confused.

But generally speaking, we know there's an aristocratic element.

We know locals down in Hampshire would would probably turn up just to see the play.

It's a kind of festival.

It's a kind of fair.

And then we've got mainly what was called at the time the fancy, or more intellectual people were called the cognicenti.

That is, there's a kind of following around fighting, which is to do with betting.

It's to do with former fighters known as pugs or pugilists.

It's to do with aristocrats who just will gamble on anything.

These people know the odds and they'll be at all the big fights.

From of course the word the fancy we get the word fan.

So they reckon there's about 1500 passengers on two trains coming out of London Bridge, 35 carriages on each.

Dickens man,

I think he's called Hollandshead, claims to be sitting in a compartment with a well-known lord, a well-known poet and a well-known politician, but he doesn't name names.

Certainly, when they got to the fight and walked half a mile across muddy fields, they were met by more security who were handing out chairs to the aristocrats who deserved them and no chairs to the rest.

So basically when you got to the scene of the fight, you could either watch the law being broken sitting down or you could watch the law being broken standing up.

And people are placing bets.

So betting is obviously an enormous part of this.

Is there betting happening at in the field?

I mean, are there bookmakers there, you know, shouting out the odds and stuff?

Yes.

The most important thing to get a fight going,

Dom, is stake money.

So

the two sides place stake bets with each side, and the winner will take the other side's stake.

That's the real money in the formal and official money in prize fighting.

So Tom Side put £500,

£50 a go, at a number of London pubs, and Heenan Side did exactly the same.

Of course,

there would be informal and relentless betting on the fight as the fight progressed.

This made it very, very dodgy business.

Because the fighters were in the fight and could hear how the odds were changing, ringside, they could themselves change the outcome of the fight.

So I just wanted to ask you about that.

I mean, what is to stop one of them throwing it?

Nothing.

Right, so how is that regulated?

Or is it not regulated?

Well, according to London Rules, 1839, which they're fighting by,

you are not meant to go down on one knee unless you've had a proper punch.

But how do you measure a proper punch?

The only person who knows a proper punch has been landed is the giver and the receiver.

If the receiver wants to cheat, which in the parlance is called a cross, and go down and lose and is bet against himself, he's made a lot of money.

So he's not going to say it wasn't a proper punch.

Of course it was a proper punch.

And the giver of the punch is not going to say it wasn't the proper punch because by giving this punch, he's won the fight.

So there's nothing to stop ringside

off-course betting, shouting the odds, and it's nothing to stop a single fighter

doing a cross.

Would a fighter like Tom Sayasay have a reputation as a man who was unlikely to do that?

He did have that reputation and that's why Bell's life wanted him to be reincarnated as a great, a great Englishman.

But in truth, the last fight he had before Heenan was against a novice, really.

And apparently, Tom had been seen dancing the night away the night before.

And there was rumours of a cross that he was not going to be serious about it.

He was going to in the parlance, he was going to chuck it.

But in the event, Tom didn't chuck it, and the fight was over in five minutes.

So the crowd has gathered, all of these people,

and it's about seven o'clock.

They come out.

Now, just to give us a sense of

what they look like and stuff, you might think because this is the 19th century, or they don't take it very seriously, they haven't been properly training.

They have been training, they've been training for months, haven't they?

On the Downs.

Tom Sayers on the Sussex Downs, Heenan in Wiltshire.

And what does a training routine involve for a 19th century boxer?

Well, they they went into training in February.

So they had two, three months training.

Tom, you notice, went on the downs with the racing fraternity and then went up the Newmarket, again, with the racing fraternity.

There is a very old and honourable connection between riding, horse being a, well, jockeying and fighting.

Both sides have to keep their weight down.

And jockeys knew how to do that.

And fighters took that seriously.

Tom's methods were exactly what a jockey of the time would do to keep fat off and keep muscles

a bit like Tom's really nice and brisk and shiny.

I'm interested to know what they do, whether it compares to my routine.

It's about starving yourself, basically.

It's about weights.

It's about

no sex.

I don't know how that goes with you.

No coffee.

No masturbation.

Hold on.

Rob, Rob, Rob, Rob.

I mean, how do people know this?

Are they writing it down?

Are there training manuals?

Yes, there are.

There are training manuals.

How are they referring to it?

Beastliness?

They call it masturbation.

It's a very old word.

I'm amazed.

I thought Victorians never talked about it.

We're not talking about the Victorians, quote-unquote, here.

We're talking about the other side of Victorian life.

Right.

They took a massive pill

before the fight, a massive blue pill for constipation.

But actually, the thing is, Tom, they weren't doing anything that jockeys weren't doing.

This was all understood and known.

And it wasn't unusual, actually.

You know, the greatest English jockey of the century, Fred Archer, died by just being overzealous in his training routines.

Too many pills.

Too many pills and not enough food.

They would make themselves sick.

I mean, all the old tricks, which we're only sadly too familiar with now.

So they did that for a few months.

Heenan couldn't settle anywhere.

Everywhere he went to train, the constabulary told him to move on.

So his camp was never settled.

He went right through the Midlands and ended up in Derbyshire for a night in jail.

And was that because the constabulary were being patriotic and trying to stop him from training?

Well, the thing was, you go back to this old thing about a breach of the peace.

Wherever he went, there was a crowd.

And the crowd

were not always charming or gentle with him and his American entourage.

Anyway, he finally got arrested at his Trent Lock near Derby, a training camp,

and he was put out on bail for more money than the actual stake he'd put down for the fight.

Anyway, he kept going and he was used to this.

It was exactly the same in the United States.

Fighting was such a hole-in-the-corner affair.

You had to keep moving.

You had to always be on watch out for the Rozas.

One important thing, I just have to take you one day back before the fight.

On the night of the 16th of April 1860, Heenan turned up at Nat Langham's pub in London, the Cambrian.

Now, why did he go to Langham's pub, the Cambrian?

Because Langham was the only man who'd ever beaten Sayers.

Oh, right.

Came from Hinckley in Leicestershire.

He was a framework knitter.

and he'd taken Sayers the full distance in 1853 and beaten him.

So there's a bit of needle here that, you know, Heenan goes to the man who beat him.

In the same sense, the one man to beat Heenan in his only fight, John Morrissey, he was in Sayer's corner.

They've got inside information.

I loved the account you give of

the entourages that both men have.

So on the morning of the fight, they meet up, they shake hands.

Heenan has the stars and stripes in his corner.

And Sayer, you say, has the royal standard on a cream background, which is tremendous, and I think is something that British boxers should reintroduce.

But 729, they come to the middle, and Sayer has his two seconds behind him, who you describe as being like wicket keepers.

So, that's people who stand up to the bowling in cricket.

Um, plus his manager, his professional walker, who is his trainer.

And my favorite detail: someone called the bird man making queer halloo sounds in a cape.

What's going on with the bird man?

No.

What's he doing?

Who is he?

No.

And why do boxes not have bird men now in capes and dwarfs and things?

Well, he's going, hello, hello, hello.

Why?

Well, I think

it certainly beats Heenan's corner, which is a bit boring.

He's got his uncle, two friends, and a man called Billy Mulligan, who the New York Times calls a very determined looking fellow.

Personally, I'd rather be with Jimmy Holden and the birdman.

So the fight is ready to begin.

Should we take a break at this point?

Tension is massive, but when we come back, the bell will sound, the fight will begin, and we will see who wins.

Can we do one thing just before that?

I've got it put in, Tom, that...

It's what they do before they actually come to the fight is they strip, which in the parlances they peel, by which I mean they take off their shirts.

And that's really important before a fight because when you see a man's body, then you see how serious they are about what's going to happen.

Right.

And the point here is both men are in superb condition.

So Tom Sayers has been daubing himself with vinegar.

hasn't he so it's he's described as looking like a square brick of walnuts so he's kind of he's dyed himself with vinegar.

Is that right, Rob?

It was an old belief.

It was skin-hardening properties of vinegar.

And as for Heenan, he's incredibly pale.

And of course, he's five inches taller, two and a half stones heavier, eight or nine years younger.

The Times called it as the two men stood together as a horse to a hen.

Wow.

Unbelievable tension.

So who will win?

The horse or the hen?

Come back in a few minutes to find out.

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Welcome back to the rest is history.

We are in a field in Hampshire on the 17th of April 1860.

The crowd has assembled.

The two men have peeled, Sayers and Heenan.

Rob, take us through what happens next.

Well, they both walk to the center of the ring, so-called.

Of course, it's not a ring.

It's actually a rectangle.

They go to the centre of the ring, and Heenan says, beautiful morning to the man who's about to try and kill him.

And Tom says, want to bet on it?

Which I loved.

They go at it according to London Prize Ring rules.

Just to be clear for listeners,

these are not the rules that govern boxing in the way that they do now.

So we'll come to how those laws evolve.

These are London rules, which sounds like a kind of spy thriller, but it's a particular kind of fighting, isn't it?

So what are London rules?

What are the boxers allowed to do?

So the first set of printed rules,

Tom, are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and they were called Broughton's Rules, 1743.

And London Rules were an evolution of Broughton's rules of 1743.

Basically there were no weight categories.

So there was no heavyweights, lightweights, middleweights.

They were just matches and the match was anybody who was willing to put their money up behind a man fighting another man.

So clearly Sayers was five foot eight and eleven stone.

He was actually a middleweight.

But he couldn't get middleweights to fight him.

Or more accurately, they couldn't get people to back them to fight him.

So he's fighting, it's a middleweight fighting a heavyweight because London rules have no weight categories.

The second thing is there's no fixed rounds.

The round ends when one man drops to one knee and he can do that at any point and get a 30-second breather.

But there aren't points, so it doesn't, you know, it doesn't penalize him.

There's no points in London rules.

You just have to really reduce a man to such a state that he can't come to scratch,

even though he's had his 30-second breather.

There was less force in this because they were bare knuckle.

And in addition to hitting with your bare hand,

you could throw,

you could wrestle.

But what you couldn't do, this is where London rules civilized things a bit, you couldn't bite, you couldn't butt, you couldn't kick, you couldn't gouge, you couldn't strangle, and of course, you couldn't hit below the waist.

And you you say in your book that prize fighters also shave themselves so like the Macedonians they shave off their beards so that their opponents can't grab them by their beards.

Yes if you are in an exchange which is part boxing and part wrestling it doesn't help to have long hair or beard.

In Mendoza's famous fight, I think it was 1795 with John Jackson, gentleman John Jackson, Jackson ended the fight by swinging him round by his hair.

So Mendoza's long hair didn't do him proud

on that occasion.

So you could always tell a fighter by his cropped hair

and crooked nose.

That's the way to do it.

And they also have spiked boots, is that right?

Yeah.

Now, the thing is, it's really, given that the Rosas are always onto you or are liable to be onto you, fights can start in one county and end in another one because the two fighters would actually be on the run.

So it's quite obvious that you couldn't fight indoors.

It was just too risky.

So most fights were outside where if the police turned up you could run for it.

So the boots were spiked.

Your head was held back.

Your fists were low but up.

Your feet were turned out.

In other words, you were well turned out.

And you would bob and weave and duck until first punch was landed and the first punch in this fight actually went to the old pro Sayers who landed once square on Heenan's nose and knobbing it was called in the parlance

knobbing in the parlance and applause in the crowd so a knobbing knobbing is when you hit someone on the nose flat on the nose yeah

and and and you draw it was never called blood of course it was always called ruby or claret so you knob to draw ruby

um at that point heenan grabbed uh sayers by the neck um but says punched his way out of it and apparently both men fell to the floor laughing round one over and there's no limit on the number of rounds is that right so if they want to fight for 10 20 30 in this case 40 plus rounds they can because looking at sayers's record he knows that this could go on for a long time because he has has had bouts that have lasted two hours, two and a half hours.

I mean, mind-boggling how exhausting and unbelievably dangerous that must be.

Well, it is dangerous, of course.

They're aiming for your head, your temple, and below your ear.

They're trying to blind you

with hits, jabbing.

I mean, gouging's out, but jabbing's

Jabbing to the eyes

or peg to the stomach, as it was called.

Or they want to throw you and land heavily on you.

Or they want to fib, which means getting your head under one arm and punching away in the face with the other.

And that was called having a suit enchancery.

Is that really what they call that?

Yeah, suit enchancery is holding your head under my arm, let's put it that way, and I hit you with my right hand.

With your British muscle.

Or there's a cross-buttock.

how about that one where you throw a man over your buttock in effect and then you land on him very heavily right

actually

dom this isn't this isn't you i don't know about you guys but this is how schoolboys fought when i was a kid it was all head and chancery and cross buttock yeah not that much punching actually it was more about wrestling someone down and getting them to say getting them to say sorry yeah headlocks it's all about headlocks isn't it so essentially you win the match by getting someone flat on the ground, but to do that, you have to make his knuckles have to be broken, his face, you know, maybe

his eyes so swollen that he can't actually see.

And as Dominic says, that might take, well, as it does in this case, it takes, what, two hours, two and a half hours?

Yeah, you have to make him incapable, basically.

And he has to be able to make it to the scratch mark himself, not carried.

There was a terrible case of manslaughter where a man was carried to the scratch by his seconds, where he was basically beaten to death.

The thing is, though, you've got to just remember this.

These fights are not as horrible and violent as they might sound because the new Queensbury Rules ring was

in certain ways more violent because you had the 10-second rule on a knockout.

So fighters were looking to hit your head so hard that your brain would hit your skull skull and cause concussion.

That's what a KO is.

And all the great fighters who followed Heenan and Sayers were KO specialists.

And in a 10-second count over a three-minute round, there was nowhere to hide.

I think it was Ali who said, you know,

you can run, but you can't hide.

In the old ring, if you were getting tired or you were hurt, you would just go down on a knee, pretend you'd been hit.

But in the modern ring, you just had to keep going until such time as the three minutes were up you also make the point don't you the difference between this fight let's say the says hean fight and a modern fight that because they're not wearing gloves

they are hurting their hands every time they land a punch which counterintuitively to me because i think of bare knuckle boxing with kind of with horror but actually the punches are much

that they're not exactly pulling their punches well you are if you've if your knuckles are bleeding Well, this is the point that your punch is perhaps not carrying the force.

I mean, you've already made this point, Rob, that it's not carrying the force that it would in the modern ring, is that right?

Yeah, that's what I've not seen a bare knuckle fight, and I don't want to.

But I've read about this.

Apparently, the old PR prize ring punch was very direct and very straight.

It couldn't hit you from the side because then you would probably break some fingers.

So

it was a fib, it was short and sharp and in the face or in the eyes.

A jab.

It was a jab rather than a knockout swing.

A swing really could break your hand.

So

I'm sure that by this point, listeners will be dying to know who wins.

Well,

it's not clear.

That's the problem.

We go 42 rounds more or less in the manner we've been discussing.

There's two big things happen in the 42 rounds.

The first thing is Sayers loses the use of his right arm.

He thinks it's broken, the crowd thinks it's broken, it turns out not to be broken, but it's certainly out of action.

So we've got to imagine Sayas now holding the arm across his chest and basically keeping out of Heenan's grab and trying to jab him in the eye.

By round 37, the second thing happens.

Heenan by now is pretty much blinded by the jabbing and he grabs Sayas, he grabs him and and pulls him to the ropes where he wraps his rope around his neck.

And basically,

195 pounds leans on the rope which is on the neck.

Now, believe it or not, this is actually unlawful according to London rules.

I was wondering.

You're not allowed to murder your opponent in the ring.

And it's at this point that the crowd

surge into the ring, and basically the fight stops.

There are rumors that also at this point, Morrissey, who you remember is the man who stopped Heenan in New York, Morrissey jumps in and cuts the ropes.

So that's not going to happen again.

This chaos in the ring.

The police finally move in to stop murder

and both fighters basically leg it across the field.

But it's amazing they're in a condition to leg it.

I was about to say one man's got no arm.

The other man is blind.

The other one's just been strangled by a rope.

They're presumably dripping with ruby and exhausted.

Yes, ruby everywhere.

Well, Heenan has to be led by the hand as he legs it across the field because he can't really see.

And Sayas is

actually Sayers in decent condition apart from his arm, which is swelling alarmingly.

They hop it back to London.

Heenan is put to bed for two days,

but not R.

Tom.

R.

Tom's up the next morning at owen swifts asking for his money because he thinks he's won it on what basis does he think he's won it because he's just been strangled whipped by a rope disqualification disqualification for the americans surely tom it's a difficult one isn't it i mean you're fighting someone who's just one wandering around the ring like a zombie can't see um and you're peppering him until he finally grabs you.

I mean, the whole thing is a tortured farce.

And in real terms, it's effectively the end of the prize ring am i not right in saying that for the press on both sides of the atlantic they say and well like and i'm quoting from your chapter sports writers on both sides of the atlantic were already busy turning a nasty case of common assault into a heroic draw between two great sporting nations so there's obviously been a lot of national pride writing on this and basically both papers on both sides of the atlantic are happy to say what a tremendous occasion this was reflects greatly uh to uh you know redounds to the credit of both great anglo-saxon nations.

Hurrah for Britain and America.

And they're both equally, they're both champions.

Is that basically the long and short of it?

Yeah, absolutely.

That's right.

They started the fight.

The press started the fight.

It's in the London and New York press once a week for a whole year before it takes place.

And then it's never out of the press afterwards.

And the whole point is

both men get a replica belt.

Both men get a reception at the Alhambra Theatre in London, where they walk round the stage arm in arm.

Heenan having to stoop a little for his diminutive opponent.

With his white cane.

Yes.

And these awful, sickly speeches are made on behalf of two proud fighting nations.

And what about the bettors?

I mean,

how's that divvied up?

Well,

we don't know about the betting, Tom, because it's so unofficial.

But the point about boxing, because there's only two men, the odds are always short.

So you're not going to get massive returns.

It was two to one when they started.

It was seven to four the day before.

It was two to one on the day.

We don't know about that.

They might have even bet against themselves.

We never know these things.

Right.

The stake money was what they were both wanting.

And I have to confess, I don't actually know what happened to that.

Before we talk about what it all means, the two men themselves, they are forever, I mean, neither of them live very long after the fight, do they?

They are both celebrities and they're linked in the popular imagination, aren't they?

They're sort of seen as brothers in arms.

Tom

has a succession of kind of benefits and basically pantomime clown appearances at which Heenan will sometimes put in a kind of

you know, he'll turn up as a sort of special guest star.

That's a long tradition, isn't it?

Frank Bruno as Widow Twankie, or whenever he was playing in the 90s.

All these men knew about tights and makeup, there's no doubt about it.

And the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton was London's biggest and Dickens's favourite.

Dickens says going to the Britannia is like going to an Italian opera.

Nothing interesting happening on the stage.

It's all off the stage where it's happening.

And Tom becomes a fixture at the Britannia with his two mules, Barney and Pete.

He's in loads of pantomimes.

I mean, his opponent, Heenan, married the great star, American star,

a kind of 19th century Barbara Streisland, Ada Mencken.

He married her.

She was a real big theatre star, whereas Tom comes from a much different tradition.

The nearest he ever got to a woman and the theater was when his wife hit him in the face outside the Britannia.

So they're two very different men, but they both are theatrical stars.

They're ornaments to to the theatre tom goes on the stage and heenan has two more fights and which he loses the fight with tom is considered a draw so poor old heenan never actually manages to win one um they both die um aged 38 39 off tb

i don't think their lifestyles were you know particularly wonderful.

Tom got £3,000 actually raised by by Lloyds and the Houses of Parliament.

So as a true English hero, he's going to be all right for money.

But he took all that money and put it into a travelling circus

in the US.

But he took a very bad year to do it.

He didn't 1862.

So he couldn't travel around while civil war was raging.

He's in Heenan's Corner in 1863.

in Heenan's fight with Tom King, which was probably a cross.

By 1864, he's a diabetic and an alcoholic, living with his sister in Camden.

And he dies in November 1865

in Camden High Street off TB.

And is he remembered?

I mean,

is his death greeted with mourning and parades?

That's a massive funeral.

Massive funeral, isn't there, Rob?

Yes.

I mean, the fight of the century was in 1860.

1865, it's called the funeral of the year.

Something between...

They reckon about 10,000 people followed the casket.

Is his dog there?

Lion?

Yes, Lion the dog.

I am Tom Sayer's dog.

Whose dog are you?

It's an invitation to fight, really, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is.

His dog is there, and his pony, and his Phaeton.

And what about his mules?

You just threw that out.

Where are these mules come from?

And what about the bird man?

I think they put the bird man in a box.

The mules were

not at the funeral, although he did have 16 horses,

but they were all sold at auction after the funeral.

So Lyon went for £30 to a North London publican.

Tom Cribb's belt, which had been presented to Tom at his...

So Tom Cribb is the great...

I mean, he's the archetype of a British boxer, isn't he?

We could do a whole programme on Cribb.

Cribb is John Bull.

And John Bull is William Cobbett.

And William Cobbett is Tom Cribb.

I mean, they are the great figures of the Napoleonic period.

Well, Tom's got his belt, his silver belt.

They sell that for £55.10.

Tom's mule goes for £13

and his mare, a Duncob, for £23.

That's after the funeral.

There's a fight at Highgate Cemetery Gates when it seemed that the 10,000 people weren't all going to be allowed in at once.

But apparently, once the fight was over, it was very, very

seemly and quite respectable.

Apparently, his wife went.

Nat Langham, his victor of 1853, he was there dressed in a red Garibaldi shirt.

And of course, wonderfully, the spectator called the whole thing disgusting.

This is the sport of harpies and capitalists.

Oh, my word.

Well, I mean, you could say it's maybe not wrong.

And what about Heenan?

Heenan died

1873 in Wyoming.

Yeah.

And again, presumably, there's been a lot of hard drinking, a lot of brawling.

He hasn't led the healthiest and most salubrious of lives.

Mind you, a lot of people die of TP in the 19th century.

It's the great killer, in particular, I mean, you know, of writers, poets, and it seems, fighters.

So I guess the question is, what does it mean?

So what does all this, as a historian, you've written lots about working class life and about Englishness and all these kinds of things.

What does this tell us?

Because the chapter in which you, in the book, in which you discuss it, is called simply bottom

Englishmen had bottom and par excellence had bottom so what do you mean by that well what they meant by it was the ability to give and take particularly take punishment so you compare it to um to the square that the British Army forms when being attacked by cavalry so famously this happens at the battle of waterloo and the boxer you say is often compared to the british soldier in a square i think what it means

Tom, boxing, like all sports, goes very deep into our consciousness, into our imagination, into the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

And

this might be described as the plebeian version of national history.

It's the plebeian version of honour, the honour fight.

that when it comes to it, the English can give an account of themselves.

And it spreads everywhere, obviously, and not surprisingly.

It seeps into the army and its sense of itself.

Not the cavalry, note, which is a very different kind of fighting, but the regiments of the line.

I don't know how much military history you know, but the regiments of the line had only one job really, and that was to walk forward into hell, really.

And when they decided to stop and unfurl their colours and fire, all they could show really was stoicism or bottom.

Bottoms are really a plebeian form of stoicism.

And the square was an example of that.

The British Wellington considered it a marvelous tactic to form a square where you could fire continuously at those around you.

Unfortunately, enemies loved the British square because they just had a red square to pour everything they could into it.

There's one meaning for you, Dom.

One meaning.

But what I also found fascinating reading your chapter was that even as

the boxer is being equated with John Bull, with the British Square, with a particular idea of Englishness,

there are also figures who are more ambivalent who are also being enshrined as gentlemen.

So you mentioned Daniel Mendoza with his long hair, who gets, you know, tossed around.

He's Jewish.

And there's

a former slave, a black American, Bill Richmond, who likewise is hailed as a gentleman for his feats in the ring.

I mean, does being a great boxer give you a kind of honorary status as a British gentleman if you are not a kind of English yeoman?

Is that what's going on?

Something like that.

I think boxing is a fraternity.

I think it is now, and it was then.

I think there's a respect.

at

pride

and each other's strength.

I mean, boxers, of course talk each other down before a fight but very rarely after one so as with this one as with this one um you know wellington referred to uh his troops uh as morbid and taciturn

and it was famous that the british infantry were quiet they would stay quiet and whereas the french would go in with all that ilan and they were famous for shouting and screaming in their attack no less brave But they were completely different styles.

And it would seem that Mendoza and Richmond and Molyneux, who was a former black American slave, were hugely popular in this country for what they were.

Richmond was a page boy at George IV's coronation.

Him and Cribb were minders on the door.

They were bouncers on the door of a coronation, dressed as page boys.

There was a kind of fraternity.

Now, of course, I'm not saying there wasn't racism.

Of course, there was racism, which was directed at them, but never to their face for obvious reasons.

Now, I know we're going to run out of time, and Tom wants to ask about

Tom mentioned the Marquis of Queensbury, but just one quick last thing before we get onto that.

The political meaning of all this, because your book is about sport and liberty, and you have a line in this chapter.

Only Tories could be true sportsmen.

Only Tories had bottom.

Is this a kind of Tory England?

Kind of traditional, resistant to being improved, resistant to reform?

You know, this is boxing has been criticized by what you might call do-gooders, and there's a sort of sense of it.

People who like it seem to have this sense of it, as you said, being a kind of an underground continuity of history, a sense of tradition, all that kind of stuff.

What this has reminded me of is Jacko Macacco.

The fighting monkey.

The fighting monkey, who likewise was covered in ruby.

Yeah.

And that also, people were upset about the idea of animals pulverizing each other to death.

But again, the same thing about do-gooders trying to clean it up.

Humanity dick, Tom, as you may remember,

trying to stamp it out.

So Rob, that line that you have about this being kind of Toryism, is that a serious point?

Yeah, it is a serious point.

The trouble with the point, although it's serious, is we never really know what Toryism is because it's by definition

non-ideological, not up for definition.

and endlessly adapting to the status quo.

Only in that sense do we know what it is at any one time.

But given what happened after, let's say after Crib, there was a huge movement in England to civilize the people.

And that movement was broadly speaking liberal, broadly speaking metropolitan, broadly speaking condescending to people who were considered rough,

stupid and moronic.

Now Toryism took a position against that as time went by.

It decided it wasn't that kind of politics, it was another kind of politics.

So as you know from the book we get examples of this civilization process all through the century, particularly to do with popular fairs, customs, hunting

and so on.

But boxing in particular managed to wriggle its way through these things, whereas other sports like bull running or bull baiting didn't.

Tourism took these things up retrospectively.

It always works retrospectively about belonging, about what the things that matter to you are the things that are personal.

The things that count are the things that are around the corner and easy to hand.

And one thing you can say about prize fighting was it was very easy to hand.

Well, very easy to two hands.

Yeah, very good.

Everybody did it.

So on the topic of kind of taming boxing.

Yes.

Famously, London rules is supplanted by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.

And the Marquis of Queensbury, as his name suggests, is an aristocrat.

This is the same Marquess of Queensbury, who we have already mentioned in our episodes on Oscar Wilde, who harries Wilde through the courts and ultimately gets him into prison.

But he introduces essentially the form of boxing that nowadays governs the sport.

How does that happen?

And again, is there a kind of

a broader lesson to learn from that?

Because there is a process, isn't there, throughout the Victorian period of the aristocracy drawing up rules and codifying what had previously been kind of plebeian ways of entertaining themselves.

What happens with the new rules, the Queensbury rules, emanate out of Cambridge University where young gentlemen spar and there's a kind of fashion for sparring.

So Byron does it doesn't he?

Byron does it.

Hazlitt does it.

All kinds of chaps do this.

And so does the Marquess of Queensbury.

And the point about sparring is, as Hazlitt said, it's not boxing.

It's a representation of boxing.

And what's happening at Cambridge is that they swap babe knuckles for gloves.

They introduce fixed rounds, weights.

They introduce, in the end, medical and health controls.

It's boxing.

they believe is going to be safer and better but of course it in a sense it is in the hands of young Cambridge undergraduate, but not in the hands of the kind of fast, heavy professional fighters that emerge in the 20th century.

So, Queensbury rules is civilizing, but in a funny way, it's even more violent in what I've called the modern American era of people like John L.

Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, and others.

Okay, well, Rob, this has been absolutely fascinating.

I mean, we could talk about this for ages.

You've got so many great characters, Mendoza, obviously, the Jewish boxer, Molynude, Tom Cribb.

There's actually so much to unpick here.

And for people who are really interested in this, your book is This Sporting Life, Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 to 1960.

And I cannot recommend it too highly.

It is a wonderful, wonderful read.

So thank you so much, Rob, for joining us on the Rest is History.

I know you listen to the podcast, don't you?

So

that is, for us, that is, it's a great honor.

to have you not just uh not just appearing on it, but listening to it voluntarily.

We all love it in our family.

You actually tell me things.

It's quite alarming, really, every time.

Right.

Well, that's very good news.

So, Tom, on that bombshell,

we will.

Ding, ding.

Yeah, ding, ding.

Ding, ding.

Bye, everybody.

See you guys.

Thanks so much, Rob.

And bye, everybody.