Henry Cooper (3 page)

After Broughton, the champions come and go, some of them more or less reputable than others, but clearly prizefighting is soon becoming a very seamy business indeed. Thrown fights, crooked betting, more deaths and severe injuries all combine to focus the attention of the law upon it very closely indeed and the organization of boxing matches develops into an art itself and coaching inns, on well-known roads and turnpikes, become a favoured venue. Advertising is largely by word of mouth or covertly distributed handbills. Boxing thrived as the worst-kept secret in Britain.

Promoters and matchmakers, many of them connected with the turf, ensure that prizefighting remains firmly in the gutter where Slack put it. One of the most influential is Colonel Dennis O’Kelly, whose other claim to sporting immortality is that he is the owner of one of the greatest racehorses of all time –
Eclipse
. O’Kelly is responsible for the careers of several celebrated Irish fighters who dominate the sport from 1770 until a new crop of English fighters arrive upon the scene, of whom the most well known is Tom Tackling, who fights, for reasons best known to himself, as Tom Johnson.

But the first successor to Broughton of any historical
importance is Daniel Mendoza, ‘The Light of Israel’. Born of Spanish Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Aldgate in the East End of London, Mendoza is a small man, 5ft 7in, and he swiftly rises up the rankings, cannily promoting his own fights and beating a succession of proven opponents. One in particular, a young toff by the name of Richard Humphries, becomes a particular bugbear; the pair fight three times, and Humphries wins the first bout, reporting to his (unnamed) sponsor: ‘Sir, I have done the Jew and am in good health.’

Mendoza battles on, clearly fighting against rather more than mere opponents – he wins both times against Humphries at their subsequent rematches – before becoming acknowledged champion of England in 1792. He himself is toppled three years later by one ‘Gentleman John’ Jackson, who has clearly read the rules and spotted a gap in them, for his tactic is simple: he grabs Mendoza, perfectly legally, by his luxuriant locks with one hand and hammers him in the face with the other until he drops, after 11 minutes. If anything, Mendoza is an even more technically skilled fighter than Broughton had been but against such exploitation of Broughton’s clearly rather naive rules, he stands little chance. But by his cleverness, even in the teeth of the establishment opposition, Mendoza succeeds in giving prizefighting a better name than anyone in 50 years.

In 1814, Jackson, who wisely retires after only a handful of fights, forms the Pugilistic Club, operated from his academy at No 13 Bond Street, London, which attempts to exert some discipline upon boxing. At one level it is successful, and counts among its members both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence, but it fails to achieve its purpose. It breaks up in 1825.

Despite the opposition of the law there is still a huge amount of popular support for boxing. It is, along with horse racing, basically the national spectator sport, and similar types of crowds follow both activities. Interestingly, although duelling is legal, as a matter of honour between, it is assumed, two gentlemen who are apparently quite prepared (and allowed) to kill each other, prizefighting is not. But by the nineteenth century, the prizefighters are men of truly national importance and enthusiasm for the ‘noble art’ cuts right through society, from the royal family downwards. The patronage of rich men is naturally important to the activity and retired boxers are often to be seen in the employ of their aristocratic supporters and sponsors, as bodyguards, messengers and, frequently,
leg-breakers
. But the prize ring also produces figures of astonishing social import. One (of whom much more later) is John Gully, briefly champion of England, who retires from the ring in 1808 and becomes the Member of Parliament for Pontefract. As a colliery boss, Gully becomes a wealthy man and highly successful racehorse owner. A Liberal, naturally.

More deaths in the ring, caused mainly by the custom of seconds being allowed to physically carry their man into the centre of the square, only to see him immediately flattened, cause a generally agreed revision to Broughton’s original rules in 1838. The square yard is replaced by a simple line scratched in the soil or chalked in the centre of the ring, so that if a fighter cannot reach it unaided – ‘come up to scratch’ – he is declared beaten.

So the first half of the nineteenth century, building on the work of Mendoza, has also seen a slight improvement in
professional standards over the second half of the eighteenth. Perhaps it is remarkable that the sport survived the eighteenth century at all given the philosophical tenets of that period, which culminated in the intellectual glories of the Enlightenment; but there was conflict in plenty as well, from the American Revolution, as well as the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, so there was no shortage of martial ardour, and violent and risky sports generally prosper in the wake of military conflicts.

The early nineteenth-century champions, men such as Henry ‘Hen’ Pierce ‘the Game Chicken’, John Gully and the three Toms – Cribb, Spring and Cannon – are feted wherever they appear; they enjoy total social mobility in a much more rigidly stratified era than ours. At the coronation of George IV in 1821, no fewer than 18 prizefighters are hired to keep order, more specifically to bar the entry of his estranged and unhygienic wife, Caroline of Brunswick, who is banned from the occasion, which must have been a distressing encounter for her. Indeed, 19 days after that, she died, un-mourned by George, who loathed her, but rather missed by the mob in front of whom she liked to cavort. A year before that, the Irish fighter Daniel Donnelly was knighted at the instigation of George IV when he was still the Prince of Wales. Donnelly was in fact the first boxing knight and would remain so for over 180 years.

The late Georgian, Regency and early Victorian periods produce further notabilities as well as the odd bad boy. Ben Caunt, twice champion, is apparently a national treasure, whereas William Abednigo Thompson – ‘Bad Bold Bendigo’ – is in prison 28 times, mainly for being drunk and disorderly. Thompson is one of a trio of triplets born to
a quite extraordinary harridan, who also has 18 other children. It is she who teaches him to box (she is recorded as having fought as a prizefighter – against male opponents – herself) and launches his career. The rivalry between Caunt and Thompson rather serves to define this era of the prize ring; the two men meet each other for the last time in 1845. The fight lasts 93 rounds, with a time elapsed of two hours and ten minutes. Thompson wins the encounter under controversial circumstances and retires. Later, he forswears drink to become an evangelistic preacher. There is a persistent story that the thirteen-ton bell in the clocktower of the Houses of Parliament is named ‘Big Ben’ in honour of Caunt, but research suggests that it was actually Sir Benjamin Hall, a particularly fat government minister, who was the inspiration for the name.

The popularity of the senior exponents of prizefighting, against the illegality of what made them so famous, put the authorities in something of a quandary. It is a matter of record that very few of the top drawer of the English ring ever went to prison – at least, not for fighting – although several lesser fighters were scooped up by magistrates, rather as a gesture than anything else. Anyone who arrested the national champion for assault was liable to have a riot on their hands very quickly, and the magistrates realized that, so the most popular prizefighters were tolerated by the law purely on sufferance. Their popularity (and their wealthy patrons) granted them effective immunity from the law. It was a bizarre situation.

But the high public regard in which these prizefighters are held in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is of itself not paradoxical, for they represent something that is quite
inaccessible to the general public, particularly after the demise of duelling. These men fight for their living, a career that puts them firmly on the margins of the law, and thus they are by definition outsiders, and the general public rather likes outsiders, particularly when they exhibit characteristics away from their work that are quite removed from what they do professionally. This contrast is to be seen throughout the evolution of the sport; the general popularity of fighters such as James Broughton, Ben Caunt, John Gully, Tom Cribb, Max Schmeling, Joe Louis and indeed Henry Cooper has as much to do with their work outside the ring as it does with their efforts within it. They are themselves men of apparent but pleasing contradictions; they seem to have a
self-determination
denied to most of us and we like, admire and even envy them for that. That public response to certain boxers remains unchanged. Others, we find on closer inspection to be flawed and we quickly turn away from them.

But aside from all that, a subject to which we can revert, another prizefighter is now coming up fast: he is Tom Sayers. He challenges for the championship of England in June 1857, the year our story begins…

1
857 was a busy and distressing year for London, indeed the whole country, for it was the year of the Great Indian Mutiny, which had swept through the north of the subcontinent with unimagined ferocity, and was, in the late autumn and early winter, suppressed with equal brutality. The mutiny was the single dominant event of the period, perhaps the most savage military encounter of the imperial epoch.

The London of 1857 would, to a twenty-first century time traveller, be physically recognizable, but rather strange. The Irish peer Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister and while he was no particular democrat, he was, despite the disaster of the mutiny, popular (except with the Queen) and ruled the empire not from No 10 Downing Street, which he regarded with disdain, but rather from his own fine town
house in Piccadilly, far superior, and from where he could admire the streetwalkers, or from his grand country estate in Hertfordshire, Brocket Hall. Among his leisure interests (mainly carnal, it must be said), he was a strong supporter and defender of prizefighting.

On 16 June of that year, Tom Sayers, a compact but sturdy bricklayer from Sussex, challenged William Perry, ‘The Tipton Slasher’, for the English prizefighting championship title. The fight took place – eventually, after several hurried relocations – on the Isle of Grain, in Kent, and Sayers won it. It was a famous encounter, lasting ten rounds. Wince when you realize that the time elapsed was one hour and forty-two minutes. At 5ft 8in, Sayers gave away (four inches) in height and no fewer than 401bs in weight to his opponent. Technically, he was not actually champion yet; he still had to beat Tom Paddock, who had been the previous title-holder, but who had been too ill to fight before. Unsurprisingly, Sayers was to beat him, too.

Historic encounters though they were, great fights indeed, they were to be eclipsed by the dire news from India, which took six weeks to arrive, that ten days after Sayer’s victory over Perry, the massacre at Cawnpore had taken place. No event in nineteenth-century history, not even the previous disaster at Balaklava (1854) nor the greater one to come at Isandlwhana (1879) made for a greater impact on Victorian English consciousness than Cawnpore. It was a seminal moment for the average Brit and rather served to set the tone, not only of public approval of the vengeance that would be wrought upon the mutineers but also the general tone of colonial military policy until the end of the century. It was events
such as this that made it clear that an aggressive spirit was perhaps no bad thing.

These matters may or may not have mattered much to William Cooper, 24, from Bishopstoke, Hampshire, as the East India Company Army recruitment drive heated up to unparalleled levels of intensity, for his mind was probably more focused on his fiancée, Bedana Keenen, a year younger than himself, who had moved, with her father Edward, a labourer, and her mother and sister (both named Bridget), from County Kildare, probably in the wake of the series of potato famines that had swept through Ireland a decade before the mutiny in India. They might well, like so many others, have chosen America, but had they done so (they could almost certainly not afford the passage) this book would not have been written.

A cooper, of course, is a barrel-maker, but William Cooper was a farm labourer. In 1857 there was little difference between the Hampshire countryside where he had been born and raised and that of Essex, where, by the time of his marriage to Bedana on 6 September 1857, he lived and worked. The newly married couple settled in a house (which may possibly have then been a tied cottage) where they had already been living together, at 1 North Street, in the parish of West Ham, near Plaistow. Bedana’s mother, Bridget Keenen, moved in too, which rather suggests that she was a widow by now. Bridget senior appears to have given birth to Bedana quite late, at the age of 46, as she gives her age in the 1861 census as 72, against Bedana’s 26. A Catherine Tatum, 50, also from Ireland, who lists her occupation as laundress, is staying with them as a visitor.

William’s new mother-in-law would have been old
enough to witness that extraordinary event in Irish sporting history, the Donnelly-Cooper prizefight, which had taken place, allegedly in front of 20,000 spectators, in the year of the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. The two men fought at the Curragh, just outside Dublin, and it was an encounter that both passed into legend and was immortalized in song. It is entirely possible that a young Palmerston was present.

In April 1860, three years after William Cooper’s marriage, the English version of the prizefight of the century took place at Farnborough, on the far side of Hampshire from William’s birthplace. It was between Tom Sayers and an American, John C. Heenan of California. Heenan was the ‘US champion’. Although the fight was quite illegal, that little detail failed to prevent both Palmerston, current Prime Minister and also ex-local MP, as well as Charles Dickens and William Thackeray from turning up to watch, and neither did it prevent special trains being laid on to transport the avid punters to the match, to a resigned acceptance by the forces of law and order.

In truth, it was a justifiable nervousness on the part of the authorities concerning the size and nature of the crowds who would attend these fights that really governed the attitude of the authorities to them. After all, there had been a serious risk of massive and violent civil disobedience since the 1848 Chartist riots. Boxing, as a violent sport, was considered to be a serious risk to law and order, given that the spectators, frequently drunk and energized by what they had seen, might decide to extend the spirit of the conflict out into the wider countryside. There had emerged an unwritten understanding, though, that prizefighting was an undesirable (but probably unavoidable) social necessity
since the abolition of bear-baiting in 1803 and cock-fighting in 1849. Any activity that drew large numbers of unruly spectators to a given place was considered to be of dubious social value, and this state of affairs would last several decades. But given the interest shown in it by the upper echelons of society, it made strict enforcement of boxing’s illegal status quite difficult; it was
de facto
protected, but remained firmly in the twilight.

But, illegal or not, this fight was an epic; after 2 hours and 20 minutes and totalling 42 rounds, the last five of which were total chaos, the result was a declared draw as the two contestants, who as a result of this encounter later became the best of friends, took to their heels. The unseemly riot that followed at least allowed the Prime Minister and his cronies to beat a dignified retreat.

The fight was hardly a secret (every major paper including the
New York Times
had a reporter present) and questions were asked in the House, which triggered a debate later on, in 1862 in the Lords. Palmerston, who carried the instincts of the Regency sporting gent well into the high Victorian period, argued strongly against Lord Lovaine, who argued, as a Whig would (most still do) that the sport was barbaric. A ‘motion of censure’ was passed, which, while it was neither one thing nor another, did not help the cause of prizefighting. In truth, it was a trivial matter by comparison with the demands placed upon parliament in the field of foreign affairs – there was by now a civil war in America, after all.

The great campaign to rebuild London’s dire and unhealthy drainage system started in the 1860s and the requirements for
labour were huge. This enterprise was one of the biggest public works programmes of the era and it went hand in hand with great swathes of public housing for the poor, led by the American philanthropist George Peabody and the English heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts. By 1864, we find that William Cooper has left the land and is now applying his skills working as a digger on one of Joseph Bazalguette’s great enterprises, the Abbey Mills pumping station in West Ham. His life has moved on and, sadly, Bedana appears to have died, as his wife is now named as Bridget (also née Keenen), whom we might assume to be Bedana’s sister. Interestingly, her age is given as the same as Bedanas would have been, so the two were probably twins, a characteristic that often runs in families and would certainly run in this one.

As William changed his job, so he changed his address, for by the time his third child (and second son), George, is born on 1 August 1864, the growing family (a daughter, Harriet, had arrived in 1862) are to be found at 5 Brooks Road, West Ham, which must have been rather handy for William’s work. The new birth is registered on 9 September and we can see from the entry on the certificate that, alas, Bridget is illiterate, for she signs her name with a simple X.

But unlettered or not, Bridget is a true communicator. With her from Ireland she has brought her family’s stories and songs, and one in particular is to have an important influence on the family’s later life. It is the epic account of the Daniel Donnelly fight from all those years before and handed down in the oral tradition; it was to become a favourite of little George’s, and thus rather important to this book. It is certainly not great verse – we will hear far worse before this book is finished, I assure you – but it is evocative:

One important spin-off of the Sayers/Heenan encounter was that amateur boxers started to consider their position. The Corinthian tradition, as exemplified by men like Palmerston, was alive and well (if creaking, slightly) and living within the Amateur Athletic Club (AAC), a new organization whose members viewed with dismay the increasing socio-legal pressure to impose an absolute ban on boxing in all its forms, amateur or professional.

A founder member of the AAC was John Graham Chambers, not long down from Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had befriended John Sholto Douglas, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry. Chambers determined that a set of rules that might serve to legitimize boxing was now mandatory, as the pressure mounting on the sport was huge, and those who were proponents of it were justifiably nervous.

In 1865, Chambers set to work. What he came up with was in effect the invention of twentieth-century boxing: a sport we would recognize now. The Chambers rules, which
passed into history as the Queensberry Rules (their noble sponsor) are relatively simple. There are 12 of them:

These rules impose upon boxing a code that puts it firmly within a type of moral framework that is both humane and perhaps even legally defensible. They mark a turning point as the sport finally starts to put its house in order. There can be little doubt that their mere existence ensured the survival of the sport in any form. The most important aspect of them was their clear intention in attempting to ensure that the art of pugilism would be allowed to dominate the ring. A secondary effect was that the sport of wrestling could now develop on its own. Whether we should be particularly grateful to Chambers and Queensberry for that is quite another question.

There was another Chambers involved in drafting these rules. He was Arthur Chambers (no relation) a professional boxer and a friend of Queensberry’s. The pair had toured America together shortly after the Civil War. It is likely that his contribution was to add to and modify the original
proposals to include several new elements, which result in an activity that is clearly recognizable today; indeed, a fight fought under these regulations would still be perfectly legal. I list them on the following pages, as it is interesting to note the effect of the input of a professional boxer.

The rules were finally published by a committee of the Pugilist’s Benevolent Association in 1866.