December 7, 2009

Elizabeth Stokes, Lady Bare-Knuckles

It wasn't only men who fought for money In Georgian London, the ladies liked a shot at the title too. Of course, women have fought in staged competitions since ancient times, but lady bare-knuckle fighters became very popular in London in the early 18thC. I imagine this was in no small part due to the rise of boxing as a spectator sport, and the high probability of seeing two athletic women stripped to the waist.

The most famous of all the early lady fighters is Elizabeth Stokes. Born Elizabeth Wilkinson, date unknown, by 1722, she was advertising in the newspapers of her upcoming fights and that same year she met Hannah Hyfield, 'the Newgate Market basket-woman' for a prize of 3 guineas. They fought with half a crown in each of their fists, and the first to drop a coin lost. Elizabeth won, despite 'the good thumping' Hannah had promised her in the paper. From then on, she began fighting in James Figg's venue, the 'Boarded-House' in Marylebone, or his Amphitheatre 'where cocks and bulls and Irish women fight' as a contemporary poem went (although as far as I know, Stokes was born and bred a Londoner). By 1728, she had married Figg's rival, James Stokes, who fought as the Citizen of London, and had been beaten by Figg on at least one occasion. From then on, she fought at Stokes's own Amphitheatre, near Sadler's Wells. The following advertisement appeared in the Weekly Journal on the 1st of October 1726:

At Mr. STOKES’s Amphitheatre,

in Islington Road, near Sadler’s Wells, on Monday next, being the 3d of October, will be perform’d a trial of skill by the following Championesses. Whereas I Mary Welch, from the Kingdom of Ireland, being taught, and knowing the noble science of defence, and thought to be the only female of this kind in Europe, understanding there is one in this Kingdom, who has exercised on the publick stage several times, which is Mrs. Stokes, who is stiled the famous Championess of England; I do hereby invite her to meet me, and exercise the usual weapons practis’d on the stage, at her own amphitheatre, doubting not, but to let her and the worthy spectators see, that my judgment and courage is beyond hers. I Elizabeth Stokes, of the famous City of London, being well known by the name of the Invincible City Championess for my abilities and judgment in the abovesaid science; having never engaged with any of my own sex but I always came off with victory and applause, shall make no apology for accepting the challenge of this Irish Heroine, not doubting but to maintain the reputation I have hitherto establish’d, and shew my country, that the contest of it’s honour, is not ill entrusted in the present battle with their Championess, Elizabeth Stokes.
Note, The doors will be open’d at two, and the Championesses mount at four.
N.B. They fight in close jackets, short petticoats, coming just below the knee, Holland drawers, white stockings, and pumps.

It is interesting and significant that the clothing of the combatants is described (nobody cares what the men wore), and sounds very practical and modest. Low and extremely rough prize fights were fought for gin, new clothes, men and such all over the City. The women 'tied up their hair and stripped to the waist'. Many of these fights were between street prostitutes and added a little to their income, or perhaps a lot, depending on how many spectators and how successful they were. Elizabeth Stokes maintained the 'half-crown rule' in her fights, which is quite clever, as it stops scratching and gouging, and puts a time limit on the fight. The rougher matches were without rules and it was thought particularly effective to punch and scratch an opponent on the face and breasts. Once again, this rough boxing was popular with the Irish, both as fighters and as spectators and as it was fought on such a low level, few records remain.

In contrast, Elizabeth Stokes's career was well-publicized. In 1728, the Daily Post carried the following:

At Mr Stokes's Amphitheatre in Islington Road, this present Monday, being the 7th of October, will be a complete Boxing Match, by the two following Championesses: Whereas I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass driver, well-known for my abilities in my own defence, whenever it happened in my way, having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing, for 10 pounds; fair rise and fall...I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London, have not fought this way since I fought the famous Boxing Woman of Billingsgate 29 minutes and gained a complete victory....but as the famous ass-woman of Stowe Newington dares me to fight her for the 10 pounds, I do assure her I shall not tail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows I shall present her with will be more difficult to digest than any she ever gave her asses.

N.B Attendance will be given at one, and the encounter is to begin at four precisely. There will be the diversion of cudgel playing as usual.

The cudgel display was not only a diversion: Elizabeth Stokes was also known to fight with weapons, including the short sword and the cudgel, and apparently she was very skilled. It should be noted that although Stokes and her husband took on other couples in mixed fights, men and woman never fought each other. Stokes is perhaps the most famous female fighter of the Georgian period, but there were others, including the famous 'Bruising Peg' who was of Amazonian proportions and quite terrifying (also very rough), and in 1795 two famous male boxers Mendoza and 'Gentleman Jackson' acted as seconds in a fight between Mrs Mary Ann Fielding and a 'Jewess of Wentworth Street'. The fight lasted 80 minutes and there were over 70 knockdowns between them for a prize of 11 guineas.

Bare-knuckle fighting for women continued into the 19thC, drawing an ever-rougher crowd. Fights were often staged at dawn before everyone went to work, or as they were coming home. An exception was 'The Boxing Baroness' Lady Barrymore, who used boxing to keep fit and amuse her sport-mad husband in the early 1820s. The Victorian period drove bare-knuckle fighting underground, and in 1867, the Marquess of Queensberry made boxing a sport for gentlemen.

(The illustration used here is a bit of fun. It's completely spurious.)

December 3, 2009

James Figg, Father of British Boxing

James Figg was born to a poor farming family in Thame, Oxfordshire in 1684 (or 1695, depending on which source you read). He was the youngest of seven children and grew up a tough little nut, going to local fairs and challenging the prize fighters in the booths there. He based himself at the Greyhound Inn in Cornmarket in Thame, where he could be challenged, and gave self-defence lessons. By the time he was a grown man he was 6 feet tall and around 185lbs, fit and fast, and travelled to fairs throughout the Midlands where he challenged all-comers from noon until sundown. He taught himself to fight with a short-sword, a staff and a club, and staged exhibitions of his skill at the fairs (very clever, as it avoided taking on an opponent for at least part of his day).

Gambling was an enormous part of bare-knuckle boxing (as it still is), and the Earl of Peterborough, a man who liked his sport and is gambling, happened to see Figg fight and offered to back him. Figg moved to London and set up home near Oxford Street. He opened his 'Amphitheatre' just north of Oxford Street, where he trained gentlemen in the 'art' of pugilism and self-defence. He also fought at Southwark Fair in his own booth, where he was known for taking on multiple opponents and beating them all. By 1720, he was openly acknowledged as London champion, and fought for money regularly, with the matches being advertised in the newspapers. There were three rounds in an organized prize-fight: the first with short-swords, the second with fists and the third with the staff (sometimes a club). There was considerable skill involved, and considerable money; it was said that sometimes as much as 3000l could be wagered on a single match. It was also pretty brutal, with the bare-knuckle fight allowing slapping, kicking, biting and gouging.

Sometime before 1723, Figg let his Amphitheatre to another boxing master and began to prize-fight on a regular basis at 'The Boarded House' behind Oxford Street, in Marylebone-Fields. It was not only men who fought there, but women and animals. Figg fought about once a month, and his opponents included Christopher Clarkson The Lancashire Soldier, Philip MacDonald The Dublin Carpenter, James Stokes Citizen of London (and husband of the famous lady-boxer Elizabeth Stokes). However, Figg's greatest opponent was Ned Sutton of Gravesend. Sutton was the only person Figg ever lost to, but he regained his title as champion on the next bout. In around 250 fights, Figg recorded only one defeat. His most talented pupil, Jack Broughton continued to run his school and was instrumental in setting the first rules of boxing in 1743.

James Figg was enormously famous during his own lifetime with many of the aristocracy attending both his school and his fights. He was a great popular hero as well, and a familiar sight around the streets of the West End. William Hogarth, who both painted his portrait and allegedly designed his trade card (in the gallery) declared him 'the master of the noble science of defence'. There was one opponent Figg could not defend himself against however, and in early December, 1734 at the end of an astonishing career, this notice appeared in the papers:

Last Saturday there was a Trial of Skill between the unconquered Hero, Death, on the one side and till then the unconquered Hero Mr James Figg, the famous Prize-Fighter and Master of the Noble Science of Defence on the other: The Battle was most obstinately fought on both sides, but at last the former obtained an Entire Victory and the latter tho' he was obliged to submit to a Superior Foe yet fearless and with Disdain he retired and that Evening expired at his house in Oxford Road.

Click here to download:

James_Figg_Father_of_British_B.zip (425 KB)

November 23, 2009

Slum Living: London's Rookeries-

In 1904, the last slum was cleared from central London in a fit of Edwardian sanitizing. Whilst the most famous rookeries were the Rats' Castle in St Giles (where Seven Dials still sits) and Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, this slum was a little closer to the heart of things: The Strand. At the end of my last post, I mentioned the redevelopment of the Strand slums, in which around four thousand people were displaced.

London has managed to retain much of its character over the centuries, although much of its fabric has been lost. It can be argued that the Victorians did more damage than the Great Fire, and the town planners (or village idiots, depending on your perspective) of the 1960s destroyed more than the Luftwaffe. The photographs in the gallery give an idea of what London was really like in the late 19th century. I have deliberately relied on photographs (with one exception), because I think the Victorians, Dickens included, did an enormous amount to create the modern stereotype of the London 'Rookeries', and I think it is useful to see how they sprang from the communal construction and courtyard living of medieval London. The idea that one could walk into a rookery by accident and not walk out alive was no doubt based upon the truth, but the fact is, these sinkhole slums existed right in the heart of London and every day people issued forth from them to work and trade with the rest of the city. Sometimes they were no more than a medieval courtyard or two that had survived the Fire and then become ever more down on its luck; sometimes they were vast warrens of streets (the Strand rookery stretched from Temple to Charing Cross).

The Victorian slums were extreme, but their roots began in the 18th century, when London began to grow at an unprecedented rate. Medieval buildings which had survived the fire were suddenly old-fashioned, and did not have all the new amenities, such as piped water. They were reliant upon the wells and pumps which were increasingly polluted by nearby cess-pits and the street-borne filth trickling through the gratings. (One excellent little snippet I discovered today: it was the done thing for men who were caught short to stand on the edge of the pavement and urinate into the road, rather than against a wall, which was the property of another and therefore, rude. The traffic was expected to ignore being splashed, although foreign diaries record Continental disgust at this 'low habit'.) Medieval and early modern buildings became cheap and were bought up by shrewd landlords for cheap lodgings, or as brothels. A prime example of this is Dyott House, which stood in Dyott Street near St Giles-in-the-Fields Church. An early Victorian account of the St Giles slum is very interesting, and the bare bones of how the people lived in his record are very unlikely to have changed much since the Georgian period. Henry Mayhew's writings cover the industries of the slums, the crime, the accommodation and the people, and they are very interesting.

On visiting a room in the garret, we saw a man, in mature years, making artificial flowers; he appeared to be very ingenious, and made several roses before us with marvelous rapidity. He had suspended along the ceiling bundles of dyed grasses of various hues, crimson, yellow, green, brown, and other colours to furnish cases of stuffed birds. He was a very intelligent man and a natural genius. He told us strong drink had brought him to this humble position in the garret...

Charles Dickens is one of the most famous authors to write about the London slums. I try to steer clear of quoting his fiction, but Sketches by Boz (1839), although three years beyond my period, is valuable as an account of how desperate things became under later population pressures:

Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three - fruit and 'sweet-stuff' manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a 'musician' in the front kitchen, and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one - filth everywhere - a gutter before the houses and a drain behind - clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.

The strong-backed, hard-drinking Irish labourers, upon whom so many London fortunes were built, made up a large part of the slum-dwelling population, and were frequently derided for it, as in this later account:

St. George's-in-the-Borough, with its back courts, where the refuse of Ireland vegetate; or Kent Street,- the thieves' district,- which years since drew forth the indignation of the topographist; or Pearl Row, St. George's Road, Southwark; or Red House, Old Gravel Lane, Borough; or a lodging house for thieves at the back of Holborn, where 100 thieves are to be seen, at eleven o'clock at night, on an average, six sometimes in one bed ; or the lower part of Bell Street, Paddington, for the lower class of thieves, such as costermongers, &c.; or the courts and alleys leading out of Tooley Street, City, all the courts inhabited by Irish thieves, &c.; or Rents Buildings, York Street, Westminster, inhabited by pickpockets and juvenile thieves...

By 1816, a Parliamentary Committee had been set up to establish the problems of the London slums, and what might be done about them. Professionals were called in to give evidence and to account for their experience of the slums. One London doctor, William Blair, had this to say:

Human beings, hogs, and dogs, were associated in the same habitations; and great heaps of dirt, in different quarters, may be found piled up in the streets. Another reason of their ill health is this, that some of the lower inhabitations have neither windows nor chimneys nor floors, and were so dark that I can scarcely see there at midday without a candle. I have actually gone into a ground floor bedroom, and could not find my patient without the light of a candle

The darkness was largely a result of unscrupulous landlords shutting up windows to avoid window tax. As intolerable as these dark lodgings were, there was always a respite: the pub/lodging/pawn-shop/repository for stolen goods/brothel, or flash-house as they were known:

There are above two hundred regular flash houses in the metropolis, all known the police officers, which they frequent, many of them, open all night: that the landlords in numerous instances receive stolen goods, and are what are technically called fences; that this fact is known also to the officers, who, for obvious reasons, connive at the existence of these houses; that many of house are frequented by boys and girls of the ages of ten to fourteen and fifteen, who are exclusively admitted, who pass the night in gambling & debauchery, and who there sell and divide the plunder of the day, or who sally forth from these houses to rob in the street.

One rather bizarre aspect of many of the accounts of the slums is that of the young (borderline legal at 12ish, the age of consent at the time) girls who lure men into the dark alleys on a promise of prostituting themselves for a very low price, and then their boyfriend/pimp robs the man who was just counting his lucky stars. If he was very unlucky, he'd also get a bit of a beating and have his pants pulled down before being kicked back onto a busy street, as a mark of his shame. Every single account takes the view that these girls are the lowest of the low: not honest prostitutes, but 'bilkers'. Thus, in 1816 we can already see the seed of hypocrisy that would come to full flower during the ensuing century.

The Victorian quest for modernisation and sanitation cleared the Georgian slums and Victorian rookeries, sweeping away the very last of medieval London. The inhabitants slunk away, but not far, setting up home in Bermondsey, Brixton and Hackney, disturbing the Victorian gentry with their thieving, conniving, pawning and best of all, their bilking.

Click here to download:

Slum_Living_Londons_Rookeries-.zip (1749 KB)