A return match was arranged a year later, and on May 20th, 1920, this pair fought again for the Championship at Olympia. Beckett in the meantime had been summarily knocked out by Carpentier, but had himself knocked out Frank Goddard in two rounds, Eddie McGoorty in seventeen, and Dick Smith in five. He had become more confident, more adept. He was not a great boxer, is not now, and is never likely to be. But he had improved. Nor had Wells been idle. He had knocked out Jack Curphey in two rounds, Harry Reeves in four, Paul Journee, the Frenchman, in thirteen, and Eddie McGoorty in sixteen. This last was a terrific fight, but McGoorty was quite out of training. Wells had also beaten Arthur Townley, who retired at the end of the ninth round. What I might call the cochranisation of boxing has now for some time past enabled vast crowds of people to watch, in comfort, altogether too great a number of championship fights. The popular excitement about these contests, or the majority of them, is largely artificial--almost as artificial as the reputations of the “champions” themselves, the result, that is to say, of purely commercial advertisement. Of course, the case of Bombardier Wells is singular. Long ago, before the war, he had his hold upon the popular imagination (if such a thing exists), because he was tall, and good-looking, and “temperamental.” As for his methods, a friend of mine who used to judge Army Competitions in India, and who saw the All India Championship of 1909, used to say that he never knew a boxer who so persistently stuck to the plan of campaign that he had previously thought out as did Bombardier Wells. Perhaps that is the secret of his mercurial career: perhaps he always has a plan of campaign and sticks to it--successfully or not, according to the plan of his antagonist. Wells’s antagonists have a disconcerting way of doing something fresh and unexpected, and the plan is liable to be a hindrance. The most crafty boxer may have a plan which he prefers, but he is able at an instant’s notice to substitute an alternative scheme suited especially to the caprice of the man he desires to beat. Carpentier does that. Wells, as already said, likes scientific boxing just as other people like golf, and he is apt to be disconcerted by fierce sloggers just as a golfer would be disconcerted (I imagine) by some one who invented and employed some explosive device for driving little white balls much farther away than can be done with the implements at present in use. Circumstances or the advice of friends pushed Wells--in the first instance possibly without any special desire of his own--into the professional ring. And people still flock to see him there, or at all events they did so in 1920, chiefly because the ring was, for him, so strikingly inappropriate a setting.