After this Belcher thrashed Andrew Gamble in five rounds and nine minutes. His next battle, quite an important one in regarding the man’s record, was yet but a brawl at the ring-side of another fight. Just after the encounter between Isaac Bittoon and Tom Jones in July of 1801, Joe Berks, the Shropshire butcher (who figures in somewhat similar circumstances with Boy Jim in Sir A. Conan Doyle’s _Rodney Stone_), somewhat elated by wine, called out, “Where’s young Jem Belcher? Where’s your champion?” So Jem went up to him and asked him what he wanted. The reply was a quick blow which Belcher, ever on the alert, stopped. They thereupon settled down to a bye-battle which lasted for nineteen minutes and which Jem Belcher decisively won. However, it was manifest that Berks had been fighting under the handicap of considerable intoxication, and a set battle was finally arranged between these two in the following November. They met at Hurley Bottom, near Maidenhead. Joe Berks was much the stronger man, and though early in the fight Jem laid open his nose with a vicious right and later cut his forehead so that Joe lost a lot of blood, his seconds finding it impossible to staunch it, he fought like a tiger. In the ninth round after these misfortunes and when he had been getting much the worst of it, he dashed in, through, as it were, Jem’s raining blows, seized hold of him and hurled him down with terrific force. Joe Berks was a gallant ruffian, and though utterly defeated in sixteen rounds and twenty-five minutes refused to give in. Finally his seconds threw up the sponge on his behalf. He was much cut and bruised both in face and body, while young Jem Belcher hardly had a mark to show, and seemed quite unhurt. He declared afterwards that he never felt a blow throughout the fight--which is probably untrue. After he had beaten Joe Berks again and Fearby, the Young Ruffian, in fourteen and eleven rounds respectively, Jem Belcher was generally regarded as the Champion. It was after these fights that a great misfortune befell him. Jem, who, like other fighters of his day, was made much of by sportsmen of all kinds, was playing racquets one afternoon with a Mr. Stewart at the court in St. Martin’s Street, when a ball struck him in the eye and literally smashed it. This was in July of 1803. The misfortune, great as it would have been to any man, was not at the moment calamitous, for Belcher had made enough money to enable him to settle down as a publican; and he now took the “Jolly Butchers” in Wardour Street, Soho. It was supposed that he would never dream of fighting again, blind as he was in one eye; and no one challenged his championship. For two years he maintained the dignity of champion, until the exploits of Henry--commonly called Hen--Pearce, the “Game Chicken,” roused him from his retirement.