William Hooper was born at Bristol in 1766, and previously to his unfortunate connexion with the notorious Lord Barrymore, followed his trade as a tinman in Tottenham Court Road, where he had the character of a smart, industrious, well-behaved young man. His qualifications as a pugilist were undoubted. Fear formed no part of his composition. His confidence was innate; and neither the size nor strength of his antagonist deterred him any more than a thorough-bred bull-dog would calculate the bulk of his unwieldy bovine foe. Transplanted from making saucepans to the festivities of Wargrave, and made the personal companion of a _roué_ nobleman, he lost his head, as many better nurtured men than poor Hooper have done. The transition from narrow means and humble station made him insolent, overbearing, and ostentatious, and finally the petted pugilist sunk into the ferocious “bully,” thence from dissipation and violent excess into a shattered human wreck, his melancholy end marked by poverty, desertion, and disease.[65] In person Hooper was compact and symmetrical. His shoulders and arms were fine, his chest deep and broad; his height under five feet eight inches, giving him the weight of 11 stone, showing him to have been nowhere overloaded. He is said to have fought “a number of good battles,” of which we have no evidence, save Pierce Egan’s assertion, to set against the _per contra_ of a contemporary, that he had “fought but twice before he met Lord Barrymore’s man.” We suspect, however, an incidental trace of our hero to lurk in the following paragraph at the end of the account of the great battle between Tom Johnson and Ryan, at Cashiobury Park (see _ante_, page 59). “Two other battles were likewise fought on the 11th of February, 1789, on the same stage. The first between Solly Sodicky, the Jew, and Wilson, in which the Jew beat. The second was between the Welchman and _a Tinman_, in which the former was cleverly defeated.” Be this as it may, on the 19th of August, 1789, Hooper was matched with a local celebrity, Bill Clarke, the plasterer, and the affair came off in Bloomsbury Fields, a plot now covered with streets and squares, adjacent to Tottenham Court Road, where Hooper exercised his vocation of a tinman. The battle was obstinately contested, Clarke being a powerful man, but the intuitive skill, activity, and courage of Hooper carried him through, and his fame as a boxer spread. Cotterel, the shoemaker, challenged Hooper for 10 guineas a side, and they met on Barnet Common, September 5th, 1789. There was a numerous assemblage, for Hooper was looked upon as something surprising, and was seconded by Tom Johnson, the Champion, while Bill Warr picked up Cotterel. Thirty-five minutes’ desperate fighting on the part of Cotterel led to his utter defeat, and Hooper, little the worse for the conflict, was proclaimed the conqueror.