Pugilistica: The History of British Boxing, Volume 1 (of 3): Containing Lives of the Most Celebrated Pugilists; Full Reports of Their Battles from Contemporary Newspapers, With Authentic Portraits, Personal Anecdotes, and Sketches of the Principal Patrons of the Prize Ring, Forming a Complete History of the Ring from Fig and Broughton, 1719-40, to the Last Championship Battle Between King and Heenan, in December 1863Miles, Henry Downes
History
Pugilistica: The History of British Boxing, Volume 1 (of 3): Containing Lives of the Most Celebrated Pugilists; Full Reports of Their Battles from Contemporary Newspapers, With Authentic Portraits, Personal Anecdotes, and Sketches of the Principal Patrons of the Prize Ring, Forming a Complete History of the Ring from Fig and Broughton, 1719-40, to the Last Championship Battle Between King and Heenan, in December 1863
Miles, Henry Downes
Boxing
The Crown, at Slough, a favourite rendezvous of the swell patrons of
pugilism, was the scene, on the 25th of September, 1780, of a boxing
match between Harry Sellers and Duggan Fearns, an Irish boatswain
(called Jack Fearns in “Boxiana”). The accounts read very like a cross,
though we can hardly say that there is clear evidence. “The battle
lasted _one minute and a half_, when victory was declared in favour of
Duggan.” We are not told _how_ the event was brought about, but the
reporter adds his own opinion: “the amateurs were swindled to a large
amount,” and certainly very clumsily.
On the 7th of June (1785), we find that Harry Sellers contested a battle
with William Harvey, an Irishman, in the Ass Field, near Holywell Mount,
Grays Inn Road, “in which, notwithstanding he exerted himself to the
utmost, he was conquered by dint of the Irishman’s strength in twenty
minutes.” The reader will observe the date is the 7th of June. This may
give him sufficient insight to value accordingly the story of “St.
Patrick’s evening” (17th March), the “insult to Mr. Harvey’s shamrock in
his hat,” the “leg of mutton and trimmings,” offered by Sellers to be
let off a thrashing, and the wretched rubbish in “Boxiana,” pp. 88, 89,
“for the greater glory of ould Ireland.” The red hot ire of Mr. Harvey
remained to cool from March 17th to the 7th of the following June, if
there be any truth in the periodical contemporary press.
The appearance of Humphries, Big Ben (Brain), and the rise of the great
Tom Johnson, seem to have quite extinguished the minor pugilistic stars,
and so occupied the whole attention of the patrons and historians of the
ring, that Sellers disappears from the scene. In “Pancratia,” p. 63, we
read, “It has been reported that Sellers actually died with grief, on
account of his friends refusing to match him with the celebrated
pugilist Tom Johnson when first he rose into fame.” This proves, at any
rate, that Sellers was what the west countrymen call “a good woolled
one:” there was no deficiency in breed, whatever there might be in his
probity or judgment.
STEPHEN OLIVER (NICKNAMED DEATH).—1770‒1788.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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