MY NAME IS Bartley Gorman and I am the King of the Gypsies. What does that mean? Well, sometimes it describes a Romany political leader or the head of an extended family: a spokesman, a figurehead. Occasionally it is a fancy title adopted by a gypsy to impress the gorgis (house-dwellers). But for the fighting men of the travelling world, it has a different meaning: it is a title earned in blood, snot, sweat and gore. For them, the King of the Gypsies is the best bareknuckle fighter of his day. And if you are the best man among the travellers, then you are a very good man indeed.
Travelling men fight. Not all of them and not all the time, but many, and often. They would rather settle a row with knuckles than resort to the courts or call the police. Their contests may be held at fairs like Appleby in Cumbria, Musselburgh in Scotland or Ballinasloe in Ireland; at race meetings like Doncaster or Epsom; in a field or encampment; on the spur of the moment in a pub or club, at a wedding or a funeral. The fighters may have trained for months or be as drunk as lords. Sometimes there are rules: no biting, no butting, no gouging, no kicking, no hitting a man when he is down. Often there are not. When a fight is ‘all-in’, anything goes.
I was born into this tradition. My great-grandfather and grandfather were Gypsy Kings and my uncle too was perhaps the best man of his day. I felt from childhood that it was my destiny to succeed them – indeed, to go one further: I wanted to be the most famous and most feared of them all. I achieved this, but at a terrible cost.
For twenty years, I reigned as champion. I have beaten dozens of opponents; fought some of the hardest men in Britain and Ireland and knocked them flat. I have cleared more bar rooms than John L. Sullivan, seen blood run down the lanes. I have been attacked by mobs, been hospitalised five times and have stood in the dock in four crown courts. Many times I have regretted it. For years, I lived on a razor’s edge and it scarred me. Yet knuckle fighting is so strongly a part of the gypsy heritage – so tied up with family pride and honour – that I felt I had to do it.
Though I no longer claim the bareknuckle heavyweight championship, I will be King of the Gypsies until I die. Then, if one man can gain recognition as the current champion, he will take over the title. He will be looked up to, admired, feared – and hunted – by all other gypsies. He will draw crowds wherever he goes. Even now, if Mike Tyson was boxing Lennox Lewis down at Doncaster racecourse and I was fighting Henry Francis 100 yards away, every gypsy man would come to see me. They wouldn’t look at the other bout.
I should explain here that the word gypsy has two meanings. In its precise sense, it describes the descendants of a nomadic people who migrated to Europe from the region between India and Iran around 700 years ago (is it coincidence that some of the oldest pictures of fist-fighting, on pottery and clay tablets, come from that area?). The Europeans thought they were Egyptians, which they shortened to ‘gypsies’. They were also known as Romanies after the language they spoke. They survived by peddling, music-making and fortune-telling. Some came to believe they were the descendants of the Biblical Cain, banished by Our Lord for slaying his brother Abel: God said to Cain, ‘For what you have done you shall wander the world until the end of time and the land shall never yield its fruit up to you.’ Cain’s people lived in tents and played flutes and were coppersmiths. Some also say the man who made the nails for Jesus’s cross was the first gypsy because afterwards he was banished to the wilderness.
In a broader sense, a gypsy is anyone who lives the gypsy lifestyle and adopts their wandering ways, habits and appearance. Most Irish travellers – the background from which I come – are not Romanies but they are still gypsies. So are the Scottish travellers and a small group called the Kale in North Wales. Altogether there are said to be 120,000 travelling people in Britain, though this includes the more recent New Age Travellers, who are mainly people seeking an alternative lifestyle.
The gypsies have kept alive a tradition of barefist fighting that goes back to the dawn of man. The ancient Africans, Chinese, Egyptians and Indians all held such contests and the Greeks made boxers one of three classes of athletes at the Olympic Games (the others were wrestlers and runners). Many history books state that, as a sport and a spectacle, boxing died with the decline of the Roman Empire, but that it not true. It survived in pockets around the world. I believe the travelling people, the gypsies, also kept it alive.
When pugilism ‘re-emerged’ in England in the late seventeenth century – it had never been away but before then there had been no newspapers to report it – the first recorded champion was James Figg, a shaven-headed bruiser who was also expert with sword and cudgel. He clobbered all comers at his amphitheatre in London. Less well known was his contemporary Benjamin Boswell, who claimed to be the son of the King of the Gypsies. The Boswells were among the elite of the Romany clans and ‘Prince’ Boswell came from an encampment on Finchley Common in London. He was said to have been a highwayman as well as a superb fighter. Captain John Godfrey, the first scribe of the prize-ring, wrote that he had ‘a particular blow with his left hand at the jaw, which comes almost as hard as a little horse kicks. Praise be to his power of fighting, his excellent choice of time and measure, his superior judgement, dispatching forth his executing arm!’ But Godfrey also claimed Boswell was a coward: ‘Though I am charmed with the idea of his power and manner of fighting, I am sick at the thoughts of his nurse-wanting courage.’ He does not say why this was; perhaps he was just prejudiced against gypsies, as so many people were in those days. Certainly Boswell was a top man of his day and often appeared at the Great Booth at Tottenham Court in London. His opponents included title claimant George Taylor, whom he beat at least once, sailor James Field and Jack Slack, who later became champion of England. Boswell was later rumoured to have returned to life as a highway robber.
Another notorious fighter of this time was Billy Marshall, who was born in Ayrshire around 1672 and who reputedly lived to be 120. He was of tinker stock and earned notoriety as a boxer and a bandit, becoming ‘king’ of the tinkers of Galloway and terrorising much of the countryside. His legendary exploits included deserting from the Army no less than seven times and from the Navy three times. He is reputed to have married on seventeen occasions and had countless children (both in and out of wedlock), fathering at least four after the age of 100! His gravestone stands in a cemetery in Kirkcudbright. As the Book of Genesis says, ‘There were giants in the Earth in those days.’
The next 200 years saw the Golden Age of pugilism in England. The ‘sport’ was bloody, cruel and dangerous but became a cult, patronised by peers and even royalty. Bouts were held within a square ring made of staked-out rope. Though rules were devised they were often ignored, particularly in the north of the country. Fighters would hit and hold, wrestle, trip and throw, fall on their foe with elbow or forearm, gouge, throttle, strangle against the ropes and even kick with their spiked shoes. Terrible injuries were routine and deaths commonplace.
Many of the men who chanced their arm in these brutal contests were gypsies. Most of them have been forgotten: their fights were never recorded and many hid their true background to avoid prejudice – you could be hanged for being a gypsy in the Middle Ages. One who did become well known was Bill Hooper, or ‘Hooper the Tinman’, who came from the Bristol area and worked as a tinsmith in London. He was discovered by Lord Barrymore and worked for him as a minder. Hooper was good enough to fight a draw with the giant Big Ben Brain but his career fell apart after a victory over Bill Wood, who was also said to be a gypsy. He ended up destitute and died in the workhouse shortly after being found slumped in a doorway.
Gypsy pugilists were noted for their cleverness and a certain showboating arrogance. One who flaunted his ancestry was Jack Cooper. He became so renowned among his people that even today travelling men will say, ‘Who do you think you are, Gypsy Jack?’ The Coopers were and still are a famous fighting tribe from Hampshire, and in the early 1800s they included Jack’s brothers Jem and Tom and cousins George and Tom. Gypsy Jack was the best of them and one of the foremost ten-stone men in the country. The head of the clan was his father, described (in the old magazine Famous Fights Past and Present) as ‘a big man with an immense black beard which nearly covered his face and wearing a broad-brimmed black beaver hat and an elaborately embroidered white slop [smock] which made him look more like an Armenian High Priest than a gypsy horse dealer.’
When the Coopers turned up for a fight, they were some sight. When Jack fought Young Dutch Sam, one of the best pugilists who ever drew breath, at Andover, there were several expensively dressed lords among the aristocratic crowd, but it was the arrival of Cooper’s backers that caused a stir. They were ‘three as remarkable men as were ever seen at a prize-fight.’
They were Romany ryes – in English, ‘gypsy gentlemen’ – and had come on the ground superbly mounted. The tallest, and at first sight the most interesting, was almost a giant, for his height could not have been less than 6ft 3in. It would be impossible for the imagination to conceive a more splendid specimen of humanity. His face was singularly handsome, the features as regular and perfect as those of a Greek statue. Among his own people he was known as Tawno Chinko, but to the general world he was George Lee.
With him was his friend and captain, the notorious Gypsy Will, who was hanged for murder five years later in front of the gaol at Bury St Edmunds. He, too, was a man of great strength and stature – 6ft – and built far more massively than his companion, with bushy, black hair, a face so swarthy it was almost the colour of a negro’s, and big black eyes. His dress consisted of a loose, blue jockey coat, top-boots and breeches and on his head he wore a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Spanish hat.
The third member of the group was Ralph Bosville, said to be the cleverest horse-doctor, horse-dealer and horse-stealer in England. This description tells you the kind of colourful people the gypsies were. Though Gypsy Jack was a great fighter, he lost that particular fight to an even better man. Jack liked the drink too much – the downfall of many a travelling man – later killed Paddy O’Leary in a prize-fight and was convicted of manslaughter.
No relation to the Hampshire Coopers but also said to have some gypsy blood was the heavyweight George Cooper. He was born in Stone, Staffordshire, in 1791 and is said to be the man on whom George Borrow based his character ‘the Flaming Tinman’ in his book Romany Rye. A sketch of Cooper shows him with kiss curls on his forehead, just like my grandfather wore. He was known as ‘The Bargeman’ because he worked on the canal boats and was highly rated: Bill Richmond, the great black pugilist, called him ‘the best natural fighter I have worked with’.
His most famous contest was against the Irish champion Dan Donnelly at the Curragh in County Kildare in 1815. Cooper was holding his own until Donnelly hurled him with what was described as ‘one of the most dreadful cross-buttocks ever witnessed’ (the cross-buttock is a throw over the hips). For extra impact, the Irishman fell on Cooper with all his weight. After eleven rounds, lasting twenty-two minutes, Cooper finally fell from two thundering smashes, the last of which broke his jaw. Today the site of the battle is known as Donnelly’s Hollow and is marked by a monument and by the footprints of Donnelly, which were dug out after the fight by his fanatical followers and which are still visible. A street poem was composed – The Ballad of Donnelly and Cooper – and became instantly popular. My cousin Maria can still sing it today. It begins:
Come all you true bred Irishmen, I hope you will draw near,
And likewise pay attention to these few lines I have here;
It is as true a story as ever you did hear
Of how Donnelly fought Cooper on the Curragh of Kildare.
Cooper fought in the prize-ring for thirteen years and opened a school for the Noble Art of Self Defence in Edinburgh. His opponents included the best men of the time such as Tom Oliver and Hickman. He died in 1834.
Thomas Britton, the ‘terror of Somersetshire’, is unknown today but was one of the best and most feared fighters among all gypsies. In the 1820s, he and John Burton led England’s most dangerous gang of highway robbers. Two of their victims died when they were brutally waylaid on their way back from a fair. Burton was caught and later executed at Taunton gaol but Britton, said in contemporary newspaper accounts to be a ‘remarkably powerful man’, escaped and fled the county. He became a horse dealer, amassed a fortune and was the scourge of Leicestershire, where he boasted he could ‘master twenty men at a time’ in pugilistic combat. He was eventually recognised by an astute peeler and in 1843 was committed to Shepton Mallet for trial. I don’t know what became of him but believe he was hanged.
Other great champions of the prize-ring days are said to have had gypsy blood: Posh Price (the name Posh means a half-bred gypsy), Tom Spring (whose real name was Tom Winters), featherweight Tom Smith and Joe Goss. Jem Ward, who was known as the ‘Black Diamond’ and was said to be of early Irish traveller stock, became champion of England in the 1820s, as did his brother Nick a decade later. So important did fighting become to the gypsies that many started naming their children after famous fighters such as Mendoza and Bendigo.
Perhaps the best-known was Jem Mace, who was born in the village of Beeston, Norfolk, in 1831, the son of a blacksmith. He learned to play the violin and left home in his teens, hanging around gypsy camps and earning a living playing at weddings. He also fought for money in the booths at fairs and eventually became a pugilist. He was known as the ‘Swaffham Gypsy’ but vehemently denied having Romany blood, perhaps because it was frowned upon in those days. Certainly he had the dark looks, his uncle Barney married a Romany, and some of his early opponents were travellers like Charlie Pinfold and Farden Smith, who Mace said in his book Fifty Years A Fighter was ‘known as the King of the Gypsies and was a regular giant, standing 6ft 2in in his stocking feet and broad in proportion.’ He and Smith fought on Norwich Hill for several rounds (a round ended when one fighter was punched or thrown to the ground) until the police arrived and they had to flee. They reconvened the next day on a nearby heath but Smith refused to fight, declaring, ‘I give you best, Jem.’
Mace’s cousin Pooley also fought a fellow Romany called Louis Gray in a field near King’s Lynn in Norfolk. Gray, who camped near Norwich, had been giving an exhibition at a boxing booth at nearby Fakenham – where I would later fight – when Pooley’s dad and uncle made some unfavourable remarks about him. One thing led to another and he was matched to fight Pooley, who won after seventeen brutal rounds.
But the age of the knuckle men was drawing to a close. In the 1860s the Marquess of Queensberry wrote the first rules for boxing with gloves. Soon it would replace barefist fighting, which was persecuted and driven underground. Only the travellers and a few other groups – such as the miners of the Welsh valleys and the Potteries – would keep it alive, holding bouts in secret, on hilltops and in hollows, away from prying eyes. Jem Mace would be the last British bareknuckle champion of the world and is known today as the Father of Modern Scientific Boxing. It is in his time that my story really begins.