During the first quarter of the present century pugilism was rampant in
the Eastern Counties of England. A pugilistic encounter was then looked
upon as an affair of national interest, and people came in their
thousands from far and near to witness it. The Norwich neighbourhood was
noted for its prize-fights, and Borrow had the names of all the champions
at his tongue's end. Cobbett, Cribb, Belcher, Tom Spring of Bedford,
Black Richmond, Irish Randall--he was acquainted with the records of them
all, as well as with those of the leading fighting-men amongst the
gipsies. They were to him the leaders of the old spirit of English
aggressiveness, and as such he revered them. His pen was always ready to
defend a straightforward bruiser, with whom, he contended, the Roman
gladiator and the Spanish bull-fighter were not to be compared. He,
himself, was no mean student of the art of self-defence, and there is
some ground for believing that the scene between Lavengro and the Flaming
Tinman, in which the burly tinker succumbs to the former's prowess after
a warm encounter in the Mumpers' Dingle, is founded upon an event which
occurred during Borrow's wayward progress through rural England.
On the publication of "Lavengro," Borrow's evident partiality for the
pugilists of his day brought down upon him a torrent of criticism and
condemnation. Who, it was asked, but a man of coarse instincts could
have found pleasure in mingling with brutal fighting-men and describing
their desperate exploits? The writer of a work who went out of his way
to drag in such characters and scenes as these could be little better
than a barbarian!
Borrow was not a man to sit down quietly under such attacks as these; he
waited his opportunity, and then had his fling. At the end of "The
Romany Rye," there appeared an Appendix, in which the author set himself
the task of smashing his critics. This same Appendix is an amazing piece
of writing; in it Borrow slashes right and left as might a gallant
swordsman who found himself alone in the midst of a mob bent on his
destruction. Mr. Augustine Birrell regrets that it was ever printed; but
there are few who will agree with him; it contains too many good things
that Borrovians would be loth to lose.
Borrow's defence is carried on in his own peculiar and inimitable style,
it is an onslaught into the camp of the enemy. Speaking of the
prize-fighters, whom a reviewer condemned as blackguards, he exclaims
defiantly, "Can the rolls of the English aristocracy exhibit names
belonging to more noble, more heroic men than those who were called
respectively Pearce, Cribb, and Spring? Did ever one of the English
aristocracy contract the seeds of fatal consumption by rushing up the
stairs of a burning edifice, even to the topmost garret, and rescuing a
woman from seemingly inevitable destruction? The writer says no. A
woman was rescued from the top of a burning house; but the man who
rescued her was no aristocrat; it was Pearce, not Percy, who ran up the
burning stairs." And so he goes on, overwhelming his opponents with a
tornado of generalities that have nothing whatever to do with
prize-fighting, and yet how delightful it all is!
There were other critics--Borrow always had plenty of critics--who found
it difficult to make his admiration for the prize-ring fit in with his
denunciation in one passage of "those disgraceful and brutalising
exhibitions called pugilistic combats." The explanation has been
suggested that for once the "John Bull" Borrow, with his patriotic
exaltation of all things English, gave way before the proselytising agent
of the British and Foreign Bible Society. It would be hard to find a
writer who does not contradict himself at times, and Borrow was so much a
man of "moods" that it would be uncharitable to set him down as a
hypocrite, as Caroline Fox does, because all his sayings and doings do
not tally with a superhuman exactitude.
But whether it was in respect to the number of glasses of ale that he
drank on his Welsh rambles--and has not "Wild Wales" been called "The
Epic of Ale?"--or his associations with the great fighting-men of his
day, he was never ashamed to admit his liking both for the ale and the
men. "Why should I hide the truth?" he asks, when telling of his
presence when a boy of fourteen at a prize-fight which took place near
Norwich. Thurtell, whose boast it was that he had introduced bruising
into East Anglia, had arranged the fight, which was ever after memorable
to Borrow for the appearance on the scene of Gipsy Will and his
celebrated gang. This well-known Romany, who was afterwards hanged
outside the gaol at Bury St. Edmunds for a murder committed in his youth,
was a sturdy, muscular fellow, six feet in height, who rendered himself
especially noticeable by wearing a broad-brimmed, high-peaked Andalusian
hat. He was anxious on this occasion to fight the best man in England
for twenty pounds (not a very tempting sum in the light of our more
advanced days); but no one accepted the challenge, though a young
countryman was anxious to do so until assured by his friends that the
notorious gipsy would certainly kill him.
Borrow has gone out of his way in "The Gipsies of Spain" to give a full
description of this Gipsy Will and his notable companions. At the risk
of wearying some readers who deprecate the prize-ring and its
cosmopolitan environment, the writer quotes something of this
description, as it appears in one of the less known of Borrow's works:
"Some time before the commencement of the combat, three men, mounted on
wild-looking horses came dashing down the road in the direction of the
meadow, in the midst of which they presently showed themselves, their
horses clearing the deep ditches with wonderful alacrity. 'That's Gipsy
Will and his gang,' lisped a Hebrew pickpocket; 'we shall have another
fight.' The word gipsy was always sufficient to excite my curiosity, and
I looked attentively at the new-comers.
"I have seen gipsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish;
and I have also seen the legitimate children of most countries of the
world; but I never saw, upon the whole, three more remarkable
individuals, as far as personal appearance was concerned, than the three
English gipsies who now presented themselves to my eyes on that spot.
Two of them had dismounted, and were holding their horses by the reins.
The tallest, and, at the first glance, the most (!) interesting of the
two, was almost a giant, for his height could not have been less than six
feet three. It is impossible for the imagination to conceive anything
more perfectly beautiful than were the features of this man, and the most
skilful sculptor of Greece might have taken them as his model for a hero
and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty, a rare thing in a gipsy;
the nose less Roman than Grecian, fine, yet delicate; the eyes large,
overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy
expression; it was only when the lashes were elevated that the gipsy
glance was seen, if that can be called a glance which is a strange stare,
like nothing else in the world. His complexion was a beautiful olive;
and his teeth were of a brilliancy uncommon even among these people, who
have all fine teeth. He was dressed in a coarse waggoner's slop, which,
however, was unable to conceal altogether the proportions of his noble
and Herculean figure. He might be about twenty-eight. His companion and
his captain, Gipsy Will, was, I think, fifty, when he was hanged ten
years subsequently. I have still present before me his bushy black hair,
his black face, and his big black eyes, fixed and staring. His dress
consisted of a loose blue jockey coat, jockey boots and breeches; in his
hand was a huge jockey whip, and on his head (it struck me at the time
for its singularity) a broad-brimmed, high-peaked, Andalusian hat, or at
least one very much resembling those generally worn in that province. In
stature he was shorter than his more youthful companion, yet he must have
measured six feet at least, and was stronger built, if possible. What
brawn! what bone! what legs! what thighs! The third gipsy, who remained
on horseback, looked more like a phantom than anything human. His
complexion was the colour of pale dust, and of that same colour was all
that pertained to him, hat and clothes. His boots were dusty, of course,
and his very horse was of a dusty dun. His features were whimsically
ugly, most of his teeth were gone, and as to his age, he might be thirty
or sixty. He was somewhat lame and halt; but an unequalled rider when
once upon his steed, which he was naturally not very solicitous to quit.
I subsequently discovered that he was considered the wizard of the gang."
Any one who is familiar with the living descendants of the Romanies of
Borrow's early lifetime will know that amongst the few characteristics of
their fathers that have been preserved down to the present day is that
skill at boxing or fisticuffs which was an absolute necessity in a time
when their hand was against every man and every man's hand against them.
Nearly all the male Romanies are possessed of a lithe, sinewy, active
frame, combined with a quickness of hand and eye that gives them a
considerable advantage over less alert antagonists of heavier build.
They are not, as a rule, in a hurry to come to blows, for they know that
in the event of injury or police-court proceedings resulting from an
encounter, prejudice is strongly against the gipsy. Still, the Romany
blood pulses quickly, and when it flies to the swarthy cheek and sets the
eyes flashing, the time has come for someone to beware. The writer has
seen something of the gipsy's skill and adroitness under such conditions,
and the impression made was a lasting one. He has known, too, of a
small, slim-built Romany thrashing a strong, six-feet-high constable, for
unwarrantable interference with the former's mother in a public bar. The
Romany race is fast dying out from our midst; but it is dying what the
sportsman would call "game."
Although Borrow's obvious admiration for the brawny men of the prize-ring
brought him almost universal condemnation, his opinions were unchanged by
his critics' wrath and denunciations. There were many points in his
father's character for which he held him in esteem and affection; but he
admired him most because he had once vanquished Big Ben Brain in a fight
in Hyde Park.
"He was always at his best," writes Mr. Theodore Watts, "in describing a
pugilistic encounter; for in the saving grace of pugilism as an English
accomplishment, he believed as devoutly as he believed in East Anglia and
the Bible."