The Strange and Terrible History of Varsity Boxing

“The following notice was issued on Monday last by the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge:-“Whereas it has been represented unto the Vice Chancellor that some students of the University have lately resorted to a professed teacher of the art of boxing, contrary to the good order and discipline of the University. We, the Vice Chancellor and Heads of College…hereby order and decree, that if any person in statu pupillari be hereafter found resorting to, or having any communication whatever with, any such teacher of the art of boxing, or be found attending any prize fight, he shall be liable to the punishment of suspension, rustication or expulsion, as the case shall appear to require.”

The Times, Friday April 29th 1842.

The official Varsity Match dates back to March 10th 1897. But the association of Oxbridge men with pugilism goes back a further century, during which one – the remarkable Captain Robert Barclay – was at the centre of the most famous bare-knuckle fight in history; and another – John Graham Chambers – drew up the rules which established the sport of boxing we know today.

The Celebrated Captain Barclay

Robert Barclay, Laird of Ury was born in 1779 to a landowning family in the north-east of Scotland. An habitual long-distance speed-walker who could keep up six miles an hour all day long, his endurance abilities had already won him several hefty wagers by the time he came up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1798.

Barclay went to the odd lecture, but he was mainly filling in time until reaching 21 and claiming his inheritance, so most of his Cambridge days were spent drinking, gambling, carousing, hunting, shooting – and learning to spar with boxing gloves. Gentlemen would not be seen prize-fighting, a brutal and bloody bare-knuckle affair. But with Britain in the midst of a generation-long war with Revolutionary France, effeminacy was ridiculed and pugilism was the very bull’s eye of fashion. Knowing how to fight and spar was considered almost an essential skill for a gentleman.

Coming down from Cambridge, Barclay soon gravitated to the heart of ‘the Fancy’ – the set of gambling-mad, aristocratic hell-raisers, headed by the Prince of Wales, who patronised the London prize ring. Barclay became a regular at the Fancy’s headquarters: Jackson’s Rooms, at 13 Bond Street, where former Champion of England ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson and fencing master Harry Angelo gave lessons. At 5 feet 11 inches and 13 ½ stone, Barclay’s tremendous strength and fitness soon gained him a formidable reputation in the sparring ring.

But it was Barclay’s feet that were his fortune. Walking challenges were a hugely popular spectator sport, and huge bets were made on them. Yorkshireman Foster Powell, for instance, had in 1792 walked 400 miles from York to London and back in 5 days and 16 hours. In the summer of 1809, for a bet of 1,000 guineas, Barclay famously set out to walk one mile, each hour of each day and night without a break for 1,000 hours – just nine hours short of six weeks. Many had tried the challenge before: all had collapsed within a fortnight. But ‘a thousand miles in a thousand hours’ seized the public imagination and thousands turned out to watch at the prepared track on Newmarket Heath. Barclay’s thousand guineas was the equivalent of £400,000 in today’s money. But with added side bets, he stood to win, or lose, 16,000 guineas – say £6 million today. In all, a whomping £100,000 – £40 million in modern terms – was wagered in the outcome.

With so much cash at stake, Barclay was probably wise to carry in his belt a brace of loaded pistols to insure against interference. Tough as he was, the relentless sleep deprivation wore him down. His knees swelled. Torrential rain chilled him to the bone. As each mile clocked up more slowly, the odds shifted heavily against him. But hour by hour, day and night, week after week he limped on and under a burning July sun, covered the final, thousandth mile in 37 minutes. The crowd gave a rousing three cheers, Newmarket church bells rang and correspondents scribbled dispatches to their London papers. Barclay had lost 32 lbs and within half an hour was in bed enjoying his first night’s sleep for 42 days. Eight days later, his clothes still hanging off him, he embarked at Ramsgate with his Regiment, the 92nd Foot, on an expedition to capture the Dutch island of Walcheren from the French. 

Another regular at Jackson’s Rooms was the poet, adventurer and revolutionary Lord Byron who, with his pet bear, was at Trinity from 1805-1807. Byron’s diary for 1814 gives a flavour of his love of the sport:

March 17th: I have been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning; and mean to continue and renew my acquaintance with the mufflers. My chest, and arms, and wind are in very good plight…I used to be a hard hitter, and my arms are very long for my height. At any rate, exercise is good; fencing and the board-sword never fatigued me half so much.
March 20th: sparred with Jackson again yesterday morning, and shall tomorrow. I feel all the better for it, in spirits, though my arms and shoulders are very stiff from it. Memo - to attend the pugilistic dinner: Marquess Huntly is in the chair.
March 28th: Yesterday, dined… with Scrope Davies – sat from six till midnight – drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret…Got up, if anything, earlier than usual - sparred with Jackson…and have been much better in health than for many days…
April 10th: …have sparred for exercise (windows open) with Jackson an hour daily, to attenuate and keep up the ethereal part of me. The more violent the fatigue, the better my spirits for the rest of the day…

Byron, a spectator at several of Barclay’s endurance events, even devoted three years of cutting, pasting and lacquering to a six foot high folding screen covered with cuttings of prize-fighters.

Cribb v Molineaux

In 1810, a 13 ½ stone African-American strolled in to Jackson’s Rooms and asked to spar. He was 26 years old, a freed slave from Virginia, and his name was Tom Molineaux. Captain Barclay seemed the ideal man to test this unknown with the ‘mufflers’….. Barclay left Jackson’s Rooms with broken ribs.

After a string of bare-knuckle victories, Molineaux and his backers put out a challenge to Tom Cribb, the 6’1’’ Champion of England. The Cribb-Molineaux story has spawned books* and documentaries by the dozen, but in short the two men fought a savage battle before a crowd of 10,000 in freezing rain at Copthall Common, near East Grinstead, in December 1810, and Cribb knocked out the exhausted Molineaux in the fortieth round only after being saved from defeat first by an outrageously long count, then by a riotous invasion of the ring during which one of Molineaux’s fingers was broken.

Fair play demanded a re-match. Many Britons had no wish to see Molineaux Champion of England. But it was plain that for Cribb to win the rematch, he would have to be far fitter. Barclay took charge of his training.

Captain Barclay marched the 16-stone Cribb over 500 miles up the North Road to his Scottish estate. For 11 weeks he put him to long speed-marches in the Grampian and Cairgorm mountains, chopping lumber and sparring to refine his technique, while savagely reducing him with purgatives and his own patent ‘sweating liquor’. He fed Cribb on underdone beefsteaks, biscuits and stale bread and allowed him just three pints of liquid a day. By September 1811, Cribb had lost 37 lbs and was as fit and strong as a racehorse.  Then they walked south again…..
*****
Cribb and Molineaux met on a stage in a field at Thistleton Gap near Melton Mowbray. The crowd numbered 20,000. It was to be the bout of the century. In a tremendous, see-saw battle featuring brilliant scientific boxing from Molineaux, Cribb’s head was brutally disfigured. But a sixth round body shot changed everything, and Cribb’s superior conditioning, size and almost inhuman toughness finally prevailed in the ninth round, when the tragic Molineaux finally fell as if dead, his jaw broken in two places.

It was Barclay’s victory as much as Cribb’s: he won £10,000 in bets – over £4 million in today’s money. The collection for the pulverised Molineaux was £49 and 15 shillings. But had Molineaux had a backer and trainer like Barclay – instead of spending the preceding months touring England giving exhibitions for a living – it could have been a different story….

Thistleton Gap was to prove the zenith for the Fancy – and for Captain Barclay. In Jackson’s Rooms in the autumn of 1811, the 32-year old Scot squared up with a 6’1’’, 15-stone Life Guards Corporal, John Shaw…. Shaw sent him hurrying to the dentist.  A year later they set to again in the Bedford Rooms in Covent Garden. This time Barclay kept his teeth, but Shaw was clearly the better man. Life Guardsman Shaw would certainly have become Champion of England, had not a combination of Napoleon and the demon drink intervened. In the opening act of the Battle of Waterloo, Shaw unwisely fuelled up with an entire bellyful of brandy then broke ranks and galloped, bellowing oaths and sabre flailing, straight into a solid regiment of French cuirassiers – for which, single-handed, even he was no match.

As Captain Barclay’s own reflexes and boxing prowess waned, his temper worsened, leading to a series of disgraceful episodes. And as the Napoleonic Wars faded into the past, public attitudes to prize-fights hardened. Times were changing.  Drink, duels and debtors’ prisons had claimed most of the Fancy – and their fighters. In 1830, having organised a fight in which a hapless Glasgow strongman called Sandy McKay was killed, Barclay went in to hiding and escaped conviction for manslaughter only through judicial bribery.

Barclay finally learned his lesson and reinvented himself. He set up an Edinburgh-to-Aberdeen service with a 15-passenger sprung stagecoach, the Defiance, which could cover the 129 miles in 15 hours. He often drove it himself – right up until the day in 1849 when the railway finally connected the two cities. He died in 1854, aged 75, on his estate, kicked in the head by a horse he was breaking in.

Queensberry Rules KO

By mid-Victorian times, the howls of the clergy and respectable classes for the prevention of bare-knuckle prize-fights were louder than ever. The gruesome Sayers-Heenan fight of 1860 – in which the two contestants pulverised each other in a Farnborough field for 38 rounds and two hours, twenty minutes, before police stormed the ring – led directly to the Anti-Prize Fight Act of 1861 was passed, which criminalised anyone who even conveyed a member of the public to a fight. The Act virtually finished bare-knuckle fighting in England.

But in the Universities, a passion for amateur sport was growing. In 1865, yet another Trinity man, John Graham Chambers, who had won rowing blues in 1862 and 1863 and been President of the University Boat Club, drew up a new code for competitive boxing, which was published with the endorsement of the Marquis of Queensberry, a keen student of the game and a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The savage old bare-knuckle London Prize Ring Rules, dating from 1743, permitted holding, throwing and wrestling and each round went on until a knockdown occurred, the victim then having 30 seconds to regain his feet and come ‘up to scratch’, or continue. Chambers’ new ‘Queensberry Rules’ turned a brutal throwback to Regency days into a hard but essentially civilised sport for civilised times – though one can only wonder what sort of crazed experiment led to Chambers’ Rule 11, banning boots with springs….

The Marquis of Queensbury Rules

1. To be a fair stand-up boxing match in a 24-foot ring, or as near that size as practicable.
2. No wrestling or hugging allowed.
3. The rounds to be of three minutes’ duration, and one minute’s time between rounds.
4. If either man falls through weakness or otherwise, he must get up unassisted, 10 seconds to be allowed him to do so, the other man meanwhile to return to his corner, and when the fallen man is on his legs the round is to be resumed and continued until the three minutes have expired. If one man fails to come to the scratch in the 10 seconds allowed, it shall be in the power of the referee to give his award in favour of the other man.
5. A man hanging on the ropes in a helpless state, with his toes off the ground, shall be considered down.
6. No seconds or any other person to be allowed in the ring during the rounds.
7. Should the contest be stopped by any unavoidable interference, the referee to name the time and place as soon as possible for finishing the contest; so that the match must be won and lost, unless the backers of both men agree to draw the stakes.
8. The gloves to be fair-sized boxing gloves of the best quality and new.
9. Should a glove burst, or come off, it must be replaced to the referee’s satisfaction.
10. A man on one knee is considered down and if struck is entitled to the stakes.
11. No shoes or boots with springs allowed.
12. The contest in all other respects to be governed by revised rules of the London Prize Ring

From 1867 – the year preceding the last public hanging in England and the consequent founding of the Football Association in an effort to provide the British public with alternative Saturday afternoon entertainment – the Amateur Athletic Club, another Chambers innovation, held an annual Championship at Lilliebridge in Middlesex. This included the first ‘Queensberry Rules’ boxing, for which Queensberry – later to earn national infamy for a fist-fight in the street with one of his sons and for a legal vendetta against Oscar Wilde that ended with the Oxford-educated poet serving two years hard labour in Reading Jail – awarded challenge cups for light, middle and heavyweight boxing. Entry was ten shillings and from the beginning, Cambridge and Oxford men were prominent among the competitors. According to the October 23rd 1909 edition of ‘Boxing’, however….

‘…this annual ‘Varsities’ meeting began to get disorderly, in the sense that the sport began to extend after the meeting from the representatives to the onlookers themselves. It had always been held in the metropolis, and the united action of the University authorities and the London police eventually brought this historic meeting to a temporary close…’

Temporary it was. In 1880, the Amateur Boxing Association was founded, Chambers among the instigators. OUABC was founded the following year and there seem to have been a couple of further unofficial boxing contests between teams from the two Universities in the early 1890s. Finally, in early 1896, Cambridge boxing gained central organisation, when a Mr Grainger of Kings’ College amalgamated his King’s Boxing Club with Fordham’s School of Arms to form Cambridge University Boxing & Fencing Club. The moustachioed Instructor Fordham’s clubrooms in Falcon Yard became the Club’s official home. The first official Varsity Boxing & Fencing Match against Oxford took place in the Corn Exchange on March 10th 1897, ending in a 2-2 draw in the boxing. For the next 15 years – until 1912, when boxing and fencing separated – Cambridge dominated the boxing, though Oxford’s mastery of the fencing events meant that Oxford won the combined event more often than not.

Many of the best University boxers trained privately with self-appointed professionals. By far the best known of these was Con Griffiths, who gave lessons in a room above a pub in Cambridge’s Jesus Lane. Griffiths, a prize-fighter from the old bare-knuckle days, disapproved of the new-fangled gloves and had a particular contempt for any special training regime. “Don’t take no beer for tea the night you are going to fight” was the only advice on training he ever gave. A competitor named Shippey ran another boxing establishment down the Newmarket Road. An attraction here was that nearby was a music hall which had been put out of bounds by the Proctors, so that after a spar with Shippey and a visit to the music hall, a sprint to evade the ‘Bullers’ completed the evening’s sport. Notable boxing Blues during this Edwardian period included the future polar explorer and Arab Legion commander Sir Philip Brocklehurst and giant all-round sportsman John Hopley, who played rugby for Barbarians and cricket for the MCC and was rated the finest heavyweight boxer in the British Empire.

From 1912, three-time ABA middleweight champion Bill Child took over as CUABC’s trainer, but the Great War scuppered any Varsity Matches in the five years 1915-1919. One third of Oxbridge graduates of military age died among the trenches and many more were maimed. Captain Ronald Rawson MC & Bar, a 1912-14 Cambridge Blue, however, got the post-war period off to a bright start by winning the heavyweight ABAs and the gold medal at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. Rawson, a whipcord-lean 6’3’’ and 180lbs and a tremendous puncher, won 27 of his 28 post-war bouts by knockout – the remaining one on points. He finally met his match in a supposed ‘exhibition’ bout at a charity show at the Brighton Pavilion against professional British and Empire light-heavyweight champion Jack Bloomfield, who had recently been decisioned in a 20-rounder for the world title. Rawson reportedly shook Bloomfield to his boots and had him on the edge of a knockout before being KO’d himself in the third round.

Reigning Olympic light-heavyweight champion and Rhodes scholar Eddie Eagan boxed for Oxford in 1923. Cambridge sportingly allowed Eagan to box the heavyweight bout first, rest while his team-mates boxed, and round up the evening by contesting the light-heavyweight bout too. He won both in the second round to give Oxford a 4-3 victory. Eagan had risen through hard work from childhood poverty in Colorado to serve as a Lieutenant in France at the end of the Great War, gain a Yale degree and become spar-mate and friend of world heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. He won the ABA heavyweight title during his sojourn in England and in later life became a successful lawyer and New York State Boxing Commissioner.

In 1937, the Varsity Match graduated to Lord Lonsdale’s Stadium Club on London’s High Holborn (subsequently reduced to rubble in the Blitz) where it was MC’d by Eagan’s good friend and fellow Oxford boxing Blue ‘Douglo’, the Duke of Hamilton – a pioneering aviator, British Olympic Committee chairman and wartime fighter squadron commander. Notable boxers of the 1930s included Oxford’s Wilfred Thesiger, perhaps the greatest explorer of the 20th century, and Battle of Britain fighter ace Noel Agazarian. Bill Child, though badly gassed during the Great War, continued as coach until 1939, having steered Cambridge to victory in 16 out of 23 matches. Varsity Matches were suspended during hostilities in the six years 1940-45, though many science and medical students remained at their studies and unofficial Oxford vs Cambridge boxing matches were held annually from 1941-45. Of these five wartime matches, each side won two, lost two, and drew one.

Never Had It So Good

After the war, the University boxing quickly re-established itself. In the post-war era, large numbers of young men came up to University as experienced boxers as a result of near-universal military service and standards quickly reached an all-time high. In 1948, Full Blue status – awarded at Oxford in 1939 – was conferred at Cambridge too and a golden decade ensued with a dozen big fixtures a season, which including a legendary 1957 tour to Gibraltar and a match against the touring South African Universities team.

The 1950s were, however, to prove a hard act to follow. National Service ended in 1961. By 1967, the Government had repealed the death penalty and withdrawn British garrisons from east of Suez. Harangued by abolitionist fanatic Baroness Summerskill, schools followed the tide of the times and steadily abandoned boxing.

The Universities continued to attract – and produce – many excellent boxers. But numbers were lower and in occasional lean years one club or other would struggle even to raise a team. There were valiant efforts to maintain standards and support Varsity boxing, including the founding in 1961 of the Pierce Egan ABC for graduate Blues of both clubs, but the sport faced a stiff headwind. In the early seventies OUABC – and with it, the Varsity Match and therefore CUABC too – nearly folded, to be saved only by the recruiting and leadership efforts of one young ex-Ampleforthian, Robert Nairac, who stubbornly refused to let OUABC die. After joining the Grenadier Guards, Nairac served in the Special Air Service, meeting a lonely but deeply courageous end while undercover in Northern Ireland.

By the late seventies, Varsity boxing had stabilised and maintained a respectable standard. From 1986 to 2001, Oxford dominated the fixture under the formidable coach Henry Dean – though Cambridge, despite lacking continuity in coaching, came within a whisker of victory on numerous occasions, most notably the controversial match of 1999. Through the 1990s, both student bodies grew in size and diversity, attracting increasing numbers of experienced postgraduates from all over the world. In 2002, the Dark Blues’ long run on top finally ended with a bang, with CUABC clocking up a ruthless 8-1 victory that featured five first-round knockouts. Three more followed: 7-2; 6-3; and a climactic 9-0 that resulted in CUABC being voted the Hawks Club’s Team of the Year. 2005 also saw the first Varsity Women’s boxing bouts.

To their enormous credit, OUABC bounced back with renewed health and vigour in 2006, winning 5-4 at the Oxford Town Hall with a team as good as any seen in the last decade. On March 8th 2007, the Varsity Match clocked made its century in front of a sell-out, 1,200-strong crowd at York Hall, the Madison Square Garden of British boxing. Oxford retained the Truelove Bowl by a knife-edge, 5-4 – two of their wins coming by majority decision. It was a close battle and a memorable night that made many new friends for both Clubs and for this historic fixture.

The 101st Varsity Match takes place at the Oxford Town Hall on Thursday March 6th 2008. For the 102nd we return to the York Hall on Thursday March 13th 2009. With Cambridge leading the series by 49 wins to 47, with four draws, OUABC will be looking to draw level. The Light Blues will be aiming to stop them – and clock up their 50th and 51st wins.

C. Peter Joy

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