Box People and Places
Latest Issue 31 Spring 2021 
  • This Issue
    • Celebrity Visits
    • Middlehill Tunnel
    • Doris Pepita Chappell
    • Local Roman Finds
    • Gingell
    • Jut the Ticket
    • Straightening & Levelling
    • Tottle Family
    • Rudloe Part 2
    • Bowdler
    • Bullocks Worldwide
    • James Shell of KIngsdown
    • Bill Peter Recalled
    • Rudloe WW2 Remnants
    • More Stink Pipes
    • Northey Tankard Found
  • Early Medieval
    • Britain in Late Antiquity
    • Box after AD 350
    • Why Speak English?
    • Art and Craft
  • Previous
    • Issue 30 - Georgian Rudloe
    • Issue 29 - Darkest Hour
    • Issue 28 - VE Day
    • Issue 27 - Northey
    • Issue 26 - Heritage Trail
    • Earlier Issues 1 - 25 >
      • Issue 25 - Slave Owners
      • Issue 24 - Highwaymen
      • Issue 23 - Georgian
      • Issue 22 - War Memorial
      • Issue 21 - Childhood 1949-59
      • Issue 20 - Box Home Guard
      • Issue 19 - Outbreak WW2
      • Issue 18 - Building Bargates
      • Issue 17 - Railway Changes
      • Issue 16 - Quarries
      • Issue 15 - Rail & Quarry
      • Issue 14 - Civil War
      • Issue 13: Box Revels
      • Issue 12 - Where You Live
      • Issue 11 - Tudor & Stuart
      • Issue 10 - End of Era 1912
      • Issue 9 - Health & Leisure
      • Issue 8 - Farming & Rural
      • Issue 7 - Manufacturing
      • Issue 6 - Celebrations
      • Issue 5 - Victorian Centre
      • Issue 4 - Slump after WW1
      • Issue 3 - Great War 1914-18
      • Issue 2 - 1950s & 1960s
      • Issue 1 - 1920s
    • Index By Author
    • Partner Sites & Book Reviews
    • Currency Converter
  • People
  • Places
  • General
  • Series
    • Northeys >
      • Early Family
      • World of the Northeys
      • Unpaid Bill: Smith & Northey
      • Family Tree
      • George Wilbraham
      • Life in Box
      • George Edward
      • Safe & Steady Son
      • Army Life
      • Theatrical Events
      • Rolls-Royce Pioneer
      • Northey Donkey Cart
      • Other Children
      • Later Family
      • Selling Up
      • Northey Legacy
    • Box School Series >
      • Box Charity School
      • Formation of Box Schools
      • Schools WW1 to WW2
      • Box Schools, 1920s
      • Boys' School, 1927
      • Evacuee Schoolboy 1941
      • Box School 1945-83
      • Class of 1954
    • Box Farms >
      • Weavern Farm and Mill
      • Old Jockey Farm
      • Hill House Farm
      • Coles Farm
    • Box Library Project
    • NATS Trails >
      • Heritage Trails 2019
      • Conservation Areas
      • Box NATS Trails 2018
      • Alcombe and Shockerwick
      • Mills on Box Brook
      • Saxon Footpaths
      • New History Trails 2017
      • Roman Road
      • Box Hill Trail
      • Georgian Middlehill
      • History Trails 2016
      • Mad House
      • Thomas Railway
      • Market Place Origins
    • Prehistory >
      • Kingsdown's Menhir Secrets
    • Roman >
      • Early History Hoard
      • Roman Road Finds
      • Ancient Discovery
      • Roman Mosaics in Box
    • Early Medieval
    • Feudal >
      • Magna Carta in Box
      • Monk's Tale
      • Norman Conquest of Box
      • Tracing Bartholomew Bigod
      • When it Rained and Rained
    • Late Medieval
    • Tudor & Stuart >
      • Box in Civil War 1642 - 51
      • Wolf Hall and Box
      • Marsh Family
      • People during Civil War
      • Original Box Revels
      • Tudor Local Government
      • Ordinary People
      • Religion in Box, 1475-1660
      • Where You Live in 1626 >
        • Ashley
        • Central Box
        • Ditteridge
        • Hatt, Old Jockey and Blue Vein
        • Hazelbury
        • Henley and Washwells
        • Kingsdown
        • Middlehill
        • Rudloe
      • Hugh Speke Shaped Box
      • Walter Bushnell
      • Reformation in Box, 1535
      • Ten Tudor & Stuart Mansions
      • Death at Thomas à Becket >
        • For Whom Box Bell Tolled
      • Tudor & Stuart Timeline
      • John Aubrey's Box
    • Georgian >
      • Napoleon versus Box
      • Revolutionary Times
      • Coaches in 1830
      • Agricultral Census 1803
      • Tithe Apportionment
      • Slavery Families
      • Mullins Family, Schoolmasters
      • Box Churchyard
      • Sheridan's Duel
      • Tree of Life at Middlehill
      • Box's Highwayman
      • 1752: Very Odd Year
      • Witches, Quakers and Chapels
      • The New Road, 1761
      • Vulgarity in Box
      • Rebuilding the Village
      • Speke Family
      • Georgian People
      • Georgian Timeline
    • Rail & Quarry >
      • Crane 57
      • Railway Men Remembered
      • Old Clay Pipe
      • Recalling Box Quarries >
        • Oily Series
      • Quarrymen and their Families
      • Built in Stoneyards
      • Quarries in 2000
      • Single Ticket
      • Trainspotting in Box
      • Light Through Box Tunnel >
        • More Light on Tunnel
        • Brunel Myth
        • Sunrise at Box Tunnel
      • Marl at Middlehill
      • James Moodey
      • Railway Staff in Box
      • Impact of Railways
      • Vivash Follow-up
      • Underground Quarries
      • Lambert's Stoneyard
      • Cranes at Work
      • Railway Policeman
      • Terror in Tunnels
      • Vivash Family
      • Railway Buildings and More
      • Why Railways Came to Box
      • Box in 1830
      • Building Box Tunnel
      • Boxing and Quarrymen >
        • More Jem Mace
      • Clift Quarry Steam Loco
      • Timeline 1830 - 1870
      • Trial Shaft
      • Underbridges
    • Late Victorian >
      • Edwardian Love Story
      • Northey Estate Sale 1912-1923
      • Box Fete & Friendly Societies
      • Methodism in Box
      • George Reeves, Quarryman Ganger
      • Dipsomania in Box
      • 1870 Start of Era
      • Victorian Farming
      • Ashley Leigh
      • Steam Mill and Cottages
      • Class Division
      • Grove Inn
      • Box House
      • Celebrations >
        • Jubilee Mug 1887
      • Parish Magazine History
      • Postcards of Box >
        • Postcard Solved
      • Skeate, Speck and Ponting
      • 1899 A Year of Festivities
      • Valens Terrace
      • Village Outings >
        • Excitement for Outings
        • Cycling Craze
      • Timeline 1840 to now
      • Local Pubs
    • Great War >
      • Photos 2014
      • Cecil Lambert's War
      • VAD Working Parties
      • After the War
      • Box School Research
      • School WW1 Projects
      • List of Servicemen
      • Embroideries
      • In Memoriam
      • Never Forgotten
      • Where They Lived
      • Christmas 1913 and 1914
      • Children in WW1
      • Neighbour Against Neighbour
      • Home & Far Away
      • Finding Private Hall
      • Box Before the War
    • Inter War Years >
      • Shops in 1920s
      • Fascism
      • Sports Day 1931
    • WW2 Index >
      • Land Girl Remembers
      • World War 2 Scrapbook
      • Box in 1943
      • Aircraft Factories
      • D Day Implications, 1944
      • Peace
      • VE Day 1945
      • After the War
      • Epitaph to WW2
      • Wartime Memories
      • Wartime People
      • Bath Blitz 1942
      • Invasion Threat 1942
      • Children in War
      • Air Raids on Box
      • Military Camps
      • Royal Visits
      • Your WW2 Tributes
      • Dunkirk Evacuation
      • Box Home Guard >
        • Home Guard Names
      • Life at Home
      • Evacuee Children
      • Village & Ammunitions Depot
      • Memories of WW2
      • In Service at Home
      • At War
      • Lead up to War
      • Servicemen & Women
      • Timeline 1939-45
      • VE Day Remembered
      • Dennis Moss >
        • Hazelbury Air Crash
        • Air Crash Wreath
        • Flight Crew Lost
        • Graham Brayshaw
      • Evacuated From Belgium
      • WW2 Resting Place
      • Sherman Tank Disaster
    • Modern >
      • Modern Art
      • Centre of Commerce
      • Shoe Sculpture >
        • Stiletto Sculpture
      • Characters in 1940s
      • Teenage Rebels, 1960s
      • Swingin Sixties or Not?
      • A Box Childhood
      • Box People from 1950s
      • Shops in 1950 Box
      • Box in 1950s
      • Village in 1950s
      • Summer of 1959
      • reCollections
      • Residents After the War
      • Coach Trips 1950s
      • Never Had It So Good !
  • Contact
    • Blog
    • Q&A
Quarrymen and Boxing           Mark Jenkinson           December 2016
​All underground photographs courtesy Mark Jenkinson
Picture
Appropriately for their tough lifestyle, Victorian quarrymen were very interested in boxing. This is evident from the many depictions underground in Box of fighting. The sketches are always the same: a side-on view of two men facing-off, with fists raised. Sometimes national or international fighters are named, but often it is just some of the pugilistic quarrymen.

Tom Sayers v Bob Brettle, 1859
The heading picture shows a professional fight between Tom Sayers and Bob Brettle. The quarryman who drew it had difficulty with the spelling (Britel instead of Brettle) but these are clearly the two protagonists involved. They only fought once, so we can accurately identify the occasion, 20th September 1859 at Ashford, Kent.

Tom Sayers was an English bare-knuckle prize fighter before the Queensberry Rules of boxing were adhered to in about 1867. Sayers was very successful, but was only 5 ft 8 in tall, and weighed under 11 stones, so he frequently fought much bigger men. However, his opponent in this bout, Bob Brettle, was of very similar stature (5 ft 7¾ in and 10 st 2 lb according to the image below). Sayers was national champion at this time and Brettle was not as strong a fighter. Sayers won after Brettle dislocated his shoulder in the 7th round. (Illustrations below courtesy Wikipedia)
Picture
Picture
Tom Sayers’ final and most renowned fight in his career followed the Brettle fight, taking place in 1860. It was against US champion John Camel Heenan, and is regarded as boxing’s first world championship. It was a brutal contest lasting 42 rounds and over 2 hours. It ended in a controversial draw after the crowd invaded the ring, possibly because Sayers was looking likely to lose.
The newspaper illustration above left shows Sayers diminutive stature compared with Heenan.
Picture
Tom Sayers' tomb in Highgate Cemetery (courtesy Carol Payne)
Tom Sayers never fought again after the Heenan match and died in 1865, aged only 39. He has a particularly fine tomb in Highgate Cemetery, which features a sculpture of his dog, Lion. His funeral reputedly attracted a crowd of 10,000; he was a real sporting celebrity of his time.
Although the quarry sketch of the Sayers-Brettle fight is undated, it must have been drawn during or after 1859. And if a Box quarryman was to draw an illustration after 1860 of any Sayers fight, I think it would be of the famous Heenan fight rather than the bout against the less illustrious Brettle. Therefore, I strongly suspect this drawing to have been drawn contemporaneously by a quarryman in late 1859 or early 1860.

Sayers appears elsewhere in Box quarry, but not as distinctly; for example, in the photograph right, which when viewed at high resolution more clearly says Tom (or Thomas) Sayers. Unfortunately, some modern explorers deemed their painted direction arrow more valuable than the context of Victorian inscriptions.

Picture
Tom King v Jem Mace, 1862-63
The underground sketch in Box quarry of a fight between Tom King and Jem Mace is less clearly drawn than the Sayers-Brettle match, but fortunately the names are distinct.
Picture
Tom King, a Londoner, was another successful English prize fighter, who learnt to box while a young sailor in the Royal Navy.
He first fought Jem Mace in 1862. Jem Mace, who originated from Norfolk, had become English champion in 1861 and he successfully defended his title against Tom King after a gruelling 43-round fight. However, there was a re-match in 1863 which King won in the 21st round.
Picture
King then went on in the same year to fight the American John C Heenan in the UK, like Tom Sayers before him. King won this fight, although yet again there was some controversy and a ring invasion by the partisan crowd. As it is undated, we cannot tell which of Mace and King’s two fights is being depicted in the quarry sketch, but clearly 1862 or 1863 is the likely date of this graffiti.

In another part of Box quarry, there appears an interesting sketch with the words 150 £ on King. With research about the boxer Tom King fresh in my mind, I wondered whether it referred to winnings or perhaps a wager. The going rate for the championship fights involving Heenan appear to have been in the £2,000-£3,000 range. Using a currency calculator, an approximate factor of 100 is given for 1860’s prices in today’s money.[1]
A £15,000 wager seems implausible for a quarryman, so perhaps it was just wishful thinking!
Tom Spring
Tom Spring was yet another English champion bare-knuckle fighter, but his time was much earlier than the other fighters we have looked at, as he retired in 1824.
Picture
While not inconceivable, I do not think this sketch dates from this period, as the vast majority of inscriptions date from the mid 19th century onwards. I suspect this is more of a reminiscence from an old quarryman, perhaps marking Spring’s passing in 1851.
Jem Carney
My final example of a professional boxer's representation in Box quarry is a rarity for being not a charcoal sketch but the remains of a 1902 Ogden’s cigarette card. For obvious reasons, paper artefacts are not well suited for a long life in a damp underground quarry. Furthermore, spotting a fading card just a few centimetres tall stuck on the wall in a labyrinthine system of 50 miles or so of pitch dark passages requires some good fortune.

Jem Carney was born in Birmingham but was of Irish descent. He was an 1880s English lightweight champion. From the account of a 74-round epic against Irish-American Jack McAuliffe, Carney was a ferocious fighter.

Right: Remains of cigarette card found underground
Picture
Fighting quarrymen
Now that we have seen the quarrymen’s interest in national and international boxing, we can look at depictions of fighting closer to home. The sketch below shows Jack Simpkins facing off against Frank Fletcher. Frank Fletcher was born in 1875, son of Henry Fletcher, a quarryman. We can see from the 1891 census that like his father, Frank too had become a quarryman by the time he was 16. Frank was reputed to be a notorious fighter and poacher.[2] There is even an intriguing inscription underground about his being fined 5 shillings by a police constable for killing a lizard!
Picture
Jack Simpkins was another quarryman who, again according to legend was the driver of a steam engine to which Frank Fletcher was fireman.[3] The sketch above is particularly interesting since it shows the two characters at work with their engine, as well as fighting.
Picture
Picture
Fletcher v Simpkins is depicted elsewhere too. The sketch above left jokingly refers to the victor being the middleweight champion of the World, so their fights don’t sound too serious !

In the graffiti above right, the same pair is fighting again. The inscription reads: Fletcher Champion of Box beat Simpkins Jan 23rd 1894. To this is added, in a slightly different style, more similar to Fletcher’s signature just seen to the left, for 4 pound bet. Again using the currency calculator, this amount seems to be around £400 in today’s money, which still seems rather high, so I wonder if there was some inflated bragging going on.

John Fletcher and William Gingell
The drawing below features another Fletcher, but this time it is John Fletcher who is fighting William Gingell. There appears to be some encouragement for one or both fighters in the form of Go in you buggar.

William Gingell was a quarryman born in 1864, son of an Ashley quarryman called John Gingell. We know the quarryman fighter Frank Fletcher of course, and his father Henry, but my census research for John Fletcher has been less conclusive, unless it perhaps refers to a contemporary quarryman from Kingsdown called James Fletcher.

Picture
I haven’t unearthed any further information for the last couple of fighting images that I include here. The inscription below left appears to read: Now then time, prize fighter, John Cole and Old James. The image below right is simply an unnamed pair, drawn in a slightly more sophisticated style than some of the more cartoon-like sketches we have seen.

Altogether, the Box quarries have quite a collection of boxing inscriptions, and I have not covered them all here. It shows that boxing played a significant part in quarrymen’s lives; there is certainly more boxing depicted than other sports, such as football.
Picture
Picture
Sources
Boxers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sayers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Brettle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_King_%28boxer%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jem_Mace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Spring
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jem_Carney

An account of the Sayers-Brettle fight
(although this article quotes September 1858, I’m inclined to believe the Sayers timeline that puts it in September 1859):
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Meet+Bob+Brettle,+the+bare-knuckle+boxing+landlord%3B+back+in+time.-a0160382044

Sayers-Heenan fight
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2010/apr/14/john-heenan-tom-sayers-boxing

Jem Mace - Bob Brettle
http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/talk/talk_jem_mace.shtml
http://www.boxingtreasures.com/bobbrettle.html

Tom Sayers dog tombstone
http://www.victorianweb.org/sculpture/funerary/222.html

An account of Jem Carney v Jack McAuliffe
http://www.boxing.com/the_great_and_forgotten_jem_carney_and_his_74_round_war_with_jack_mcauliffe.html

1891 census
http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Box/Box%20-%20Census%201891.pdf

Roger Tucker, Scripta Legenda Box Quarries - Volume 1
Roger Tucker, Some Notable Wiltshire Quarrymen
References
[1] Currency calculator
[2] Roger Tucker, Scripta Legenda Volume 1
[3] Roger Tucker, Scripta Legenda Volume 1
Back to Rail & Quarry Age
Back to Issue 15