Pugilistica: The History of British Boxing, Volume 3 (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

The opening of Chapter I

WILLIAM THOMPSON (“BENDIGO”), OF NOTTINGHAM, CHAMPION. 1835-1850.

William Thompson, whose pseudonym of Bendigo has given its name to a district or territory of our Antipodean empire, first saw the light on the 11th day of October, in the year 1811, in the city of Nottingham, renowned, in the days of rotten boroughs and protracted contested elections, for its pugnacious populace, its riotous mobs, and rampant Radicalism, succeeded, in a like spirit, even in later “reformed” times, by its lion-like “lambs,”[2] and “tiger-Tories.” William was one of three sons at a birth, and, we are assured, of a family holding a respectable position among their neighbours, some of them filling the ministerial pulpit, and others belonging to a strait and strict denomination of dissent.

Read on in Part 1 →