Just a quick ‘bonus’ blog post as I spotted this wonderful book in Sanders of Oxford during a visit to the city at the weekend. We were in the shop looking at old maps and prints and spotted ‘An Almanac of Twelve Sports’, illustrated by William Nicholson, on the way out of the shop. The book was published in 1897 so I thought there’d be a good chance of it featuring boxing. Sure enough it features as the month of November.
According to the friendly staff in the shop Nicholson was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and, tongue-in-cheek, invited him to add verse for each month knowing that Kipling strongly disliked all sports. The passage for November reads:
Read here the Moral roundly writ
For him that into battle goes –
Each soul that, hitting hard and hit,
Encounters gross or ghostly foes:-
Prince, blown by many overthrows
Half blind with shame, half choked with dirt
Man cannot tell but Allah knows
How much the other side was hurt!
It also seems as though Nicholson may have used Georgian-era etchings as inspiration for his ring scene. The shin-length trousers, and stances of the boxers, are much more reminiscent of fighters from an earlier bareknuckle era, with Nicholson using an earlier image as a ‘study’ before adding gloves and ring ropes. The scene looks very familiar to one I think I know, but can’t find at the moment – though I suspect the figure on the right is modelled on Bill Richmond, or Tom Molyneux. The figure on the left looks, to me, a lot like images I’ve seen of Jack Broughton. All three men, particularly Molyneux and Broughton, are the subjects of many reproduced images in the sporting press in the decades leading up to the publication of this book, and it seems reasonable that Nicholson would have been very familiar with them.
For an example of how these men were capture by the press of the time, see Lord Byron’s amazing ‘decoupage screen’ currently on display at The National Portrait Gallery in London.
Writers on Boxing 
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