CHAPTER IV
JEM BELCHER
If the love of Fair Play is not born in us, and has therefore to be taught, we do have ingrained in us a very real admiration for a good loser. Nothing, as we know only too well, succeeds like success—particularly material success. But somewhere or other deep down in us we have a kind of mistrust of what the world at large calls success: there may be a tinge of superstition in our feeling. At any rate we have a very warm corner in our hearts for the glorious failure: and not without good reason, for there are more failures than successes, and, having failed, it is easy enough to invent the glory.
Jem Belcher is probably the most renowned prize-fighter that ever lived. He won several splendid victories, details of some of which have come down to us. But it is not his victories that have given fame to him so much as his glorious defeats: and these not so much on account of the champions who beat him, though they were very famous too, as on account of Belcher’s personality. This, compounded as it was of qualities and especially defects, unlovely in themselves, was of exactly the kind which endears itself to the English speaking world, and to that world not only.
Jem Belcher was a roysterer, a drinker, a loose fish. He was also jealous and vindictive. But he was indomitably courageous and he was good-looking. He was a gracefully built man, and well-proportioned, but he made no great show of muscle. He stood 5 ft. 11 in., but never weighed more than 11 stone 10 lb.—only a little over the modern middle-weight limit.
Jem Belcher was born at Bristol on April 15th, 1781, being on his mother’s side a grandson of Jack Slack, the champion of 1750. He went to work as a butcher’s boy, and whilst quite a lad, showed amazing precocity as a boxer. His first recorded fight, when he was but seventeen, was with Britton, whom he beat in March of 1798 in half an hour or so. Then he came to London, where he was kindly treated by Bill Warr, now an elderly man, who put on the gloves with him to see what he was made of. As a result of this trial, Warr backed Jem against Paddington Jones, whom he easily beat. In the following year he fought a drawn battle with Jack Bartholomew, when quite out of condition. In 1800 he was matched with Bartholomew again and fought him for three hundred guineas a side on Finchley Common. Belcher had already shown himself as a brilliantly scientific boxer, aggressive, “never to be denied,” as they say. But with Bartholomew, a much heavier and stronger man, he showed how well he could defend himself, “milling on the retreat” when necessary. In spite of this Bartholomew dashed at him at the beginning, and, forcing down his guard, knocked Jem down. So certain were Bartholomew’s backers that he had the fight in one hand, so to say, that they immediately sent off messengers to London announcing his victory. This was a little premature, for no sooner had those messengers left the ring-side than Belcher with lightning speed hit his opponent several times in succession without a return, and finished a brilliant round by throwing him a hard cross-buttock. The effects of this handicapped Bartholomew for the rest of the encounter. He had plenty of pluck, and all of it was needed. The moral courage required to stand up and take a beating from a much lighter man, or rather a boy, is very great. The rounds were short and very fierce, seventeen being fought in twenty minutes. And at the end of that time Jem sent home a tremendous body-blow which knocked Bartholomew down and out of time. He was unable to reach the scratch after the half-minute’s rest.
After this Belcher thrashed Andrew Gamble in five rounds and nine minutes. His next battle, quite an important one in regarding the man’s record, was yet but a brawl at the ring-side of another fight. Just after the encounter between Isaac Bittoon and Tom Jones in July of 1801, Joe Berks, the Shropshire butcher (who figures in somewhat similar circumstances with Boy Jim in Sir A. Conan Doyle’s Rodney Stone), somewhat elated by wine, called out, “Where’s young Jem Belcher? Where’s your champion?” So Jem went up to him and asked him what he wanted. The reply was a quick blow which Belcher, ever on the alert, stopped. They thereupon settled down to a bye-battle which lasted for nineteen minutes and which Jem Belcher decisively won.
However, it was manifest that Berks had been fighting under the handicap of considerable intoxication, and a set battle was finally arranged between these two in the following November. They met at Hurley Bottom, near Maidenhead.
Joe Berks was much the stronger man, and though early in the fight Jem laid open his nose with a vicious right and later cut his forehead so that Joe lost a lot of blood, his seconds finding it impossible to staunch it, he fought like a tiger. In the ninth round after these misfortunes and when he had been getting much the worst of it, he dashed in, through, as it were, Jem’s raining blows, seized hold of him and hurled him down with terrific force. Joe Berks was a gallant ruffian, and though utterly defeated in sixteen rounds and twenty-five minutes refused to give in. Finally his seconds threw up the sponge on his behalf. He was much cut and bruised both in face and body, while young Jem Belcher hardly had a mark to show, and seemed quite unhurt. He declared afterwards that he never felt a blow throughout the fight—which is probably untrue.
After he had beaten Joe Berks again and Fearby, the Young Ruffian, in fourteen and eleven rounds respectively, Jem Belcher was generally regarded as the Champion.