Deaf Burke, on the other hand, was young and healthy, and in high spirits. He was seconded by Tom Gaynor and Dick Curtis, Byrne by Tom Spring and Jem Ward. On stripping, Burke was seen to be in perfect condition, but Byrne looked still a little too fleshy and had no special show of muscle upon him. He had a good deal of advantage in height. Burke was the favourite but not at greater odds than 5-4, or guineas to pounds.
In the days of bare knuckles there was generally a certain amount of “honour” to be gained by achieving the first knock-down, or drawing first blood. There was often betting on the subject, anyhow on the former event. In the first round of this match a good deal of amusement was caused by Burke. Byrne hit him on the nose and made him sniff. Whereupon Byrne called out, “First blood!” Burke deliberately wiped his nose with his finger and showed it to his opponent unstained. Then they went at it again, and before long the Irishman was seen to be bleeding at the mouth. But at the same moment Burke’s nose did begin to bleed, so the umpires and the referee decided that it was a tie.
The second round found both the men in the best of good tempers, and the hitting was even. Towards the end of this set-to there was a fierce rally in which both gave heavy punishment. They closed, and Byrne threw Deaf Burke and fell upon him. Burke’s defence was the sounder, but his antagonist was the better wrestler. In the fourth round Byrne swung his right with tremendous force at his man’s head, and had the blow landed on the jaw it might well have finished the battle. But Burke moved forward at that moment and the blow caught him on the back of the head with much of its force spent, and no particular damage was done.
There was some good fighting in the next round. Each landed a hard left, and then Byrne stepped back, landing a splendidly timed upper-cut with his right as Burke came in. Then he closed and hurled the “Deaf ’un” down. Jem Ward derisively asked Burke from Byrne’s corner “How did you like that?” and Burke grinned.
Byrne’s hand was now beginning to swell from the effects of his tremendous punch in the fourth round. He again threw Burke, who appeared none the worse for it. He was hitting the oftener, Byrne the harder: but the Irishman’s best blows did not get through the other man’s defence. Both were badly marked, however, and before the fight had lasted three-quarters of an hour, had revived themselves with brandy.
By the eighteenth round they were getting slow. Burke had a primitive ruse which he employed from time to time of looking at his man’s body and grimacing and then bringing up his fist to the head. He tried this now with eminent success. In the next round Byrne received a very hard blow under the ear, not by any means the first, which must have done him more harm than he knew at the moment. He fought back, however, and landed on Burke’s nose and again on the eye, when Burke lowered his hands for a moment to wipe them on his breeches. “Loud laughter at Burke’s expense,” says the writer in Bell’s Life.
The first knock-down was administered by Byrne in the twenty-seventh round. After that Byrne had distinctly the best of it for some time. He threw Burke with terrific force on his head in the twenty-ninth round and in the next hit him so severely about the body as to make him sick. Burke was evidently weak, and Byrne seemed to have the fight in his hand. He threw his opponent again and again, rushing him to the ropes and hitting him severely before closing.
The responsible officials ought now to have stopped the fight, there is no excuse for them whatever. What followed was sheer beastliness and nothing else. Burke and Byrne are in no wise to blame. Both fought until they were virtually senseless. Both tried to be, quite roughly speaking, fair.
In the forty-third round Tom Cannon, a well-known bruiser and a backer of Deaf Burke, broke, with others, into the ring and began to curse Burke. “Get up and fight, Deaf ’un,” he shouted. “D’ye mean to make a cross of it?”
With some difficulty Cannon and the rest were expelled from the ring, and the fight, if fight it can be called, went on.