64.—Neale guarded his ribs and head steadily, making some good stops, but Baldwin bored in; Ned could not keep him out, and was hit in the body and thrown, Baldwin falling over him. (Shouts for Baldwin.)
65.—Neale planted his left, but Bob hit with him, gave him a rib-bender with the right, and finally hit him down. (“It’s all over, Neale’s beaten!” was the cry.)
66, and last.—Neale came to time greatly distressed; Bob was loudly called on, and as he came in met him with a right-hander in the mark, and poor Ned fell heavily. This was the coup de grace. On Neale being lifted on his second’s knee his head dropped, and he became perfectly insensible. On “time” being called Baldwin was saluted as victor of the hard-fought field. Both men were reconducted to St. Albans, where they were carefully attended to. Neale, whose condition was certainly the worst, complaining chiefly of pain from the body blows he received, and the disablement of his right hand. The fight lasted one hour and eleven minutes.
Remarks.—By this victory Baldwin placed himself on the topmost round of the ladder as a game, enduring, and resolute boxer, while Neale’s superior art, activity, and precision all but balanced Baldwin’s advantages in weight, strength, and stamina. It was an heroic battle, and either of the men at different changes of the well-fought fight might have resigned the prize without discredit to his courage or his honour. Indeed, more than once a scrupulously strict time-keeper might have called on one or other of the men with fatal result to his chance of success. A fairer or better ring, and more fair-play principle in those surrounding it, have seldom been seen of late.
Baldwin and Neale both showed on the following Tuesday, when White-headed Bob took a benefit at the Tennis Court. Considering the severity of the contest, both men looked well—a satisfactory proof of their excellent condition, and of the effects of careful training.
This was Baldwin’s last encounter in the P.R. By the assistance of his aristocratic patrons he became host of the “Coach and Horses,” St. Martin’s Lane, afterwards kept by Ben Caunt. Baldwin was a free liver, and his position one of temptation, which he was by constitution and temperament by no means inclined to resist. He died at his house in October, 1831, aged twenty-eight years, from an inflammatory attack, after a short illness.
CHAPTER VIII.
SAMUEL EVANS (“YOUNG DUTCH SAM”)—1825–1834.
Among the town celebrities of the second quarter of the nineteenth century the subject of this memoir held a prominent place. His immediate and personal intimacy as boon companion or “pal” of a certain notorious marquis, and an earl whose career, while “sowing their wild oats,” savoured rather of the early days of the Regency than those of Queen Victoria, brought him too often before the public. Indeed, the nature of the associations into which he was thus unfortunately thrown, acting upon a volatile and reckless disposition, led him into excesses which destroyed a fine constitution, prevented his availing himself of more than one opportunity of achieving competence and a fair social position, and finally consigned him to a premature grave. In the ensuing pages, however, we shall chiefly deal with Young Dutch Sam as a public demonstrator of the art of self-defence, and as one whose biography furnishes an illustrative chapter in the history of the Ring.
Samuel Evans, deservedly distinguished as “the Phenomenon,” was born in Wells Street, Ratcliff Highway, on the 30th of January, 1808. He was descended from a sire whose fame as a professional boxer the son did no discredit. The battles of Samuel Elias, in his day also dubbed “the Phenomenon,” will be found in our first volume. Sam’s earlier years, from all that we have gathered from his own lips and his intimates, were spent in the same “university” which another famous “Samuel” (not Johnson, but Weller) declares to be the “best for sharpening the intellect” of the youth who may chance to be subjected to its rough discipline. The traditions of Rosemary Lane, now itself swept into what Thomas Carlyle calls “the dustbin of the past,” were once rife with reminiscences of the intuitive fistic skill and the marvellous mastery of milling manœuvres displayed by “Young Sam,” in many an encounter with the pugnacious progeny of the “peoplesh,” who once populated that inodorous but sweetly named thoroughfare, renowned for the “ancient and (fried) fish-like smell” of its edibles, and the yet more fusty emanations of its clobbered and thrice-renovated garments.
Thus Sam fought his way upwards in the rude “battle of life” until his sire “shuffled off this mortal coil” in the month of July, 1816, when Sam appears to have been thrown upon his own resources. Sam was evidently a precocious youth, for in his fifteenth year, if we take Pierce Egan’s account, he was following the employment of a baker, when his associate in dough, one Bill Dean, a chap with some milling pretensions, threatened to serve out Young Sam for some trifling fault. This brought forth the father’s blood in his veins, and in emulation of his warlike sire, he challenged Dean out to fight early the next morning; but old Burntcrust, his master, locked Sam up in his bedroom to prevent the mill. Sam, however, in defiance of bolts and bars, got out of the garret window, scrambled over the tiles of several houses, found his way into a strange house, ran down the stairs, ultimately into the street, and met Bill Dean at the appointed place, Kennington Common, when the battle commenced without delay. In the course of four rounds Young Sam played his part so well that Dean would not fight any longer, gammoning it, as was supposed, that his thumb was out of joint.