They thrive but ill, nor do they last when grown;
And should we count them, and our store compile,
Yet Thebes more gates could show, more mouths the Nile.[26]
and so went on the “confusion in the camp” until little Tom Sayers came, and, by disposing of Perry and Paddock, united England in one “Championship of all the weights.”
Paddock’s claims to a niche in our gallery of celebrities are indisputable, as it was his lot to encounter almost every big man of repute in his day. He fought, as we shall see, Nobby Clarke (twice), Bendigo, Harry Poulson (three times), Aaron Jones (twice), Harry Broome, the Tipton Slasher, Tom Sayers, and Sam Hurst. With this anticipation of his career we will proceed to a more detailed account of the doings of the “Redditch needlepointer” than has been hitherto given; merely noting that this nickname, which we many times heard from his intimates and other provincials, seemed rather derived from the staple trade of Paddock’s native town than from any employment at “needlemaking” by the burly Tom himself, who was but slightly polished up from a rough and ready rustic chawbacon by his fourteen years of incidental town life.
Tom’s birth dated from 1824, and his pursuits, as we have intimated, were those of a farmer’s boy; indeed, Tom might have lived and died unknown, and taken his long nap in a nameless grave—
“Beneath those ragged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep”—