Jones, for a long period, up to the present year, 1881, has been living in America, where he has earned respect for his civility, steadiness, good behavour, and his skill as a teacher of the art of boxing. A paragraph in a recent newspaper informs us of his return to the Old Country at the age of fifty-one.

TOM SAYERS (Champion)

PERIOD VIII.—1846–1863.

FROM THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF TOM SAYERS TO THE FIGHT BETWEEN HEENAN AND KING.

CHAPTER I.

TOM SAYERS (CHAMPION).—​1849–1860.

As seven cities contended for the honour of being the birthplace of Homer, so, parvis componere magna, half a dozen places, English and Irish, have been named as the spot of dull earth whereon the last Champion of England opened his sharp little grey eyes. Somers Town and Camden Town, his favourite haunts in later life; Pimlico, now a palatial precinct of Belgravia, and several other places, have been oracularly declared, in “Answers to Correspondents,” in sundry sporting journals, to have been the locus in quo Tom struggled into what proved in his case literally “the battle of life.” A clever sporting writer (“Augur”) remarks with truth that “Ireland makes it her rule of faith always to claim the winner, be it man, woman, or quadruped. The ‘divided honours’ of Farnborough presented no obstacle to this. She adopted the maternity of Heenan out of hand, and with fair pretence, and now she has put in a post mortem claim to Tom Sayers. A regular county Kerry genealogy has been found for him, including a maternal aunt, who, naturally and nationally attributes his valour to her family infusion of the ‘blood of the Fitzgeralds!’”

In the memoir in Bell’s Life, at the date alluded to (which to our knowledge was from the pen of a trueborn Celt), we read “Tom Sayers, whose parents came from Dingle, in the county of Kerry,” &c. This gossip we pass, being able to state from personal knowledge, not only that Tom was born at “Pimlico,” a place of “fish-like smell,” in the middle of Brighton, Sussex, on May 25th, 1828, but that his father, “Old Tom,” so called from the bronzed complexion he transmitted to his son, whom he survives, is a genuine Sussex man, born at Storrington, near Steyning, in that county, where he was baptised in 1793, and in 1819 married a home-born and home-bred Sussex woman. Tom’s pedigree, therefore, is indisputably that of an Englishman. How he passed his youth, pushing off the Brighton hog-boats from the shingly beach of London-super-mare, we may also pass. In due time he was placed out to the trade of a bricklayer, and we have heard him say his first “big job” was on the Preston Viaduct of the Brighton and Lewes Railway, a noble structure of stone and white brick, visible from the Brighton terminus, crossing the Preston Road. Tom quitted Sussex, and in 1848 he was following his vocation on the extensive works of the North Western Railway at Camden Town, a locality for many years a favourite with the departed Champion.