“Accident to Bendigo.—William Thompson, better known by his cognomen of ‘Bendigo,’ has met with an accident which is likely to cripple him for life. On Monday he had been to see the military officers’ steeplechase, near Nottingham, and on his return home he and his companions were cracking their jokes about having a steeplechase among themselves. Having duly arrived nearly opposite the Pindar’s House, on the London Road, about a mile from Nottingham, Bendigo exclaimed, ‘Now, my boys, I’ll show you how to run a steeplechase in a new style, without falling,’ and immediately threw a somersault; he felt, whilst throwing it, that he had hurt his knee, and on alighting be attempted in vain three times to rise from the ground; his companions, thinking for the moment he was joking, laughed heartily, but discovering it was no joke went to his assistance and raised him up, but the poor fellow had no use of his left leg. A gig was sent for immediately, in which he was conveyed to the house of his brother, and Messrs. Wright and Thompson, surgeons, were immediately called in. On examination of the knee we understand they pronounced the injury to the cap to be of so serious a nature that he is likely to be lame for life.
This serious mishap, which befell him on the 23rd of March, 1840, was the result of those “larking” propensities for which Bendy was notorious. It shelved our hero most effectually, leaving the field open to Caunt, Nick Ward, Brassey, Deaf Burke, Tass Parker, and Co., whose several doings will be found in the proper place.
While Bendigo suffers as an im-patient under the hands of the Nottingham doctors for more than two years, we shall, before again raising the curtain, interpose a slight entr’acte in the shape of a little song to an old tune, then in the height of its popularity, “The Fine Old English Gentleman;” of which we opine we have read worse parodies than this, which was often chaunted in the parlour of Tom Spring’s “Castle,” in Holborn, at various meetings of good men and true, the patrons of fair play and of the then flourishing “Pugilistic Association,” whereof Tom was the President, and “the Bishop of Bond-street” the Honorary and Honourable Treasurer.
THE FINE OLD ENGLISH PUGILIST
By the P.L. of the P.R.
I’ll sing a song of days of old now vanish’d like the mist,
And may the fire of “Frosty Face” a modern bard assist
To pay the honours justly due to each Old Pugilist,
Who, not for filthy lucre, but for conquest, clenched his fist,