All these had already disappeared, or withdrawn in disgust, and left no successors. Their places were usurped by a clamorous crew of sharp practitioners, loud-mouthed disputants, and tricky match-makers—the sweepings of society in the Old and New Worlds. Those on this side of the water were backed by the ill-gotten gains of the keepers of low gambling hells and night-houses, those on the other side by the proprietors of bar-rooms, drinking-saloons, and the large crowd of loungers, loafers, and rowdies who hang on the skirts of the Sporting World of the Great Republic and are its disgrace and bane. The cardinal principle of these worthies, like that of the “welshers” of our own race-courses, being “heads I win, tails you lose,” it was certainly a trial for an Englishman’s patience and gravity to hear and read it urged, as a reason for choosing Ireland as a battle-ground, that our Hiberno-American cousins (or cozens) were afraid their man “would not get fair play” in England. But we must proceed.
No sooner had the conditions been duly published to the world in the sporting papers than the “high contracting parties” set off upon their provincial tours, with the summer all before them. With Coburn’s progress his “secretary” kept the newspaper press au courant; we were told, from week to week, how he put on the mittens with Joe Goss, Bill Ryall, Jack Rooke, Reardon, and others, at Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Dublin, and of course “bested” them. Those who knew how these things were arranged, took them with the needful “grain of salt,” and we coupled them with the significant fact that three of the pugilists named each separately expressed to us his envy at Mace’s good luck, and his regret that he was not in his place to “try conclusions” with the newly imported “champion.” Mace, too, was not behind in travelling the “circuits,” having for his “agent in advance” and “secretary,” Harry Montague, well known, even up to 1881, as secretary to “Myers’s Great American Hippodrome and Circus.”
We skip over the months until we come to September 24th, at which time, strange to say, not a single detail seemed to have been arranged by either party, and when, at the last deposit at Harry Brunton’s, Barbican, the £1,000 was declared to be made good, and the £100 cheque of the stakeholder thereafter handed over to Coburn and Co., we must confess we were much exercised in mind to know what would be the next move in the kriegspiel. We were soon enlightened. Coburn’s representatives having won the toss, communicated that the rendezvous would be Mr. Woodroffe’s, “Cambridge Arms,” Island Bridge, near Dublin, on Monday, October 4th. Accordingly, to “mak’ siccar,” we booked ourselves, on the previous Saturday, by the “Wild Irishman” for Holyhead, and thence by the swift mail-packet, the “Scotia,” landed early on Sunday morning at Kingstown, suffering some delay from a tremendous south-wester in the Channel. Here we found our Irish friends all alive, and as full of questions and eager inquiries for news as if they had been ancient instead of modern Greeks. More Hibernico, too, we soon found that they could tell us more than we knew about the matter; for by way of a secret we were informed in the street, before we had landed six hours, that “Joe” (Coburn) “shure was in Limerick, and that the foight ’ud come off nigh hand there, at Goold’s Crass,” which, if thus publicly known, made us sure that it would not. We stood on the pier watching the arrivals. By the Liverpool packet came a large accession to the English division; among them Jerry Noon, Bos Tyler, Welsh, Hicks, with Fred Oliver, the Commissary, and his henchman, Puggy White, and not a few familiar faces from London, Birmingham, Manchester, and the North.
In Dublin we found not a few “London particulars” of the Press: the editor of Bell’s Life (Frank Dowling), with young Holt as his aide-de-camp, the editor of the Era, ditto of two new penny Sportsmen, with half a dozen penmen of the London dailies and weeklies, all seeking pabulum for their “special correspondence” from the Irish capital. At “the Imperial” we met an American party, which included John Heenan, his “secretary (!)” Mr. Hamilton, Cusick, and the literary and artistic representatives of a New York “illustrated” journal. Here, too, we met our friend Shirley Brooks (the editor of Punch, in posse), looking fair, fresh, and pleasant, and more resembling a smart Meltonian fresh from “the shires” and following the brush across a grass country than a London Press-man just escaped from the consumption of the midnight gas. To him, as one of the “uninitiated,” we imparted our confidence, that he had better enjoy himself in the pleasant circles of Dublin society, than set out on any such “pig-shearing” expedition as the contemplated journey must in all probability prove.
Monday morning came, and we strolled down Dame Street. We were quickly hailed by a car-driver, “Would we like jist a dhrive to Monkstown? Shure an’ Mishter Mace is up there, at the Salt Hill hot-el, he is; an’ there’s lots o’ gintry as he’s a shtrippin’ an’ showin’ hisself to—shure I seen him mysilf through an open windy, yesterday marnin’; an’ by the same token he a-runnin’ a quarter race like a shtag, an’ batin’ his man, a rig’lar paydesthrian too. Will I dhrive yer hanner?” Yes; but not to Monkstown. At this moment we were accosted by an old, very old acquaintance, none other than the erewhile host of the “Blue Boar’s Head,” Long Acre, a renowned English “paydesthrian,” Drinkwater, better known in sporting circles by his alias of “Temperance.”[39] This worthy relic of a better period and better men, had been for some years located in the Irish capital, in a confidential employment in an extensive commercial institution, and, as he was among the curious, we mounted the jolting jaunting-car, and away we went for Island Bridge.
The scene here was curious, and quite novel to an English eye. Groups of people, consisting of men with a large sprinkling of slatternly women and barefoot children, were thickly scattered on the roads and river-banks, while vehicles of every description, and some of no possible description, rattled through the crowds amid cheers, shouts, and now and then objurgations and cries from the assemblage. Hard by, to complete the oddity of the picture, stood a squad of active, good-looking, and apparently good-humoured constabulary, each carrying his handy rifle-carbine and sword-bayonet, and all seemingly on the best of terms with Paddy and Shelah, and the “gossoons” who formed the holiday gathering. Making our way into the house we there found, that though the much-talked-of Goold’s Cross was the appointed champ clos, that not only was there, up to this time, no train or other mode of conveyance thither even suggested, but that the “assembled chiefs” were only about to discuss the nomination of a referee, as provided by the articles. Had this matter been left to Harry Brunton on behalf of Mace, and “Ould Nat” as the representative of Coburn, no doubt that matter would have been quickly and amicably settled. That this did not suit the “managers” was quickly apparent. We found a meeting much resembling, on a smaller scale, a Yankee “caucus,” or an assembly of French communards at Belleville, gesticulating, shouting, swearing, and all talking at once, while in the midst our deaf friend, Harry Brunton, Old Nat, Mr. Edwin James, and half a dozen Hibernian amateur counsellors in vain tried to obtain a hearing. Finally, as nothing could be done here, an adjournment took place to a more private apartment. Here the squabble was renewed. For referee, after various names had been assented to by Brunton and rejected by the Coburn party, the latter declared, that they would fight under the refereeship of no man but a certain Mr. Bowler, of Limerick, a person utterly unknown to any one present, and of whom no one could certify that he had the slightest acquaintance with the rules of the Ring, or the duties of the office thus proposed to be thrust upon him. At this time, too, it was truly reported that a body of 100 constabulary were posted near Thurles, and that a man had been just arrested at Goold’s Cross on suspicion that he was Coburn, who, however, was stated to be safe at a place called Ballangella, twelve miles from Limerick. Brunton now put his foot down in refusing the mysterious Mr. Bowler, and as Messrs. James and Co. were equally obdurate, the dispute as to whether either party meant fighting went on until the clock struck three, when the match, according to the articles, was actually off. Hereupon Harry Brunton declared his intention of not trusting his man to the forbearance of the Irish police, and, unless a fair referee were agreed on, he would wash his hands of the whole affair and return to England. Harry then left the house, and embarked on board the Holyhead packet, Mace also leaving at nine o’clock. And now came the concluding scenes of this Irish comedy. The Coburn clique loudly proclaimed their intention of claiming the £900 in the hands of the stakeholder. They would go down to Goold’s Cross—and they did so—and then and there summon the “runaway” to meet their man. Resolved to see out the farce, we took tickets. On the platform were a hundred greencoats armed with carbines; and a ruddy-faced young rustic, whose name proved to be Ryan, as unlike Mace as could be, having been pointed out by some practical joker as Mace, was forthwith arrested as the redoubted English champion, but soon set at liberty. The ring, consisting of four posts and a rope, having been pitched at a place called Pierstown, Kilmana, and the police being assured that there being but one man there could be no fight, stood laughing by, while proclamation for the appearance of the English champion was made and the stakes duly claimed, and so the curtain fell.
The scene shifts to England, where the stakeholder, after innumerable criminations and recriminations, declared “a draw” of the battle-money by each party as the only possible verdict. Of course the Mace party, and Harry Brunton especially, were seriously out of pocket by the fiasco, in travelling, training, and other expenses, beyond the £100 disbursed to Coburn and Co. The editor of Bell’s Life thus sums up the case:—
“Looking at the matter calmly and dispassionately, we are led to think that Mace has been treated harshly. Of Coburn we have formed this opinion, that he never had the slightest intention of fighting; that he had not even trained; that he was a mere instrument in the hands of others, and believed the match would be turned to account by some trick of Yankee juggling, without the peril of exposing his cutwater countenance to the active props of Mace’s handy digits. Taking the affair as a whole, it has been one of the greatest and most fatal blows to pugilism within our memory, and will tend more to estrange and disgust true patrons of the Ring than any event of our time. We have not heard any more appropriate name bestowed upon any great disappointment than that invented by the sporting editor of the Morning Advertiser, when he described the no-result as ‘the collapse of a gigantic wind-bag.’”
While on the subject of the Press, we cannot refrain from a pleasant episode in relief of so much chicanery and knavery.
No one can deny the native humour of our Irish fellow-countrymen, and their keen sense of the ridiculous, hence some Irish wag turned this affair of Mace and Coburn to laughable account. A certain portion of the “unco’ guid” Puritan and eminently pious Catholic press of Dublin was loud in its outcries of horror, and its denunciations of the unhallowed incursion of “fighting men” into the peace-loving “island of saints.” It called loudly for the strong arm of the law to preserve intact the holy soil, miraculously cleared by St. Patrick, from a renewed invasion of foreign “vermin.” Some sly wag (the hoax was worthy of Theodore Hook himself) accordingly indited the following “pastoral” from the Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, which, being forwarded to the leading Irish papers, found ready insertion and approving editorial comment:—