Pugilistica: The History of British Boxing, Volume 3 (of 3) / Containing Lives of the Most Celebrated Pugilists; Full Reports of Their Battles from Contemporary Newspapers, With Authentic Portraits, Personal Anecdotes, and Sketches of the Principal Patrons of the Prize Ring, Forming a Complete History of the Ring from Fig and Broughton, 1719-40, to the Last Championship Battle Between King and Heenan, in December 1863

by Henry Downes Miles

WILLIAM THOMPSON (“Bendigo”)
of Nottingham.

PUGILISTICA:
THE HISTORY OF BRITISH BOXING.

PERIOD VII.

FROM THE CHAMPIONSHIP OF BENDIGO (WILLIAM THOMPSON) TO HIS LAST BATTLE WITH CAUNT (1845).

CHAPTER I.

WILLIAM THOMPSON (“BENDIGO”), OF NOTTINGHAM, CHAMPION. 1835–1850.

William Thompson, whose pseudonym of Bendigo has given its name to a district or territory of our Antipodean empire, first saw the light on the 11th day of October, in the year 1811, in the city of Nottingham, renowned, in the days of rotten boroughs and protracted contested elections, for its pugnacious populace, its riotous mobs, and rampant Radicalism, succeeded, in a like spirit, even in later “reformed” times, by its lion-like “lambs,”[2] and “tiger-Tories.” William was one of three sons at a birth, and, we are assured, of a family holding a respectable position among their neighbours, some of them filling the ministerial pulpit, and others belonging to a strait and strict denomination of dissent. The late Viscount Palmerston expressed his opinion that had not John Bright, the coadjutor of Cobden and Gladstonian Cabinet Minister of our own day, been born a Quaker, he must have grown up a pugilist; a similar reflection suggests itself to those who knew the character and genius of William Thompson; with the difference that in his case the young pugilist did grow into an elderly Methodist parson, as we shall hereafter see, while the Broadbrim secular Minister has not yet figured in the roped twenty-four feet.

There is a closer psychological connection between fighting and fanaticism, pugnacity and Puritanism, than saints and Stigginses can afford to admit, and the readiness of wordy disputants to resort to the argumentum ad hominem, or ad baculinum, and the facile step from preachee to floggee of parsons of all sects and times, need no citations of history to prove. The young Bendigo, as we shall see hereafter, became another illustration of the wisdom of Seneca,[3] and took to theological disputation when he could no longer convince his opponents by knock-down blows.