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Chapter 2

Ring Rookie

“When he talked about boxing, it seemed like he would jump up and knock you out himself. G.B.S. loved to talk a big game — his eyes lit up, and that wit — sort of jabbing here and there.”

POLLY LAUDER TUNNEY

The gym had a heavy, pungent smell. The damp stench of sweaty clothes, body odor, liniment, rubbing lotions and lingering tobacco would leak out from the floorboards and cling to the rafters. In dusty corners, there might be benches for hangers-on with shifty eyes and breath reeking of onion, but the presence of men on the outskirts of the racket was common, even in the best gymnasiums. The syncopated rat-a-tat-tat of gloves against leather speed bags, jarring at first, would in time become only background noise. Later, even the smell wouldn’t seem to matter so much.

They were an unlikely pair — the short stocky man who jabbered incessantly and the tall, skinny fellow with a red beard and protruding ears. (Ears were a family specialty, according to Shaw, who wrote that when he was a child, “my nurse had to hold me by my waistband to prevent my being blown away when the wind caught them.”) Bernard Shaw hadn’t wanted to come to the gym, to any gym. It hadn’t been his idea in the first place. He had resisted for so long that his best friend, the persistent and excitable Paquito Beatty, had started boxing lessons without him. Beatty was loquacious, even more so than Shaw, and while swinging his fists, he couldn’t stop making quips, often in a Cockney dialect that had his tall friend throwing back his head and howling with laughter.

If their snickering and guffawing hadn’t already disrupted the men training in the gym, Beatty would make sure it did by lapsing into one of the singsong rhymes that punctuated his speech, usually at his best friend’s expense:

Of all contradictory fellows

In the course of my life whom I saw

None can compare I solemnly swear

For a minute with George Bernard Shaw

Shaw liked to say that the prize ring had a natural attraction for romantic and hysterical people, especially poets like Beatty, who was “crazy” about boxing. There just seemed no way to shut him up. For 2000 years, poets had been the most valued members of Irish society; in the old days, they were the only citizens allowed to move freely around the country. It seemed to have gone to Beatty’s head. He was incorrigible, and he continued his chirpy banter while leaping about taking potshots at his tall opponent as if they were entertainers at an Irish country fête:

He’ll argue on questions of medicine

And argue on questions of law

He’ll argue on boxing and banking

This versatile George Bernard Shaw

Beatty nicknamed his sparring partner “Gully Belcher,” combining the names of two famous ring gladiators of the era, Jem Belcher and John Gully. “Gully Belcher Shaw!” Gully, Shaw said later, may have been the first fighter in history who appreciated the value of money. Gully was discovered in a debtor’s prison when Hen “The Game Chicken” Pearce visited for a boxing exhibition, fought Gully, and lost. Members of The Fancy, as boxing was called in the 1800s, heard of Gully through this exploit, bailed him out, and he became champion of England. He retired, distanced himself from pugilism, invested in business, became a member of Parliament and died a rich man — a perfect example, said Shaw, of reinventing oneself. Jem Belcher, also a onetime champion, died penniless and friendless at age 30, but not before he discovered a strapping 6 foot 1 inch fighter named Shaw, known as “the Lifeguardsman.” The prizefighter Shaw might have made a name in the ring but was killed at Waterloo.

In the beginning, a slender, cautious, intellectual young man like Bernard Shaw would seem among the least likely of men to contemplate getting close to a boxing ring, much less climbing into it. Shaw was a shade over 6 feet, gangly and thin to angularity, with delicate hands, reddish hair and a long, bony face bearing a soft, almost ladylike, transparent complexion. His abrupt and jerky mannerisms in moving his arms and body bore no resemblance whatsoever to the conditioned grace of an athlete, much less a boxer. He hated his first name, George. It was one of the things he tried to unload, along with painful memories of his repressed and socially awkward childhood.

With acquaintances, he could be glib, opinionated, impertinent, argumentative, literate and clever, and not everyone, even close associates or family, liked him. When at age 18, he had made his first appearance in print with a public profession of atheism in an arrogant, satirical letter to Dublin’s Public Opinion, his churchgoing relatives were scandalized.

Shaw had been a lonely child in an impersonal family with an alcoholic father and a musical mother, neither with time for nor interest in him or his two sisters. Deeply frustrated with life in Ireland, he had arrived in London in 1876, desperate to create a new self and develop the genius that he felt was within him. At age 20, virtually penniless, he became an unwelcome occupant in a cramped London flat that he shared with his mother and elder sister. He brought with him an enormous contempt for snobbery and a comedic wit that masked shyness so deeply embedded that he often covered it with impudence and aggressiveness. He was friendless and anxious to be independent.

For Shaw, meeting the gregarious, intrepid Beatty, a rambunctious, charming Irish renegade who was lavish with his hospitality, had been salve for his soul. Here was a friend who shared his creative imagination and understood his Irish humor, who appreciated wit as an art form and celebrated satire as its most penetrating mode of attack.

Pakenham Thomas Beatty was the unorthodox offspring of a wealthy Irish diplomat; born in Maranhao, Brazil, his nickname fit his crusading spirit and round, boyish face perfectly. Beatty was an impractical idealist who moved through a series of clubs and antimonarchist societies buttressed by a large but fast-dwindling inheritance. He had a flair for the classics and languages, and by the time he and Shaw became friendly in 1878, Beatty was writing poetry in the style of Swinburne.

In the words of Beatty’s grandnephew, Claudius Beatty, they were “just two lads together enjoying life, two free spirits longing to be famous for their writing and wanting to be accepted and admired for their ideas.” Shaw was 22, and Beatty was 23.

The Victorian England that had drawn Shaw and Beatty, as well as tens of thousands of others, across the Irish Sea had grown dramatically in wealth while Ireland struggled to survive the aftereffects of its largest human disaster in a century: the Great Famine. The scourge of the Black Death began in 1845 with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the chief means of sustenance for millions of peasant farmers. Deadly black potato rot swept across rural Ireland like a plague, destroying food and life, and dismantling fam-ilies. By mid-century, two million people had died from starvation and disease or fled to foreign lands, a fate that seared the psyche of a nation and caused the Irish to hate their British landlords and the British government for gener-ations to come.

The Shaw and Beatty families were not among the suffering poor, but in the great waves of emigration to England, the majority of the Irish were forced to live on the fringes of English social life. To be Irish was seen as being a revolutionary, happiest with a grievance against society, especially British society. The Irish were stereotyped as drunks and criminals, accused of breeding without restraint and allowing their own backyard ways to impoverish them. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic epithets were common. Even by the 1870s, it did not matter that Beatty’s father had been well-to-do or that Shaw had been born into an impecunious but refined Protestant family with airs of the privileged and distant ties to the aristocracy.

“Behold me, then, in London in an impossible position,” wrote Shaw. “I was a foreigner — an Irishman — the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the British university mill.”

Initially, it was clear that fisticuffs seemed ideally suited to Beatty, someone prone to settling issues by punching first and asking questions later. Once, in an impetuous gesture of heroism, Beatty leaped over the wall of a schoolyard and bashed a schoolmaster in the face for flogging a boy, an action that landed him immediately in Hammersmith Police Court. Shaw bailed him out of jail the next day. On another occasion, a bailiff showed up after Beatty neglected to pay his rent. When Beatty tried to keep him out, the bailiff jammed his foot in the door. “Work and thrift is my motto, young man,” chirped an undaunted Beatty, and with that he punched the bailiff in the jaw, sending him sprawling to the ground, and slammed the door. Beatty’s coat-of-arms bore the motto non vi sed arte (not by strength but by cunning). Artful pugnacity, said the Beattys, ran in the family.

Shaw spent his days under the gigantic glass-and-iron dome of the Reading Room in the British Museum, his working office. As a regular, he had a chair, a folding desk, a small hinged shelf for books, pens and ink, a blot-ting pad and a peg for his hat. His most cherished possession was his green Reading Room card, a lifetime pass, guaranteeing he would always have a place to ply his trade.

A superintendent who occupied a raised seat in the center of the big, circular room monitored occupants, like Shaw, who sat at tables that radiated from the center of the room like spokes in a wheel. The Reading Room was open from nine in the morning until about eight o’clock at night, and Shaw spent his days poring over books and writing articles and novels that he hoped to publish. He had made it plain to Beatty he had no time for sports and wanted no part of his new passion for combat, not that boxing was a sport in the conventional sense, of course. One did not “play” boxing as you would play football or cricket. There was no team nor were there team rules, no one except oneself to make that inspired judgment call at a crucial moment. Boxing was distinctive in that it was performed between two men in a square called a ring, and the sport itself was often referred to as if none other existed and called “The Game,” the most punishing and individual of all sporting contests.

Shaw had been introduced to boxing as a boy, during an era when prizefighting could be either an illegal hole-in-the-wall activity or a sanctioned, staged competition. Modern boxing derived from the English bare-knuckle pugilism of the 18th century; the English champion, Daniel Mendoza, “the fighting Jew,” had first visited Ireland in 1791. He popularized the sport with touring exhibitions, fighting in farmers’ fields and villages around the country. The Irish took to boxing as if fighting was their birthright, and in later years, fans flocked to fights pitting the sons of St. Patrick against visiting English boxers, if only because the events seemed a symbolic staging of the ongoing Anglo-Irish conflict. One of Shaw’s boyhood memories was of a prizefighter who was so terrified of injury or death that he kept a mirror in the ring. Even when winning, the fighter only consented to persevere when he could see his face between every round, to be assured that his features had not been obliterated.

Englishmen persuaded themselves that they, too, could use their fists, and were even naturally gifted at it, a presumption that Shaw considered as preposterous as claiming that every Frenchman could use a foil or every Italian a stiletto. In England, boxing was considered the most dramatically masculine of sports because of its association with the cradle of pugilism, ancient Greece. The poet Lord Byron called it a “noble art,” the sport in which competitors fought skillfully, displaying Olympian traits of the mind and spirit as well as of the body. The art of self-defense was considered as necessary for the education of a gentleman as dancing a minuet or speaking French. For the landed gentry, the possibility of being injured as an amateur fighter was actually an opportunity for a public show of raw courage and manliness. In typical upper-class understatement, it was often referred to as “the science of sweet bruising.”

One of Shaw’s favorite clowning poses was to throw his arms around his shoulders to represent himself as a physical coward. He had no intention of becoming involved with Beatty’s passion for gloved combat, but that didn’t deter the irrepressible poet from pressing Shaw to join him at the gym.

If found on a desolate mountain

A vulture his entrails shall gnaw

He’d choose just that place to argue the case

Argumentative George Bernard Shaw

“I am about to take boxing up from the scientific Ned Donnelly, a very amiable, though powerful, person in appearance,” Beatty wrote in September 1881. Addressing Shaw as Balzac, then one of Beatty’s favorite authors, he continued: “The meek Michelle, whom you would rashly have selected out of a room full to strike, is a phenomenon as an amateur bruiser. So much, O’Balzac, for your discrimination! If you wish, those pointers that I learn from the Donnelly I will teach unto you.”

Shaw apparently did not respond. Ten days later, his friend wrote again, “I send for your careful reading a copy of Donnelly’s admirable Self-Defense, the best book of its kind ever published. It explains very clearly what other writers leave in hopeless confusion. ‘I am a great man for the body — hit him here, the pit of my stomach,’ were his words of wisdom to me, ‘and he won’t come again.’” Beatty invited Shaw to dinner. “Articles of agreement as to boxing lessons can be drawn up,” he added.

Shaw certainly would have gone to dinner, for in the spirited Beatty household, he had found a home away from home, an affectionate family so unlike his own, among whom he could share laughter, mischief, ideas, conversation and genuine fun. The extended Beatty clan had embraced him, fondly dubbing their fastidious friend “Barbarossa” (red beard) and “old man Shaw.” To amuse the children, Barbarossa dug in the garden with them, read stories and sang. Once during a rainstorm, he climbed into bed fully dressed in his Jaeger boilersuit, opened all the windows and held open an umbrella to delight his small audience. He studied French with Beatty’s wife, Ida, flirted with her sisters, taught and played piano duets with members of the household, was a frequent guest at meals and met grandparents, cousins, in-laws, uncles and friends, becoming godfather to one child and a supporter of all.

When Beatty’s first child, nicknamed “Bertie,” was christened, the elderly godfather, the poet Richard Hengist Horne, gave the infant tiny boxing gloves and promised that he “shall be taught to lick anybody of his size, or half a head taller, who tries to bully him at first school or ‘fag’ him at second school.” Shaw wrote a comic poem with references to the father’s boxing friends and urged the baby to eat to reach fighting weight, warning the infant: “A boxer thou canst not rely on; His wife can but spoil thee with love.”

Friendship won out. Shaw finally agreed to visit the London Athletic Club, conveniently located in the Haymarket theatre district near busy Piccadilly Circus, a brisk 20-minute walk from his desk at the British Museum. As home to aristocrats of leisure and fine breeding, the club would not have been a natural habitat for either Shaw or Beatty. But the gym specialized in boxing, and Ned Donnelly, who had written the best-selling Self-Defense; Or, the Art of Boxing, was head coach and “professor” of the club’s most popular sport.

Many considered Donnelly the best instructor in London. A retired prizefighter with the commanding presence of a panther, Donnelly was often called “the Royal Professor” because when he was summoned to spar before the King, he immediately went out and bought a new top hat and frock coat. Shaw based a character on Donnelly, describing him thusly: “A powerful man with a thick neck that swelled out beneath his broad, flat earlobes. He had small eyes, and large teeth over which his lips were slightly parted in a smile, good-humored but affectedly cunning. His hair was black and close cut, his skin indurated, and the bridge of his nose smashed level with his face.” He was a modest and affable fellow when sober and unprovoked, Shaw wrote, and about 50 years old.

In the gym, there would have been other aspiring boxers and gentlemen pugilists in fitted shirts, knitted tights and soft, moccasin-like slippers warming up with pushups and by jumping rope, stretching on the bars, shadow boxing and sparring on mats or in the ring. (Like opera singers, boxers generally train and work out alone except when sparring with a partner.) For strength and balance training, a trapeze, flying rings, weights and dumbbells were traditionally used.

Coach Donnelly had revived a scientific method of fighting in the ring from earlier in the 18th century that could be blended with the new Queensberry rules of 1866. Donnelly’s method of scientific boxing made the sport a thinking man’s game with a series of stylistic movements for every parry and thrust. It appealed to gentlemen amateurs who could rely on the skills of practiced footwork and training, as opposed to a rough, knock-down-and-drag-out scrimmage that relied mostly on strength. Shaw always referred to unthinking brute force as simply “bashing.”

The old regulations allowed as many rounds as the combatants could sustain until one fighter was gravely injured or simply gave up from exhaustion; battles could last for a hundred rounds or more. The Queensberry rules called for padded gloves, three-minute rounds, ten-second knockdowns and a cap on the length of the fight. The new rules were created by the 8th Marquis of Queensberry, later known to Shaw as the father of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the young aristocrat who had a scandalous homosexual relationship with fellow playwright Oscar Wilde. Amateur fights were promoted in the army and public (private) schools. It was English violence, the wags said, disguised as English honor.

Shaw, looking for inspiration for his writing and a new connection in life for himself, became intrigued with the unconventionality, the hardihood and the inherent danger of the game, as well as the camaraderie and serious-minded atmosphere among those learning Donnelly’s “science.” In addition, prizefighting was one of the few sports that offered a way out of poverty to the disenfranchised and underprivileged, a social reality that Shaw, the emerging socialist, appreciated.

Beatty, the one with the funds, paid the club dues for both. Shaw purchased a pair of five-pound dumbbells for himself.

Nothing in Shaw’s life had prepared him for the surge in confidence and adrenaline, for the vitality he would experience concentrating on the rudiments of trading punches while feinting, jabbing and becoming agile on his feet. He agreed with Lord Byron, who had boasted that the thrill of sparring lifted his spirits and kept him mentally alert. Even the effort to hold up two arms and continually stare an opponent in the face required tremendous stamina and could make the difference in winning a spar. For perhaps the first time in his life, Shaw got a full measure of what it was like to focus his intellect and his body on a single goal, that of avoiding the sharp and sudden punishment in another man’s fist while trying to deliver offensive blows himself. Unlike other sports, a boxer must be concerned not only with what he does, but with what is done to him. Because Shaw was tall, with a long left arm that he could use to jab the other fellow in the face, he was surprised to find that he was often successful, especially against the shorter Beatty.

“I had an easy time with him,” a pleased Shaw would later tell his friend Gene Tunney. “He was not tall and I had such long arms that I held him off by keeping my left glove in his face. He was annoyed, very.”

For Shaw, the give-and-take rhythm of the game would resemble the tempo in his writing, from the sharp and saucy rat-a-tat-tat of his dialogue to the bold sweep of his convictions, hurled against an unsuspecting audience.

“There are,” he wrote later, “no sports which bring out the difference in character more dramatically than boxing, wrestling, and fencing...I soon got an imaginary reputation in my little circle as a boxer; and as I looked credibly like a tall man with a straight left and had in fact picked up some notion of how to defend myself, I was never attacked with bodily violence.”

Shaw and Beatty sparred between the flower beds and bushes in the Beattys’ garden and in the gym, read the sporting papers and regularly attended boxing competitions, often with friends and other amateurs. The inspiration Shaw was looking for came from an exhibition match featuring one of the cleverest fighters of the day, Jack Burke, “the Irish Lad” who used the scientific style taught by Coach Donnelly. Shaw had written three unsuccessful novels, and in writing his fourth, Cashel Byron’s Profession, decided to focus on boxing, using Burke’s exploits as a metaphor for the fighting spirit that he was to display in his own life through the pen.

His fictional hero was named for the medieval seat of kings in Ireland, the Rock of Cashel, and the popular, romantic poet Byron, who had been a well-known boxing enthusiast. Shaw endowed his protagonist with all the qualities that he thought a winner in and out of the ring should possess. Cashel was a young man of Shaw’s age who, in striving to create a better life, wills himself into an iron-nerved and fanatically committed fighter able to throw off the chains of the Irish underdog in English society. As an Irish Horatio Alger, Cashel exudes individualism and moral zeal, and he has the ability to control his life’s circumstances. He’s a thinking, “scientific” fighter who utilizes learned skills to fight defensively and physical strength to stand up to the most ruthless brawlers in the ring. Shaw learns to respect fighters who try to make a living with their fists, and he especially admires their confidence in the face of the condescension often heaped on them by society.

In casting Cashel as a man who becomes master of his fate, Shaw makes him the kind of man he wants to become himself — a writer and reformer. This new self-image is a dramatic change from the Shaw who departs Ireland as a wary, inexperienced intellectual, a boy of modest means who leaves school at 15. The timid young man who arrives in England unsure of himself, now feels that boxing in the gym like English aristocrats puts him on the same plane — and he’d outthink them and outtalk them as well.

Boxing has become a rite of passage, not for what he will win in the ring but as a bridge to self-reliance and a new, weightier identity.

Personal combat, Shaw said, is interesting, “not only technically as an exhibition of skill, but because it’s also an exhibition of character concentrating into minutes differences that years of ordinary intercourse leave hidden.”

“In the eyes of a phoenix, even the arena — the ring, as they call it — is a better school of character than the drawing room,” writes Shaw in the novel.

The fictional Cashel wins the world championship in an honest and skillful manner, raises the standards of a corrupt boxing world by never submitting to a bribe, retires at the top of his game, marries and raises a family, enters business and runs successfully for a seat in Parliament. Shaw wrote that he gave his Cashel “every advantage a prizefighter can have: health and strength and pugilistic genius. In plain fact, the pugilistic profession is like any other profession. Common sense, good manners and a social turn count for as much in it as they do elsewhere.” The novel was finished in 1883, and three years later was published in book form. When the publisher inferred from the book that Shaw was a formidable boxer, he said Shaw laughed and replied, “I know the moves, just as I know the moves in chess.”

St. Patrick’s Day of 1883, a Saturday, was a day that would confound future scholars who studied the worldly Shaw, a man not seen as one likely to risk himself in a sporting contest. In what may have been a flourish of Irish bravado, Shaw and Beatty entered a national amateur boxing competition. Wrote Beatty, referring to himself:

Old Plantagenet into training must get

Drink later, eat steaks that are raw

The Shaw’s nose has kist the tip of his fist

(And you won’t like it, George Bernard Shaw)

They signed up for the annual Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships far enough ahead of time so that their names could be printed in the large official program. The Queensberry Challenge Cup was not just a local tournament, but a public, advertised competition at the sprawling Lillie Bridge Grounds, the home of London’s major sporting events and fairs. The Amateur Boxing Association, the sport’s first governing body, had been formed in Britain in 1880, only three years earlier. P. Beatty, London, was listed in the lightweight and middleweight division. G.B. Shaw, London, was entered as a middleweight and a heavyweight. (A heavyweight in those days could be any weight, and boxers often changed weight divisions, depending on their opponents.) “I dont call no man a fighting man what aint been in the ring,” says Ned Skene, the coach (based on Donnelly) in Shaw’s novel. “You’re a sparrer, and a clever, pretty sparrer; but sparring aint the real thing. Some day, please God, we’ll make up a little match for you.”

The competition would have been about a year and a half after Shaw first joined Donnelly’s gym. Shaw had seen other amateurs injured and knocked out and had suffered injury himself. It is not entirely clear, but the record indicates that neither actually got in the ring that day. One version holds that Beatty was so nervous that Donnelly gave him a stiff dose of brandy before entering the ring, the effect being to paralyze him. The official ruling could have been that they did not have enough fights under their belts, or they may not have fought simply because their names were not drawn. The last tantalizing possibility is that one or both of them fought and lost, then sat in the stands to watch the winning match, as boxers often do. In any event, Shaw wrote the winners’ names on his official program, in the neat script that he had perfected as a teenage land agent in Dublin.

The raw drama of the ring in all its color, excitement and controversy had captured Shaw’s imagination. “Pugilism,” he said, “became one of my subjects.”

In 1901, Shaw added a preface to his novel in which he expressed surprise that the book had survived so long. He continued to follow prizefights from afar, but he was generally disgusted with the gamblers and the quality of the people who had taken over the sport and felt that his fictional, highly moral Cashel, his ultimate man of action, would never be equaled. Shaw moved on with his life and began writing plays, many of which were peppered with references to pugilism and boxing. Spirited idioms and commentary on the sport would also appear in his letters, books, prefaces and newspaper articles, and as stage directions and dialogue.

Only with Paquito, his old friend and sparring partner, did Gully Belcher Shaw discuss old times in the ring.

It would be another two decades before boxing became important to him again.