‘Boxing is in the blood’: Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle and the prize ring
What do Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle have to do with boxing? More than you may think. Doyle, who created Holmes, was a boxing enthusiast who boxed a bit and wrote extensively about the sport.
Doyle stood 6ft tall and weighed in the neighborhood of 200lb. He began sparring while a medical student at the University of Edinburgh and described himself as “a fair average amateur”.
“One can compress more exercise into a short time in this way than in any other,” Doyle advocated. He also wrote, “Boxing is the finest single man sport” and added, “I have seen nearly all the great boxers of my time from JL Sullivan down to Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson.”
Indeed, Doyle claimed in 1920 that he’d been asked to referee the 1910 championship fight between Johnson and James Jeffries. “I considered the proposal carefully,” he wrote. “But I did not feel inclined to travel thousands of miles and possibly to have to face a hostile demonstration from the supporters of the beaten man, whichever it might be.”
In reality, it’s unlikely that the offer to referee Jeffries-Johnson was a serious one. At one point, the publicity machine that promoter Tex Rickard put in place to heighten interest in the fight had turned to the choice of a referee, and the editor of the New York Morning Telegraph suggested that Doyle officiate. Johnson thought that former US president Theodore Roosevelt would be a better choice.
Doyle revered boxing tradition but acknowledged there were times when the sport had fallen low. Writing in 1921, he looked back a half-century and declared, “They were the bad old days, those, in the prize-ring. The old knuckle-fighting had died out in scandal and disgrace, smothered by the pestilent crowd of betting men and ruffians of all sorts who brought disgrace and ruin upon the decent fighting men. An honest sportsman who desired to see a fight was usually set upon by villains against whom he had no redress, since he himself was engaged on what was technically an illegal action. He was stripped in the open street, his purse taken, and his head split open if he ventured to resist. No wonder that the classic sport was attended by those only who had nothing to lose. The legal glove fight had not yet arisen, and the cult was in a strange intermediate condition. It was impossible to regulate it and equally impossible to abolish it, since nothing appeals more directly and powerfully to the average Briton.”
But Doyle took joy in the spread of boxing through the general population in the early-20th century and wrote, “I rejoice to think that boxing is taken up by most of our public schools and in the Army. That a weaker man should be beaten by a stronger man would indeed be intolerable. But when we have two men of equal weight and equal experience, either of whom can surrender of his own free will, I see no reason why we should raise any cry of brutality.”
And he vigorously opposed reformers who sought to abolish the sport, stating, “Of one thing I am certain. The present course of action will never succeed in exterminating boxing in England. You can drive it underground, but you cannot stop it. Instead of having contests in the presence of the public, the press, and the police, you will have it underground. You can have it in the back parlour of a public-house. But you are going to have it somehow. It is certain you will not stop it. That is absolutely impossible. Boxing - the love of boxing - is in the blood of the people.”
That brings us to Sherlock Holmes, one of literature’s most beloved characters. The original Holmes canon consists of four novels and 56 short stories written by Doyle and published between 1887 and 1927. In the first – a novel titled A Study in Scarlet – Dr Watson lists Holmes’s areas of expertise and says he was an “expert boxer” while noting that the detective knew “next to nothing” about the contemporary boxing scene.
Boxing surfaces again in The Sign of Four (the second Holmes novel) when Holmes encounters an ex-prizefighter named McMurdo who is working as a porter:
“McMurdo,” cried Sherlock Holmes genially. “I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t you remember the amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?”
“Not Mr Sherlock Holmes!” roared the prize-fighter. “God’s truth! How could I have mistook you? If instead o’ standin’ there so quiet, you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question. Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”
Holmes’s skill as a boxer is also cited in several short stories – The Gloria Scott, The Yellow Face, and The Solitary Cyclist. But in truth, the references to boxing in the Holmes canon are simplistic. Doyle’s best writing about boxing was elsewhere.
The Croxley Master: A Great Tale of the Prize Ring is a novella that tells the story of Robert Montgomery, a young medical student with a background in amateur boxing who enters the prize ring out of desperation to compete for a £100 purse that he needs to finance the final year of his medical education.
Doyle described Montgomery’s first sighting of his opponent on the day of the fight as follows: “The prize-fighter had come out from his curtain, a squat formidable figure, monstrous in chest and arms, limping slightly on his distorted leg. His skin had none of the freshness and clearness of Montgomery’s, but was dusky and mottled with one huge mole amid the mat of tangled black hair which thatched his mighty breast. His huge shoulders and great arms with brown sledge-hammer fists would have fitted the heaviest man that ever threw his cap into a ring.”
Montgomery is on the brink of defeat during the fight but rallies to turn the tide.
“It was a magnificent blow,” Doyle wrote. “Straight, clean, crisp with the force of the loins and the back behind it. And it landed where he had meant it to – upon the exact point of that blue-grained chin. The Master fell backwards, flat, prostrate, striking the ground with so simultaneous a clap that it was like a shutter falling from a wall. A yell broke from the crowded benches as the giant went down. He lay upon his back, his knees a little drawn up, his huge chest panting. He twitched and shook, but could not move. His feet pawed convulsively once or twice. It was no use. He was done. ‘Eight – nine – ten!’ said the timekeeper. And the roar of a thousand voices with a deafening clap like the broadside of a ship told that the Master of Croxley was the Master no more. Montgomery stood half dazed, looking down at the huge, prostrate figure. He could hardly realize that it was indeed all over.”
Doyle’s love of boxing is also on display in three short stories.
The Lord of Falconbridge is set in the early days of prize fighting with an overly contrived plot but a dramatically-told prizefight at the end. The Fall of Lord Barrymore has an unusual boxing scene in which an elite boxer dressed as a woman throttles a bully to humiliate the bully and his patron. The Bully of Brocas Court draws on Doyle’s love of the paranormal.
Unfortunately, Doyle came down on the wrong side of history in a controversy that involved boxing. In 1922, the British Home Office banned a proposed fight in England between world light-heavyweight champion Battling Siki and British heavyweight champion Joe Beckett and issued a statement that read, “In contests between men of colour and white men, the temperaments of the contestants are not compatible. Moreover, all sorts of passions are aroused. Such contests, considering there are a very large number of men of colour in the British empire, are considered against the higher national interest and they tend to arouse passions which it is inadvisable to stimulate.”
Doyle supported the ban, writing, “Let black and white keep separate and fight among themselves. Some of the greatest fights in the history of the ring have been between white and coloured men, as when Cribb and Molyneaux met last century. But conditions were not so complex then. The British Empire did not contain so many black people. Nowadays a mixed fight gets beyond sport and enters the region of interracial politics.”
Putting that statement in context of its time, it should be noted that the Times also supported the ban, editorializing, “Boxing matches between white men and blacks, to be photographed for the delectation of coloured races all over the world, have become a dangerous anachronism. To allow them to take place on English soil would in these days be an act of suicidal folly.”
But let’s return to boxing at its core and close with Rodney Stone – a novel Doyle wrote in 1896 that builds to a fight between an honorable former champion turned blacksmith named Jack Harrison and Crab Wilson (an elite fighter with a dastardly patron).
Reflecting back on that battle, the narrator who tells the tale declares, “Many a time in my life, I have braced myself to a hard task by the remembrance of that morning, asking myself if my manhood were so weak that I would not do for my country, or for those whom I loved, as much as these two would endure for a paltry stake and for their own credit amongst their fellows. Such a spectacle may brutalize those who are brutal. But I say that there is a spiritual side to it also, and that the sight of the utmost human limit of endurance and courage is one which bears a lesson of its own.”
Doyle wrote those words more than a century ago. But they could have been written about Muhammad Ali fighting Joe Frazier in Manila, Arturo Gatti v Micky Ward, or any number of other fights that have enthralled boxing fans over the years.
The essence of boxing remains unchanged.
Thomas Hauser’s email address is thomashauserwriter@gmail.com. His next book – Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Rutledge – will be published later this month and is available for preorder on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk as well as other platforms. In 2019, Hauser was selected for boxing’s highest honor - induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
