Women who pack a punch
QUESTION Who was the first female boxer?
The first female boxers date back to bare-knuckle fighting days. The earliest recorded bout was in 1722 between Londoners elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell and hannah Hyfield of Newgate.
Wilkinson is believed to have been the maiden name of elizabeth Stokes, a boxer who ran an amphitheatre in Islington Road, North London. Another boxing proprietor of the era, James Figg, was said to have had unnamed Irish female boxers in his shows.
Over the years there have been many female boxers. In 1900, Polly Burns was proclaimed the women’s world champion. she went on to marry one of the wellknown Fairclough boxing brothers of St helens, Lancashire.
Birmingham Boxer Billy Noon gave exhibition bouts with his wife. In the Twenties, Annie Newton was proclaimed the greatest woman boxer in the world.
Most famous of them all was Barbara Buttrick, who was born in 1930 in Cottingham, Yorks. At just 4ft 11in, she became known as The Mighty Atom.
Buttrick started her boxing career in 1948, touring europe with carnivals as a bantamweight in the boxing booth. She went on to fight more than 1,000 exhibition matches and 30 professional fights, losing just one and drawing another. She moved to the U.S. in the mid-Fifties to further her career, retiring in 1960. She still lives there and is involved in women’s boxing in an official capacity.
I’m a boxing historian and met Barbara when she came to a London ex-boxers’ meeting some years back. She is a bright, intelligent and interesting lady.
The first woman to be licensed by the British Boxing Board of Control was Jane Couch MBE in 1998.
Harold Alderman MBE, Canterbury. FEMALE bare- knuckle boxing was popular in Georgian england. The first woman to achieve a reputation in the ring was elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell, who titled herself the ‘ european Championess’. She issued a challenge in the London Journal of 1722: ‘I, elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clerkenwell, having had some Words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring Satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the Stage and Box me for Three Guineas, each Woman holding half a Crown in each hand, and the first Woman that drops her Money to lose the Battle.’
This rule prevented the gouging and scratching which was common in 18thcentury boxing.
Hyfield responded in kind, declaring: ‘I, Hannah Hyfield of Newgate Market, hearing the resoluteness of elizabeth Wilkinson, will not fail, God-willing, to give her more Blows than Words, desiring home Blows, and from her no Favour.’
Wilkinson reportedly beat Hyfield after 22 minutes and went on to compete as a boxer for the next six years.
Wilkinson married James Stokes, owner of Stokes’s amphitheatre, and fought alongside her husband against other pugilistic couples.
Other entertainments at Stokes’s amphitheatre included ‘. . . fine diversion of bulls, bear, and ass-baiting, and dog fighting, particularly, and a dog will be dressed up with fireworks to augment the diversion of the spectators’.
T. W. Cowan, Worksop, Notts.
QUESTION Sir Isaac Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. What is the origin of this title?
The Lucasian Chair was founded in mathematics in 1663 as a gift from henry Lucas MP to the university.
Isaac Newton was awarded this professorship only one year after his MA and was required to give just one lecture a week in one term, often to an empty room. The 18th holder of the chair was theoretical physicist Stephen hawking.
Katie Wales, Great Shelford, Cambs.
QUESTION Which art fake has sold for the most money?
The Vermeer Forgeries, supposed to be painted by the 17th- century Dutch master Jan Vermeer (1632-75), were brilliant fakes by Dutch painter and portraitist han (henri) van Meegeren (1889-1947) — his revenge on the art critics and ‘experts’.
he started in 1936 with The Disciples Of emmaus, sold as a Vermeer for 550,000 gulden after it was vetted by experts. encouraged by the ease at which the art world fell for his hoax, Van Meegeren painted more fake Vermeers.
he even sold The Woman Taken In Adultery to Adolf hitler’s air chief hermann Goering, who had nearly 140 pictures in a collection, at one stage, considered the world’s most valuable.
The truth only came to light in 1945 when Allied commissioners were seeking to restore to their former owners art treasures confiscated by the Nazis during the war.
Selling works of national importance was considered collaboration with the enemy and could be punished by death.
The Goering sale was traced back to Van Meegeren, who confessed to the faking of 14 Dutch masterpieces, nine of which had been sold for a total of 7,167,000 gulden. One had sold for 1.6 million gulden, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
To prove his story, Van Meegeren agreed to paint another ‘old masterpiece’ in prison in the presence of experts.
he was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment in October 1947 and died on December 30 after two heart attacks.
Unlike Goering, hitler owned a genuine Vermeer, The Allegory Of Painting, which is one of the most famous works of art in the world.
It now has its own room in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
E. Felix Schondorfer, Stoke Poges, Bucks.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT; fax them to 01952 780111 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.