THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE ‘PROFESSOR’
Looking back on George Bernard Shaw’s boxing days at Ned Donnelly’s London gym
APART from being a noted playwright, critic and social commentator, Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw was a boxing devotee. In the 1920s, he became friends with that scholarly world heavyweight champion, Gene Tunney, and the pair corresponded regularly. By then Shaw was an old man, but half a century earlier he gave boxing a go himself. His friend Pakenham Beatty, a pupil of the self-styled fistic “Professor” Ned Donnelly, got Shaw interested in boxing. Donnelly ran a gym called the London Athletic Club at 18 Panton Street, near Haymarket. It was not a spit-and-sawdust place but a boxing school for gentlemen. His pupils included three peers of the realm, a naval captain and three army officers. Shaw went there too – with Beatty.
According to one source, Shaw and Beatty applied to enter the 1883 amateur boxing championships (then called the Queensberry championships), but were not chosen for competition. To Shaw, though, that didn’t matter. He’d already gathered enough material – having soaked in the atmosphere of the Victorian gyms and boxing tournaments – to write a pugilistic novel. That book, Cashel Byron’s Profession, was published in 1886. And one of its characters – a boxing trainer called Ned Skene – was modelled on Donnelly.
Around the time he and Shaw first met, Donnelly published an instruction manual on the art of boxing, which the playwright studied keenly. Released in several editions, this classic work is now back in print as part of the London Library’s 175th anniversary celebrations, for which it has reproduced various quirky items from its vast holdings.
The book describes (with illustrations) various blows, parries and moves, some of which you may see in boxing today, and others rooted in the bare-knuckle ring which you definitely won’t see. Donnelly’s The Noble English Art of Selfdefence is available from Pushkin Press. More background info on Donnelly can be found in Tony Gee’s riveting tome, Up to Scratch: Bareknuckle Fighting and Heroes of the Prize-ring. THE BRADLEY-DIXON MYSTERY GARY SHAW, the boxing historian behind the excellent book series, The Mersey Fighters (co-written with Jim Jenkinson and Chris Walker), wrote to me recently about the Ike Bradley Yesterday’s Heroes piece. The article mentioned an unconfirmed fight between Bradley and George Dixon, which Bradley insisted he won by KO, emphasising that Dixon had entered the ring “blind drunk”.
In the weeks after the alleged bout, which supposedly took place in Dublin in 1904, Bradley referred to it in newspaper interviews. Dixon, though, denied the fight had happened. But Ike was still mentioning it over 40 years later.
From his research, Shaw feels certain that the Bradley-dixon fight took place. “My guess is that it was some sort of unofficial fight,” he notes. “Both Bradley and Dixon were in Dublin at the time and Dixon by then was well known to like a drink!”