Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Inside a rickety wooden tavern, a crowd of men drunkenly revel in cheer, their mouths slick from the oils of cheap meats and cheap drinks. They're packed in so tight, the building creaks under the strain of so many bodies.
They're anticipating the fight of the night. It's 1750 in the heart of London, in Georgian England, and one of our fighters steps into the informal ring. They're greeted by leery smiles, sneers, spits, and heavy pats on their exposed back as they make their way through the disorderly crowd. Lit by hearth and candlelight, our fighter's opponent comes into view. Grubby face, oily hair, no shoes.
and a tattered skirt. A woman. Fire in her eyes, she lunges at our fighter. The tavern's patrons cheer as the women wrestle, punch, scratch, and claw, whatever it takes to finish it. With a final blow, one of our bruisers is down. The other celebrates with a relieved sigh as the crowd erupts around her. The name of our victor is forever lost to time.
In this special episode, we're following one historian on her journey to bring to life a people long forgot, who walked London's most notoriously dangerous streets more than 200 years ago, revealing a time when women risked terrible injury and disfigurement in savage, illegal fights with no holds barred.
You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds a light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. This is The Women Fighters of Georgian London.
In St. James's Square, a stone's throw from Buckingham Palace, is the London Library, one of the United Kingdom's leading research institutions and the world's largest lending library.
This unique collection has been used by some of history's best-known academics and writers: Tennyson, William Thackeray, T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, and the legendary author Charles Dickens. It's incredible to think that Charles Dickens did his research here in this building. One of my favorite things about Dickens is that he was a little boy in Georgian London,
And that's what he very often writes about. But people think that he's the Victorian author, when in fact lots of it is drawn from characters, people and places in Georgian London. Speaking is Lucy Inglis, historian and author and specialist on the Georgian era. It's in this library where she has discovered new research that sheds light on the seedy underbelly of historic London.
the largest and most prosperous city in the world in Georgian times. The Georgian period was an era of huge expansion and change. It was a time of near constant war in almost every corner of the globe, from 1714 until the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837.
British interests spread throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia, laying the foundations of an empire that would one day encompass a fifth of the world's population. This was the age of enlightenment and reason. Yet it was also an age of upheaval. Trade, including the Atlantic slave trade, had brought great wealth to Britain.
But it was the industrial and agricultural revolution that spelled a massive societal shift. In pursuit of jobs, the majority of working people had left their rural towns and villages, and were newly urbanized in overcrowded industrial inner cities. The gap between fabulous wealth and extreme poverty had never been wider. Nowhere was this more the case than London.
Back at the library, Lucy recounts this transformative time for the city. London is an amazing city. It became a world city in less than 100 years.
and a city that grew from half a million people to well over a million by the time Victoria arrived on the throne. Lots of people thought it was a monster, although it was minuscule compared to how big it is now. The areas were so distinct and the people differed in each area and you get this incredible mix and
a real sense of dynamism and vibrancy. That energy that was created in the 18th century is the energy that we have about London now, I think. It still withers and that's one of the really special things about the city. It was during the course of Lucy's research into this era that she first became captivated by the backstreet world of everyday Georgian Londoners.
A world in which lords and commoners alike found their entertainments in bawdy, smoky, crowded theatres and alehouses, or in the dark cobbled streets and alleyways which contained a world of gambling, drinking, prostitution, and above all, fighting. It seems Londoners loved a fight, from vicious animal blood sports to bare-knuckle prize fighting.
And it's this bloodthirsty appetite which led to the grim spectacle of woman fighting woman on the streets of the richest city in the world. It's this world that Lucy Inglis feels driven to investigate. She finds that just like today, it was a society deeply riven with serious social problems.
that are strikingly recognisable. Alcohol was part of daily life for pretty much everybody in Georgian London and Georgian England as a whole. People self-medicated with alcohol. It was used as a way of getting enough calories in through beer or wine. It was used as a proper medical cure for various disorders. So
People were very familiar with drinking pretty much throughout the day. In the early Georgian period, the kind of alcohol you could afford to drink reflected your status in society.
Spirits had been the preserves of rich men because spirits essentially meant brandy or fortified wine that would get you very drunk. And those were all imported so they cost lots of money and ordinary people couldn't afford them. So beer and bad wine were really the drinks of the ordinary folk. By the 1740s though, there was a new, highly intoxicating substance on the market that even the most unfortunate could afford to drink.
It was known, and is still known today, as gin. Gin was very much the preserve of poor drinkers. To become a distiller was cheap to set up and it was cheap to operate. You weren't regulated in the same way that other victualers or vintners were. Then, because gin distilling can use bad grain that can't be used for beer or bread,
then that second-rate grain was suddenly, the government had an answer for it, it could be used and it was turned into gin. In the 18th century there was a huge increase in gin drinking across the nation. It became known as the gin craze. Strong liquor that was cheaply produced and cheap to consume was readily available.
By 1740, London alone was producing 45 million litres of gin each year. Amongst the 650,000 people living there, that works out to 71 litres per person a year, or four double gins per person per day. For a medical insight into this epidemic is former surgeon Mick Crumplin. He is an expert on medical techniques used throughout history.
He has studied how the health of everyday people in the past was affected by the hazards of their times.
I think the greatest impact of gin in Britain, and we know that it had a big impact because the mortality at the end of the 18th century started to fall when there were legal changes to restrict the sale of gin and tax it and so forth, the mortality fell. So it had a significant effect on the British population. In these new informal gin shops, patrons would spend night on night lounged on a straw floor in a drunken stupor.
Gin was served to all, irrespective of gender or social background. Gin was sold in gin shops, which were very often people's front rooms, and both men and women set up selling gin, whereas in other alcohol retail it was mainly dominated by men. So if you're drinking in someone's front room, there's not really the social stigma. You can drink with other men. Men and women can drink together, then get very drunk,
And so you had, in a very short time period from the 1720s, what other people saw as a breakdown in morals and even society itself with the introduction of this supremely intoxicating substance.
Gin wasn't the only new craze that broke down gender and class barriers in the Georgian era. In the 18th century, gambling becomes this phenomenon. It's almost like a fever. Cards become quite solitary, aggressive games of chance, which, when exaggerated by lots of men sitting around, and women sometimes drinking, they become very absorbed. There are lots of debates that went on throughout the city on whether cards was an acceptable
comfortable social pastime. So that gambling culture filtered down all the way through almost every pastime that could be met upon.
Among the most popular things to bet on were the blood sports. Everybody would go to cockfighting. You would have the duke and the poor man as long as they could pay the entry fee. And they would all enjoy that sport together, which is a great social leveller. It's against this intoxicating atmosphere of alcoholism, compulsive gambling and the social classes intermingling that Taylor...
that tastes in popular entertainments become more and more debased and extreme.
Bare-knuckle fighting becomes very popular, both as yet another thing to bet on, but also as a bloodthirsty spectacle. Bare-knuckle boxing has always been a thing that happened all the way through the ages, but it became much more of an urban phenomenon at the end of the 17th century, when you had cockfighting, horse-baiting, bull-baiting, and man against man was just part of the experience.
It was mainly the preserve of male participants and spectators. But as Lucy has found, it wasn't a world inhabited exclusively by men. The bare-knuckling was what everyone came to see and to gamble on. That was where the high stakes were played. But it would have been quite unusual for women to go, unless they were quite rough women, to be present at bare-knuckle fights. However, that didn't stop them competing.
Compared to countless records of men's bare-knuckle prize fighting, the reports of women's fighting are few and far between. Though, through her extensive research, Lucy has pieced together what's known.
From the pages of archives, two types of women brawlers emerge. The first is quite a respectable woman, usually married to a sporting man, and their fights were quite heavily regulated. They held money in their hands so that their fists had to stay clenched. Then as soon as they dropped one of the coins in their hands, the fight was over.
So it was quite a formal sport. However, that's not really the type of boxing that was so massively popular for women in the 18th century, which was the stripped down, hair pulling, kicking, no holds barred fighting that went on in some of the really rough areas of London. If you knew where and when to look in the rough areas of Georgian London, you'd be able to find the women's fights.
Part sporting contest, part grudge match. There was always an element of illicit spectacle about them. They were known as catfighting. Catfighting was very often held on a Saturday or a Monday afternoon. And it would often be women from the same community with grudges against one another.
It was always, "She has said this to me and I must have my revenge." In the smaller communities, word would get round that one woman had crossed another or stolen her husband or her boyfriend or anything. And then two days later, they would meet. It's these smaller communities that help Lucy find out more about the cat bites. Not only who was fighting, but also who was watching.
The main spectators would be people from the surrounding streets. London was very much about neighbourhood communities. Anyone with an interest in that community would be the type of spectator. But it was quite well known that near Tottenham Court Road on Saturday night there would be women fighting. Just near to Tottenham Court Road was the infamous St Giles District of London.
Generally, you find lots of records to do with disturbances in St Giles in the Fields and from the Irish community in particular. The areas that were very popular for bare-knuckle fighting was essentially the corner from Tottenham Court Road where it meets Oxford Street. Lots of these fights took place in that area. Contemporary Oxford Street is London's bustling modern complex of flagship stores for all types of brands.
If you were to stand on this corner today, you would see a modern glass entranceway to the Tottenham Court Road subway station, along with nearby fast food joints and a local West End theatre, as classic bright red London buses rumbled by. However, it was once known as one of the roughest, grimiest and most decrepit areas of London. A centuries-old church stands nearby, known as St Giles in the Fields.
It's one of the last reminders of this dark period in London's 18th century past. It once marked the entranceway to the notorious maze of run-down streets beyond. It was a no-go area for all but those who had no choice but to live and work there. It was what was known as a rookery.
St Giles in the Fields was one of the very early developments and at the beginning it was quite grand. So you get these large houses built on the medieval timber frames, then the fire to the east in 1666 wipes out most of that style of housing. But St Giles remains. So
So when London is rebuilt, the housing is thought to be generally of better quality and it's certainly better provided with sanitation and running water. So people want to live in the newer housing, not the older housing.
And so these medieval buildings get really run down and dilapidated and the timbers are blackened through soot and smoke and they become very rickety and they start to lean into one another and very often you have struts and poles holding walls apart to stop two houses falling into one another and they look like blackened nests, the big messy nests.
that you see in the trees when you get an enormous rookery. An old word meaning a large collection of tree nests, St Giles is just one of several rookeries across London in the 18th century. Another famous rookery is Jacob's Island in Bermondsey, later immortalized by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. Dickens witnessed for himself the squalid conditions on a nocturnal tour of the rookeries.
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These rookeries came as the result of an expanding city needing ever more manual labor, something the Irish immigrants of St. Giles had plenty of.
London was going through the very start of the boom and they needed physical workers, manual labourers to fuel this boom. And the Irish, because they were naturally healthy and fit and had grown up in Ireland in very rural conditions, did not suffer from the respiratory problems and general weaknesses that often affected native-born Londoners. Irish men and women of Georgian London were certainly not green to hard work.
They provided the extra backbone needed for a city that was expanding at a rate never before seen.
So the Irish traditionally, Irish men had always come over to harvest hay around London, in the fields around London. This fitted very neatly with the potato crop. They would come over, earn money and then they would go back for the harvest, their own harvest. But when they started to find work, particularly as sedan chair carriers and paving London, they tended to stay. And when they stayed, their families came over with them.
And so you go from having a large but temporary Irish population, which came and caused trouble but then went home, you have a large stable population, a population that is not going home. And that's one of the things that Londoners found very, very difficult to deal with. Local Londoners had a hard time sharing their streets with Irish outsiders.
They reasoned their prejudice by pointing to what they saw as unsavoury Irish traditions. The Irish that came tended to be Roman Catholic, and London has traditionally been prejudiced against Roman Catholicism.
So you had lots and lots of social routines and norms amongst this poor Irish population, such as the laying out of the dead for extended periods of time, very drunken wakes. Keeping a pig was a sign that you could provide for your family. So in these extremely crowded courts and slums, people would keep at least one pig. Those two behaviours in particular, the laying out of the dead and the pigs,
became an enormous social stigma. People talked about it constantly. It comes up constantly in records. Perhaps it was this preoccupation that local Londoners had with their Irish neighbours that means today we have evidence of women's cat bites at all.
It's very difficult now to look back and to know who was fighting in these catfights because they weren't the sort of things that were documented particularly well. However, when they are documented, it's usually the Irish community of St Giles that the women came from. The locations for the fights were usually the back streets of St Giles, which at this time were little better than in sanitary open sewers. Even before the fight began, there were health hazards everywhere.
Mick Crumplin provides a medical understanding of the mostly invisible stakes that these women were up against.
I think the environment in which these women would have to fight in the so-called boxing ring or cockpit or pub or anywhere in the street, the whole environment would be filthy. There would be animals, you know, on the street and be kept in the house or in the backyard and human excrement and all this would give rise to a much larger bacterial population in the environment of the combat.
And this is why infection, even in a tiny wound, could be so risky. And I think that these women probably would be presumably fighting somewhere between their late teens, but probably not beyond their 30s. With the majority of fighters being young women, often whose only means of earning a living was prostitution, inevitably, the male crowds fueled by drink wanted to see more than just the fight.
It was very common for the poor women to fight stripped to the waist and this of course attracts spectators. These fights were pretty serious. Lots of damage done to chests and breasts and faces and hair pulling and really very aggressive.
And it was over when it was over, when someone gave in. So there were no rules at all. No doubt it would deteriorate from fisticuffs into grabbing people's hair and clothing and scratching and it would get out of control very quickly. It would be a very unpleasant contest indeed.
There are many types of injury you can inflict on somebody else, causing anything from a broken cheekbone to a broken nose to an eye injury to a soft tissue throat injury to a broken ribs, depending on the force of the blow.
But for the deliverer, there was also a high risk because if you hit someone in the jaw or mouth or teeth, there is a veritable soup of bacteria in these people's mouths. And if they were in the habit of drinking a lot of gin and very poor dental hygiene, the chance of getting an infection in the knuckles was extremely high. And that will lead to poor healing, secondary infection, even death sometimes from spreading infection from the limb up the arm.
We don't have any records of a fight to the death between women in the Georgian period, but they would certainly have died probably relatively young and from entirely preventable diseases just engendered by poverty and lifestyle. Despite such grim prospects and consequences,
The lifestyle of a catfighter still held a strong appeal for many young women. Female bare-knuckle fighters may have been extremely poor, but they also had the ability to earn relatively a lot of money in a very short space of time. I mean, as much, if not more, as they would earn as prostitutes. And one woman's reputation as a fighter still holds high above the catfighters and gutter brawlers of St. Giles. She was known as Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes.
Elizabeth Stokes does represent the organised side, the professional side of female bare-knuckle fighting. She married James Stokes, the pugilist, and she made a career of challenging other well-known women fighters. There were big staged events that were advertised in all the newspapers. Liz Stokes is particularly famous because she was a Cockney, they called her the Cockney Championess.
So she's particularly famous for being a Londoner and married to a Londoner. Elizabeth Stokes, who became known as Lady Bare Knuckles, set herself up as a cut above the catfights of St. Giles and the other rookeries. Newspaper adverts for her fights still exist, in which it's made clear that the combatants were properly and modestly clothed.
Stokes was no topless catfighter. In contrast to the very poor fighters who obviously didn't want to spoil their clothes and were giving a big show, Liz Stokes definitely didn't want you to think that you were coming to see that type of fight. She fought in a close tight jacket of quite coarse material, a short skirt just below the knee, which then would have britches worn underneath, and pumps.
And that was the way that women boxed well into the 19th century. She set that model. Though the era of modern women's boxing was still more than two centuries in the future, Elizabeth Stokes was the first superstar British woman fighter.
I think Liz Stokes probably is the first great female bare-knuckle fighter. She's certainly the first one that we have proper records of. That's not to say that there certainly would have been women who were fighting beforehand, but I think also she sets the bar quite high because she was surrounded by professional men. Her husband and his cohorts who did this properly for a living.
So she transformed it into a very marginal sport for women, both socially, culturally and literally, and brought it into mainstream arenas where men competed for money. The great changes sweeping Georgian Britain continued apace into the early 19th century. Yet by this time, Elizabeth Stokes was long gone, and the era in which wild female catfights could be tolerated was on the wane.
With the end of the Georgian era, and with new Victorian values applied to London society, prize-fighting for men declined sharply, and the women's had completely drifted into legend. With the great slum clearances of Victorian times, the rookeries disappeared, and the squalid London described by Charles Dickens was no more.
Yet the women who fought with bare knuckles more than 200 years ago are still there, just beneath the modern streets, where Georgian London still remains.
What happened to women's fighting as a sport after Lady Bare Knuckles fought her last match? For a deep dive into the famous female fighters of history, listen to our extra episode, Forbidden Fruit, available soon on all your favorite podcast platforms.
This is an audio production by Laika Shott Entertainment. Presented by Bridget Lappin. Executive Producers Danny O'Brien and Henry Scott. Story Producer Maddie Bowers. Assistant Producer Alice Tudor. Thank you for listening.