Pod Insights The Rest Is History 593. The Fight of the Century About this episode Why did two men - John Heenan and and Tom Sayers - illegally meet in a field in Hampshire, in 1860, to brutally fight one another, captivating Britain in the process? What can the fight tell us about the nature of Britishness in the 19th century? Was this the birth of boxing? Who won the infamous boxing match? And, how did the fight change the course of British sport, forever?
In this week’s episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Robert Colls, to discuss one of the most legendary clashes in English history…
Visit https://www.store.steampowered.com and search for ‘Total War Rome’ to buy now.
Go to fuseenergy.com/history to switch your energy to Fuse and get £20 credit.
Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com
For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com
_______
Twitter:
@TheRestHistory
@holland_tom
@dcsandbrook
Producer: Theo Young-Smith
Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude
Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.
0:16 Dominic Sandbrook? So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options. And of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers, and there are real people there to help.
0:42 Tom Holland? So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.
0:49 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working. And in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland, who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.
1:09 Tom Holland? Well, Dominic, you are in luck. Because if you are hiring, then ZipRecruiter is the great time saver. You can try it free at ziprecruiter.com/history. It shows you qualified candidates almost instantly. So save time with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
1:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/history. That's ziprecruiter.com/history. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter.
1:54 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot, capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
2:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Way down in merry England, the home of Johnny Bull. Where the English drink their glasses, they drink them brimming full. Saying, 'Here's to merry England likewise, our Britain's brave. The champions we are, o'er the land and o'er the wave.' Way down in merry England, all in the bloom of spring. Where English burly champions stood stripped off in the ring. To fight that noble heenan, the gallant son of Troy. To try his British muscle on the bold Benisha boy. Two heavy flags were hoisted that floated o'er the ring. On one there was a tiger all ready for a spring. On the other was an eagle, a gallant bird she was.
3:24 Dominic Sandbrook? For she had a bunch of thunderbolts and held them in her claws. Oh, the pennies they were tossed and the melee did begin. The bets on sayers and heenan, two on one, came rushing in. They fought like noble heroes till one received a blow. Which caused a crimson tide from young heenan's nose to flow. 'The first blood for Johnny Bull!' Old England shouts for joy. But the following cheers arose for the bold Benisha boy. That tiger rose within him, like lightning in his eye. Saying, 'Smile away, old England, but Johnny, mind your eye.'
4:05 Dominic Sandbrook? So that's the beginning of a lovely poem.
4:08 Tom Holland? It's the beginning.
4:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, it's the beginning, Tom.
4:10 Tom Holland? How long does it go on for?
4:11 Dominic Sandbrook? It goes on for much, it goes on for 42 rounds. It's a poem called Heenan and Sayers, and it was by Mrs Elwood Nickerson, written in about, we don't know, about 1860, 61 in New England. And this poem is celebrating the fight of the century, the clash between Tom Sayers and John Heenan on the 17th of April, 1860. Tom, are you a great boxing aficionado?
4:36 Tom Holland? Not hugely, but as you will know, I am a fan of British muscle because I've actually just come from the gym where I've been toning my British muscle.
4:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, that's a nice image.
4:47 Tom Holland? So I feel absolutely prepped and ready for this.
4:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Good.
4:50 Tom Holland? I mean, one thing I am, well, at least I used to be a fan of, was going off to fields in Hampshire.
4:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
4:56 Tom Holland? To engage in illegal activities.
4:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, my words. Oh, no.
4:59 Tom Holland? So as name checked by Jarvis Cocker in
5:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
5:03 Tom Holland? his famous song Sorted for Ease and Whiz.
5:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. This is a lovely image.
5:08 Tom Holland? And reading about this fight, which takes place illegally in a field in Hampshire, I couldn't help but think about how, you know, how the traditions of merry England run deep. So people, you know, in the 90s weren't gathering to watch boxing matches, but they were gathering to celebrate.
5:26 Dominic Sandbrook? To go to raves.
5:27 Tom Holland? Going to raves. So there's, there's kind of deep continuities, aren't there?
5:30 Dominic Sandbrook? Crikey. Well, I didn't expect that to, that angle to be the angle of choice.
5:34 Tom Holland? Well, I've introduced British muscle and ease and whiz.
5:36 Dominic Sandbrook? So we thought we would dig into the story behind this extraordinary clash between Tom Sayers and John Heenan, what it tells us about Britain, America, Britishness, sport.
5:48 Tom Holland? It's about sport above all, isn't it? It's about
5:51 Dominic Sandbrook? But it's about what sport means.
5:52 Tom Holland? But also in the long run, how it comes to be tamed and codified and in a way made kind of posher, as we will see.
6:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I think that's true. And we are joined by very much a friend of The Rest Is History. So listeners who heard our episode on Orwell will remember him. He is Professor Robert Coles, Emeritus Professor at De Montfort University and author of the brilliant book, This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England 1760 to 1960, in which this fight Plays a kind of lead role as a whole chapter about this fight. Rob, welcome back to the rest is history.
6:28 Speaker 02 Thank you. Great to be back.
6:29 Dominic Sandbrook? So what's going on? You have, to set the scene, it's very early in the morning. It's the 17th of April 1860. It's a Tuesday. It's in the middle of nowhere, a field in Hampshire. All of these people have gathered to watch these two men knock seven bells out of one another. What is the story behind all this?
6:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you want to know what's going on in this field in Hampshire in 1860, what you don't do is read Mrs Nicholson's poem because it's quite clear that she's not been within a thousand miles of this, this fight, which took place the year before. It's billed, across the Atlantic, as the first international heavyweight championship. It's been talked about for 12 months before, and it will be talked about for 40, 50 years afterwards. Generally speaking, journalists and others called it the fight of the century. In many ways, it was really none of those things.
7:33 Speaker 02 The American, the Irish American who'd come across to do his business, John Camel Heenan, had only had one professional fight in his life, which he'd lost. So he was a novice, really. His claim to be there was he had a talent for violence.
7:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
7:56 Speaker 02 I don't know if you've seen the wonderful Scorsese film Gangs of New York, but Heenan had operated within those gangs as a minder, as an enforcer, as a publican by day and a hard man by night. So he was just a hard case, who was chancing his luck against the English champion. The English champion was a very different kettle of fish. Tom Sayers was an out and out professional. He'd been fighting since he was sixteen, born in Brighton, born in the lanes in Brighton, started fighting at sixteen up on the downes, on the racecourses, what the press called casual wagers, you know, five minutes done in a corner, money changes hands.
8:41 Speaker 02 In his twenties, Sayers had moved to London, where he had plied his trade as a bricklayer in Camden. Camden was new then, the railway was coming, and Tom did his work there. He also did part-time fighting and amassed enough money to become a publican. The Laurel Tree in Bayham Road, Camden, was his pub. And he got married and he had children. And in eighteen fifty, aged twenty-four, he had his first out-and-out professional fight. By the time he's facing Heenan in that field, seven o'clock in the morning, April eighteen
9:25 Speaker 02 sixty, he'd had fourteen fights, of which he'd lost only one. So what are they there to do? Well, what they're there to do is the most awful thing it would seem possible to imagine. They were there to inflict such injuries on each other with their bare hands that one of them was going to be incapable of standing up, or at any rate coming to the centre of the ring, the scratch mark, and standing up in that position. That's what they were there to do. Behind this fight really was the New York press and the London press.
10:05 Speaker 02 In New York, we had a newspaper, a sporting newspaper called Porter's Spirit of the Times, and they thought in Heenan, they had someone who could relieve the English of their own championship. In Tom Sayers, Bell's Life, which was the leading sporting newspaper, Bell thought they had a man who could restore the prize ring to some kind of honour and respectability, which it had lost in the eighteen fifties and forties. In the event both newspapers were wrong, as we shall see. So anyway, Heenan makes it to London, December eighteen fifty-nine, and the two men meet
10:47 Speaker 02 at Owen Swift's public house, The Horseshoe, in Titchborne Street.
10:52 Tom Holland? If I can just jump in, Owen Swift, he's a fighter himself, who has killed people in the ring, is that right?
11:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, Swift has killed three men in the ring, and the last one being Brighton Bill. And he spent his time before magistrates and always got away with it.
11:12 Tom Holland? Rob, how did he get away with it?
11:13 Speaker 02 Well, the legal position of fighting was very unclear. Judges absolutely detested it and wanted it finished with. But magistrates found it a lot easier to turn a blind eye. And as we know, the police in the middle of the nineteenth century were not organised or as well informed as they might be.
11:36 Tom Holland? And are magistrates turning a blind eye to it because they are fans, because they're enthusiasts, because they think that it's an expression of British manliness, or what's the reason?
11:46 Speaker 02 I don't think so, Tom. I think the reason they're turning a blind eye is, although fights are strictly speaking a breach of the peace, and they're very nervous about disorder, stopping one would probably be more disorder.
11:59 Tom Holland? Oh, I see, right.
12:00 Speaker 02 And more breach of the peace. But above all else, of course, you've got aristocratic patronage. And if you're a, you know, if you're a local country vicar who's also a magistrate, stepping in to stop a fight where there are lords and dukes and gentlemen, you wouldn't last long. So magistrates turned the blind eye, judges pressed for it to be stopped. At law, fighting was odd, mainly it was a breach of the peace, or it could be common assault, or it could be riot, or worse still, it could be manslaughter.
12:39 Tom Holland? Yeah.
12:39 Speaker 02 And as the century wore on, more and more cases for manslaughter were brought to court, but nothing much happened. I've actually got some boring figures here, which I once spent my time counting. Out of thirty tried at the Old Bailey for manslaughter in the ring between eighteen fifty six and seventy five, out of the thirty men, thirteen were acquitted and seventeen were convicted, but all of them got less than six months in jail.
13:13 Tom Holland? Right.
13:14 Speaker 02 If you're a carter or a labourer, you tend to get convicted. If you're an old Etonian schoolboy and you've just killed a fellow student, as did happen to Lord Shaftesbury's youngest brother in the eighteen twenties, who was killed in a sixty round fight, you get let off.
13:32 Tom Holland? So that is like the one in Tom Brown's School Days with, what's it, Slugger, Slugger somebody, Slugger somebody has a fight behind the gym school.
13:41 Speaker 02 Slugger.
13:42 Tom Holland? Slugger, Slugger, that's right.
13:43 Speaker 02 Slugger Williams fights Tom. And Thomas Hughes, who wrote it, knew exactly what he was writing about when he did that.
13:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Sorry, we took you off piece, didn't we, by getting into this. So they've met for the first time at Swift's pub, the two contestants, Heenan and.
13:59 Speaker 02 Sayers.
14:00 Dominic Sandbrook? And Sayers, exactly. And so the fight is going to happen, but at this point, nobody knows when and where it will happen.
14:09 Tom Holland? Which again, it's like, it's like raves, isn't it? That people know something's going to happen, but they don't quite know how to get there and people are waiting to be texted the number and the address and places like that. So it's a bit like that.
14:20 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's a one, that's a great analogy, actually, a rave. It's exactly that, Tom. It's a rave. Everyone's turning up at London Bridge at four AM on the morning of the fight and nobody knows where the fight's going to happen, but they're all buying a ticket for Farnborough.
14:37 Tom Holland? And Rob, when you say everyone, I mean, you really do mean everyone. So Dickens's friend, people say Lord Palmerston's going.
14:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, the Prince Wales.
14:45 Tom Holland? What is the class of person who is, who is going down on this train to this boxing match?
14:51 Speaker 02 Because it's secret, no one knows where it is, but of course, everyone does know where it is. And let's just say reports are rather mixed and confused. But generally speaking, we know there's an aristocratic element. And we know locals down in Hampshire would would probably turn up just to see the the play. It's a kind of festival, it's a kind of fair. And then we've got mainly what was called at the time, the fancy, or more intellectual people were called the cognoscenti. That is, there's a kind of following around fighting, which is to do with betting. It's to do with former fighters known as pugs or pugilists.
15:33 Speaker 02 And it's to do with aristocrats who just will gamble on anything. These people know the odds and they'll be at all the big fights. From, of course, the word the fancy, we get the word fan. So they reckon there's about fifteen hundred passengers on two trains coming out of London Bridge, thirty five carriages on each. And Dickens' man, I think he's called Holland's Head, claims to be sitting in a compartment with a well-known lord, a well-known poet and a well-known politician, but he doesn't name names. Certainly, when they got to the fight and walked half a mile across muddy fields,
16:14 Speaker 02 and they were met by more security, who were handing out chairs to the aristocrats who deserved them and no chairs to the rest. So basically, when you got to the scene of the fight, you could either watch the law being broken, sitting down, or you could watch the law being broken, standing up.
16:35 Dominic Sandbrook? And people are placing bets. So betting is obviously an enormous part of this. Is there betting happening at, in the field? I mean, are there bookmakers there, you know, shouting out the odds and stuff?
16:48 Speaker 02 Yes, the most important thing to get a fight going, Dom, is stake money. So the two, the two sides place stake bets with each side, and the winner will take the other side's stake. That's the real money in the formal and official money in prize fighting. So Tom's side put £500, £50 a go at a number of London pubs and Heenan's side did exactly the same. Of course, there would be informal and relentless betting on the fight as the fight progressed. This made it very, very dodgy business because the fighters were in the fight and could hear
17:32 Speaker 02 how the odds were changing ringside, they could themselves change the outcome of the fight.
17:38 Tom Holland? So I just wanted to ask you about that. I mean, what is to stop one of them throwing it?
17:41 Speaker 02 Nothing.
17:42 Tom Holland? Right, so how is that regulated or is it not regulated?
17:45 Speaker 02 Well, according to London Rules 1839, which they're fighting by, you're not meant to go down on one knee unless you've had a proper punch. But how do you measure a proper punch? The only person who knows a proper punch has been landed is the giver and the receiver. If the receiver wants to cheat, which in the parlance is called a cross, and go down and lose and is bet against himself, he's made a lot of money.
18:15 Tom Holland? Yeah.
18:16 Speaker 02 So he's not going to say it wasn't a proper punch. Of course, it was a proper punch. And the giver of the punch is not going to say it wasn't the proper punch because by giving this punch, he's won the fight. So there's nothing to stop ringside off course betting, shouting the odds, and it's nothing to stop a single fighter doing a cross.
18:38 Tom Holland? Would a fighter like Tom Sayers have a reputation as a man who was unlikely to do that?
18:44 Speaker 02 He did have that reputation and that's why Belslyff wanted him to be reincarnated as a great, a great Englishman. But in truth, the last fight he had before Heenan was against a novice really, and apparently Tom had been seen dancing the night away, the night before, and there was rumours of a cross, that he was not going to be serious about it. He was going to, in the parlance, he was going to chuck it. But in the event Tom didn't chuck it and fight was over in five minutes.
19:15 Dominic Sandbrook? So the crowd has gathered, all of these people, and it's about seven o'clock they come out. Now, just to give us a sense of, you know, what they, what they look like and stuff. You might think because this is the 19th century or they don't take it very seriously. They haven't been properly training. They have been training, they've been training for months, haven't they, on the downs. Tom says on the Sussex Downs, Henin in Wiltshire. And what's a training routine involved for a 19th century boxer?
19:44 Speaker 02 Well, they went into training in February, so they had two, three months training. And Tom, you notice, went on the downs with the racing fraternity. And then went up the Newmarket, again with the racing fraternity. There is a very old and honourable connection between riding, horse being, well, jockeying and fighting. Both sides have to keep their weight down and jockeys knew how to do that. And fighters took that seriously. And Tom's methods were exactly what a jockey of the time would do to keep fat off and keep muscles. And bit like, Tom's really nice and brisk and shiny.
20:28 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm interested to know what they do, whether it compares to my routine.
20:31 Speaker 02 It's about starving yourself, basically. It's about weights, it's about no sex. I don't know how that goes with you.
20:43 Speaker 02 No coffee.
20:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh.
20:45 Speaker 02 No masturbation.
20:46 Dominic Sandbrook? Hold on, Rob, Rob, Rob, Rob. I mean, how do people know this? Are they writing it down? Are there training manuals?
20:51 Speaker 02 Yes, there are, there are training manuals.
20:54 Dominic Sandbrook? How are they referring to it? Beastliness?
20:56 Speaker 02 They call it masturbation, it's a very old word.
20:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I'm amazed. I thought Victorians never talked about it.
21:01 Speaker 02 We're not talking about Victorians, quote unquote, here. We're talking about the other side of Victorian life. They took a massive pill. Before the fight, a massive blue pill for constipation. But actually, the thing is, Tom, they weren't doing anything that jockeys weren't doing. This was all understood and known, and it wasn't unusual, actually. You know, the greatest English jockey of the century, Fred Archer, died by just being overzealous in his training routines.
21:30 Tom Holland? Too many pills.
21:31 Speaker 02 Too many pills and not enough food. They would make themselves sick. I mean, all the old tricks, which we're only sadly too familiar with now. So they did that for a few months. Heenan couldn't settle anywhere. Everywhere he went to train, the constabulary told him to move on. So his camp was never settled. He went right through the Midlands and ended up in Derbyshire for a night in jail.
21:56 Tom Holland? And was that because the constabulary were being patriotic and trying to stop him from training?
22:01 Speaker 02 Well, the thing was, you go back to this old thing about a breach of the peace. Wherever he went, there was a crowd. And the crowd, you know, were not always charming or gentle.
22:11 Tom Holland? Yeah.
22:11 Speaker 02 With him and his American entourage. Anyway, he finally got arrested at his Trent Lock near Derby, a training camp. And he was put out on bail for more money than the actual stake he'd put down for the fight. Anyway, he kept going and he was used to this. It was exactly the same in the United States. Fighting was such a hole in the corner affair. You had to keep moving. You had to always be on, watch out for the rosas. One important thing, I just have to take you one day back before the fight. On the night of the sixteenth of April, eighteen sixty, Heenan turned up at Nat Langham's pub in London, the Cambrian.
22:56 Speaker 02 Now, why did he go to Langham's pub, the Cambrian? Because Langham was the only man who'd ever beaten Sayers.
23:04 Tom Holland? Ah, right.
23:05 Speaker 02 Came from Hinkley in Leicestershire. He was a framework knitter and he'd taken Sayers the full distance in eighteen fifty three and beaten him. So there's a bit of needle here that, you know, Heenan goes to the man who beat him. In the same sense, the one man to beat Heenan in his only fight. John Morrissey, he was in Saya's corner.
23:27 Dominic Sandbrook? They've got inside information.
23:28 Tom Holland? I love the, um, the account you give of the, the entourages that both men have. So on the morning of the fight, they meet up, they shake hands. Heenan has the Stars and Stripes in his corner and Saya, you say, has the Royal Standard on a cream background, which is tremendous. And I think is something that British boxers should reintroduce. But 729, they come to the middle and Saya has his two seconds behind him, who you describe as being like wicket keepers. So that's people who stand up to the bowling in cricket. Plus his, his manager, his professional walker, who is his trainer. And my favorite detail, someone called the Birdman making queer halloo sounds in a cape.
24:11 Tom Holland? What, what's, what's going on with, with the Birdman?
24:15 Speaker 02 I know.
24:16 Tom Holland? What's he doing? Who is he?
24:18 Speaker 02 I know.
24:20 Tom Holland? And, and why do boxers not have Birdman now in capes and dwarfs and things?
24:26 Speaker 02 Well, he's going, halloo, halloo, halloo.
24:30 Tom Holland? Why?
24:32 Speaker 02 Well, I think it certainly beats Heenan's corner, which is a bit boring. It, he's got his uncle, two friends and a man called Billy Mulligan, who the New York Times calls a very determined looking fellow.
24:49 Speaker 02 Personally, I'd rather be with Jimmy Holden and the Birdman.
24:53 Tom Holland? So the fight is ready to begin. Shall we take a break at this point? Tension is massive, but when we come back, the bell will sound, the fight will begin and we will see who wins.
25:04 Speaker 02 Can we do one thing just before that? I've got to put in Tom that, um, it's what they do before they actually come to the fight is they strip, which in the parlance is they peel. By which I mean, they take off their shirts. And that's really important before a fight, because when you see a man's body, then you see how serious they are about what's going to happen.
25:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
25:30 Speaker 02 And the point here is, both men are in superb condition.
25:33 Dominic Sandbrook? So Tom Sayers has been daubing himself with vinegar, hasn't he? So he's described as looking like a square brick of walnut. So he's kind of, he's dyed himself with vinegar, is that right, Rob?
25:46 Speaker 02 It was an old belief, there were skin hardening properties of vinegar. And as for Heenan, he's incredibly pale. And of course, he's five inches taller, two and a half stones heavier, eight or nine years younger. And the Times called it, as the two men stood together, as a horse to a hen.
26:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Wow, unbelievable tension. So who will win, the horse or the hen? Come back in a few minutes to find out.
26:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in a field in Hampshire on the 17th of April, 1860. The crowd has assembled, the two men have peeled, Sayers and Heenan. Rob, take us through what happens next.
26:33 Speaker 02 Well, they both walk to the centre of the ring, so called. Of course, it's not a ring, it's actually a rectangle. They go to the centre of the ring and Heenan says, beautiful morning, to the man who's about to try and kill him. And Tom says, want to bet on it?
26:50 Speaker 02 Which I loved. They go at it according to London prize ring rules.
26:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Just to be clear for listeners, this is, these are not the rules that govern boxing in the way that they do now. So we'll come to how those laws evolve. These are London rules, which sounds like a kind of spy thriller. But it's a particular kind of fighting, isn't it? So what are London rules? What are the boxers allowed to do?
27:14 Speaker 02 So the first set of printed rules, Tom, are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and they were called Broughton's Rules, 1743. And London rules were An evolution of Broughton's Rules of seventeen forty-three. Basically, there were no weight categories. So there's no heavyweights, lightweights, middleweight. They were just matches. And the match was anybody who was willing to put their money up behind a man fighting another man. So clearly, Sayes was five foot eight and eleven stone. He was actually a middleweight. But he couldn't get middleweights to fight him. Or more accurately, they couldn't get people to back them to fight him.
27:59 Speaker 02 So he's fighting, it's a middleweight fighting a heavyweight because London Rules have no weight categories. The second thing is there's no fixed rounds. The round ends when one man drops to one knee. And he can do that at any point and get a thirty-second breather.
28:16 Tom Holland? But there aren't points, so it doesn't, you know, it doesn't penalize him.
28:20 Speaker 02 There's no points in London Rules. You just have to really reduce a man to such a state that he can't come to scratch. And even though he's had his thirty-second breather. There was less force in this because they were bare-knuckle. And in addition to hitting with your bare hand, you could, you could throw. You could wrestle. But what you couldn't do, this is where London Rules civilized things a bit. You couldn't bite, you couldn't butt, you couldn't kick, you couldn't gouge, you couldn't strangle. And of course, you couldn't hit below the waist.
28:57 Tom Holland? And you say in your book that prize fighters also shave themselves. So like the Macedonians, they shave off their beards so that their opponents can't grab them by their beards.
29:08 Speaker 02 Yes, if you are in an exchange, which is part boxing and part wrestling, it doesn't help to have long hair or beard. In Mendoza's famous fight, I think it was seventeen ninety-five with John Jackson, gentleman John Jackson. Jackson ended the fight by swinging him round by his hair. So Mendoza's long hair didn't do him proud on that occasion. So you could always tell a fighter by his cropped hair and crooked nose. That's the way to do it.
29:41 Dominic Sandbrook? And they also have spiked boots, is that right?
29:44 Speaker 02 Yeah, the thing is, it's really, given that the rosas are always on to you or are liable to be on to you. Fights can start in one county and end in another one because the two fighters would actually be on the run. So it's quite obvious that you couldn't fight indoors. It was just too risky. And so most fights were outside where if the police turned up, you could run for it. So the boots were spiked. Your head was held back, your fists were low, but up, your feet were turned out. In other words, you were well turned out and you would bob and weave and duck until first punch was landed.
30:29 Speaker 02 And the first punch in this fight actually went to the old pro, Sayers, who landed one square on Heenan's nose. And nobbing, it was called in the parlance.
30:42 Speaker 02 Nobbing in the parlance and applause in the crowd.
30:45 Dominic Sandbrook? So a nobbing, nobbing is when you hit someone on the nose?
30:47 Speaker 02 Flat on the nose, yeah. And you draw, it was never called blood, of course, it was always called ruby or claret. So you nob to draw ruby. At that point, Heenan grabbed Sayers by the neck. But Sayers punched his way out of it and apparently both men fell to the floor laughing. Round one over.
31:11 Dominic Sandbrook? And there's no limit on the number of rounds, is that right? So if they want to fight for 10, 20, 30, in this case 40 plus rounds, they can. Because looking at Sayers' record, he knows that this could go on for a long time because he has fought, had bouts that have lasted two hours, two and a half hours. I mean, mind boggling how exhausting and unbelievably dangerous that must be.
31:39 Speaker 02 Well, it is dangerous, of course, they're aiming for the, they're aiming for your head, your temple and below your ear.
31:49 Speaker 02 They're trying to blind you with hits, jabbing. Engouging's out, but jabbing's in. Jabbing to the eyes or peg to the stomach, as it was called. Or they want to throw you and land heavily on you. Or they want to fib, which means getting your head under one arm and punching away in the face with the other.
32:13 Dominic Sandbrook? And that was called having a suit enchancery. Is that really what they call that?
32:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, suit enchancery is holding your head under my arm. Let's put it that way. And I hit you with my right hand.
32:24 Dominic Sandbrook? With your British muscle.
32:25 Speaker 02 Or there's a cross buttock. How about that one? Where you throw a man over your buttock, in effect. And then you land on him very heavily.
32:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
32:35 Speaker 02 Actually, Dom, this isn't, this isn't new. I don't know about you guys, but this is how schoolboys fought when I was a kid. It was all head enchancery and cross buttock.
32:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
32:46 Speaker 02 Not that much punching, actually. It was more about wrestling someone down and getting them to say, getting them to say sorry.
32:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, headlocks, all about headlocks, isn't it?
32:55 Tom Holland? So essentially you win the match by getting someone flat on the ground. But to do that, you have to make his, his knuckles have to be broken. His face, you know, maybe so, his eyes so swollen that he can't actually see. And as Dominic says, that might take, well, as it does in this case, it takes what? Two hours, two and a half hours?
33:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, you have to make him incapable, basically. And he has to be able to make it to the, the scratch mark himself, not carried. And there was a terrible case of manslaughter where a man was carried to the scratch by his seconds, where he was basically beaten to death. The thing is though, you've got to just remember this. These fights are not as horrible and violent as they might sound. Because the new Queensbury Rules ring was in certain ways more violent. Because you had the 10 second rule on a knockout. So fighters were looking to hit your head so hard that your brain.
33:56 Speaker 02 Would hit your skull and cause concussion. That's what a KO is. And all the great fighters who followed Heenan and Sayas were KO specialists. And in a 10 second count over a three minute round, there was nowhere to hide. I think it was Ali who said, you know, you can run, but you can't hide. And in the old ring, if you were getting tired or you were hurt, you would just go down on a knee, pretend you'd been hit. But in the modern ring, you just had to keep going until such time as the three minutes were up.
34:32 Dominic Sandbrook? You also make the point, don't you, the difference between this fight, let's say, the Sayas-Heenan fight and a modern fight. They're because they're not wearing gloves. They are hurting their hands every time they land a punch, which counter intuitively to me, because I think of bare knuckle boxing with kind of with horror. But actually, the punches are much, they're not exactly pulling their punches. Well, you are if your knuckles are bleeding. Well, this is the point that your punch is perhaps not carrying the force. I mean, you've already made this point, Rob, that it's not carrying the force that it would in the modern ring. Is that right?
35:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's what I've not, I've never seen a bare knuckle fight and I don't want to. But I've read, I've read about this. Apparently, the old PR prize ring punch was very direct and very straight. It couldn't hit you from the side because then you would probably break some fingers. So it was, it was, it was a fib. It was short and sharp and in the face or in the eyes. A jab, it was a jab rather than a knockout swing. A swing really could break your hand.
35:35 Dominic Sandbrook? So I'm sure that by this point, listeners will be dying to know who wins.
35:41 Speaker 02 Well, it's not clear. That's the problem. And we go 42 rounds, more or less in the manner we've been discussing. There's two big things happen in the 42 rounds. The first thing is Sayas loses the use of his right arm. He thinks it's broken. The crowd thinks it's broken. It turns out not to be broken, but it's certainly out of action. So we've got to imagine Sayas now holding the arm across his chest and basically keeping out of Heenan's grab and trying to jab him in the eye.
36:16 Speaker 02 By round thirty seven, the second thing happens. Heenan by now is pretty much blinded by the jabbing. And he grabs, say as, he grabs him and pulls him to the ropes where he wraps his rope around his neck. And basically, one hundred and ninety five pounds leans on the rope which is on the neck. Now, believe it or not, this is actually unlawful according to London rules.
36:44 Tom Holland? I was wondering.
36:46 Speaker 02 You're not allowed to murder your opponent in the ring. And it's at this point that the crowd surge into the ring and basically the fight stops. There are rumours that also at this point, Morrissey, who you remember is the man who stopped Heenan in New York. Morrissey jumps in and cuts the ropes. So that's not going to happen again. This chaos in the ring. The police finally move in to stop murder. And both fighters basically leg it across the field.
37:20 Tom Holland? But it's amazing, they're in a condition to leg it.
37:22 Dominic Sandbrook? I was about to say, one man's got no arm, the other man is blind.
37:26 Tom Holland? The other one's just been strangled by a rope.
37:28 Dominic Sandbrook? They're presumably dripping with ruby and exhausted.
37:31 Speaker 02 Yes, ruby everywhere. Well, Heenan has to be led by the hand as he legs it across the field because he can't really see. And, and Sayes is, actually Sayes is in decent condition apart from his arm, which is swelling alarmingly. They, they hop it back to London. Heenan is put to bed for two days. And, but not our Tom. Our Tom's up the next morning at Owen Swift's asking for his money because he thinks he's won it.
38:02 Tom Holland? On what basis does he think he's won it? Because he's just been strangled by a rope.
38:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Disqualification, disqualification for the Americans, surely, Tom.
38:09 Speaker 02 It's a difficult one, isn't it? I mean, you're fighting someone who's just wandering around the ring like a zombie, can't see, and you're peppering him until he finally grabs you. I mean, the whole thing is a tortured farce. And in real terms, it's effectively the end of the prize ring.
38:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Am I not right in saying that for the press on both sides of the Atlantic, they say, and I'm quoting from your chapter, sports writers on both sides of the Atlantic were already busy turning a nasty case of common assault into a heroic draw between two great sporting nations. So there's obviously been a lot of national pride riding on this. And basically, both papers on both sides of the Atlantic are happy to say, what a tremendous occasion this was, reflects greatly, you know, redounds to the credit of both great Anglo-Saxon nations, hurrah for Britain and America, and they're both equally, they're both champions. Is that, is that basically the long and short of it?
39:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely, that's right. They started the fight, the press started the fight. It's in the new, it's in the London and New York press once a week for a whole year before it takes place. And then it's never out the press afterwards. And the whole point is, both men get a replica belt, both men get a reception at the Alhambra Theatre in London, where they walk round the stage arm in arm.
39:35 Speaker 02 Keenan having to stoop a little for his diminutive opponent.
39:40 Dominic Sandbrook? With his white cane.
39:43 Speaker 02 Yes. And these awful sickly speeches are made on behalf of two proud fighting nations.
39:50 Dominic Sandbrook? And what about the betters? I mean, who, who, how's that divvied out?
39:54 Speaker 02 Well, we don't, we don't know about the betting, Tom, because it's so unofficial. But the point about boxing, because there's only two men, the odds are always short. So you're not going to get massive returns. It was two to one when they, when they started. It was seven to four the day before, it was two to one on the day. We don't know about that. They might have even bet against themselves, we never know these things.
40:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Right.
40:17 Speaker 02 The stake money was what they were both wanting, and I have to confess, I don't actually know what happened to that.
40:24 Dominic Sandbrook? Before we talk about what it all means, the two men themselves, they are forever, I mean, neither of them lived very long after the fight, do they? They are both celebrities and they're, but they're linked in the popular imagination, aren't they? They're sort of seen as brothers in arms. Tom.
40:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Has the succession of kind of benefits and basically pantomime clown appearances at which Heenan will sometimes put in a kind of, you know, he'll turn up as a sort of special guest star.
40:54 Tom Holland? That's a long tradition, isn't it? Frank Bruno in as Widow Twanky or whatever he was playing in the nineties.
41:00 Speaker 02 All these men knew about tights and makeup, there's no doubt about it. And the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton was London's biggest and Dickens's favourite. Dickens says going to the Britannia is like going to an Italian opera. Nothing interesting happening on the stage, it's all off the stage where it's happening. And Tom becomes a fixture at the Britannia with his two mules Barney and Pete. He's in loads of pantomimes.
41:28 Speaker 02 I mean, his opponent Heenan married the great star, American star, kind of 19th century Barbra Streisand, Ada Menken. He married her, she was a real big theatre star, whereas Tom comes from a much different tradition. The nearest he ever got to a woman and the theatre was when his wife hit him in the face outside the Britannia. So they're two very different men, but they both are theatrical stars, they're ornaments to the theatre. Tom goes on the stage and Heenan has two more fights, which he loses. The fight with Tom is considered a draw. So poor old Heenan never actually manages to win one.
42:12 Speaker 02 They both die aged 38, 39 of TB. I don't think their lifestyles were, you know, particularly wonderful. Tom got £3,000 actually, raised by Lloyds and the Houses of Parliament. So as a true English hero is going to be all right for money. But he took all that money and put it into a travelling circus.
42:38 Tom Holland? Pussy did.
42:39 Speaker 02 In the US. But it's a very bad year to do it, he did it in 1862. So he couldn't travel around by a civil war was raging. He's in Heenan's corner in 1863, in Heenan's fight with Tom King, which was probably a cross. By 1864, he's a diabetic and an alcoholic, living with his sister in Camden.
43:02 Speaker 02 And he dies in November eighteen sixty five, on Camden High Street of T B.
43:08 Tom Holland? And is he remembered? I mean, is his is his death greeted with mourning and parades and?
43:13 Dominic Sandbrook? There's a massive funeral, massive funeral, isn't there, Rob?
43:15 Speaker 02 Yes, I mean, the fight of the century was in eighteen sixty, eighteen sixty five is called the funeral of the year. Something between, they reckon about ten thousand people followed the casket.
43:28 Tom Holland? Is his dog there?
43:29 Speaker 02 Lion?
43:30 Tom Holland? Yes, Lion the dog. I am Tom Say's dog. Whose dog are you?
43:33 Speaker 02 It's an invitation to fight, really, isn't it?
43:36 Tom Holland? Yeah, it really is.
43:37 Speaker 02 His dog is there, and his pony, and his phaeton.
43:41 Tom Holland? And what about his mules? You just threw that out. Where have these mules come from? And what about the Birdman?
43:47 Speaker 02 I think they put the Birdman in a box. The mules were not at the funeral, although he did have sixteen horses. But they were all sold at auction after the funeral. So Lion went for thirty pounds to a North London publican. Tom Crib's belt, which had been presented to Tom at his.
44:10 Tom Holland? So Tom Crib is the great, I mean, he's the archetype of a British boxer, isn't he?
44:14 Speaker 02 Well, we could do a whole programme on Crib. Crib is John Bull, and John Bull is William Cobbert, and William Cobbert is Tom Crib. I mean, they are the great figures of Napoleonic period. Well, Tom's got his belt, his silver belt. They sell that for fifty five pound ten shillings. Tom's mule goes for thirteen pounds, and his mare, a dun cob, for twenty three pounds. That's after the funeral. There's a fight at Highgate Cemetery gates, when it seemed that the ten thousand people weren't all going to be allowed in at once. But apparently, once the fight was over, it was very, very seemly and quite respectable.
44:55 Speaker 02 Apparently, his wife went, Nat Langham, his his victor of eighteen fifty three, he was there, dressed in a red Garibaldi shirt. And of course, wonderfully, the spectator called the whole thing disgusting. This is the sport of harpies and capitalists.
45:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, my word. Well, I mean, you could say it's maybe not wrong. And what about Heenan? Heenan died eighteen seventy-three in Wyoming.
45:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
45:22 Dominic Sandbrook? And again, presumably, there's been a lot of hard drinking, a lot of brawling. He hasn't led the healthiest, most slubbery of lives.
45:30 Speaker 02 Mind you, a lot of people die of TP in the nineteenth century. It's the great killer, in particular, I mean, you know, of writers, poets, and it seems fighters.
45:40 Dominic Sandbrook? So I guess the question is, what does it mean? So what does all this, as a historian, you've written lots about working class life and about Englishness and all these kinds of things. What does this tell us? Because the chapter in which you, in the book in which you discuss it, is called simply bottom. Englishmen had bottom and par excellence had bottom. So what do you mean by that?
46:04 Speaker 02 Well, what they meant by it was the ability to give and take, particularly take punishment.
46:12 Dominic Sandbrook? So you compare it to the square that the British Army forms when being attacked by cavalry. So famously, this happens at the Battle of Waterloo. And the boxer, you say, is often compared to the British soldier in a square.
46:26 Speaker 02 I think what it means, Tom, boxing, like all sports, goes very deep into our consciousness, into our imagination, into the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. And this might be described as the plebeian version of national history. It's the plebeian version of honour, the honour fight, that when it comes to it, the English can give an account of themselves. And it spreads everywhere, obviously, and not surprisingly, it seeps into the army and its sense of itself, not the cavalry, note, which is a very different kind of fighting, but the regiments of the line.
47:12 Speaker 02 I don't know how much military history you know, but the regiments of the line had only one job really, and that was to walk forward into hell, really. And when they decided to stop and unfurl their colours and fire, all they could show really was stoicism or bottom. Bottoms are really a plebeian form of stoicism. And the square was an example of that. The British Wellington considered it a marvellous tactic to form a square where you could fire continuously at those around you. Unfortunately, enemies loved the British square because they just had a red square to pour everything they could into it.
47:54 Tom Holland? Yeah.
47:55 Speaker 02 There's one meaning for you, Dom, one meaning.
47:58 Tom Holland? But what I also found fascinating reading your chapter was that even as the boxer is being equated with John Bull, with the British Square, with a particular idea of Englishness, there are also figures who are more ambivalent, who are also being enshrined as gentlemen. So you mentioned Daniel Mendoza with his long hair, who gets tossed around. He's Jewish. And there's a former slave, a black American, Bill Richmond, who likewise is hailed as a gentleman for his feats in the ring. I mean, does being a great boxer give you a kind of honorary status as a British gentleman if you are not a kind of English yeoman? Is that what's going on?
48:40 Speaker 02 Something like that. I think boxing is a fraternity. I think it is now, and it was then. I think there's a respect at pride and each other's strength. I mean, boxers, of course, talk each other down before a fight, but very rarely after one.
49:01 Tom Holland? So as with this one?
49:02 Speaker 02 As with this one. You know, Wellington referred to his troops as morbid, intasiturn. And it was famous that the British infantry were quiet. They would stay quiet. Whereas the French would go in with all that elan, and they were famous for shouting and screaming in their attack, no less brave. But they were completely different styles and it would seem that Mendoza and Richmond and Molyneux, who was a former black American slave, were hugely popular in this country for what they were. Richmond was a page boy, George IV's coronation. Him and Crib were
49:47 Speaker 02 minders on the door, they were bouncers on the door of a coronation, dressed as page boys. There was a kind of fraternity. Now, of course, I'm not saying there wasn't racism. Of course, there was racism, which was directed at them, but never to their face, for obvious reasons.
50:02 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, I know we're going to run out of time and Tom wants to ask about, Tom mentioned the Marcus of Queensby, but just one quick last thing before we get on to that. The political meaning of all this, because your book is about sport and liberty, and you have a line in this chapter, "Only Tories could be true sportsmen, only Tories had bottom." Is this a kind of Tory England, kind of traditional, resistant to being improved, resistant to reform? You know, boxing has been criticised by what you might call do-gooders and there's a sort of sense of it. People who like it seem to have this sense of it, as you said, being a kind of an underground continuity of history, a sense of tradition, all that kind of stuff.
50:41 Tom Holland? What this has reminded me of is Jaco Macaco.
50:44 Dominic Sandbrook? The Fighting Monkey.
50:45 Tom Holland? The Fighting Monkey, who likewise was covered in ruby.
50:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
50:49 Tom Holland? And that also, people were upset about the idea of animals pulverising each other to death.
50:54 Dominic Sandbrook? But again, the same thing about do-gooders trying to clean it up. Humanity Dick, Tom, as you may remember, trying to stamp it out. So, Rob, that line that you have about this being kind of Toryism, is that a serious point?
51:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is a serious point. The trouble with the point, although it's serious, is we never really know what Toryism is, because it's by definition non-ideological, not up for definition, and endlessly adapting to the status quo. Only in that sense do we know what it is at any one time. But given what happened after, let's say after Crib, there was a huge movement in England to civilise the people. And that movement was broadly speaking liberal, broadly speaking metropolitan, broadly speaking condescending to people
51:45 Speaker 02 who were considered rough, stupid and moronic. Now, Toryism took a position against that as time went by. It decided it wasn't that kind of politics, it was another kind of politics. So, as you know from the book, we get examples of this civilisation process all through the century. Particularly to do with popular affairs, customs, hunting and so on. But boxing in particular managed to wriggle its way through these things, whereas other sports like bull running or bull baiting didn't. Toryism took these things up retrospectively, it always works retrospectively about belonging,
52:29 Speaker 02 about what the things that matter to you are the things that are personal. The things that count are the things that are around the corner and easy to hand. And one thing you can say about prize fighting was it was very easy to hand, well, very easy to two hands.
52:44 Tom Holland? Yeah, very good.
52:45 Speaker 02 Everybody did it.
52:46 Tom Holland? So on the topic of kind of taming boxing.
52:50 Speaker 02 Yes.
52:51 Tom Holland? Famously, London Rules is supplanted by the Marcus of Queensbury Rules. And the Marcus of Queensbury, as his name suggests, is an aristocrat. This is the same Marcus of Queensbury who we have already mentioned in our episodes on Oscar Wilde, who harries Wilde through the courts and ultimately gets him into prison. But he introduces essentially the form of boxing that nowadays governs the sport. How does that happen? And again, is there a kind of a broader lesson to learn from that? Because there is a process, isn't there, throughout the Victorian period of the aristocracy drawing up rules and codifying what had previously been kind of plebeian ways of entertaining themselves?
53:35 Speaker 02 What happens, the new rules, the Queensbury Rules emanate out of Cambridge University, where young gentlemen spar. And there's a kind of fashion for sparring.
53:45 Tom Holland? So Byron does it, doesn't he?
53:47 Speaker 02 Byron does it, Haslett does it, all kinds of chaps do this. And so does the Marcus of Queensbury. And the point about sparring is, as Haslett said, it's not boxing. It's a representation of boxing. And what's happening at Cambridge is that they swap bare knuckles for gloves. They introduce fixed rounds, weights. They introduce in the end, medical and health controls. It's boxing, they believe is going to be safer and better. But of course, in a sense, it is in the hands of young Cambridge undergraduates,
54:28 Speaker 02 but not in the hands of the kind of fast, heavy professional fighters that emerge in the 20th century. So Queensberry Rules is civilizing, but in a funny way, it's even more violent in what I've called the modern American era of people like John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey and others.
54:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, well, Rob, this has been absolutely fascinating. I mean, we could talk about this for ages. You've got so many great characters. Mendoza, obviously the Jewish boxer, Molyneux, Tom Crib. There's actually so much to unpick here. And for people who are really interested in this, your book is This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 to 1960, and I cannot recommend it too highly. It is a wonderful, wonderful read. So thank you so much, Rob, for joining us on The Rest Is History. I know you listen to the podcast, don't you?
55:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
55:18 Dominic Sandbrook? So that is, for us, that is a great honour to have you not just appearing on it, but listening to it voluntarily.
55:26 Speaker 02 We all love it in our family. You actually tell me things. It's quite alarming, really, every time.
55:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, well, that's very good news. So, Tom, on that bombshell, we will...
55:38 Speaker 02 Ding ding.
55:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, ding ding.
55:39 Speaker 02 Ding ding.
55:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Bye, everybody.
55:42 Speaker 02 See you, guys.
55:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Thanks so much, Rob, and bye, everybody.
56:13 Speaker 03 Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems.
56:55 Speaker 03 Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonilurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.
57:23 Speaker 04 Progressive's Accident Response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. The only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. So Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's Accident Response. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions.
57:53 Speaker 05 They're running a cover-two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
Previous 592. Mad Victorian Sport Next 594. The First World War: The Invasion of Belgium (Part 1) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
