across the Irish Sea had grown dramatically in wealth while Ireland struggled to survive the aftereffects of its largest human disaster in a century: the Great Famine. The scourge of the Black Death began in 1845 with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the chief means of sustenance for millions of peasant farmers. Deadly black potato rot swept across rural Ireland like a plague, destroying food and life, and dismantling fam-ilies. By mid-century, two million people had died from starvation and disease or fled to foreign lands, a fate that seared the psyche of a nation and caused the Irish to hate their British landlords and the British government for gener-ations to come.
The Shaw and Beatty families were not among the suffering poor, but in the great waves of emigration to England, the majority of the Irish were forced to live on the fringes of English social life. To be Irish was seen as being a revolutionary, happiest with a grievance against society, especially British society. The Irish were stereotyped as drunks and criminals, accused of breeding without restraint and allowing their own backyard ways to impoverish them. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic epithets were common. Even by the 1870s, it did not matter that Beatty’s father had been well-to-do or that Shaw had been born into an impecunious but refined Protestant family with airs of the privileged and distant ties to the aristocracy.
“Behold me, then, in London in an impossible position,” wrote Shaw. “I was a foreigner — an Irishman — the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the British university mill.”
Initially, it was clear that fisticuffs seemed ideally suited to Beatty, someone prone to settling issues by punching first and asking questions later. Once, in an impetuous gesture of heroism, Beatty leaped over the wall of a schoolyard and bashed a schoolmaster in the face for flogging a boy, an action that landed him immediately in Hammersmith Police Court. Shaw bailed him out of jail the next day. On another occasion, a bailiff showed up after Beatty neglected to pay his rent. When Beatty tried to keep him out, the bailiff jammed his foot in the door. “Work and thrift is my motto, young man,” chirped an undaunted Beatty, and with that he punched the bailiff in the jaw, sending him sprawling to the ground, and slammed the door. Beatty’s coat-of-arms bore the motto non vi sed arte (not by strength but by cunning). Artful pugnacity, said the Beattys, ran in the family.
Shaw spent his days under the gigantic glass-and-iron dome of the Reading Room in the British Museum, his working office. As a regular, he had a chair, a folding desk, a small hinged shelf for books, pens and ink, a blot-ting pad and a peg for his hat. His most cherished possession was his green Reading Room card, a lifetime pass, guaranteeing he would always have a place to ply his trade.
A superintendent who occupied a raised seat in the center of the big, circular room monitored occupants, like Shaw, who sat at tables that radiated from the center of the room like spokes in a wheel. The Reading Room was open from nine in the morning until about eight o’clock at night, and Shaw spent his days poring over books and writing articles and novels that he hoped to publish. He had made it plain to Beatty he had no time for sports and wanted no part of his new passion for combat, not that boxing was a sport in the conventional sense, of course. One did not “play” boxing as you would play football or cricket. There was no team nor were there team rules, no one except oneself to make that inspired judgment call at a crucial moment. Boxing was distinctive in that it was performed between two men in a square called a ring, and the sport itself was often referred to as if none other existed and called “The Game,” the most punishing and individual of all sporting contests.
Shaw had been introduced to boxing as a boy, during an era when prizefighting could be either an illegal hole-in-the-wall activity or a sanctioned, staged competition. Modern boxing derived from the English bare-knuckle pugilism of the 18th century; the English champion, Daniel Mendoza, “the fighting Jew,” had first visited Ireland in 1791. He popularized the sport with touring exhibitions, fighting in farmers’ fields and villages around the country. The Irish took to boxing as if fighting was their birthright, and in later years, fans flocked to fights pitting the sons of St. Patrick against visiting English boxers, if only because the events seemed a symbolic staging of the ongoing Anglo-Irish conflict. One of Shaw’s boyhood memories was of a prizefighter who was so terrified of injury or death that he kept a mirror in the ring. Even when winning, the fighter only consented to persevere when he could see his face between every round, to be assured that his features had not been obliterated.
Englishmen persuaded themselves that they, too, could use their fists, and were even naturally gifted at it, a presumption that Shaw considered as preposterous as claiming that every Frenchman could use a foil or every Italian a stiletto. In England, boxing was considered the most dramatically masculine of sports because of its association with the cradle of pugilism, ancient Greece. The poet Lord Byron called it a “noble art,” the sport in which competitors fought skillfully, displaying Olympian traits of the mind and spirit as well as of the body. The art of self-defense was considered as necessary for the education of a gentleman as dancing a minuet or speaking French. For the landed gentry, the possibility of being injured as an amateur fighter was actually an opportunity for a public show of raw courage and manliness. In typical upper-class understatement, it was often referred to as “the science of sweet bruising.”
One of Shaw’s favorite clowning poses was to throw his arms around his shoulders to represent himself as a physical coward. He had no intention of becoming involved with Beatty’s passion for gloved combat, but that didn’t deter the irrepressible poet from pressing Shaw to join him at the gym.
If found on a desolate mountain
A vulture his entrails shall gnaw
He’d choose just that place to argue the case
Argumentative George Bernard Shaw
“I am about to take boxing up from the scientific Ned Donnelly, a very amiable, though powerful, person in appearance,” Beatty wrote in September 1881. Addressing Shaw as Balzac, then one of Beatty’s favorite authors, he continued: “The meek Michelle, whom you would rashly have selected out of a room full to strike, is a phenomenon as an amateur bruiser. So much, O’Balzac, for your discrimination! If you wish, those pointers that I learn from the Donnelly I will teach unto you.”
Shaw apparently did not respond. Ten days later, his friend wrote again, “I send for your careful reading a copy of Donnelly’s admirable Self-Defense, the best book of its kind ever published. It explains very clearly what other writers leave in hopeless confusion. ‘I am a great man for the body — hit him here, the pit of my stomach,’ were his words of wisdom to me, ‘and he won’t come again.’” Beatty invited Shaw to dinner. “Articles of agreement as to boxing lessons can be drawn up,” he added.
Shaw certainly would have gone to dinner, for in the spirited Beatty household, he had found a home away from home, an affectionate family so unlike his own, among whom he could share laughter, mischief, ideas, conversation and genuine fun. The extended Beatty clan had embraced him, fondly dubbing their fastidious friend “Barbarossa” (red beard) and “old man Shaw.” To amuse the children, Barbarossa dug in the garden with them, read stories and sang. Once during a rainstorm, he climbed into bed fully dressed in his Jaeger boilersuit, opened all the windows and held open an umbrella to delight his small audience. He studied French with Beatty’s wife, Ida, flirted with her sisters, taught and played piano duets with members of the household, was a frequent guest at meals and met grandparents, cousins, in-laws, uncles and friends, becoming godfather to one child and a supporter of all.
When Beatty’s first child, nicknamed “Bertie,” was christened, the elderly godfather, the poet Richard Hengist Horne, gave the infant tiny boxing gloves and promised that he “shall be taught to lick anybody of his size, or half a head taller, who tries to bully him at first school or ‘fag’ him at second school.” Shaw wrote a comic poem with references to the father’s boxing friends and urged the baby to eat to reach fighting weight, warning the infant: “A boxer thou
