won out. Shaw finally agreed to visit the London Athletic Club, conveniently located in the Haymarket theatre district near busy Piccadilly Circus, a brisk 20-minute walk from his desk at the British Museum. As home to aristocrats of leisure and fine breeding, the club would not have been a natural habitat for either Shaw or Beatty. But the gym specialized in boxing, and Ned Donnelly, who had written the best-selling Self-Defense; Or, the Art of Boxing, was head coach and “professor” of the club’s most popular sport.
Many considered Donnelly the best instructor in London. A retired prizefighter with the commanding presence of a panther, Donnelly was often called “the Royal Professor” because when he was summoned to spar before the King, he immediately went out and bought a new top hat and frock coat. Shaw based a character on Donnelly, describing him thusly: “A powerful man with a thick neck that swelled out beneath his broad, flat earlobes. He had small eyes, and large teeth over which his lips were slightly parted in a smile, good-humored but affectedly cunning. His hair was black and close cut, his skin indurated, and the bridge of his nose smashed level with his face.” He was a modest and affable fellow when sober and unprovoked, Shaw wrote, and about 50 years old.
In the gym, there would have been other aspiring boxers and gentlemen pugilists in fitted shirts, knitted tights and soft, moccasin-like slippers warming up with pushups and by jumping rope, stretching on the bars, shadow boxing and sparring on mats or in the ring. (Like opera singers, boxers generally train and work out alone except when sparring with a partner.) For strength and balance training, a trapeze, flying rings, weights and dumbbells were traditionally used.
Coach Donnelly had revived a scientific method of fighting in the ring from earlier in the 18th century that could be blended with the new Queensberry rules of 1866. Donnelly’s method of scientific boxing made the sport a thinking man’s game with a series of stylistic movements for every parry and thrust. It appealed to gentlemen amateurs who could rely on the skills of practiced footwork and training, as opposed to a rough, knock-down-and-drag-out scrimmage that relied mostly on strength. Shaw always referred to unthinking brute force as simply “bashing.”
The old regulations allowed as many rounds as the combatants could sustain until one fighter was gravely injured or simply gave up from exhaustion; battles could last for a hundred rounds or more. The Queensberry rules called for padded gloves, three-minute rounds, ten-second knockdowns and a cap on the length of the fight. The new rules were created by the 8th Marquis of Queensberry, later known to Shaw as the father of Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, the young aristocrat who had a scandalous homosexual relationship with fellow playwright Oscar Wilde. Amateur fights were promoted in the army and public (private) schools. It was English violence, the wags said, disguised as English honor.
Shaw, looking for inspiration for his writing and a new connection in life for himself, became intrigued with the unconventionality, the hardihood and the inherent danger of the game, as well as the camaraderie and serious-minded atmosphere among those learning Donnelly’s “science.” In addition, prizefighting was one of the few sports that offered a way out of poverty to the disenfranchised and underprivileged, a social reality that Shaw, the emerging socialist, appreciated.
Beatty, the one with the funds, paid the club dues for both. Shaw purchased a pair of five-pound dumbbells for himself.
Nothing in Shaw’s life had prepared him for the surge in confidence and adrenaline, for the vitality he would experience concentrating on the rudiments of trading punches while feinting, jabbing and becoming agile on his feet. He agreed with Lord Byron, who had boasted that the thrill of sparring lifted his spirits and kept him mentally alert. Even the effort to hold up two arms and continually stare an opponent in the face required tremendous stamina and could make the difference in winning a spar. For perhaps the first time in his life, Shaw got a full measure of what it was like to focus his intellect and his body on a single goal, that of avoiding the sharp and sudden punishment in another man’s fist while trying to deliver offensive blows himself. Unlike other sports, a boxer must be concerned not only with what he does, but with what is done to him. Because Shaw was tall, with a long left arm that he could use to jab the other fellow in the face, he was surprised to find that he was often successful, especially against the shorter Beatty.
“I had an easy time with him,” a pleased Shaw would later tell his friend Gene Tunney. “He was not tall and I had such long arms that I held him off by keeping my left glove in his face. He was annoyed, very.”
For Shaw, the give-and-take rhythm of the game would resemble the tempo in his writing, from the sharp and saucy rat-a-tat-tat of his dialogue to the bold sweep of his convictions, hurled against an unsuspecting audience.
“There are,” he wrote later, “no sports which bring out the difference in character more dramatically than boxing, wrestling, and fencing...I soon got an imaginary reputation in my little circle as a boxer; and as I looked credibly like a tall man with a straight left and had in fact picked up some notion of how to defend myself, I was never attacked with bodily violence.”
Shaw and Beatty sparred between the flower beds and bushes in the Beattys’ garden and in the gym, read the sporting papers and regularly attended boxing competitions, often with friends and other amateurs. The inspiration Shaw was looking for came from an exhibition match featuring one of the cleverest fighters of the day, Jack Burke, “the Irish Lad” who used the scientific style taught by Coach Donnelly. Shaw had written three unsuccessful novels, and in writing his fourth, Cashel Byron’s Profession, decided to focus on boxing, using Burke’s exploits as a metaphor for the fighting spirit that he was to display in his own life through the pen.
His fictional hero was named for the medieval seat of kings in Ireland, the Rock of Cashel, and the popular, romantic poet Byron, who had been a well-known boxing enthusiast. Shaw endowed his protagonist with all the qualities that he thought a winner in and out of the ring should possess. Cashel was a young man of Shaw’s age who, in striving to create a better life, wills himself into an iron-nerved and fanatically committed fighter able to throw off the chains of the Irish underdog in English society. As an Irish Horatio Alger, Cashel exudes individualism and moral zeal, and he has the ability to control his life’s circumstances. He’s a thinking, “scientific” fighter who utilizes learned skills to fight defensively and physical strength to stand up to the most ruthless brawlers in the ring. Shaw learns to respect fighters who try to make a living with their fists, and he especially admires their confidence in the face of the condescension often heaped on them by society.
In casting Cashel as a man who becomes master of his fate, Shaw makes him the kind of man he wants to become himself — a writer and reformer. This new self-image is a dramatic change from the Shaw who departs Ireland as a wary, inexperienced intellectual, a boy of modest means who leaves school at 15. The timid young man who arrives in England unsure of himself, now feels that boxing in the gym like English aristocrats puts him on the same plane — and he’d outthink them and outtalk them as well.
Boxing has become a rite of passage, not for what he will win in the ring but as a bridge to self-reliance and a new, weightier identity.
Personal combat, Shaw said, is interesting, “not only technically as an exhibition of skill, but because it’s also an exhibition of character concentrating into minutes differences that years of ordinary intercourse leave hidden.”
“In the eyes of a phoenix, even the arena — the ring, as they call it — is a better school of character than the drawing room,” writes Shaw in the novel.
The fictional Cashel wins the world championship in an honest and skillful manner, raises the standards of a corrupt boxing world by never submitting to a bribe, retires at the top of his game, marries and raises a family, enters business and runs successfully for a seat in Parliament. Shaw wrote that he gave his Cashel “every advantage a prizefighter can have: health and strength and pugilistic
