VICTORIAN BOXING SENSATIONS!

Sarah Elizabeth Cox introduces the pugilists who punched their way into Britons' affections during the dying days of bare-knuckle prize-fighting

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1 The lion-taming lightweight

How a West Indian warrior became a knock-out success in London's East End

Picture the scene. Two boxers walk out before an uproarious crowd at the Sebright Music Hall in the London district of Hackney and “received a welcome of extraordinary character”.

“The house rose en masse when the men appeared on the stage,” declared the Sporting Life of 3 January 1888, “and before they were allowed to place themselves into position, had to bow their acknowledgements over and over again. The place was crammed to suffocation.”

The late Victorian era was a boom-time for British boxing. Across London in the 1880s, audiences could watch gloved exhibitions, tournaments and matches every night of the week. And few pugilists drew crowds quite as large as one of the men who stepped onto that Hackney stage back in January 1888: Hezekiah Moscow.

Moscow has recently been lapping up the audience's acclaim once again, in the TV drama A Thousand Blows, inspired in part by his story. So who was this pugilist who made headlines in the 1880s and again in 2025?

We know that Moscow was born in 1862 in the West Indies — although the 1891 census doesn’t give us any more detail about exactly where — and that he arrived in London at the age of 19. It was then, soon after setting up home in Britain’s capital city, that he began to box.