Britain’s obsession with boxing is as deep-rooted as its devotion to cricket

Boxing has long been a British obsession, exported successfully to North America, but never widespread on the Continent. Mainland Europeans struggled to understand that in general there was no quarrel between contestants who assaulted each other so brutally. ‘Anything that looks like fighting,’ explained one bewildered French visitor, ‘is delicious to an Englishman.’ He might have said the same about drinking or gambling, pastimes embedded in the fabric of Georgian society to an ‘astonishing extent’. They were habits, moreover, upon which the popularity of boxing depended.

The story of Daniel Mendoza, little known except to sporting historians, is fascinating on both a personal level and more generally. The man one paper called that ‘celebrated hero of the fists’ was a ‘man for his time’, the late 18th century: a lavishly gifted boxer, as bare-knuckle fighting became vastly popular.

It was not unusual for fights, casually arranged and marketed by today’s standards, officially frowned upon if not forbidden, to be watched in rain-sodden fields by tens of thousands.