Oral Histories: Roberto

My name is Roberto Nigro. My main area of research is identities, masculinities and ideas of heroism within the Jewish community in the Georgian period. There's a big Italian community here in Peterborough. It was due to the brick yards recruiting many Italian families from southern Italy in the postwar period and most mostly in the sixties as well. And say, I grew up in a very large community here, but it was also a very unwelcomed one...at the same time. I remember hearing certain teachers, I actually overheard this, I'll put this nicely now: "Those damn Italians!" you know? And I actually overheard that. And this is the sort of environment I grew up in at school. But um... yeah, that's I would say I kind of relate a little bit to the period that kind of the environment that Mendoza grew up in at the time... Very hostile towards the Jewish community. I mean, it was quite frequent to to hear stories of Jew-baiting and things like that where they just... As if it was a pastime. And I also remember when I first started going out into town and things like that when, when we about 17 or 18, that we knew, that the BNP [British National Party] were in town. And there was sort of like this...rumour had spread that they'd just go around beating people up because of the color of their skin or their heritage, you know? So I kind of feel a little bit of a connection there.

I was at Goldsmiths University in 2017. I was doing a module called Landmarks of London, and it was a walking history module. The route I'd chosen was from Arnold Circus down to Sclater Street and then back up onto Bethnal Green Road all the way to the end, towards the tube station. I got to the very end and I come to Paradise Row. It was just winter, freezing as well, and I walked down there and thought oh this is interesting, let's go and have a look at this blue plaque and then I see: Daniel Mendoza, Pugilist, 1764 to 1836, English champion who proudly billed himself as Mendoza the Jew, Lived here when writing The Art of Boxing.

I'd done a bit of research at the time about anti-Semitism in the 18th century, and the 19th century in particular. So I kind of had a bit of an idea of what it meant to be a Jew at that time but this guy billed himself as The Jew. He wanted people to know it. So I thought, okay, he's being quite brave so I didn't really know what the rest of the story [was] at that time. And I thought, wow, this seems like a really interesting guy.

Three important years for the lives of Daniel Mendoza. Richard Humphreys. And I'd say bareknuckle boxing and the Jewish community in this country. 1788, 1789, 1790 are really important for a lot of things and not to mention the French Revolution going on in the background at the time!

So I'll start with Richard Humphreys. He was known as the Gentleman Boxer. The story goes, we don't know exactly for sure but in Mendoza's memoir, he confirms that Richard Humphreys saw Daniel Mendoza fighting a tea dealer. And he certainly sees something in Daniel Mendoza, he sees a special talent and he says, "well, I'm going to take you under my wing". He definitely seems to support him and probably leads to his next... Daniel Mendoza's future involvement in other fights. He can't take it away from him. He [Mendoza] has a natural talent. And he actually, despite from a very young age, he was about 16, a young person but is actually fighting much older men and much bigger men and that, that he has a talent for it. So unfortunately, after a few fights, the relationship goes sour. Now, Mendoza relates it to an argument that happened at a specific training camp. He said that Richard Humphreys was behaving immorally. So the first fight is arranged in the 9th of January, 1788 at Odiham. And it's a rainy day. It's hammering it down. And Richard Humphreys is definitely at this moment still seen as a favorite. He's an experienced fighter. He has his own gym as well, which Mendoza would have later. But it doesn't quite go the way... It very much an anticlimactic fight. There was a lot of buildup for it. But I would say the rain saw to Mendoza slipping on the actual surface and he injures himself. Humphreys is awarded the victory, but it's a hollow one because he didn't acutally properly beat him. And what ensues after this is this rivalry in the newspapers. And, for anyone who follows boxing today, you would see a lot of this, they called it trash talk don't they? And you see a lot of this in the pre-fight press conferences and things like that. And it's actually very entertaining to read because they just literally take pot shots at each other in the newspapers. So Richard Humphreys comes out, "Oh, he faked the injury" and then Mendoza comes back at him. He comes back with his doctor clarifying the injury and saying, you know, "You're immoral and if you're willing to meet me in the ring again, we'll see what really happens." Mendoza has trained very hard for this fight, gets in fantastic shape, recovers from his injury and... this fight once again is surrounded with controversy. But many of the newspapers confirm that Mendoza throughout the whole fight had the upper hand. But it was it was interrupted twice. It was so bad that, well, some of the newspapers confirmed people stormed the ring, the two "Seconds" for Mendoza and Humphreys, one being Tom Johnson, the actual national champion who was behind Humphreys, starts having a bit of a scuffle with Harvey Coombe, who was Mendoza's "Second". But anyway, what happens then is they restart again. And the allegation was that Humphreys was falling down without actually being hit. This gave him a bit of time [as] in the old rules you could use this to gain a bit of time to actually get your breath back and break up the sort of motion of the fight. Maybe it stopped Mendoza in gaining some sort of continuous rhythm in actually beating him. So this fight became so important, particularly that one that actually outshone the news of the French Revolution, the Storming of the Bastille, in the newspapers the next day, because, I've seen it, it's actually a little column just for oh, yeah, the people revolted in Paris, but massive column for Daniel Mendoza and Richard Humphreys at Stilton. So, yeah, it was a pretty big event, yeah.

There needs to be another fight to settle it. And it does come on the 29th of September in Doncaster, on the banks of the River Don in 1790, and Mendoza basically comes out and shows his superiority. Humphreys, to be honest, gives a good fight but Mendoza is just on another level, and he beats him quite convincingly. So he kind of revolutionizes the way bare knuckle boxing was conducted at the time cause they thought "Okay this is working, this guy, he's smaller than most people. He weighs less. And yet he's beating people much bigger than him" and even much more experienced at times. In terms of Richard Humphreys, he'd been around a long time. And yet he was proving that this this was a rather successful tactic to bring to the ring.

He seems to have transformed the identity of the Jewish community here in England. And he's done that. And it's literally gone from people that were regularly attacked and beaten up in the streets, had some horrible abuse thrown at them... it was a real terrible time for them. And Mendoza comes along and displays that you can stand up for yourself. You can teach yourself to defend yourself. Don't get me wrong, he's no angel at all in any sense, but he is the shining light for the Jewish community at the time who had endured so much abuse. And what he does, not only does he show and show it in the ring, he sets up his own gym in Capel Court, around the corner from the old Bank of England, he even teaches it himself to people who are willing to learn. I've heard that he also encouraged Jewish women as well to actually get involved, to a point that he even was a patron to one of them.

I think it's very much an epic story because it has everything that makes a great story. In essence...if someone wants to have all the ingredients of a great story, it's there for Daniel Mendoza. He lives through all the highs and the lows, he reaches the very heights of the society, he allegedly meets the King on many occasions, at the end. Unfortunately for him, he does end up in debtor's prison, he has many brushes with the law. He's no mastermind criminal or anything like that but he does end up penniless, unfortunately. But this was the tradition with many, many boxers. They are at their height when they are involved in the sport. They make quite a lot of money. But unfortunately, they don't know how to sustain it. And many of them came from working class backgrounds, meaning that they didn't have anything else to sustain them after. So like Richard Humphreys, he came from a rather upper class background and he just set up in the coal mining industry after he retired and he made lots of money and was fine. But many of the others didn't have that. They didn't have those sort of connections, so many of them became pub landlords, Daniel Mendoza being one of them. There was actually a joke I read about... They say, Show me a pugilist and I'll show you a pub landlord in the making! I read once, at the time, that was the general feeling. So what you get with Daniel Mendoza's story is the mixtures of highs and lows and the struggle as well. Not only to contend with the amount of prejudice that was directed towards him but he owned it. He came out and said, "Yeah, that's right. I am a Jewish man. What are you going to do about it?" And then, you know, if you're going to come and attack me, you better be ready because I'm going to defend myself. And that's very much a good message, I think… when, you know, when you look at different other minorities going through the years is that…you don't have to take this, you know? You can find ways of overcoming even the worst situations, the worst abuse. And I think that's a good message to take from Mendoza's story.