Amazing that the BBC denounces a whole country and its population over a boxing match, especially as the BBC’s interpretation of what happened in the match is coloured by the colour of the two opponents…one black, one white…guess which has the BBC’s sympathy?
England’s shame
The boxing match between a freed slave and a sporting star
In the brutal world of bare-knuckle boxing a fight, more than 200 years ago, between a freed American slave and a Bristol-born boxer remains one of the most controversial and bloody battles in boxing history.
The contest – the first ever world title fight – between Tom Cribb, the son of a Bristol coal worker, and Tom Molineaux, a slave who won freedom with his fists, is an “an incredible story of racism, intrigue, gambling and above all courage”.
There may well have been racism…but not the sort the BBC want you to believe:
From Tom Cribb vs. Tom Molineaux (1st meeting)
Strangely, the main problem that England had with Molineaux had nothing to do with his color–the extreme racism of the late 19th century was still some time off. In fact, the British people were quite willing to give Molineaux credit as an excellent boxer, and his numerous affairs with white women were by and large overlooked. The much greater offense, in their eyes, was the hideous fact that he was an AMERICAN! The idea that a foreigner could take the sacred trophy of British sporting was unthinkable.
Pierce Egan’s Boxiana is the source for the majority of this fight narration. It was composed at a time shortly after this Cribb-Molineaux fight took place by a man who had seen most of the fights of the era.
The BBC gives the impression that Cribb was thoroughly beaten throughout the fight and only won through ‘dirty tactics’ such as a punch to the throat (a potential Tory MP?)…
Cribb was brought time and time again to his knees while the crowd, who sensed a Molineaux victory, subjected the US fighter to appalling racist abuse….
…Molineaux battled on for two more rounds. He threw Cribb to the floor but hit his head against one of the wooden ring stakes which concussed him. Sensing his moment Cribb punched Molineaux in the throat.
Broken, lying on the floor Molineaux raised his hand and said “Massa Richmond, me can fight no more”.
……but such tactics seemed to have been normal…Molineaux for instance putting Cribb in a headlock and punching him repeatedly in the head….Cribb put Molineaux down just as many times.
As for that ‘appalling racist abuse’ the BBC doesn’t list it nor provide a reference where it can be checked…it presumably isn’t in the contemporary report from Pierce Egan unless they mean the anti-American abuse….if so strange they don’t make that clear and prefer to give the impression the abuse was based on Molineaux’s skin colour.
The BBC doesn’t say much about Molineaux’s manager, Bill Richmond, also ‘black’:
Bill Richmond was a better pugilist than Thomas Molineaux in 1805 and 1815. He was such a familiar face on the English boxing scene, as pugilist/corner man/trainer, that he would be cheered over White opponents late in his career.
And perhaps confirms being American was the real problem people had with either of them:
Bill Richmond, despite ‘tainted’ as American born, was thoroughly British.
And it seems that the manipulation of the system was a regular occurrence with Cribb and so nothing to do with ‘race’:
‘….a Cribb/Bob Gregson 1809 English Championship bout. Gregson was dominating by the 22nd round, a 10-1 betting odds favorite, until suddenly it was over by the 23rd round with Tom Cribb the victor. Richmond was openly suspicious that Cribb’s patronage and power was affording him more than the legal 30 seconds following a knockdown while an opponent had no mercy. The combination of patronage (which Cribb had) and gambling wages (better to ‘cheat’ than lose) leaves suspicion over several Tom Cribb victories.‘
Still not sure why the BBC has labelled this as ‘England’s Shame’. It might well be Tom Cribb’s shame but to somehow transpose that onto a whole nation seems somewhat ambitious even for the BBC’s historical revisionist section that rewrites world history with a leftward, anti-Brtiish, anti-white slant.
Englands Shame
Screams the bBC from somethign which transpired almost 200 years ago. But hang on the Slave Trade Act was passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, 3 years before this fight took place. Maybe there lies the reason Molineaux moved from the US to the UK to live. In fact while the ethical latte drinking idiots love to play the “Britian became rich on the backs of slaves” the fact remains it alone went out of its way in which to force other western nations to do likewise. Maybe that explains why today the Brits cheered on Big Frank, Nigel Benn, Eubank (well maybe not) Prince Naseem, Your boy Khan, what about in other fields, Mo the runner, Jessica Ennis, what about Ryan Giggs, unlike other countries the UK allows non whites to share the central stage with Whites. (look at American TV for what I mean) The best English Players at the World cup were coloured. The UK has moved on a lot from 200 years ago, yet to the left, the UK can only be the worse place on Earth if you are non-white.
The funny thing bBC report after bBC report of asylum seekers getting into Europe all wish to move to……England..
You’d think the racist country as portrayed by the bBC would be the last place, preferring to go instead to Pakistan, France, South America,Cuba, China or even….Palestine.
The bBC, the traitors within our midst
OH BTW, in the rematch between these two gentlemen, the bout lasted 11 rounds with Cribb winning.
Excuse me, but using the word ‘coloured’ is forbidden.
If you find yourself drifting into possible hate-think again, please refer to this leaflet for correction –
http://www.srtrc.org/faqs
Clicked on the link and haven’t had such a good laugh in a long time.
It reads like a three year olds primer or it has to be the most patronising garbage I have ever read.
Mice Height wrote:
“Excuse me, but using the word ‘coloured’ is forbidden.”
I actually found myself in the position the other month of pointing somebody out by referring to him as the coloured person. I was immediately rebuked by a white woman that calling somebody coloured was offensive, I simply said I find calling somebody black offensive and what would you call me?. She shut up.
Don’t miss the BBC’s strange formulation in Cribb’s biography: apparently he was the ‘son of a Bristol coal worker’.
Huh?
Is that like a miner? AKA the BBC’s favourite shorthand for salt of the earth working man? That’s still better than being a slave but it hardly fits the BBC’s narrative of a privileged white oppressor.
The BBC desperately wants this case to be a metaphor for ‘white privilege’ but it pretty much proves the opposite. Most white Britons didn’t own slaves, plantations or even shoes.
And then, of course, if we’re talking sneaky tricks to buy time for a boxer to recover from a knock-down, well, you know:
http://voices.yahoo.com/boxing-history-muhammad-ali-knocked-down-henry-7664790.html
I read the article on the bbc’s site.
it’s not history, in fact it’s a fabrication of contemporary culture
Good ol’ BBC. Find conflict where at the time there was none. And transport it from 200 years ago to land in their cosy and dull armour plated bubble.
What will the BBC be selecting in 200 years time to drive their agenda? Nothing I hope, because with a bit of luck, they won’t exist.
I can’t wait that long.
Should rename it, The Black Broadcasting Company.
Has anybody else ever noticed, that when the BBC do a contentious piece such as this one in the post, nobody is allowed to comment on it, leaving their disinformation unopposed?
A quick check shows that the boxing match would have been fought under the London Prize Ring Rules, which were always bare-knuckle fights and allowed tactics such as throwing an opponent to the ground and also, amongst other things, holding on to an opponent whilst hitting him.
Rounds lasted until a fighter was ‘knocked down’, that is unable temporarily to continue to fight. When that happened he had 30 seconds to recover and a further eight seconds to make his way to the ‘scratch’ mark at the centre of the ring to continue fighting. Matches continued until one or other of the boxers failed to return to the scratch mark in time or signalled he could no longer continue. There were no fixed lengths to rounds and neither was there a specific number of rounds to be fought, the fight continued on until one fighter was the clear winner.
The last official ‘World Championship’ to be won under those rules were just over a century ago in 1889.
The Queensberry Rules as we know them today were only first created a century and a half ago in the 1860s.
When the fights took place it was only two or three decades after the American Revolutionary War and Independence so Americans of whatever colour would hardly have been particularly popular. Add to that the fact it was the period of the Napoleonic Wars and the Americans had been allied with the French to win their independence British sensitivities would still be rather raw when it came to Americans.
People of different races when they came or were brought to Britain at those times were more of a curiosity than anything to be hated or feared. What really kills the idea that what happened had anything to do with racism is if that were the case would a Black freed slave have been allowed to get in the same ring as a white man in a Championship Match in the first place.
Interestingly, although omitted from the cited article (and the play?), the celebrated Jewish pugilist – Daniel Mendoza – was (according to this) Molineaux’s second in his fights. Mendoza, despite his antecedents, had been heavyweight champion of England from 1792 to 1795. It seems there is no mention of him on the BBC website (per BBC website search element “mendoza”) – more the BBC’s “shame” than England’s.
The BBC has long adopted the policy of raking over history and applying today’s liberal left standards to whatever they can find which blackens the west in general, and the UK in particular, and then expressing their outrage. This policy is bearing fruit in changing people’s attitudes, even some otherwise sensible folk I know, express how appalled they are by what the Brits did hundreds of years ago.
I am sure that the BBC and fellow travellers know well that when looking at history you really do have to make sure you judge things by the standards of the time you are looking at. They are refusing to do this for purely propaganda purposes as part of their decades long campaign to change British attitudes in the direction of the liberal left.
Straight outta the 1930’s Max Schmeling-Joe Louis bouts, in which Schmeling, a decided underdog for having lost to part-Jewish Max Baer (whom Louis had beaten handily), defeats Louis in their first meeting, setting up the rematch in which the tables were turned in style, Louis coming out so strong in the opening round (and Schmeling having no answer for him) that the ref ended it before Schmeling could take any more abuse.
This too had the whole racism angle, with the added fillip of anti-Semitism as well; the fact that Schmeling was probably over the hill even in the earlier fight but was the cannier fighter able to keep a still-rising boxer like Louis at arm’s length in that bout, which a two-years-older Schmeling could not do against an in-his-prime Louis, is overlooked, in the seeming drawing of some moral from the whole story.
But of course, Max Schmeling wasn’t a Briton of the Regency, was he, so the BBC can’t make their point about early 19th C. racism.
‘colour’ at the time of Molineaux/Cribb was a metaphor of temperament…green with envy etc…Shakespeare is full of ‘colour’ references….the use of the term ‘blackguard’ is an example….black just happened to be the colour of the choleric, indisciplined…nothing to do with race. The anger against Molineaux was his mouth and Americanism…
‘But Molineaux was charismatic, confident to the point of brashness, and an effective, if crude, self-promoter. Calling himself “the champion of America,” he began hanging around the taverns and pubs known to be havens of the Fancy — the Horse & Dolphin on St. Martin’s Lane, Bob’s Chop-House in Holborn — and boasting to an incredulous crowd about what he’d do to the champion of England if he got him in the ring.’
It was a violent sport …illegal….in the age of elegance and brutality….to build a ‘racism’ into the history…typical of the pigmentomanics of the BBC..and others of their colour, is a sad reflection of our times.
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