There is a sketch on p.45 of L.A. Jennings’ fascinating She’s a Knockout!: A History of Women in Fighting Sports which caused a loud squeal to emerge from my mouth. 

Most likely drawn from a photograph (and what I wouldn’t give to find the original!), in the centre stands Alf Ball, a young, moustachioed, slim white man in waistcoat and shirt sleeves. In front of Alf, facing each other with gloved fists raised, are the two women I’d been searching for a picture of for five years. 

Please be aware that this article contains quoted phrases used by newspapers in the 1880s which are considered offensive today.

We know Ball to have been 5ft 7 and a half, and he stands much taller than both women, placing them around 5ft at a guess. Or perhaps he’s stood on a box or something. The lady on the left is a little larger and has a stern expression, the one on the right shows a hint of a smile. They’re wearing dark dresses edged with white lace at collar and cuff, over white petticoats which end below the knee. Both women have short Afro hair, or it may be longer and pinned up at the back. Both women are Black. 

Jennings focuses on women boxers in America during the late-Victorian period, and she explains that the sketch originally appeared in the September 6th 1890 issue of the National Police Gazette alongside a brief piece about Ball and his “famous coloured boxers”. The Gazette noted the women’s skill in the ring but only Ball is named. Jennings writes with disappointment that Ball is lauded for his talent as a professor (trainer) in teaching the women to fight, rather than the women being given recognition for talent in their own right. She does not mention that Ball and the two women were based in England at the time, and like the original source, does not seek to name the ladies either.

The women in the picture are Violet and Rosaline Mills, known as the Sisters Mills, or the Muscular Maids from Mexico. Although, neither Violet or Rosaline may have really been called Violet or Rosaline, their surname was probably not Mills, they may not even have been sisters, and I have no evidence at all to suggest they came from Mexico. I’m pretty sure they were Black, or mixed heritage.

Here’s what we’ve got.

The Sisters Mills first appeared in the newspapers in January 1888 when the Sporting Life reported from a boxing competition at the Brothers Ball sparring pavilion – the Balls’ travelling boxing booth which was stationed at Deptford fairground, just off Deptford High Street in south east London. The write-up noted “exhibition sparring” by the Sisters Mills and by the Brothers Ball. In February, a report on the pavilion’s activities in the Sporting Life described the women as “little Creoles” – and they “delighted the company with their cleverness”.

In February 1888 the Mills sparred at Jack Wannop’s farewell benefit at the New Cross Public Hall, a very large venue a short walk from Deptford (there’s a depressingly ugly, but useful, Big Yellow Storage Unit on the site now). The pair were described in the newspapers as “dark skinned young ladies” and “well built”. 

“Donning the gloves they set about each other in vigorous fashion for the orthodox three-rounds. The ladies needless to say were accorded a good reception,” noted the Sporting Life. Alf Ball appeared later in the night’s programme.

“However Wannop unearthed such talent was the greatest mystery on the board to all concerned,” the Life’s reporter commented. I’ll never not enjoy Jack getting his dues for anything, but there’s that credit for the man again, backing up Jennings’ argument. The Sisters gave “a very clever display” a few days later back at the Balls’ Deptford pavilion.

It is a series of March 1888 adverts in the Sporting Life for Belmont’s Sebright Music Hall, Hackney Road, which gives the women’s names as Violet and Rosaline Mills “from South America”. March 12 1888 is described as their first appearance in England. We know it’s not, because they’ve already been hanging out with Wannop and Ball in New Cross and Deptford, of course, but the Sebright’s manager, George E. Belmont, notoriously preferred his advertising copy to be more colourful than accurate.

They’re billed as The Champion Coloured Lady Boxers of the World and as The Muscular Maids from Mexico and hired by the Sebright to box three rounds against each other, twice nightly. Their description in advertising as “dark dudeens” appears to be both a reference to their skin colour and petite stature – a dudeen being a short clay pipe for smoking. These are the only references I can find to them being from Mexico. 

The Sisters (“direct from Mexico”) also appeared for six nights at the Royal Albert, opposite Canning Town station, in March. These are not small venues – I believe the Albert held around 1,200 people. On other nights they’re still with the Balls in Deptford putting on “fine displays”. The Sporting Life considered them a big enough draw to include in their boxing listings for the week in mid-March, 1888, and a few days later the Cricket and Football Field – a magazine tailored to the fan of cricket and football, I believe – also commented on the Sisters’ existence. 

“The fighting-fizzle fever seems to be spreading. The ladies have caught it…” the paper reported, noting the women’s appearances at Belmont’s hall. 

The Balls were on the road later that year – in Oxford in October, the city’s newspaper reports from the Michaelmas Hiring Fair, in which all sorts of novelties were engaged to attract an audience, from performing fleas to marionettes, “sundry minor exhibitions” and, at the top of the hour, a boxing show, in which “two females of colour” known as the Sisters Mills, displayed the noble art of self defence.

Alf was promptly hauled before magistrates in Oxford for operating an unauthorised boxing booth at the Elm Tree Tavern on Cowley Road. Neither the Vice-Chancellor or Mayor had given him permission to show boxing, and thus he was in breach of section 22 of the Oxford Police Act, 1881. Alf and the Sisters Mills had the misfortune of being busted by a police officer, PC Paucutt, who explained to the court that he’d headed round the back of the pub to find a tent erected and two Black women fighting in it. Alf was charging two pence for people to enter and watch, with the money payable to a woman at the entrance.

The PC told the court that this went on for well over three hours, during which time he also saw boxing by men and boys. The fact he stood there from 7pm until 10.30pm suggests he rather enjoyed the experience.

Alf argued that he was ignorant of the law, sorry guv’nor, and was fined five shillings with costs of 11 shillings and sixpence. 

Deptford boxer and, later, publican, Dick Leary – a man buried in Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery whose grave I have never been able to locate – was afforded a benefit in January 1889 at the New Cross Public Hall. Appearing alongside local Black boxers Jem Haines (who also toured with the Balls) and Jack Watson, a clog dance by a chap called Mr Cronk, comic songs, topical songs, more boxing, and a bit of wrestling, were our “Creole female boxers”. They were rather “clever”, according to the Sporting Life.

However, the same month we also find Alf Ball writing to the Sporting Life to decline challenges which he’d received from women anxious to box “his” ladies. According to a printed note in the paper, he would not be entering into any negotiations for a proper match since he thinks it “infra dig” (or, undignified) for women to box for prize money!

Lady boxers were not found on every corner in London during the late 1880s but had started to increase in number. They seem to have been far more popular by the 1890s. By my count (based on newspaper adverts and write-ups from appearances) there were perhaps 10 active in Britain in the late 1880s including the Sisters Mills, although others may have toured unremarked upon with fairground boxing booths. These women weren’t entering competitions and certainly weren’t considered professional boxers – but appeared largely in boxing-themed music hall sketches or as novelty acts sparring between men’s matches. 

Between 1888 and 1890 you could find “Champion Lady Boxer in the World” and burlesque artiste Selina Seaforth touring in a comic boxing act entitled “Fisto, or the Rival Maidens”. The daughters of Professor Charles North were around, and allegedly the Champion Lady Boxers of England. A Lady Boxer in Cardiff made headlines in the South Wales Echo during the “present mania for pugilism” in February 1888 – Mrs Gray hoped to meet another lady for a fight, according to a note in the Sportsman, but would otherwise be sparring with her husband. Mrs Noon of Billy and Mrs Noon fame was based in Birmingham (indeed, she was sometimes promoted as the Champion Lady Boxer of Birmingham) but also boxed in London, and typically performed with her husband. Mrs Maude Pearce was a “Celebrated Lady Boxer and Fencer” and Miss Rosie Danvers went by “Champion light-weight lady boxer of the world” and typically sparred exhibitions against men.

In June 1890 an article from the St James’s Gazette appeared syndicated across the UK’s newspapers. Titled, simply, Lady Boxers, it blamed American girls for a sudden wave of interest in the sport. The pugilists of the United States were said to be “experiencing an era of unusual prosperity in imparting their science to Columbia’s daughters” and just as England’s ladies were starting to “show their prowess and ankles on the cricket field” now they were also desiring to don the gloves. 

The article prompted a response from The Lancet – our oldest and most prestigious medical journal – sternly arguing for both cricket and the manly art (both sports designed for “the development of male muscular powers and agility”) to stay men-only. Our great medics suggested that women should content themselves with “other games and methods of physical improvement where muscular strain is avoided”. 

And just like that, within two years of appearing, the Sisters seem to have gone again. The Sporting Life offices, which operated a mailbox for athletes to receive post, had a letter sitting there for them in 1892 but who it was from, what it said, and whether they ever picked it up is unknown. In 1899 a Brummy Meadows put a notice in the Life requesting that “the lady boxers who travelled with Alf”, or any other female boxer, should contact him as he had an engagement open for two female boxers in France. I’ve found no sign of them after early 1890.

The play on milling – a furious form of boxing which forms part of military training, or more literally, the grinding down or pressing of some sort of material – in the ladies’ surname suggests it to be a pseudonym much in the way Hezekiah Moscow was known as Ching ‘Hook’. 

And whether they were really called Violet and Rosaline, or perhaps Violetta, Rosalie, Rose, or other variations, is also unknown. I have scoured birth, marriage, death, census records and so on for potential matches but with nothing to show for it.

In 1891, Alf Ball, with wife Lily and son William, were living on the Wanstead Flats among a large community of Showmen which included his brother Joseph Ball and family. Among them are a large family with the surname Miller, but no Mills, and no one among them or any of the other family units living there who had a birthplace outside the UK. If two women from Central or South America had lived alongside the Balls in 1888-1889, and we don’t know for sure whether they did or were lodging elsewhere, then they definitely weren’t doing so by 1891. 

1890 saw Alf Ball occupied with fighting Alf Mitchell (those “Muscular Middleweight Marvels” – that’s another George Belmont-ism) and others, including Australian champion Harry Downie. Ball was only in his mid 20s at this time, and at the peak of his boxing career (I’ll be writing more on that in Part III of his story soon). I can find no mention of the Sisters appearing at any type of event with him that year or after. Alf continued to tour and organised boxing events as a promoter in a number of different cities (an assault-at-arms in Chelmsford in January 1891 made headlines after a drunk boxer was forcibly ejected by Alf due to his backstage antics, and was found later splashing about in a river. The Chelmsford Chronicle politely decided not to name him). These events don’t tend to include novelty acts or other interludes to boys’ and men’s boxing.

Much like the story of Juno May, a female wrestler active for a year or so around 1906, the end of the Sisters Mills’ story is an unsatisfying one. Sorry! Without knowing their real names and being able to trace them through records – a marriage, a birth, a run-in with the law, perhaps – or find them on the census, they disappear from the newspapers and into thin air. I’m pretty certain they are not the singing Sisters Mills who had toured since at least the 1870s, or the sisters called Mills found drowned in a canal in 1893.

Did they tire of life on the road with Alf, perhaps marry, have children, and settle into housewifery or with employment less unusual than travelling lady boxers? Return to whichever part of the world they came from, or journey elsewhere? Carry on boxing but with it unremarked upon in the newspapers? I’ll continue to search, and, as always, welcome ideas if they come to you.