I started researching Victorian boxers and wrestlers in late-2018 after enrolling on an MA History at Goldsmiths, University of London and ‘rediscovering’ Jack Wannop by accident. My first posts on Hezekiah Moscow went online a few months later.
A TV show happened. Work, distractions, a pandemic, a lot of being ignored and passed by, and a baby who is now suddenly a chaotic nearly-three… all happened.
It has been a very long, tumultuous and exhausting, eight years.
But it’s HERE! Well, almost.
My debut book, The Devils’ Dance Floor – Hezekiah Moscow and the Fight for Life in Late-Victorian London, will be published by independent publishing house, Duckworth, on the 25 February 2027.
You can pre-order it for delivery from Waterstones, Bookshop or Amazon, or if you are lucky enough to live near an indie bookseller or a library, please consider requesting that they get a copy or copies in stock for next year.
PRE-ORDER HERE FOR DELIVERY IN FEBRUARY 2027
The Devils’ Dance Floor is the true story of London’s last generation of bareknuckle boxers, and their fight to survive the hard streets and clashing society of the 1880s East End.
It’s a book about hard men in hard times, interweaving the tales of eight boxers from across the world. Men like Hezekiah ‘Ching Hook’ Moscow, a ship’s cabin boy from the West Indies who became a boxer, bear tamer and music hall sketch artist after arriving in London around 1881.
We also meet one-eyed Henry ‘Sugar’ Goodson from Brick Lane, Jamaican Alec Munroe, African Americans Jem Haines and Jack Davenport, Cumbrian wrestler and boxer Jack Wannop, Alf ‘The Greatest Showman’ Ball and the last bareknuckle heavyweight champion, Jem Smith.
Expect cameos from a raft of international champions, John L. Sullivan, Peter Jackson, George Godfrey and Jake Kilrain among them, as well as some of my lesser-known research obsessions – the Sisters Mills, Felix Scott and, of course, Steve the Donkey…
As their extraordinary stories unravel, Devils’ provides a close-up of a changing city, exploring subjects from the law, medicine and migration to journalism and entertainment.
It is a book about pressmen, policemen and prizefighters – fighting men whose remarkable stories still resonate today.
The Devils’ dance floor is the boxing ring, pitched in the back saloon at the Blue Coat Boy, the Blue Anchor, Wannop’s Gymnasium, Alf Ball’s travelling tent or an obscure field behind a hedge near Bruges.
The Devils’ dance floor might be wider Whitechapel and the gin-soaked depravity of the streets around Brick Lane where violence was common, life was short and the boxing ring at the back of the pub quite often meant, perversely, safety and escape.
It is, more generally, London in the late Victorian era: a city of widespread poverty and hardship, of horrific disease and living conditions, of incredible wealth and all the good and bad that accompanied it.
And then there was the saying, back then, about boxers: the good ones, the ones who had the potential to rise, those who had fire in their heart and head, were said to have the Devil in them. A boxer who was technically skilled, fit, a decent performer but without drive and ambition – well, they had no Devil.
All of the men in this book had the Devil in them. And a few had demons too…
Thank you, from the depths of my heart, to all of you supported this project for all this time, and helped make this happen.
The articles I write for this website have had over 200,000 views over the past few years, with many more of you witness to some of the work I’ve been doing with magazines, newspapers, on podcasts, and with the National Archives too. Quite a few people probably watched A Thousand Blows as well, I reckon.
If just a tiny fraction of you buy or borrow my book and meet my lads, finally, IN PRINT, I’ll be a very happy historian indeed.
Click here for pre-order links!
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