That spring they had their first real holiday for ten years. They went to the South of France for two weeks, Roy had considered giving up his railway job, but for the moment he was keeping it to see how much Uncle Julian’s invested income brought in. On the way back from the South of France they spent two days in Paris, and Roy made inquiries about the film he was interested in. Later that year in Swindon he intended to give a private showing to his interested friends of La Bête Humaine.
Jacka’s Fight
My grandfather was called Jacka Fawle. He used to tell this story, often he would tell this story, and often-times you could not stop him; but it did not matter so much because it was true. He lived into old age, and we children would know if any stranger came by that he would take the first opportunity of telling this story, you could rest assured, so that, hearing it so often, we knew it all by heart and would chime in if he left out a detail. But it was all true.
My grandfather, he was born in Helston in Cornwall in 1853 and went down a mine before he was twelve. At eighteen he married Essie Penrose and in the next twelve years they had eight children, my mother youngest of them all. In 1883 the mining slump came to its worst, and Wheal Marble, where he was working, closed down. So like many of his friends, he thought he would go to America to make his way. There was work there and opportunities there, money to be made. It was a long way and a hard journey, but men wrote home that they were doing well out there. Some even sent home money so that their wives could go out and join them.
Well, it was a hard parting for Jacka and Essie, but there was little chance of her going with him with all the little children crying around her feet. Not that she showed much sign of wishing to go, for, like many women born within sight of the sea, she really feared it and trembled to set foot upon it. So she moved with her young brood of chicks into her father’s tiny cottage and bade a tearful farewell to Jacka as he left home. With a Bible in his pocket and a bundle on his shoulder he set off one wet day in March, and they all stood in the doorway in the rain watching while his short sturdy figure grew smaller and smaller trudging down the lane. He walked west on the old coaching road, to Truro, to Mitchell, and thence to Padstow, where he took ship for San Francisco.
It was a terrible voyage – four months it took them around Cape Horn in villainous seas and then all the way up the western seaboard of the New World. Scurvy and seasickness and dysentery and bad food. Seven months passed near to the day when my grandmother opened her first letter from him. It was full of good cheer and good heart and he never mentioned the hardships, for he still hoped she would join him in a year or two. But in fact he had been little enough time in California, casting around as you might say, before he changed his trade. Mines there might be, but much of it was more like prospecting than what he belonged to do. Chance of riches and chance of nothing at all. While building opportunities were everywhere. Houses, churches, factories, all were going up like mushrooms on a damp evening. And bricklayers were in short supply.
So he became a bricklayer, my grandfather became a bricklayer, and his wages were good and steady.
He too was good and steady because he had been reared in the Primitive Methodist Connexion; and many times, he said, in those early years he was thankful for his careful upbringing. San Francisco was a wild and wicked place, where any man could go to Hell for the price of a few weeks’ wages. Indeed all California was the same: a lost continent where lust and strong drink and greed and vice were raging. So he made few friends and those were strictly of his own kind. There were other Cornishmen in the city and he tended to be drawn to them because of memories of home. And he attended chapel every Sunday.
Each month, on the first of the month, he wrote a letter home, and each month, regular as a clock, he sent home a small sum of money to help support his family. Each letter ended: ‘Hopeing that soon dear wife you will be able to joyne me your ever loving Husband.’
But the months turned into years and she did not join him. The children were all well and all growing, she wrote, but so slow. And Essie could not face the sea …
If there had been any work at home Jacka would have returned, given up his regular well-paid work and gone home, for he was a family man, and it fretted him that all his children would be strangers to him. Sometimes too he could not help but cast his eye upon another woman; yet by grace he saw this as a lure of Satan and hurriedly dismissed carnal thoughts from his mind. Even his memories of Essie were fading. She wrote him: oh yes, she wrote him, telling him homely details of life in Helston; but she was no handy one with the pen, far worse than he; and the cost of the post was so high that often she missed a month.
All this time he was saving, was Jacka. He lived quiet and he lived frugal and some he sent home and some he saved. But it was tedious work. First it was $500, then it was $800 then $1000. By the time he was thirty-seven, he had saved $ 3000 and had not seen his wife and family for seven years. Seven long years. It seemed a lifetime. But in all things he was canny, and he kept his money deposited in different banks to lessen the risk. He came to know northern California well, for all his work was not in San Francisco. He worked with Irishmen, Poles, Portuguese, Swedes, Italians, and second-generation Americans. But all the time he stayed true to himself and unchangingly Cornish. He would meet with five or six other Cornishmen every Sunday, and they’d talk of Pasties and Leekie Pie and Pilchards and the damp beautiful landscapes of home.
One day in the early ’ nineties one of these Cornishmen, called by the name of Sil Polglaze, he came to Jacka and told him that there was this middleweight boxer come to town, just fresh come from New Zealand but a true Cornishman as ever was; and he was fighting a man called Abe Congle in the Park next Saturday afternoon and how about them going along? Jacka hesitated about this, wondering if there might be sin in it, but it did not seem so, so he said all right, he’d go. Thus he took his first look at Bob Fitzsimmons.
It was a motley crowd that day, no mistake, and nearly all of them shouting for Congle; but Fitzsimmons stunned Congle unconscious in the second round. So it was that all the patriotism in Jacka, lying underneath and scarce acknowledged, came bubbling out like an adit from a mine, and afterwards he pushed his way sore-throated through the crowd and spoke to the Cornish boxer and his wife.
Now Fitzsimmons at this time was twenty-eight, and no figure of a boxer at all. You could laugh, and many did, for already he had a bald patch and had long arms and legs like thin poles quite out of proportion to his great chest and stomach. He weighed scarcely more than 150 lbs, and he had a round red face and his teeth were large and bright like wet tombstones and had stood all the unkindness of the ring. He would have done proud as a comic turn in a circus but it would be foolishness to take him seriously as a boxer. Only Congle did that. Only Congle, still being doused with water like a babe at a christening.
Soon Fitzsimmons was telling Jacka that he too had been born in Helston – in Helston of all places! – and asking all manner of questions about it and whether old so-and-so was still alive, and if the Hal-an-Tow was still danced. I reckon Jacka became his slave for life at that first meeting, and sure enough he was there at the second fight when Fitzsimmons laid low a hard tough negro called Black Pearl. This time it took him two more rounds, but the outcome was just the same. He went in soaking up the punishment which would have stopped any ordinary man and then let fly with his long incredible fists and presently there was a black heap on the ground, and Fitzsimmons was standing there, Jacka said, with his long arms dangling and his white teeth glinting like a bone in his raw red face.
Afterwards, after Fitz left San Francisco, Jacka tried to keep track of him by reading the newspapers, but it wasn’t that easy. Fitz went all over the States, but his news value was not high and sometimes the San Francisco papers did not bother to mention when he had been in a fight. Only the big ones were reported, and every now and then through the years that followed Jacka would find an item saying that Fitzsimmons had beaten Peter Maker, or Joe G
odfrey or Millard Zenda.
Now although Jacka was a rare one for all things Cornish, he’d made no boast about it, living in such a mixed community, and he was content to be called a Limey when talk of nationalities came up. But Fitz’s appearance on the scene had fired his local loyalties with a hot new fire, and while he was not the sort of man to make a show of himself in front of others, he was never above a mention of the wonderful prowess of his friend and fellow townsman Bob Fitzsimmons, and to let it be known what great fighting men Cousin Jacks were when their blood was up. So he became much more vocally Cornish, so to say, and so he found himself sometimes at odds with the Americans and the Swedes and the Irish. Just because he had so much to say for Fitzsimmons they derided Fitzsimmons the more. And so hard words and hard thoughts grew up, half jesting, half serious, and they centred around the name and the figure and the prestige of the scrawny, ungainly, ageing boxer.
When someone brought in the word that Fitzsimmons had put in his challenge for the heavyweight championship of the world everyone except Jacka fairly died with laughter. The great James J. Corbett, Gentleman Jim, six feet one inch in height and 190 lbs in weight, with not an ounce of spare flesh upon him, the best boxer of his age and the idol of the United States, was too superior in every way to be matched with this shambling creature. The challenge was of course refused, and all Jacka’s mates told him that this refusal had saved Fitz’s life. Quick to defend his idol, out on a limb on his behalf, Jacka shouted that Corbett was afraid and that Ruby Bob was being cheated of the title.
How they laughed! How they lay about and laughed till the tears ran into the bricks and mortar. From then on it was the recognized thing to have Jacka on about it. Any time anyone craved for a quick laugh they had only to mention this challenge and Jacka would be upon his feet and arguing for his friend. I think my grandfather was a good-tempered sort of Christian most of his life, but he often-times lost his temper over this. It changed him a little, made him morose. He never fought anyone because fighting wasn’t his way; but he came near to it more than once.
So more years passed. Jacka was growing grey at the temples and heavier in the girth of neck and stomach. His eldest son was 25, his youngest daughter 14, and he was a grandfather four times over. He had not saved so much money in the last seven years as in the first seven, for he had come to live a little cosier himself, to value a good meal and a glass of beer and a pipe of tobacco at the day’s end. But he had saved all the same. In another ten years he reckoned he would have enough to go home, to buy a smallholding somewhere around the Helford River and live out the rest of his life in quietness and peace. By then all his children would have flown; but some of them with luck would not have flown so far, and he and Essie would be able to play with the grandchildren. It was an ambition as yet too far away to look forward to, but there it stood as a reward for a long life of toil. And patient Essie would be there waiting for him still.
Fitzsimmons too had gone on his way, putting all manner of boxers down and out, growing older too and scrawnier but still not quite finished. He was too hard for the young ones – yet. They just had to bide their time, while age and hard knocks crept up on him. So one day the distinguished Corbett found he could no longer ignore this middleweight that no other middleweight could endure the course with. A match was made, arranged, actually fixed for March 17 next, the contest to be for the heavyweight championship of the world, in Carson City, Nevada, the winner to receive a purse of twelve thousand dollars.
And everyone knew for certain who that would be. In vain Jacka defended his idol. They jeered at Jacka, and the good nature had gone out of it on both sides. One big Irish brick-layer called O’Brien was stronger even than most for Corbett – who was half Irish – and offered five to one in any amount and currency Jacka cared to name – if he dared to back his fancy. Jacka refused. In the years in California he had attended chapel whenever he could, and, although his sternest convictions had worn a little away, he still knew gambling to be sinful and he had never indulged in it.
In the weeks before the fight, however, O’Brien continued to goad him; and at last, hemmed into a corner where refusal spelt cowardice, he bet O’Brien fifty dollars at seven to one that Ruby Robert would win. The money was paid over to the foreman, a big Swede called Lindquist, who was known to be a straight and honest man.
Carson City is only just in the state of Nevada on the other side of Lake Tahoe, and so little more than 160 miles from San Francisco. It was only just off the main railway east, and it was told that the Virginia and Truckee Railroad were laying special tracks so that rich spectators could go all the way on special sleeping coaches, travel overnight and be ready fresh for the contest in the morning. The poorer folk by leaving before it was light could arrive in another special train just the same. Tickets for the fight were $5, and early Jacka bought one. Some of his mates would not pay the money but said they would be able to get in cheaper on the day.
Sitting over his pipe in the evening talking to Sil Polglaze and others of his cronies, Jacka thought much, he said, of the money he had wagered. He stood to lose fifty dollars – but to gain three hundred and fifty. The odds were not excessive, for eight and nine to one were being offered in some quarters. Jacka had the courage of his convictions and so trusted Fitz to win. So he stood to win. So he stood to win a considerable sum. It was a sin to gamble; but was this exactly gambling, properly to be so described? He did not feel sinful now he had risked the money. He did not think he would feel sinful if he took O’Brien‘s stake. He did not think he would feel sinful if he even added to the money at risk.
He would never have done it but for the burning conviction within him that a good Cornishman was better than a good Irish-American. The patriotic resentment he felt towards his mates was as passionate as if he had been called to declare his Faith. And his passion, equally, was not based either on judgment or on knowledge. He had not seen Fitzsimmons for six years. He had never seen Corbett in his life. But he was called on to testify. And the only way he could testify was by risking his money. His hard-earned, laboriously hoarded money. Some of it. Not much, but some. Altogether in the world, if he counted every silver and gold coin he owned and every bank chit, he could muster about $5,600. It was some tidy little nest-egg. How much of it could be put at risk? $300 perhaps? He stood the chance of converting it into $2000. Such a small investment – less than 6 months’ saving – to gain so much.
Where most of the bets were laid was in the pool rooms, and these were places which for long years Jacka had avoided as haunts of the devil. But this last four years he had taken to going into Scherz’s Rooms with Silvester Polglaze for a quiet game of pool and a glass of beer. No wagers, mind. Just the play. They played for the pleasure and the relaxation. But this was where the wagers for the fight were placed, and the odds were put up on a blackboard, and Jacka licked his lips and saw them shortening, then lengthening again after Corbett gave an interview, then shortening as the time of the fight drew near. Scherz was a Swiss, a tough, hard, cold man but he’d never cheat you. A lot of working men left their money with him because they trusted him before the banks. So this was the place to risk your money if you wanted to risk your money, where it would be safe if you won. Jacka put on $ 200 at 8 to 1, $100 at 6 to 1, another $100 at 4 to 1; then when the odds stretched out again, he put on a further $ 300 at 7 to 1.
It was strange, Jacka said, that after he had put the money on, handed over the counter in gold dollars, he felt first a terrible hard nasty sinking sensation of depression, and then after an hour or so a sudden upsurge of hope. No twinges of conscience, that was strange, no feeling that he shouldn’t have done it, only an urge to do more. It was like a drug; but it wasn’t like the ordinary gambler’s drug, when the wins and the losses, the sudden ups and downs of fortune carry a man fluctuating till he loses his stability altogether. There were no losses in this – nor as yet no wins: there was nothing to elate Jacka and nothing to depress him, only a burning conviction t
hat somehow his ungainly hero would come through. A week before the fight he went with two Swedes into the California Athletic Club, and encouraged by them, put on another $500 at 20 to 3. Then at work he took a bet with a man called Sullivan for $ 200. On the Wednesday before the fight, Jacka went like a thief to one of his banks – the one he trusted least – and withdrew $800. From there, with no one to accompany him and no one to egg him on, he went out and laid his bets.
The last days were an age in passing. Jacka lived in a daze feverishly thumbing through the papers, talking scarcely to no one, refusing even the dangling bait of argument; only stopping in at one bank and then another to draw more money out. Before the fight more than half his total savings had been placed upon Fitzsimmons to win.
On the day all those who were going to the fight had to be up at four a.m. to catch the early morning train. All those leaving off work for the day lost a day’s wages and a good conduct mark, but the absenteeism was so great that a whole mass of workers could not be penalized.
It was a long train drawing out of Oakland Station, and a slow one as it wound its way puffing up through the foothills of the Nevadas. Jacka sat with Sil Polglaze and a man called Mark Lothar; Jacka sat in a corner of the hard wooden carriage and spoke to no one. Only his eyes gleamed like one who has seen the light. The train was crowded, and men standing in the compartments shuffled and swayed against each other for four hours until at last it came to rest in the specially built sidings in Carson City.