Even given Gussie’s loss—which was immediately disputed and in press accounts over the years went from a loss in the third round to a draw in the fourth round and eventually to a win—the promoters of the show figured Gussie would be a real crowd pleaser and offered her the chance to join the tour as a sparring partner to Hattie. Sometime thereafter, likely in the winter/early spring of 1892, Gussie left her life at the ropewalk to take up a stage career fighting in Hattie Leslie’s company and was said to have even replaced her for a while after Leslie’s death from typhoid fever on September 28, 1892, although the exact dates of Gussie’s tour cannot be confirmed.
The tour took Gussie as far as Chicago before she returned—though according to Gussie, she’d been cheated out of her earnings. She also “was engaged to appear as a boxer with the London Sports company in the fall of 1893, and drew crowded houses for two weeks in Boston where she defeated twelve men, including Prof. Bagley and Tommy Butler, but her salary was not forthcoming at the end of the two weeks.” Returning to the ropewalk, she worked as a brick handler, and in 1895 or so “bought the Cook street saloon.”
Still, she was said to say, “If I only had some education, I would not be in this kind of business, but I must do something.”[6]
By 1899 Gussie had not only worked as a prizefighter on stage but also run a saloon. If that wasn’t enough, an article published in the World about an investigation into her job as a stevedore along Newtown Creek in the Greenpoint area reported the following:
Miss Freeman is five feet ten inches tall, her fighting weight is 180 pounds and the foreman regards her as his best “man” on the docks. She is twenty-nine years old and has never been kissed by a man. . . . Being too strong to do needlework she trained and handled fighting dogs. Later she took up fighting chickens with success. She defeated men and women in the prize-ring. She challenged Corbett and Fitzsimmons, but they told her to get a reputation. . . . She figured as the star in several burlesque troops, but relinquished her career for her present occupation.[7]
Gussie was not only a pioneer of the ring but also a representative of working-class women who in a direct line to the fighters in 18th-century London lived by their fists and their wits as best they could. The rope works also spawned other women who took to the fistic science such as “‘Limpy Sall’ . . . the champion girl fighter; ‘Lu’ Raftery and also a once renowned female terror known as ‘the Gouger.’”[8]
These women certainly did not set out to be boxers, but given the tough lives they lived, with little or no access to education, earning a dollar by loading bales of hemp, entering a boxing contest, or plying the boards with a boxing act was just one more way to ensure food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Gussie, outsized and living on her own terms in male-dominated occupations, captured the imagination of her community and the world at large that read of her exploits—so much so that a half-century later she still captivated those whose lives she touched. And while she may not have practiced the true sweet science, her perseverance and courage allowed others to always think of her as a real boxer.
Apocrypha: Polly Fairclough—Lady Boxer Champion of the World
One of the more famous, if controversially so, of the female fairground boxers at the turn of the century and beyond was Polly Fairclough. She came to be known as Polly Burns or Mrs. Thomas (Tommy) Burns. Yet the peak of her fame wasn’t at the turn of the century when she actually performed in boxing shows, but after she’d left the ring—first in the 1920s when she was married to a former boxer and impresario named Tommy Burns on through the 1940s after a series of articles hit the popular press in England and Ireland where they settled.
According to the remembrances of her grandson, Patrick Dillon, Polly Fairclough’s actual birth name was likely Mary Agnes Taylor. As Mary Agnes, she was born in 1881 in Whitehaven, Cumbria, Lancashire, a region in the northwest of England near Liverpool. Patrick contended that her father’s name was James. As proof he had her birth certificate, which showed his name as James Taylor, but there was also some indication that his name might actually have been Thornton.
James was said to have been a horse dealer and trainer at local circuses in Lancashire. When Polly was a small child, she allegedly watched her mother, a trapeze artist, take a fatal fall. After the tragedy of her mother’s death, James is said to have married into “the famous fighting Fairclough family,” although it is not substantiated.[9] Polly, along with her father and her new “family,” became full-time circus hands, where she picked up the gloves at sixteen and began her career as a lady pugilist in the boxing booths at fairgrounds across northern Britain. Later accounts were further embellished with stories of Polly having “wrestled lions and lifted ponies with her teeth.”[10]
These stories were included in a documentary about her life entitled My Great Grandmother Was a Boxer, which appeared as part of the True Lives series on Ireland’s RTE network in the late 1990s. The film, directed by Niall Byrne, a well-known film composer, followed Polly’s great-granddaughter’s journey in search of the truth about Polly’s life and times. The great-granddaughter claimed to be a descendent of Polly, although other descendants of the family, including Polly’s grandson, Patrick, knew nothing of her prior to the publicity surrounding the film.
In terms of what can be substantiated about Polly’s life, the English census of the spring 1901 lists her as a twenty-year-old residing as a boarder on London Road in the Southwark section of London, interestingly in the same neighborhood where modern boxing began. The census also listed her as married to a twenty-three-year-old pugilist named John Fairclough. Polly’s occupation was listed as a “music hall artist.”[11] Whether she became a “Fairclough” through her father’s remarriage—which thereby gave her the chance to meet and marry John Fairclough—or whether the Fairclough connection in her youth was fanciful and, in fact, she married into the family herself, is unknown. What is very probable is her marriage to her pugilist husband in 1899.
Polly herself gave many interviews that embellished on her life and times, which as her great-granddaughter discovered years later left many tantalizing clues but little to substantiate her claims. In one, published in July of 1945, Polly was described as having been “a good-looking colleen, dark-haired and feminine, who was able to—and did—trade punches with the best fighters of her day.” She was also touted as “one of the fastest, surest boxers ever to enter the ring.”
The reporter went on to write about her appearance at traveling fairs where she would “appear on the platform while the barker challenged any man in the crowd to box three rounds with her for $50” and where “hundreds of disillusioned fellows” would emerge “with split lips and shiners after taking the beating of their lives.” [12]
What can be substantiated are Polly Fairclough billings as a champion lady boxer in towns such as Seaham Harbour, where she appeared in 1903 at the New Theatre Royal along with other variety artists. A photograph from around 1900 also exists of her on the stage at the front of a boxing booth, a heavyset young woman with dark hair parted in the middle, pulled back in a bun. She also appeared at the Burton Statute Fair in a boxing booth and gained some notoriety there.
Other stories about Polly’s exploits include her having fought 110 rounds in a single day at the boxing booths (possibly true given the long days and nights carnival boxers work); having exhibition fights with the famed American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in Dublin; and sparring with Britain’s answer to Johnson, Billy Wells. There are, in fact, two pictures of Polly and Billy from the 1920s in the RTE archives in Ireland taken out of doors on what appears to be a lawn. Given the existence of the photographs, if Polly actually ever did meet Jack Johnson it was likely under similar circumstances.
A photograph published in 1935 shows her in a playful boxing stance with Irish heavyweight Jack Doyle. She still looked quite spry as she extended her left in a jab toward Doyle’s ribs. How the photograph came to be taken is unexplained, though it giv
es every indication that she had notoriety in her native Dublin at the time.[13]
One other famous story about Polly was that as a young girl of sixteen she fought a “hefty sailor” who “knocked out four of her front teeth and cut her lip.” It is claimed she “walk[ed] down from the ring, sat down on a stool and had a doctor sew her lip with horsehair.”
“Nobody ever knocked out Polly,” she was to say.[14]
Toward the end of Polly’s life, after the death of her husband, Tommy Burns, she fell on hard times financially, so much so she sold her story to the British tabloids. This brought her a minor celebrity in places as far-flung as Darwin, Australia, and the United States, and kept her name in the press until her death in near poverty in 1959 at the age of seventy-seven. A newspaper article that came out in the 1940s about her life was also the inspiration for a future boxer named Barbara Buttrick, who in reading about her was so enthralled she took up the gloves herself.
Alongside Polly plying the boards on both sides of the Atlantic as a champion lady boxer were such women as Annie Currie who appeared in a “scientific sparring exhibition” with C. J. Lewis, “a well-known instructor in the art” at the Wildwood Resort near Washington, D.C., in 1900.[15] “Lady Estella” Riche, the “Female Sampson” and “Champion Lady Boxer,” “appeared in a vaudeville act,” interestingly at a “moving picture theater” on Broadway, in New York City (and was also arrested for “project[ing] one of her muscular feet with such force against the anatomy of ‘Shorty’ Kuhn, a stage hand, as, in the parlance of the prize ring, to put Kuhn to sleep,” having gotten into an altercation with him “after the close of the last performance”).[16] The Gordon Sisters act that started in the late 1890s and was immortalized on film by Edison continued to play in East Coast theaters into the early 1900s. Their act consisted of scientific sparring as well as bag punching by Belle Gordon.
There were plenty of other aspirants as well, as this 1905 letter sent to the theatrical producers Thompson & Dundy, published in New York’s Morning Telegraph, shows:
Dear Sir—Can you use a fat lady Boxing act. One is knone as amelia Hill and Miss Mary Peters. Miss Peters weight is about 600 pounds height 5 foot 4. amelia Hill weight 475 pounds-height 4 foot 9. We do a little dancing. Miss Peters does a skirt dance and Amelia Hill does a little Oriental dance, making it a 15 min. act. We strip from dresses to bloomers for the Boxing act. Trusting this will meet with your favor
Salary 50 joint.
I remain
Miss amelia Hill.[17]
Texas Mamie: A Woman in the Ring
I’ve been up against some good ones and I’ve got some reputation, but Mamie trimmed me for fair.
—Goldie O’Rourke, November 5, 1907
Mamie Winston Donavan (Dunaman),[18] known as “Texas Mamie,” was born in Dallas, Texas, on April 25, 1883. She told reporters that as a young girl she had accompanied her parents to Montreal, Canada, before eventually settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her invalid mother. An article in the National Police Gazette, introducing her, described her as “shapely, muscular and fine looking” and available “to meet any woman in America of her weight in a scientific boxing match for a good sized side bet.”[19]
She started her boxing career as a bag puncher performing in contests and began prizefighting in private “smokers” around 1905. She became a stage performer in 1906 with a “scientific” pugilism act performed in such places as the Curio Hall in Philadelphia, where she called out any woman boxer to meet her on the stage with one hundred dollars given to the fighter who could last four rounds without being knocked out. Over the years her act grew to include wrestling, sparring, and bag punching. She was also alleged to have backed out of a fight with Polly Fairclough set to be staged in Paris sometime in 1900, but there is no evidence that this ever occurred, and there is every indication that Texas Mamie did not even box at that time. Given Mamie’s later prominence, it is likely that a bout between Polly and Texas Mamie was wishful thinking on the part of one boxing impresario or another, or perhaps even Polly herself.
As a fighter, Texas Mamie gained much exposure in the press, beginning with her introduction to the boxing world by the National Police Gazette. She also had two widely reported fights in the summer and fall of 1906. She told the Gazette of how she boxed to support her mother and how she used the winnings from one of her fights to send her mother to Atlantic City for a week by the sea, something that seemed to resonate well with the boxing writers of the day.
The most famous of those fights took place on August 19, 1906, when Texas Mamie fought Ellen Devine in a prizefight held at a popular resort along the Delaware River. Devine, hailing from New York City, was in her first professional match. The diminutive women were both said to have weighed in at about 105 pounds and were in excellent fighting condition. Both Texas Mamie and Ellen Devine had been in training for some time prior to the match and so were ready for action, though little is known about their previous experience or what their training regimen consisted of. The fight itself followed Marquis of Queensbury rules, with the exception of their boxing costumes, which included the addition of a skirt worn over their tights.
The fight was lauded as the “fastest bout between ladies” ever seen with one witness describing the action as follows:
Ellen done well in the first two rounds, but Texas took the lead in the third and Ellen was badly beat up by the Texas’ rushing tactics. With a hard wallop in the sixth and last round and a right on the solar plexus, Texas doubled Ellen up and the New York girl was counted out by Referee Sam Devon of Camden.[20]
The knockout left Devine unconscious for some minutes. Luckily a physician was in the crowd and helped to bring her around. The press also reported that while Texas Mamie was on her way home she was attacked by a dog and bitten on the thigh. The wound did not become infected and it healed well after being cauterized by a doctor.
The Texas Mamie–Ellen Devine fight took place on a Sunday, and as if to preempt the possible outcry for boxing on the Sabbath (as had happened nearly twenty years earlier when Hattie Lewis fought on a Sunday), Texas Mamie was quoted as saying, “I wouldn’t box on Sunday if it wasn’t for mother. . . . I have to support her and the winnings come in handy.”[21] She also proudly took home the $200 purse.
While most of the reporting about the fight was straightforward and lauded the “science” of the two boxers, the idea of two women engaging in fisticuffs—even scientific ones—did not sit well with all, and even for the less critical press, the “virago” meme was revived with such headlines as “Amazons Fight Six Hot Rounds.”
Of the negative articles, the Spokane Press ran a headline that read “The Shame of ‘Texas Mamie’ and Another Female Pug.” The text of the article was in the same vein with the author writing, “If there was anything needed to kill an outlawed, brutal sport, it was to have women enter the field,” and ended with the idea that it “hurt” to watch.[22]
The Minneapolis Journal, while reprinting the basic facts of the fight from other press sources, added their own editorial content with a sub-headline that read “All Around Degeneracy Belt Seems to Belong to Philadelphia.”[23]
Even given the backlash in some quarters, the fight proved popular enough that a local gymnasium manager named James O’Brien went about putting together a “smoker” between the two fighters set for the Labor Day weekend a few weeks away.
Following on the heels of her big win over Ellen Devine, the national press reported, Texas Mamie’s next major fight was in early October when she gained a knockout win in the fourth round of her contest against Ida (or Ada) Atwell, a Bostonian who was the “directress of a physical culture school.” The bout was fought “in front of 300 hundred or so sports,” in Staten Island, New York, at the Corinthian Athletic Association clubhouse.[24] Texas Mamie was said to have “rushed from her corner at the sound of the bell and right across the ring at Miss Atwell . . . [landing a] left and a right” while “cleverly” blocking any counters.
She defeated her opponent with a “hard cross counter to the jaw.”[25]
Texas Mamie was applauded for her “side-stepping, blocking, feinting and general all-round gameness,” so much so that “the Corinthians” voted to gift her with a “diamond belt” for being the “‘real thing’ in the female Fistians.”[26]
Flush with the success of her fights, Texas Mamie came to New York City later in October of 1906 “to teach fellow members of the gentle sex the lady like art of self-defense” while still seeking “to defend her title of lady champion scientific boxer of the world.” Setting up shop at “a new school for physical culture” said to have “blossomed in the Tenderloin,” she was lauded as “the presiding genius there.”[27]
The story was widely reported and garnered headlines such as “Texas Mamie To Open School, Boss Woman Boxer Will Teach Sisters the Art of Self Defense.”[28] Snippets of ads in newspapers in 1906 and early 1907 give the impression that Texas Mamie divided her time between developing her variety theater act and her physical culture school, and catching what matches she could in private smokers in between her more formal prizefights.
The next well-publicized bout was against British boxing champion Goldie O’Rourke in 1907. Press accounts noted that the fight was put on in North Bergen, New Jersey, at the Guttenburg Race Track with a ring erected in sight of the horse barns. Of interest was the fact that the chief of police himself was in attendance along with some “several hundred men and boys and a dozen women,” a far cry from earlier female bouts that were routed by the police.
As the women entered the ring, Goldie was said to be 114 pounds and a few inches taller than Texas Mamie who weighed in at 103.5 pounds. As one reporter put it though, despite the weight and height differences, “‘Dallas Bantam’ as the sporting world knows Miss Donavan, proved too scientific for the English Champion,”[29] and knocked her out in the thirteenth round.
A History of Women's Boxing Page 11