If their snickering and guffawing hadn’t already disrupted the men training in the gym, Beatty would make sure it did by lapsing into one of the singsong rhymes that punctuated his speech, usually at his best friend’s expense:
Of all contradictory fellows
In the course of my life whom I saw
None can compare I solemnly swear
For a minute with George Bernard Shaw
Shaw liked to say that the prize ring had a natural attraction for romantic and hysterical people, especially poets like Beatty, who was “crazy” about boxing. There just seemed no way to shut him up. For 2000 years, poets had been the most valued members of Irish society; in the old days, they were the only citizens allowed to move freely around the country. It seemed to have gone to Beatty’s head. He was incorrigible, and he continued his chirpy banter while leaping about taking potshots at his tall opponent as if they were entertainers at an Irish country fête:
He’ll argue on questions of medicine
And argue on questions of law
He’ll argue on boxing and banking
This versatile George Bernard Shaw
Beatty nicknamed his sparring partner “Gully Belcher,” combining the names of two famous ring gladiators of the era, Jem Belcher and John Gully. “Gully Belcher Shaw!” Gully, Shaw said later, may have been the first fighter in history who appreciated the value of money. Gully was discovered in a debtor’s prison when Hen “The Game Chicken” Pearce visited for a boxing exhibition, fought Gully, and lost. Members of The Fancy, as boxing was called in the 1800s, heard of Gully through this exploit, bailed him out, and he became champion of England. He retired, distanced himself from pugilism, invested in business, became a member of Parliament and died a rich man — a perfect example, said Shaw, of reinventing oneself. Jem Belcher, also a onetime champion, died penniless and friendless at age 30, but not before he discovered a strapping 6 foot 1 inch fighter named Shaw, known as “the Lifeguardsman.” The prizefighter Shaw might have made a name in the ring but was killed at Waterloo.
In the beginning, a slender, cautious, intellectual young man like Bernard Shaw would seem among the least likely of men to contemplate getting close to a boxing ring, much less climbing into it. Shaw was a shade over 6 feet, gangly and thin to angularity, with delicate hands, reddish hair and a long, bony face bearing a soft, almost ladylike, transparent complexion. His abrupt and jerky mannerisms in moving his arms and body bore no resemblance whatsoever to the conditioned grace of an athlete, much less a boxer. He hated his first name, George. It was one of the things he tried to unload, along with painful memories of his repressed and socially awkward childhood.
With acquaintances, he could be glib, opinionated, impertinent, argumentative, literate and clever, and not everyone, even close associates or family, liked him. When at age 18, he had made his first appearance in print with a public profession of atheism in an arrogant, satirical letter to Dublin’s Public Opinion, his churchgoing relatives were scandalized.
Shaw had been a lonely child in an impersonal family with an alcoholic father and a musical mother, neither with time for nor interest in him or his two sisters. Deeply frustrated with life in Ireland, he had arrived in London in 1876, desperate to create a new self and develop the genius that he felt was within him. At age 20, virtually penniless, he became an unwelcome occupant in a cramped London flat that he shared with his mother and elder sister. He brought with him an enormous contempt for snobbery and a comedic wit that masked shyness so deeply embedded that he often covered it with impudence and aggressiveness. He was friendless and anxious to be independent.
For Shaw, meeting the gregarious, intrepid Beatty, a rambunctious, charming Irish renegade who was lavish with his hospitality, had been salve for his soul. Here was a friend who shared his creative imagination and understood his Irish humor, who appreciated wit as an art form and celebrated satire as its most penetrating mode of attack.
Pakenham Thomas Beatty was the unorthodox offspring of a wealthy Irish diplomat; born in Maranhao, Brazil, his nickname fit his crusading spirit and round, boyish face perfectly. Beatty was an impractical idealist who moved through a series of clubs and antimonarchist societies buttressed by a large but fast-dwindling inheritance. He had a flair for the classics and languages, and by the time he and Shaw became friendly in 1878, Beatty was writing poetry in the style of Swinburne.
In the words of Beatty’s grandnephew, Claudius Beatty, they were “just two lads together enjoying life, two free spirits longing to be famous for their writing and wanting to be accepted and admired for their ideas.” Shaw was 22, and Beatty was 23.
The Victorian England that had drawn Shaw and Beatty, as well as tens of thousands of others, across the Irish Sea had grown dramatically in wealth while Ireland struggled to survive the aftereffects of its largest human disaster in a century: the Great Famine. The scourge of the Black Death began in 1845 with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the chief means of sustenance for millions of peasant farmers. Deadly black potato rot swept across rural Ireland like a plague, destroying food and life, and dismantling fam-ilies. By mid-century, two million people had died from starvation and disease or fled to foreign lands, a fate that seared the psyche of a nation and caused the Irish to hate their British landlords and the British government for gener-ations to come.
The Shaw and Beatty families were not among the suffering poor, but in the great waves of emigration to England, the majority of the Irish were forced to live on the fringes of English social life. To be Irish was seen as being a revolutionary, happiest with a grievance against society, especially British society. The Irish were stereotyped as drunks and criminals, accused of breeding without restraint and allowing their own backyard ways to impoverish them. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic epithets were common. Even by the 1870s, it did not matter that Beatty’s father had been well-to-do or that Shaw had been born into an impecunious but refined Protestant family with airs of the privileged and distant ties to the aristocracy.
“Behold me, then, in London in an impossible position,” wrote Shaw. “I was a foreigner — an Irishman — the most foreign of all foreigners when he has not gone through the British university mill.”
Initially, it was clear that fisticuffs seemed ideally suited to Beatty, someone prone to settling issues by punching first and asking questions later. Once, in an impetuous gesture of heroism, Beatty leaped over the wall of a schoolyard and bashed a schoolmaster in the face for flogging a boy, an action that landed him immediately in Hammersmith Police Court. Shaw bailed him out of jail the next day. On another occasion, a bailiff showed up after Beatty neglected to pay his rent. When Beatty tried to keep him out, the bailiff jammed his foot in the door. “Work and thrift is my motto, young man,” chirped an undaunted Beatty, and with that he punched the bailiff in the jaw, sending him sprawling to the ground, and slammed the door. Beatty’s coat-of-arms bore the motto non vi sed arte (not by strength but by cunning). Artful pugnacity, said the Beattys, ran in the family.
Shaw spent his days under the gigantic glass-and-iron dome of the Reading Room in the British Museum, his working office. As a regular, he had a chair, a folding desk, a small hinged shelf for books, pens and ink, a blot-ting pad and a peg for his hat. His most cherished possession was his green Reading Room card, a lifetime pass, guaranteeing he would always have a place to ply his trade.
A superintendent who occupied a raised seat in the center of the big, circular room monitored occupants, like Shaw, who sat at tables that radiated from the center of the room like spokes in a wheel. The Reading Room was open from nine in the morning until about eight o’clock at night, and Shaw spent his days poring over books and writing articles and novels that he hoped to publish. He had made it plain to Beatty he had no time for sports and wanted no part of his new passion for combat, not that boxing was a sport in the conventional sense, of course. One did not “play” boxing as you would play football or cricket. There was no team nor were there team rules, no one except oneself to make that