Captain Barclay and Training During the Bare-Knuckle Era
Fighting comes naturally to the human animal. But that hardly means that fighting is easy. Regardless of innate athleticism and explosive strength, sincere application of study is required to master techniques and patterns of movement. Anybody who has spent any time around the combat sports has seen nerdy looking ectomorphs tool physical dynamos or broken down old men hand out lessons to the young and virile.
But in high-level prizefighting, where both sides have the requisite physical gifts and the time spent learning their craft, as often as not, the key to victory lies in what took place in the weeks and months before the fight. Sheer force of will, buttressed by hours of painful training, has been the critical ingredient to all the heroic moments in prizefighting history. The old-time members of the Fancy, in the 18th and 19th century, called the quality “bottom.” The greatest of fighters separated themselves from their peers by virtue of possessing greater bottom. Modern fighters will commonly say: “Train hard so the fight might be easier.” Early 19th century fight writer Pierce Egan expressed a similar sentiment in different words, noting that the savvy fighter would “undertake, as a matter of profit, that trouble which they would avoid, simply for victory.”
To understand some of the fundamental differences between fight training in the bare-knuckle era and modern training, it is important to first of all remember the basic differences in the rules of combat during that era. Fights were to a “finish,” when one man either conceded defeat or was rendered unable to continue. So fights, especially at the highest level, where fortunes hung in the balance, might last for hours.
Rounds were of indeterminate length. A round came to an end when one of the fighters was either knocked down by a blow or thrown, at which point he had 30 seconds to recover and make it back to the scratch line. So while fights of the era were brutal, they also featured periods of relative inactivity. Without the benefit of protective gloves, fighters had to be more calculating with their punch selection and would often circle and feint, or else pummel in the clinch, looking to secure the leverage for a cross-buttocks throw. Fighters had to be able to be conditioned to stay on their feet and engaged for long period of time, but needed the wind to battle furiously in spurts.
As a result, when a fighter was in training, his day was framed by two sessions of vigorous hikes of up to 20 or more miles, followed by running around a mile at top speed. A fighter training for a championship bout might log between 30 and 40 miles in a day, building up his body’s stamina. The middle of the day was reserved for the sparring session, which would ideally last about an hour, when every possible scenario in the fight was strategized and game-planned. The remaining hours of the day were devoted recovery through nutrition, sweating under piles of heavy blankets, massage and the relaxation of idle conversation or games like cards.
Pedestrianism was one of the most popular sports of the 18th and early 19th century, and the greatest competitor in that sport, Captain Robert Barclay Allardice, was an avid fan of pugilism, who trained and sparred regularly with top professionals. He was also the leading prizefighting trainer of the age. An infantryman by profession, Captain Barclay’s most celebrated accomplishment was the stunning feat of walking one mile every hour for 1000 straight hours, in order to win a bet of 1000 guineas. Barclay lost 32 pounds over the course of his 42 day ordeal, dropping from a muscular and athletic 186 pounds to a gaunt 154. Crowds of up to 10,000 spectators lined parts of his route and the betting activity surrounding the challenge is believed to have reached a total of approximately five million pounds in modern currency.
As a trainer, Barclay’s biggest triumph was bringing heavyweight champion Tom Cribb back into condition to face the rugged Tom Molineux in 1810. Like many great champions, Cribb had gone soft as a result of success. Barclay described the champ at the start of his training as “corpulent, big-bellied, full of gross humours, short of breath” and unable to walk even 10 miles without difficulty. Molineux, a former African-American slave, was the classic hungry challenger, and a tremendous physical specimen. Cribb had his work cut out for him.
Barclay was a strong believer in the need to train far away from the city, where the air was clean and restorative for the lungs. He brought Cribb away from London, to the Scottish highlands. The champion had gone fleshy and was a solid 25 to 30 pounds above his fighting weight of just below 200 pounds.
Before starting the training in earnest, Barclay turned his fighter lose for two weeks, to amble at his leisure while bird hunting in the nearby hills and fields. He wanted to ease Cribb back into condition, rather than throwing him into vigorous training too quickly, at the risk of having him “train off” from too much exertion too soon. However, by the end of his training period, Cribb was back down to his proper fighting weight and easily covering 30 or more miles in a day on foot. He came to scratch against Molineux in such obviously great condition that the challenger later confessed to having felt discouraged before the fight even began.
Like any great fight trainer, Barclay was keenly aware of the important mental and spiritual aspects of preparing his man for combat. Barclay’s Practical Advice on Training focuses considerable space to discussing the need for understanding the psychology, or temperament, of an individual fighter and then adjusting the nature of his instruction and the rate of ramping up training to best encourage and build the fighter’s mental state. As an elite athlete in his own right, Barclay threw himself into much of the physical regimen right alongside his fighter. He was a firm believer in the need of the trainer to observe the same spartan discipline as his fighter during training, eschewing smoking and drinking just as he expected his fighter to do. If the trainer “must whet,” Barclay wrote, then he must at least “do it on the sly.”
Barclay believed the trainer should talk about “nothing but victory and how it was to be obtained,” while at the same time discussing his man’s faults and weaknesses in blunt terms. He believed it was extremely important to understand if an individual fighter was lacking in confidence, and then specifically address the fighter’s concerns by training in the proper tactics to overcome the concerns. Much of Barclay’s psychological methods would seem as natural to a fight trainer today, two centuries later.
However, the early 19th century understanding of physiology did lead to some crude ideas being incorporated as standard training practices. It was routine for a training camp to begin with a “purging” period, in which the fighter was prescribed a triple course of diuretic salts, to clean him out thoroughly before starting the preparations. Ideas about “building up the blood” led to blood letting being adopted as a method to clean out “weak blood” in order to make way for healthy new blood. Even when it comes to these techniques, Barclay seems to have been a bit ahead of his peers. He had strong opinions that the gentlest possible purging medicines should be used, and that purging routines should be tailored to the needs of the individual athlete, with young or well-maintained fighters requiring no more than a single dose.
Even in our era of modern sports science, opinions on the best proper nutrition tend to vary greatly. But in the early 19th century, Barclay had already hit upon some basic principles that still ring true in our era. Barclay was utterly contemptuous of the kind of mass produced bread that was readily available in London, viewing it as nutritionally useless. One of the advantages he noted about training in the countryside was that the little bit of bread he would secure to feed his fighters was heartier, being made from coarse, fermented wheat instead of the highly refined flour of the city. Barclay also anticipated the paleo craze by nearly two hundred years, insisting that the athlete in training should eat meat from animals that were “naturally fed, on grass.”
When it comes to what Barclay viewed as his essential supplement, the old soldier once again seems to have been well ahead of his time. Barclay prescribed a gruel of water, salt and oats as the primary beverage for athletes in training, referring to it as “all-potent water gruel — iron prince of health and strength.” This is during the same era in which Samuel Johnson noted derisively in his satirical dictionary that oats were “a grain, which in England is generally given to horse, but in Scotland supports the people.” Barclay no doubt would have approved of Lord Elibank’s famous response, that England was noted primarily for the quality of its horses, while Scotland was famed for the quality of its men.
