An Irishman’s Diary on Dan Donnelly, Ireland’s undefeated bare-knuckle boxing champion

On the morning of December 15th, 1815, more than 20,000 people converged on a hollow in the Curragh near Kilcullen to watch a bare-knuckle fight between Dan Donnelly, from Townsend Street, Dublin who was labelled the champion of Ireland, and George Cooper, from Staffordshire. Some of the spectators may have looked forward to “the scratch” as it was called, as a less violent re-run of the rebellion of 1798 or the recent battle of Waterloo.

Others, “the fancy”, as boxing fans were known, only wanted a good spectacle but a minority were serious gamblers and one of these, a Miss Kelly, the sister of Donnelly’s trainer, put her entire inheritance at risk. Happily for her, Donnelly won, after knocking out his opponent in the 11th round.

The two detailed accounts of the fight that survive make frequent use of the word “dreadful” to describe the blows delivered but both fighters escaped serious injury. However, the purse, ie prize money for the fight ,which had originally been fixed by a group of English gentlemen at 100 guineas, or £105, to be split 80:20 between the winner and the loser, was reduced to 60 guineas, and Cooper received nothing. In a gesture that was typical of Donnelly, he took up a collection for his opponent.

In 1888, a limestone obelisk was erected at the scene with the legend “Donnelly beat Cooper on this spot December 15th, 1815” and Jack Yeats used the fight as inspiration for two paintings and a drawing. Donnelly, a carpenter whose people had come from the Cooley area of Co Louth, was the ninth of 17 children and, according to his 1821 biographer TG Hazard, the first to survive to maturity. He came to the notice of Capt Edward Kelly, a horse trainer and bagpipe player who had a stud at Maddenstown, Co Kildare, after he had given a good account of himself in a number of altercations in Dublin.

Whiskey punch

When an English pugilist, Tom Hall, issued a challenge to any Irish boxer in 1814, Kelly offered Donnelly and took him to his brother John’s house in Calverstown to teach him self-defence and, particularly, to ensure that he stayed off drink, no mean challenge as the boxer had a weakness for whiskey punch.

The fight took place on September 9th, and Donnelly won almost every round until Hall capitulated during the 17th, after Donnelly had struck him while he was on the ground and the referee had refused to intervene because he believed that Hall had dived and deserved the punishment. Dan spent his prize money on drink for himself and hangers-on and was back struggling to earn a living as a carpenter within a few weeks.

A timber merchant then set him up as a publican in Capel Street on his assurance that he would “avoid prodigality and live by industry”. But he didn’t, and the business, the first of his ventures into the drink trade, failed.

In 1819, he went to England to work as a sparring partner for boxers in order to pay debts that he had accumulated and joined forces with a Lancashire pugilist, Jack Carter, who took him to London, where his fame from the Curragh encounters had made him known.

A fight with Tom Oliver, the premier boxer of the time, was organised and took place at Crawley Downs outside the city on July 19th.

Oliver was superior technically but after a bruising 34 rounds over 70 minutes he accepted defeat. Donnelly made £300 from the venture but some of the money was lost, more was spent on drink, and when he reached Liverpool on the way home a few weeks later, he had only £2 left. He opened his last pub at the corner of Greek Street and Pill Lane. There on Monday, February 14th, 1820, according to a contemporary report, he developed a chilliness and heaviness that led to uncommon trembling, and two days later he was dead at the age of 38.

Right arm

His funeral at the Hospital Fields, also called Bully’s Acre, the free burial ground in Kilmainham, was one of the largest seen in Dublin but two students exhumed his body and sold it to a surgeon named Hall, who eventually reburied it, apart from the right arm, which he preserved and gave to a Scottish medical school. The limb was later returned to Ireland and was displayed in the Hideout pub in Kilcullen for about 40 years. It featured in an exhibition in Limerick in 2011.

Shortly after Donnelly's death a rhyming epitaph appeared in Blackwood's Magazine: "Overthrown by punch, unharmed by fist, He died, unbeaten pugilist."