Fitzsimmons, Physical Culture and Self Defence (1901)

Robert James Fitzsimmons was born in Helston, Cornwall, in 1863, the son of a policeman who had settled in Cornwall. He became the first boxer in history to hold world championship titles in three weight divisions — middleweight, heavyweight, and light heavyweight. His self-defence manual, published in 1901 at the height of his international fame, constitutes a direct primary source from a pugilist of Cornish origin. Fitzsimmons’s career unfolded within the same diasporic Cornish world as the miners’ wrestling communities documented elsewhere in this archive: the Cornish emigrants of California, New Zealand, and South Africa who practised Cornish wrestling were his contemporaries.

Source: Fitzsimmons, R. J. (1901). Physical culture and self defence. Dodd, Mead & Co.