CHAPTER XII.

TOM BROWN (“BIG BROWN”) OF BRIDGNORTH—1825–1831.

Big Brown of Bridgnorth, as he was appropriately styled, for a short period attracted the attention of the pugilistic world by his bold claim to the title of “Champion of England,” pretentiously put forward by his friends upon the resignation of that honourable distinction by Tom Spring. Indeed, it would appear that Big Brown, who had for some time held a local supremacy in wrestling and boxing on the banks of the Severn, was first fired with the ambition of earning a name and fame in the P.R. by a visit, in the year 1824, of the ex-Champion, “with all his blushing honours thick upon him,” to that part of Salop in which Bridgnorth Castle “frowns proudly down o’er sedgy Severn’s flood.” Brown was at this time thirty-one years of age, being born in 1793—certainly too late in the day to reverse and make an exception to the axiom of antiquity, “Ars longa, vita brevis,” so far as the art pugilistic is concerned. Nevertheless, his introduction to Spring so favourably impressed the Herefordshire hero that he declared Brown “fit to fight anything that ever trod upon shoe-leather.” On this dictum Brown left his friends in Shropshire and repaired to the “mart for all talent,” the great Metropolis.

Brown’s trial match, for £100 a-side, with old Tom Shelton (see _ante_,