In the beginning of the following month (June, 1808), Gully and Cribb took a joint benefit at the Fives Court; Gully and Jem Belcher, Cribb and Tom Belcher, Tom Jones and Tom Blake, Cropley and Dogherty, George Cribb and Wood, were among the leading exhibitors. Gully repeated his declaration of retirement from the ring, and public opinion looked upon the coming fight of Tom Cribb and Gregson as a sort of test as to Gully’s successor.
In taking leave of so remarkable a man as the subject of the present memoir, a man who after many years of intercourse with the most eminent public men of his time, arrived at fortune, fame, and even senatorial honours, we may be suspected of panegyric from personal knowledge, and a desire to dilate on a theme so immediately connected with the history of British pugilism as the merits of its professors, while it yet had the name and standing which it has, much through the misconduct of its members, temporarily lost.
Gully, as a pugilist, has well earned a niche in the temple of pancratic fame; and if his battles were not so numerous as many other professors have been, they were contested with a decision of science and game, rarely equalled, perhaps never excelled, and justly entitle him to honourable mention in the records of boxing. His practice, it was well known, had been very confined, and his theoretical knowledge of the science could not have been very extensive, yet his natural courage and quickness surmounted these difficulties, and, with a fortitude equal to any man, he entered the ring a most consummate pugilist. Though his frame was never a model of symmetry, he had many points of the athletic build. His height was about six feet.
We cannot conclude this sketch of Mr. Gully without remarking that, with the knowledge of the world, he united the manners of a well-bred man; intelligent and quick of observation, he united with those qualifications, when moving in a less elevated sphere, that proper sense of his own capabilities, which generally attends intelligence and merit. After a few years passed in the occupation of a tavern-keeper, in which he earned general respect, he was so fortunate in turf speculations, and so well served by sound judgment in racing matters, that he retired and became the purchaser of Ware Park, Hertfordshire. Here he associated with the first circles of the county; fortune still smiling on him, he became a spirited breeder and racehorse proprietor, an owner of collieries, and lastly, in 1832, attained the proud position of one of England’s senators; being returned to parliament as representative for Pontefract, in the first reformed parliament. We recently heard a blockhead object that Mr. Gully was originally a butcher: his father, whom he succeeded, was a master butcher of respectability—so was the father of Cardinal Wolsey. We have had among succeeding occupants of the woolsack, a Newcastle barber’s son, and the offspring of a grocer; one prime minister, the son of an actress; another the descendant of a cotton spinner; the greatest engineering genius of our age, the son of a pitman, himself a furnace-stoker, and, as we shall presently see, a pugilist; so that surely such sneers at self-made men by those who have certainly not made themselves are too snobbish and contemptible to affect any but their utterers. A paragraph from the pen of a sportsman must find a place here: