Latest news with #HezekiahMoscow
CBC
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How A Thousand Blows reimagines Victorian England's underground boxing world
A Thousand Blows is a new TV show that takes viewers inside London's underground boxing world — and one of its most notorious crime syndicates. Set in England in the 1880s, the crime drama follows characters based on real-life historical figures Mary Carr, leader of the female gang of thieves called the Forty Elephants, and Hezekiah Moscow, a Jamaican British bare-knuckle boxer. While there's no evidence that Carr and Moscow ever met in real life, the show imagines what would happen if they did cross paths. Today on Commotion, culture critics Hanna Flint and Jovanté Anderson join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to share their thoughts on the show, and how well it brings this little-known history to light.
The Guardian
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Long Wave: How A Thousand Blows recovers the lost history of a lion-taming West Indian boxer
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. Last week I watched Steven Knight's historical drama series A Thousand Blows, in which Hezekiah Moscow (played by Malachi Kirby), a plucky young man from Jamaica, arrives in London to become a lion tamer but ends up a boxer. The Bafta-winning film-maker and historian David Olusoga, an executive producer on the series, tells me about the real Moscow and the difficulties of recovering the history of Black life in 19th-century London. That's all after the weekly roundup. Caricom seeks reparative justice | Caribbean leaders have defended their pursuit of slavery reparations, describing the compensation for centuries of enslavement and oppression as a simple matter of justice. Gaston Browne, the Antigua and Barbuda prime minister, told Natricia Duncan, our Caribbean correspondent, that governments in the region were seeking 'a final resolution' of this issue and a reset in the relationship between the Caribbean and Europe. Appalachians cultivate community power | The Black Appalachian Coalition, an environmental justice group, is trying to 'dismantle the romanticised whitewashed narrative around Appalachia'. Activists want to improve health outcomes and resource access as well as the wellbeing and safety of Black people in the eastern US community. Ghana's Kantamanto market struggles to rebuild | Six weeks after a devastating blaze in Accra ripped through one of the world's biggest secondhand markets, many stalls remain unfinished and thousands of vendors still have no income. Black Ecuadorians defend their heritage | Afro-Ecuadorians fear their culture is at risk of disappearance. They say there are few people in the country who can make marimbas – a pitched percussion instrument that can take 15 days to construct from palm trees – and young people are losing interest in continuing the tradition. Women thrive in Africa's art scene | Since 2023, female African artists have collectively surpassed men in auction sales – and the trend shows no sign of stopping. 'This shift marks a significant moment in art market history, particularly as global sales of [female] artists have not yet reached parity with men,' says Lindsay Dewar of the research company ArtTactic. As David Olusoga – who also sits on the board for the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – tells me, the boxing and wrestling historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox is the authority on constructing the real Hezekiah Moscow's life. Research published on her blog, Grappling With History, inspired his depiction in A Thousand Blows and provided insight on his life. Moscow, born around 1862, was a 'traveller' from the West Indies who became a lion tamer and performer at an east London aquarium – he was later accused by the RSPCA of 'cruelly ill-treating' four bears. As Cox writes, these allegations were likely to have been false and malicious as the accuser had been subjected to a 'summons for perjury for fabricating evidence against Moscow and the aquarium'. From May 1882, Moscow was regularly appearing in sports newspapers under his boxing name Ching Hook, most likely a racist nickname drawn from his facial features. But by 1892, he was no longer featured in these publications. Apart from record of a marriage and daughter, there are sparse details of the rest of his life, or the conclusion of it, with no hospital, death, cremation records or obituaries as yet found. As Cox writes, Moscow simply 'disappeared into thin air' (although as she is working on a book on boxing history, we can hope for an update). Reflecting on this potted history, Olusoga says: 'Hezekiah Moscow's story is typical of what we have when it comes to Black Victorians in that it's a fractured biography. We have flashes of detail and then ages of darkness. And that is incredibly frustrating but it is typical of the Black 18th- and 19th-century experience. People emerge into the world – we have newspaper reports, we have pictures of them – and then they disappear. Very often we don't know what happened to them at the end of their life.' But this is the power of historical drama, and how it can be monumental in writing Black lives back into the public imagination. Creative licence is a gift. While historians will never be able to create a complete biography of Moscow, drama can conjure a life for such figures and provide an inner life that reflects the known conditions of their environment. Navigating a hyper-globalised world Though we can't be certain of Moscow's origins, the series constructs his identity through historical cues. He is depicted as Jamaican, his consciousness of the British empire having been shaped by witnessing the violent suppression of the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion as a child. In the show, Moscow surprises the hotelier Mr Lao with his fluency in Chinese, which he says was taught to him by his grandmother. This detail was imagined in response to the racist Ching Hook nickname, to play on speculation that Moscow had Chinese heritage. 'There were Chinese indentured labourers sent to Jamaica, which is where we think he's from,' Olusoga says. 'Most of these Chinese labourers, the 'Coolies' as they were called, went to Guyana or Trinidad. Not many went to Jamaica, but some did, so he could have been of mixed Chinese ancestry. We think he was born around the right time for that to be a possibility.' Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Whatever the facts of his heritage and the exact country in the West Indies he migrated from, Moscow arrived in London when it was near the apex of its power, Olusoga says. 'In the 1880s, it's a city of around 5 million, and it's rushing towards 6 million. It's the biggest city in the world. It was also a port city, so there is the world of the port, of the dock workers, and of the sailors and seamen who are from all over the world.' London, with its maritime connections, was the centre of the largest empire the world had ever seen and the largest trading hub. As such, Moscow and the other characters in A Thousands Blows are navigating a 'hyper-globalised world' where sailors from west Africa and the Caribbean are interacting with Irish migrants and Jewish migrants who had fled pogroms in imperial Russia. Olusoga refers to a parliamentary debate recorded in Hansard, in February 1893, in which an MP who complains about hearing foreign languages in the East End of London describes 'sonic streets you may go through and hardly know you are in England' – an achingly familiar discourse in our current times. A world of performance In the 1880s, boxing was the great working-class sport, says Olusoga, and it is the natural environment for Moscow to be drawn into. At the time, there was an incredible lore and legacy of late 18th- and early 19th-century Black boxers such as Bill Richmond and Tom Molineaux, both of whom were born into slavery in the US and hailed as sporting heroes in England. But boxing's significance in 1880s London was as an arena in which poor people of various ethnicities and origins, if they had the ability and the luck, could rebuild their fortunes, Olusoga says. 'It is a place of chance and skill and danger and risk but incredible reward. Middle-class people don't [box] because it's an incredibly risky thing to do.' Class informs the picture of boxing in Moscow's London as a sport that enabled marginalised groups from all over the world to take their chances on a better life by jumping into the ring. But it is also true that some Black men took up boxing because in Britain they were often conscripted into a world of performance. Olusoga says in late-Victorian London the 'exoticism and rarity' of Black people was of incredible value, 'so you see Black people on the stage and you see Black people as street performers'. And African American music was especially popular: 'The Fisk Jubilee Singers coming from Tennessee and the Bohee Brothers – African Americans are in London teaching people how to play the banjo, [leading to] a big banjo craze. Black people are on the stage, they are on the street singing and performing and they are in the ring. In some ways, the ring is just another stage in which these people's exoticism and rarity is channelled.' This is depicted in A Thousand Blows at a Gilded-Age party, where a Black acrobat swings around the room to collective awe and wonder. What we can know of Moscow's real life, and that of many Black Victorians, is limited. But dramas such as A Thousand Blows offer hope that their names will not be forgotten, even if their lives cannot be charted entirely. 'For the first time since the 1880s, the name Hezekiah Moscow is in the newspapers,' Olusoga says. 'Isn't that an amazing second life for this forgotten figure, about whom so many details of his life will never be known to us? I find it really moving that, 140 years later, Hezekiah Moscow is once again the talk of London.' A Thousand Blows is streaming on Disney+ in the UK, Ireland and select regions, and on Hulu in the US. Black History for Every Day of the Year by David Olusoga, Yinka Olusoga and Kemi Olusoga is published by Pan Macmillan. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Thousand Blows cast tease 'madness and mayhem' in season 2
A Thousand Blows is out now on Disney+ and has already stormed the charts with its gripping tale of the rise of Jamaican Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) in the boxing scene of Victorian England, and the colourful characters he meets along the way. The good news is that anyone keen to see the story continue will get to do so because the series was commissioned for two seasons straight off the bat, with both filming back-to-back. And the cast tease to Yahoo UK that there is a lot to be excited about in the upcoming epsiodes, namely a lot more "madness and mayhem". Season 1 ends with Hezekiah Moscow parting ways with Mary Carr, the leader of the Forty Elephants, who he came to believe was using him for her own gain. With the pair's relationship fractured and Hezekiah still grieving the death of his best friend Alec Munroe, he is at a loss of what to do next. Hannah Walters, who both stars and executive produced the series, says: "I think it's just more of the same, just more of the madness and mayhem and emotional torment, and fun [of] everything. It's even more, I'd say. It's a journey, it's a proper journey, but it's one that you don't want to... it's a mad train you don't want to get off of." Daniel Mays, who plays MC Punch Lewis, described season one as being "left on a knife edge", and said of season 2: "There's obviously been huge amounts of conflicts between the dynamics of the characters, and it's about really how they can repair that and move forward. It just feels like the stakes are even higher the second round." This was a sentiment mirrored by James Nelson-Joyce, who portrays Treacle Goodson, who went on to tease: "You really see them pull together as a community, like everyone comes together in season 2 cause an outside forces trying to penetrate in and so everyone backs each other. "And that's the beautiful thing about Season 2 is we're not warring with each other, we're all protecting one another really. It's good." A return date has not been confirmed for A Thousand Blows, but those who finish the series will have been given a taste of what's to come with a teaser trailer for the next season. It was simply stated that the show's second season would be "coming soon" and an announcement of a date will likely be imminent. Speaking of the collaboration with Disney+ on the series, Walters tells Yahoo UK: "Disney+ have been incredibly supportive and they saw the mileage within the TV series, which is why we got the two seasons, which is incredible for us and yeah, super exciting." A Thousand Blows season 1 is out now on Disney+.
The Independent
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
A Thousand Blows: The remarkable true story of bare-knuckle boxer Hezekiah Moscow and notorious girl gang The 40 Elephants
In the grimy underworld of 19th-century London, a bare-knuckle boxer dreams of making a name for himself, while an all-female gang of thieves terrorises the West End. This is the world of A Thousand Blows, the latest historical drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, which lands on Disney+ this week. Starring Stephen Graham, Small Axe 's Malachi Kirby, and The Crown's Erin Doherty, the series is a brutal, fast-paced tale of Victorian London's underground fight scene, entwined with the exploits of The 40 Elephants – a notorious all-female crime syndicate. While much of the drama is fictionalised, both the gang and the enigmatic boxer at its heart, Hezekiah Moscow, are rooted in real history. Knight's A Thousand Blows follows Moscow, played by Kirby, as he becomes entangled in the criminal world ruled by The 40 Elephants and their leader, Mary Carr (Doherty). Meanwhile, Graham plays Sugar Goodson, a ruthless bare-knuckle fighter loosely inspired by a real figure of the same name. 'I just felt that, because it took place in the 1880s in London, that was an opportunity to tell that fantastic story of hardship and triumph and marry that with the story of The 40 Elephants and put those two things together," Knight told the Radio Times.. The 40 Elephants were one of Britain's longest-running organised crime syndicates. First documented in 1873, though possibly dating back to the 18th century, the gang took their name from their base in Elephant and Castle, South London. As historian Brian McDonald detailed in his books Gangs of London and Alice Diamond and the 40 Elephants, they were experts in deception and shoplifting, swindling high-end West End stores such as Harrods with tactics ranging from wearing fake arms to impersonating housemaids in wealthy households. Their exploits didn't just fund their lifestyles – they set rules, too. Southwark News noted in 2015 that the gang had a strict Hoister's Code, which forbade drinking before a job, wearing stolen clothes, or talking to the police. While many gang members' names are historically accurate, A Thousand Blows plays with the timeline. Mary Carr, born in 1862, is depicted as the gang's leader in the 1880s, though the group peaked decades later. Alice Diamond (played by Darci Shaw), another key character, was only born in 1896 but appears alongside Carr in the show. In reality, the gang was at its most formidable in the 1920s, even forcing smaller criminal outfits to pay them protection money. Despite historical liberties, The 40 Elephants remain a fascinating anomaly in British crime history – perhaps the only gang to have inspired a inspired a cocktail bar in their name. Unlike the Peaky Blinders or the Kray twins, Hezekiah Moscow is a largely forgotten figure. But his story – discovered by A Thousand Blows star Graham and his wife, Hannah Walters – is just as remarkable. Graham recalled being shown an 'amazing' photograph of Moscow, describing him as looking 'regal' and full of 'humility and dignity.' According to extensive research by historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox, Moscow was a Jamaican migrant who arrived in England in the 1880s intending to become a lion tamer but found success in boxing instead. Fighting under the pseudonym 'Ching Hook' or 'Ching Ghook,' his alternate name suggests mixed heritage – something reflected in A Thousand Blows, where Moscow speaks Mandarin thanks to his Chinese grandmother. By 1882, he had gained recognition in the East London boxing scene and became a minor celebrity, making headlines for his powerful performances in the city's rowdy, underground fight venues. But boxing wasn't his only talent – Moscow was also a music hall singer and a lion tamer at the Shoreditch Aquarium. His circus career, however, led to controversy. He was charged by the RSPCA for 'cruelly ill-treating' four bears in his care – a rare documented detail in an otherwise elusive personal history. Despite his prominence, little is known about Moscow's later years, adding an air of mystery to his story. He was accompanied in London by his friend Alec Munroe, played in A Thousand Blows by Francis Lovehall (Small Axe). Munroe, another Caribbean-born boxer, struggled to find the same success as Moscow. His life was tragically cut short in 1885 when he was stabbed to death in Spitalfields at the age of 35. Although A Thousand Blows is set more than a century ago, its themes remain timeless. Migration, survival, and the struggle for identity are as relevant today as they were in the 1880s. ' A Thousand Blows is about somebody who comes aboard a ship and arrives in a sprawling city that has no mercy and no pity,' Knight told the Radio Times. 'Human beings don't change. Love, jealousy, hatred, it's always there.'
