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.

Weekly roundup

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In depth: A fight for survival in Victorian Britain

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.

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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.”

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.

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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.

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