George and Granny Hennessy

 George and Granny Hennessy

Old George Hennessy was a tough nut who fascinated me. He was a fighter if ever there was, and was forever getting into trouble through his fighting Irish temper. He must have been a clever scrapper for he went fifteen rounds to draw with the great Pedlar Palmer one-time flyweight champion of the world, when in his heyday. He must also have been a pretty rough fighter too, to which his scarred face and broken nose bore witness. He would describe his fights to me in a way that gripped my attention and invariably they concluded with the old man saying, as he lowered his fists slightly, ‘Then I drawed the box on him, and bang-bang, down he went!’ The old boy was a past master at the art of feinting which he would sometimes demonstrate, telling me to hold my hands up, left foot forward, slightly crouched, now, with a complete movement of his body, hands and eyes, I would instinctively drop my guard, and then wham, over would come a knobbly old set of knuckles to land on my chin while I’d been expecting to get it in the midriff! That is what ‘drawing the box on them’ meant. 

The old man thrilled me with his tales of roughhouses and fights at his various ports of call around the world. On one occasion after a set-to with the police he was thrown out of Melbourne and had to walk the five hundred odd miles to Sydney to get another ship to bring him home. But old George’s pride and joy was an old cutting from a local paper which described how he flattened several policeman in Woolwich before seven of them finally overpowered him and took him to the lock-up. I can still see the headlines. And the old man weighed no more than nine stone at the time! What a toughy! 

Granny Hennessy, ‘Ginnie,’ worked as a cleaner on the ships, for they were very poor, and to sit down to a meal meant eating with a knife stamped ‘Mauretania,’ fork embossed ‘TSS Tuscania’ while the crockery was from P & O or Cunard Line!! 16, Elizabeth Street was full of such items, each with a tale to tell.


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