User:Boxerrob/sandbox

Margaret Foley or her stage name as Peg the Horse Leg is a victorian era womans boxer and performer. Born in 1870 to Irish immigrants in Westminsters notorious Devils Acre; a place known for its excess in violence, poverty and alcoholism. She was the eldest child of fourteen, five of whom died in their infancy. Her father was a railroad worker and her mother a candlemaker, both of whom were devout practising catholics and suffered from alcoholism, it is suggested by psychologist Bernhart Trieman that her parents constant indulgence in alcohol and violence towards one another would be behaviour emulated by Margarets rampant alcoholism and famed boxing career. From a young age Margaret was always fighting or getting into trouble especially on the streets where instead of attending school she would attempt to sell her mothers candles, and she had been caught a number of times stealing food from other street vendors, at the age of eleven she was kicked out of sunday school for throwing a fellow student out of a church window and during her teenage years her parents repeadetley tried to get her to join a nunnery back in Ireland to stem at this point was an extremely unruly child that had constant run ins with the police, they got so far as to secure a place at kilkennys our fair lady nunnery, but she was sent back within a week after assualting a visiting bishop. At fourteen years old she got in trouble for assualting a local butcher who she deemed had given her too small a portion, the metropolitan police arrested magaret but the local magistrate kicked out the case for unknown reasons. It is documented that Margaret was never violent to her siblings and routinely got into fights on their behalf or to protect them, as the eldest sibling she had many responsibilities to them and was remarked by her siblings in later years as being a very caring and motherly figure, but was easily ired by those outside her family. By the age of sixteen she had already secured a reputation in and around London for her fighting prowess and was by no means of small stature as many victorian women were, just afte her eighteenth birthday she was weighed in at nineteen stone, a record that comes to us from the dockyards that she begun working in, even though she was hired as a cleaner she would go on to the heavy loading and offloading something that had up to this point been exclusive to men. A rumour suggests that one time that a journalist from the Pall Mall gazzette came down once to verify claims of a woman that was stronger than her male counterparts, to which legend has it she showcased her strength by lifting him up before throwing him into the Thames, it is unlikely this rumour is true as no such writing ever featured in an edition of this newspaper, but some have suggested that its absence is attributable to the embarrassment suffered by the reporter. It is unclear when Margaret started drinking, but by the age of seventeen Margaret was arrested several times for assault and all surviving records indicate she was in an inebriated state, no prison records exist for her and all court records are long since unavailable suggesting that she had a drink problem, but her crimes did not warrant punishment. Historian Ellain Deselves concludes in her study of gender and victorian crime that a large stigma was attached to the concept of women assualting men evidenced by the lack of convictions compared to the number of police records for arrest, she notes in her study of 1048 files across 3 decades there were only 12 convictions.