A Thousand Blows, the knockout new drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, puts Victorian-era boxer Hezekiah Moscow in the spotlight. But it doesn’t even begin to do justice to the astonishing real-life history

For many people, the story of Black British boxing starts with the disgraceful scenes that took place at Wembley Arena in September 1980.

Bottles and racist abuse rained down on Black American boxer Marvin Hagler after beating Alan Minter, a white British fighter. It was an ignominious end to a match whose ugly buildup involved race-based taunts, and which commentator Harry Carpenter described as the “low point of my many years at British ringsides”.