Not long after the turn of the nineteenth century, when steam was replacing sail, Stanley Taylor was born in a rudimentary attic room in the seamen's pub, the Ship and Bottle Inn. The rowdy pub lay at the bottom of Hessle Road, in the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, not far from the busy quayside, usually jammed with steamships and creaking fishing boats. Infant Stanley was not to blame for what transpired immediately after he took his first breath, but that intake of oxygen would dramatically change the destiny of both himself, his pugilist father Thomas Taylor, and his kith-and-kin. Especially...