Origins of the Flashman-Gully-Bismarck boxing scene

Sounds like MacDonald Fraser sourced it from a Phil-Alfie (Price)-Kaiser Bill incident in Devon. It’s fiction’s loss that GMF didn’t discover the Sausage Duel: As a cofounder and member of the liberal party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei) [Rudolf Virchow] was a leading political antagonist of Bismarck. He was opposed to Bismarck’s excessive military budget, which angered Bismarck…