Robert Gregson was a bare-knuckle pugilist nicknamed the "Lancashire Giant". Few men were more widely known in the sporting circles of London, for the few years he made the metropolis his home, than the burly, bigboned, gigantic landlord of "Bob's Chophouse," better known as the Castle, Holborn; the head-quarters of pugilism in the great days for a long series of years. Gregson was born July 21, 1778, at Heskin, three miles from Chorley, and ten from Preston, Lancashire, UK, to parents who possessed a farm of considerable extent, and married into wealth, Mary Owen.