The Strongest Men on Earth Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. ‘See, he does not come!’

  2. A new craze

  3. The strongmen arrive

  4. The Iron Duke

  5. Challenges, feuds and misadventures

  6. Sex, adventure and romance

  7. Elaborate nonsense

  8. Louis and Louis

  9. The electric girl and other ladies

  10. The Russian lion

  11. Final curtains

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent Isabel White for her enthusiastic support and considerable input into the writing of this book from beginning to end. I am also indebted to my editor at the Robson Press, Hollie Teague, for her guidance, encouragement and meticulous editing skills.

  INTRODUCTION

  They were nothing if not adaptable. Achieving real fame and fortune in the brief golden age of strength athletics, some of the professional strongmen and women were prepared to take almost any risks and put their bodies through the most reckless forms of endeavour to attain their coveted top-of-the-bill status.

  One of the first of them was Jack Holtum, a former Danish sailor. He earned a steady living by flexing his mighty muscles and lifting heavy weights onstage, but these displays were not enough to mark him out from his competitors. Instead he added a new finale to his act in which, twice nightly, he caught a cannonball fired at him from point-blank range. This was enough to transport him to the ranks of superstars, even if it did cause a group of his female fans in Paris to circulate a petition begging him to return to his previous posing display and not risk marring his beautiful physique by offering it up for such dangerous target practice.

  Rosa Richter went one better in the high-risk stakes. As a child she toured as a boy in a strongman act with a Japanese circus. Realising that this was never going to bring in the wealth she dreamt of, at the age of fourteen she became the first female human cannonball, being fired a distance of seventy-five feet onto a trapeze before dropping into a net. It was an incredibly perilous way of earning a living, but, while still in her teens, she commanded a fee of £200 a week during the 1870s and became one of the first circus strongwomen to take her act into the music halls and vaudeville.

  An Italian called Luigi Brinn had an impressive enough strongman act. Supporting on his back a rowing boat containing fourteen sailors who pretended to row, he would stagger around the stage supporting his burden. But even this proved insufficient to the braying crowds and, in order to compete with his fellows, he enlarged his repertoire by supporting a heavy artillery piece and a uniformed attendant on a platform on a pole balanced upon his chin, and assimilated the recoil with barely a stagger when the weapon was fired.

  The emphasis among these would-be Hercules was always on determination. Australian Don Athaldo was three times discharged from his country’s armed forces for being medically unfit yet developed his strength to such an extent that he trained thousands of his fellow countrymen with his postal strongman courses. He was capable of towing a touring car and six passengers for eight hundred metres up the steep incline of a Sydney thoroughfare.

  A few of them had to remain alert to avoid the attention of law-enforcement agencies, especially some of the strongmen who branched out into the lucrative area of postal bodybuilding courses. Alois P. Swoboda, who emigrated from Austria to the USA, numbered President Herbert Hoover among his clients and was a millionaire before he was thirty. But when he launched his ‘Conscious Evolution’ course and claimed to be able to regrow lost limbs by the use of willpower, he incurred the wrath of the American Medical Association.

  Ostensibly these strength athletes were competing to see which of them could claim the title of world’s strongest man or woman. In reality, the exhibitionists of both sexes strutting and preening onstage represented the embodiment of the whole modern ideal of physical culture, even if most of this self-absorbed fraternity did not know it.

  By the closing decade of the nineteenth century, a number of events and forces had combined to focus public attention on the subject of health and physical development and make the advent of professional strength athletes an enthusiastically received form of popular entertainment for the next twenty-five years.

  A revival of interest in the Greek physical ideal, brought about by research into Greek statuary, and the importation of the Elgin Marbles to Great Britain as the result of judicious bribery; the development of photography; the sudden establishment of sporting and athletic clubs among the middle classes, allied to a new national fascination with professional sport; the springing up of the Young Men’s Christian Association with its emphasis on physical fitness; the concept of muscular Christianity conceived by Charles Kingsley and taken up by Thomas Arnold of Rugby and other public school headmasters; the concern of the government about the lack of fitness generally exemplified by the poor physical condition of the new city-dwelling recruits for the armed forces: all played a part in the national consciousness. Everywhere the strongmen were taking over as bill-toppers in music halls and vaudeville theatres as they became, for several decades, the new public heroes.

  Among Victorian women, too, there was a sudden interest in such sports as tennis and bicycling and an increasing tendency among some of them to compete on equal terms with men. This found expression in the wider world of the Suffragette movement, with its principle of equal rights for women. A handful of its members, specially trained in ju-jitsu, became known as the Bodyguard, deputed to look after the safety of the leaders of the movement. This led in turn to an interest in public exhibitions of self-defence for and by women, which for a time became a small but well-patronised branch of show business.

  These new idols of both sexes came from many different backgrounds and nations. Many of them were sufficiently charismatic and interesting to sustain the interest of the crowds flocking to the halls to witness their performances. Eugen Sandow had become an itinerant circus performer to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army. Almost by chance he became the figurehead of a worldwide physical culture movement and one of the first ‘dumb acts’ to make a considerable fortune on the halls, as well as improving the health and physiques of thousands of the students of his revolutionary postal bodybuilding courses. His great rival, Charles Aloysius Sampson from Alsace-Lorraine, was the last of the old-time chest-beating, moustache-twirling strongmen. In order to enter the new world of vaudeville he turned cheating into an art form and continued to call himself the world’s leading strongman, despite all evidence to the contrary.

  Some of the strongest of the strength athletes had fatal flaws to prevent them from scaling the heights of their adopted profession. The Frenchman Louis Uni performed under the heading of Apollon and might have been the strongest man of them all. Alas, he was too lazy to try hard and was constantly reviled by his discontented wife after he failed in his attempt to enter the upper echelon of the performers’ hierarchy as a lion tamer. The hirsute Canadian Louis Cyr had enormous physical strength but had the misfortune to look like a cross between Ghengis Khan and a yeti, and could never draw the crowds. The Saxon Trio (with an ever-changing line-up) had a most impressive strength and balancing act but tended to turn up onstage in a state of extreme intoxication and hurl weights willy-nilly into the stalls. Olympic champion Launceston Elliot was a crowd-puller with his onstage simulated gladiatorial combat. Unfortunately, his main opponent in his company had delusions of grandeur and tended to fight back too hard, causing the bruised and battered Elliot to call it quits and replace the fight scene with a g
entler act featuring a bevy of underclad young ladies.

  Among the women, Kate Sandwina struck a blow, literally, for her sex, by defeating her adoring future husband in a wrestling contest, and then carrying him off to her tent to revive him. Little Annie Abbott, the Georgia Magnet, weighed around 100lbs but resisted the efforts of the strongest of men to lift her from the ground.

  Little has been written about this brief but fascinating heyday and this book intends to change that: witness the golden age of professional strongmen and women.

  1

  ‘SEE, HE DOES NOT COME!’

  On the evening of 2 November 1889, the strongest man in the world was performing his act on the stage of the Imperial Theatre at the Westminster Aquarium in London. The 30-year-old Charles Aloysius Sampson, born in the disputed border territory of Alsace-Lorraine between France and Germany, was wearing tights and gladiator boots. A strap over one shoulder glittered with medals he had won in physique contests and exhibitions of strength. With his bulging muscles, dark, greased hair parted in the middle and large curling moustaches he presented an imposing figure, heaving aloft a dumbbell from the selection of weights and other apparatus littering the stage. A contemporary newspaper reporter described the strongman as looking considerably younger in the flesh than he did in the posters advertising his performances. Sampson was a naturalised American citizen, 5ft 8in. tall, measuring 44in. around the chest and weighing 212lbs. He claimed to have 18in.-flexed biceps, although contemporary photographs do not bear this out. The skin on his hands and arms had been coarsened by a decade of work with weights and cables.

  Reporters liked Charles A. Sampson, even if his fellow music hall performers, tired of his constant boasting, did not. He was always good for a story and, if some of them tended to strain credibility, they still filled the column inches. His latest piece of self-aggrandisement had consisted of a rambling account of how he had been attacked with a sword by a drunken American officer on his recent tour of the USA. The officer had smashed the flat of the blade down on the strongman’s head, shouting, ‘If you are so strong, you can try to break this!’ According to Sampson, he had retaliated with a single punch, breaking his assailant’s shoulder blade in three places, subsequently earning himself a fine of $25 in a local courthouse.

  He also claimed that in the previous year, 1888, he had brought production at a small factory to a halt by the simple process of wrenching an engine from its moorings, thus putting it out of action until the engineers could repair it. The strongman gave no reason for this burst of Luddite vandalism.

  Sampson was always adept at publicising himself and his performances. In his newspaper interviews he gave many embellished accounts of a sickly, undernourished childhood, of how he had been written off by the medical profession yet transformed overnight into superhuman strength after a bolt of lightning struck him at fourteen years old. He also alleged that he had nursed himself back to health and strength after being wounded in the Franco-Prussian War.

  Actually, like most strength athletes of the time, Sampson seems to have been a well-developed youth who had increased his natural power by a system of lifting heavy weights. Apprenticed to a circus strongman, he had begun to pick up both barbells and the tricks of his chosen trade. Willing to travel the world, he had ended up in the USA just as the new dime museums were flourishing. Displaying all sorts of freak shows and novelty acts they remained open from ten in the morning until ten-thirty at night for an all-inclusive fee of ten cents, with new performances starting every hour.

  Sampson had done so well in his new milieu that he had been emboldened to try his luck in Great Britain and had secured his first booking in London. He had done reasonably well on his initial engagements but had antagonised indigenous strongmen with his arrogance and refusal to fraternise with his contemporaries. His rivals were also quick to spot that many of the newcomer’s performance feats, like their own, were obviously faked. One English strongman, Tom Pevier, was particularly disgusted with Sampson’s clumsy effrontery when it came to breaking in half what were plainly previously weakened coins. ‘His tricks were so apparent to us all that he was challenged and offered genuine coins to break,’ wrote the indignant rival Hercules.

  In fact, Pevier’s intervention was rather more dramatic than he claimed. Rounding up a group of other music hall artistes, the raucous group had attended one of Sampson’s exhibitions and offered him the coins to break. When the strongman refused, Pevier and his friends started throwing the money at him, with other members of the audience following suit with enthusiasm. Theirs was something of a pyrrhic victory. After the curtain had fallen, Sampson and his partner Cyclops scurried eagerly about the stage picking up the coins and bearing them off in several canvas bags to the bank.

  One aspect of his billing matter which particularly marked Sampson out from his competitors was his self-imposed title of the world’s strongest man. He was genuinely a strong athlete but he was not above embellishing his performances when he thought that he could get away with it. His famous challenge barbell occupied a prominent place on the stage throughout his act and was sometimes placed in an open-topped box. The strongman would lift the weight above his head and then carefully replace it in the container. Sampson would then challenge any man in the audience to lift the weight. Many tried but none was successful. This was not surprising: the barbell was now screwed to the stage, kept in place by catches at the bottom of the box, which Sampson had removed surreptitiously just before lifting the weight. He would then replace the catches when he lowered the barbell back into the box, or his colleague Cyclops would do so when he pretended to clean the weight before an attempt was made to lift it. As a variation on this theme, the strongman’s assistants would wheel a flimsy-looking cart bearing the barbell on to the stage. In reality the vehicle was made of heavily disguised lead and weighed more than 400lbs. When the weight was clipped to its surface no man could hope to shift it.

  Another ploy was to have a barbell placed across the tops of two barrels. As a preamble, spectators would be invited onstage before Sampson attempted his lift. They were defied to manhandle the weight off the top of the barrels. Again, none would succeed. Then, with mighty roars and much stalking up and down the stage while he beat his chest with his fists, the strongman would swoop upon the barbell and thrust it painfully overhead, to great acclaim.

  On these occasions the secret of the strongman’s success lay in the fact that the barbell had been deprived of much of its weight before the unsuspecting eyes of the audience, after the challengers had failed to budge it and before Sampson made his own effort. This was achieved by two concealed holes in the orbs on the ends of the supporting bar. They were opened by Sampson’s innocently hovering manager as the strongman distracted the spectators with his florid warm-up antics at the front of the stage. This allowed the heavy sand with which the weights were packed to run down unnoticed into the barrels, rendering the weight much lighter by the time Sampson attempted his own lift.

  Tonight, the audience watched Sampson’s demonstration of power lifting with pleased anticipation, waiting for the contest that was supposed to follow. The newspapers had been full of it for days. In his book Sandow on Physical Training, G. Mercer Adam, a friend and occasional collaborator on the strongman’s books, summed up the public’s interest: ‘If the fate of the Empire had hung in the balance, more keenness in the coming match could not have been shown.’

  Every seat in the house was taken and hundreds of would-be spectators had been turned away. Many of the disappointed were still milling about outside the theatre, disrupting the horse-drawn traffic in London’s Tothill Street.

  The reason for the excitement was indicated on the posters in the foyer. ‘£500 Challenge!’ they proclaimed. Any man able to duplicate Sampson’s feats of strength would receive this worthy sum.

  With his cynical blend of genuine strength and barefaced chicanery, so far Sampson had defeated all comers, but tonight he was genuinely worried. The challenge
had been accepted. Only a few days before, a young Prussian strongman, appearing under the stage name of Eugen Sandow, had defeated a strapping ex-blacksmith billed as Cyclops, the stage name of Franz Bienkowski, a protégé of Sampson’s. Now the newcomer was about to meet Cyclops’s master.

  At least that had been the intention. As Sampson’s performance was drawing towards its close, Sandow still had not arrived. From the wings Sampson’s manager maintained a wary scrutiny. If the challenger did not appear within the next ten minutes, Sandow would lose the match by default.

  The audience began to get restless. The promised competition had caught the fancy of sporting London. Some of the spectators had paid as much as a shilling for a balcony seat. A place in the gallery cost threepence, while twice this amount would secure a seat in a so-called private box holding fifty occupants. These were not inconsiderable prices at a time when a glass of beer sold for twopence and cigarettes cost a penny for five.

  At that moment, Eugen Sandow was held up in the crowd outside the theatre. As he struggled through the mob he was followed by his agent Albert Fleming, a tough gymnasium owner, gambler and general fixer; his trainer and mentor Louis Atilla; and Captain Molesworth, the manager of the Westminster Aquarium, who was there almost by accident having ventured forth innocently into the night in search of the missing athlete and was now locked out of his own theatre with him.

  Sandow was a blond, handsome bisexual native of Konigsberg, a port on the Baltic, and weighed in the region of 196lbs. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered, generally unassuming man offstage. A few days earlier the Daily Telegraph had described him as ‘a short, but perfectly built young man of twenty-two years of age, with the face of a somewhat ancient Greek type, but with the clear blue eyes and curling, fair hair of the Teuton’. So far, in his young and not notably successful life, he had been an acrobat, artist’s model, weightlifter and wrestler. He had toured the Continent with small fairs and circuses, often hungry and frequently unemployed. Originally he had changed his name from Friedrich Wilhelm Müller to avoid being drafted into the army in his home country, before embarking upon his present itinerant lifestyle. Now, ever hopeful, he was trying to embark upon a career as a music hall strongman. At the moment, his command of English was limited.