The Strongest Men on Earth Read online

  If it was a scam, on this occasion it worked. Jeering spectators shouted at Sampson to concede the match. The stubborn Frenchman ignored them. He hurried into the wings and returned with a length of chain. He threw it to the younger man, challenging him to break it. Sandow was willing enough to make the effort but Fleming ordered him to drop the steel shackles. Strength feats of this nature had not been included in the original challenge. Even when Sampson broke the cable himself, Fleming would not allow his man to attempt the deed.

  By now the crowd was with Sandow all the way. Its members began chanting ‘The weights! The weights!’ Sensing the threatening atmosphere behind the apparent light-heartedness, the judges ordered that the contest should conclude at once with a weightlifting competition to decide which man on the stage was the stronger of the pair.

  Beginning an incredible few minutes, Sandow picked up a dumbbell weighing 280lbs and lifted it over his head with one hand. Still holding the weight aloft, he lowered himself to the floor and then scrambled to his feet again. He deposited the weight on the stage. While Sampson looked on glumly, Fleming affixed a steel chain around Sandow’s other arm. Lifting a 220lb dumbbell overhead with his free arm, at the same time he inflated the other bicep and, with a roar, broke the chain.

  It was the end of the contest and everyone present knew it. Sampson could not hope to follow that. The strongest man in the world had been thoroughly beaten.

  The ex-champion did not take defeat gracefully. George Mozart, a music hall comedian in the audience that night, said that for a moment it looked as if a fight was going to break out between the two strongmen. Fortunately the cheers of the crowd engulfed the victor, who was embraced by Fleming and Atilla.

  After a few minutes, an excited Sandow came forward to claim his prize money. He was to be disappointed. Charles Sampson and his manager had slipped off the stage during the celebrations and now were nowhere to be seen. Later, the Frenchman claimed ‘I left the stage when I saw that I could not obtain fair play.’ Albert Fleming complained bitterly to the sympathetic audience. The Marquess of Queensberry and Lord de Clifford agreed that the young Prussian should be recompensed in full, although both judges added hastily that they were in no way responsible for finding the missing cash.

  That left only Captain Molesworth. The manager of the Westminster Aquarium was no stranger to controversy at his establishment, having been in a similar position when the Prussian had defeated Sampson’s partner, Cyclops. With a £100 prize for the winner, neither Sampson nor Cyclops could produce that sort of money when Sandow had triumphed. Molesworth, who had been in the audience, had guaranteed the cash, thus averting trouble. Again, ever the pragmatist, Molesworth realised it would be cheaper to pay Sandow off than incur a bill for a wrecked theatre.

  Reluctantly agreeing to do what he could on this occasion, the manager left the stage and started scouring the building for ready cash. There was nothing like the advertised sum on the premises. After much scurrying around the various tills and box offices in the building, Captain Molesworth could only return with £350 in his hand. Sheepishly he presented this sum to Albert Fleming.

  Sandow’s agent would have preferred the full amount but realised that his strongman had secured much more than a thousand pounds’ worth of publicity upon the stage of the Imperial Theatre that evening. It remained only for him to start exploiting Eugen Sandow’s newfound fame.

  There was to be one inconvenient coda to what so far had been an evening of almost unmitigated triumph for the Prussian. Jerome K. Jerome, the celebrated comic author of Three Men in a Boat, was, at the time, a poorly paid junior clerk living in a cheap London boarding house. In an account in his autobiography, Jerome recalled how his landlord had evicted a fellow lodger, a burly young fair-haired German with curling moustaches, for celebrating too noisily in his room upon his return from a night out. The overenthusiastic reveller was Sandow, returning from his triumph at the Westminster Aquarium.

  But even as the dispossessed strongman tramped the inhospitable streets of London with his luggage in the small hours of that morning, the Prussian could not have been too disheartened. He suspected that great things lay in store for him.

  So far, 1889 had proved to be an eventful year. The exploits of the serial killer Jack the Ripper were still terrifying the inhabitants of the East End of London. Dockworkers at the Port of London had successfully gone on strike for a rate of sixpence an hour, the so-called ‘dockers’ tanner’. At Mayerling in Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the Hapsburg Empire, and his 17-year-old mistress had been found dead in a remote hunting lodge. No one seemed certain whether it had been a suicide pact or if the prince, trapped in a loveless marriage, had killed his mistress and then himself. The Eiffel Tower opened in Paris. A dam collapsed at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, drowning more than two thousand in the ensuing flood. Thomas Edison had displayed the first moving pictures and President Benjamin Harrison had opened Oklahoma to white settlers.

  And the golden age of the professional strongman was about to begin.

  2

  A NEW CRAZE

  For days after the showdown between Sandow and Sampson newspapers were full of the event. The Sportsman reported:

  Athletics had an exciting, not to say uproarious field night on Saturday at the Westminster Aquarium. The rival athletes, Samson [sic] the Alsatian and Sandow the German gave a public trial of strength, with the object of proving which was ‘the strongest man on earth’.

  Several newspapers poked fun at Sampson’s ungracious acceptance of defeat. The Glasgow Herald wrote satirically:

  It is painful to hear that Samson [sic], the strongest man on earth has been subjected to destructive criticism, as if he were an historical myth like William Tell’s apple.

  As far away as New York, the Brooklyn Eagle had its own take on the contest, referring to Sandow as a Pomeranian:

  As the Pomeranian snapped length after length of the steel chain bracelets with his biceps and burst the wire ropes with his pectoral muscles, men rose in the audience and waved banknotes of big denominations as an invitation to Sampson to beat Sandow if he could, but the former sulked and declined.

  Almost at once a popular song about the contest was being sung on the halls. With lyrics by Edward Roden and music by F. F. Venton, it was called ‘The Strongest Man on Earth’. The song began ‘In days of old a Sampson bold’, while the chorus went:

  Up jumped Sandow like a Hercules,

  Lifting up the iron bars

  And breaking them with ease.

  Sampson looked astonished and said it wasn’t fair.

  But everyone knows that Sandow was the winner there.

  The song became the signature tune of an 18-year-old singer, dock labourer and former prizefighter, Alec Hurley, who a few years later was to marry the reigning Queen of the Music Halls Marie Lloyd.

  By now the music halls were flourishing. There were forty in central London alone and many more in the suburbs. Some of them were rough and ready establishments, but new ornate halls were being built all the time. Contemporary music hall artistes like Vesta Tilley trilled such favourites as ‘Burlington Bertie’ and ‘Jolly Good Luck to the Girl Who Loves a Sailor’. Marie Lloyd warbled ‘Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way’ and ‘Oh, Mr Porter’. Eugene Stratton crooned ‘Lily of Laguna’ in blackface; Charles Coburn was renowned for his rendition of ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, once being called upon to sing the chorus ten times in succession before an appreciative audience would let him go, while the substantial Talbott O’Farrell, known to the irreverent as ‘that bloody great barrel’ gave his all to ‘That Old Fashioned Mother of Mine’.

  Within weeks of the Sandow–Sampson contest, and driven by the newspaper publicity, the two major strongmen were basking in the ultimate accolade of being parodied on other stages. At the Empire, Leicester Square, the comedians known as the Brothers Griffith were soon putting on a burlesque sketch of the Sandow–Sampson competition. Dressed as the famous str
ongmen, the scrawny siblings exchanged dialogue in heavy cod foreign accents. Part of their exchange went:

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Gorgonzola.’

  ‘Mein Gott! You must be strong!’

  The comic Tom Wootwell devised another parody inspired by the Prussian’s success against Sampson. He would wander on to the stage in a tatty costume, emulating the tights and vest of a strongman. Beneath this costume his calves and upper arms were absurdly inflated to resemble muscles. At the end of the act, after a great build-up, Wootwell would fix a chain around his biceps and attempt to burst it by flexing his arm. When he did so, the sawdust taking the place of his arm muscles would leak, deflating the biceps rapidly.

  As the winner of the contest, Eugen Sandow profited straight away from his triumph. He accepted a six-week run at the Alhambra music hall at an impressive £150 a week. This was a considerable sum for the time. It was not in the class of the actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, Lillie Langtry, the ‘Jersey Lily’, who had embarked upon a series of tours of North America for a fee of £250 a week, expenses and a percentage of the profits, nor did it compare with the income of Annie Oakley, ‘Little Miss Sureshot’, who was currently touring Great Britain with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Her feats of marksmanship were drawing her an income of $700 a week.

  Two artistes about to break through to the big time were earning music hall salaries more typical of 1889: Dan Leno, the clog-dancing comedian, and the young singer Marie Lloyd. In 1889, Leno was earning £28 a week in pantomime while the weekly appearance fee of Marie Lloyd, preparing for her first tour of the USA, was £30.

  Sandow’s new income was immeasurably more than the young strongman had ever earned before and it was a colossal sum compared to that paid to other strongmen at the time. Even the established Sampson had only commanded £10 a week at the Imperial Theatre, plus a small share of the profits.

  The young Prussian enjoyed being feted and revelled in meeting the great and the good. In a period in which the proliferating music halls were eager to broaden their repertoires and encourage more spectators into their theatres, famous legitimate actors were offered such good money to perform that they were happy to appear in twice-nightly sketches. This led to a sometimes incongruous meeting of different backgrounds and cultures. Music hall executive George Alltree reported on the reaction of the imperturbable and ultra-refined classical actor, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, waiting in the wings with his wife at a London hall, just as two perspiring acrobats scurried off the stage at the conclusion of their performance. Always keen to observe the niceties, the great actor had drawled, ‘I don’t believe you’ve met my wife. Maud – the two Whacks. The two Whacks – Maud.’

  Taking advantage of his sudden good fortune, Eugen Sandow spent most of the next twelve months on a triumphal tour of the provincial music halls, although whenever possible he took time out to further his contacts within his new profession on the halls. He took great pains in teaching the actor George Alexander how to throw a mutineer over the side of a ship for a West End production. For the time being he continued to employ Louis Atilla as an assistant onstage and a trainer and consultant behind the scenes. Showing the ruthless business streak that was to become his hallmark, the young Prussian pruned his payroll by dismissing his agent Albert Fleming immediately and began his canny lifelong practice of handling all his own financial affairs. Fleming accepted his dismissal phlegmatically and soon left for South Africa, where he operated a gymnasium and promoted boxing matches. It was not long before the Prussian had also dropped Atilla and embarked upon a successful solo career. Atilla was to prove less sanguine about the summary severance and launched a vindictive campaign to find another strongman to challenge and defeat Sandow.

  Sandow was a single-minded man who always seemed to know what he was doing and why he was doing it. The journalist and politician (and new friend to Sandow) T. P. O’Connor described the strongman as a curious mixture of great shrewdness and a simplicity that amounted sometimes to childish naivety. Sandow was also inclined to be quick tempered and his language could be rough and ready.

  For a while Sandow toured with a magician called Bertram in a show entitled ‘Music, Muscle and Mystery’. Already Eugen Sandow was devoting a great deal of care to the planning of his act and doing his best to avoid the routine of lifting inanimate weights deployed by most other strongmen. He was determined to make his act stand out and to sustain the top-of-the-bill status into which his recent Imperial Theatre success had catapulted him. In the 1880s, almost all the music hall bill-toppers were singers or comedians. So-called ‘speciality acts’ like Sandow’s appeared emphatically at the bottom of the bill, largely disregarded by the audience as it arrived or prepared to take its leave. Many of the strongmen only secured work as ‘disappointment acts’, recruited at the last minute when other performers dropped out. Nevertheless, after the furore caused by his Westminster Aquarium victory, Eugen Sandow wondered if he could dare to hope to raise the status of these ‘dumb acts’ in general and his own planned muscle routine in particular. He knew that this was his big chance and one not likely to be repeated. A natural businessman and fiercely ambitious, he was convinced that he had the courage and determination to make the most of the opportunity so suddenly presented to him. All he needed was a gambit to establish his style, and already the Prussian had a pretty good idea of the form this was going to take.

  As befitted his new title of the strongest man in the world, at first Sandow included much powerlifting and many displays of force in his performances, but these soon were smoothly assimilated into dramatic and humorous sketches to appeal to a wider audience. This approach involved the manipulation of unusual objects, not just the dull, repetitious routine lifting of barbells and dumbbells and tearing packs of cards in half.

  For one of these brief sketches, the curtain would rise on a pianist playing rather badly. The strongman would appear, mime his displeasure at the standard of performance and then tiptoe up behind the musician. Suddenly Sandow would dive, seize both the piano and its player, lift them both off the ground and carry his load apparently effortlessly into the wings. As he did so, the pianist, who was also Sandow’s offstage boyfriend, would start playing ‘You Should See Me Dance the Polka’, while the strongman, still encumbered, would break into an appropriate skittish dance as the stage lights dimmed.

  Striking a more patriotic note, Sandow would march onto the stage in the tunic of a British sergeant and would stop at a set depicting a fissure in a tropical terrain. More soldiers wheeling a cannon would follow him and stop in dumb confusion, indicating their concern at being unable to go any farther to fire upon their unseen foes. At this the resourceful Sandow would drop into an arched wrestler’s bridge, supporting himself upon his hands and heels as he stared up at the roof. A long board was balanced across his heaving raised chest, and the troops and their artillery piece would proceed over the improvised human bridge in a line to the other side of the gap.

  These were genuine innovations in a strongman’s repertoire, far removed from the usual huffing and puffing and heaving overhead of standard weights of dubious provenance, accompanied by much over-dramatic slapping of chests and biceps.

  The great difference, however, between the young Prussian’s stage performance and those of most of the behemoths who had preceded him lay in his superb physique and the onstage uses to which he was to put it. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Eugen Sandow was a beautifully built man, with a chiselled musculature and the ability to display it to its best advantage. His mentor Atilla had noticed this years before when the itinerant Sandow had first wandered into his Brussels gymnasium. He had taken the young man under his wing and devised a special weight-training programme for him involving many repetitions of the lifting of comparatively light weights in order to isolate the different muscle groups and enable them to stand out in high definition when flexed.

  The contrast with the shapeless, amorphous body of the avera
ge professional strongman, who trained only to develop his power, was marked. For years it had enabled the young Sandow to secure a steady living as a professional artists’ model as well as a strongman and wrestler.

  Atilla encouraged Sandow to concentrate in his stage act on his natural advantages of grace and athleticism. Unlike most other strongmen the Prussian would devote a whole section of his performance to a display of posing, depicting famous statues and paintings, embellished by spectacular lighting effects. The results were so impressive that before long Sandow numbered many women among his fans, as well as men. In her memoirs, Recollections of Vesta Tilley, published in 1934, music hall artiste and male impersonator Vesta Tilley remembers the strongman showing her a box filled to the lid with items of jewellery pressed upon him by adoring female followers.

  From the beginning, Eugen Sandow concentrated on promoting himself and his music hall act. He was always available for interviews with newspapers and took part willingly in any exploits required of him. An assistant who toured with the strongman in his early days on the road recounted how even then Sandow would take every opportunity for self-advertisement. When he and his company were waiting for a train connection at one of the junctions on a Sunday, when artistes were travelling all over the country from one music hall to another, Sandow would make a great show of pulling one of his performer’s heavy trunks away from the others, wait until a crowd had gathered, then lift the hamper by one corner and push it above his head before dropping it with a clatter. The assistant added that the prudent Prussian always made sure that it was never the trunk bearing his labels and possessions that was dented in the final crashing descent.