The Strongest Men on Earth Read online

  Although he had lost his crucial challenge match with Sandow, the defeated and irrepressible man from Alsace-Lorraine, Charles A. Sampson, also cashed in on the sudden public interest in strongman acts. After all, he and the Prussian were suddenly by default the best-known strength athletes in Great Britain, perhaps in the world, and although it was already apparent that there was a muscle-man fad in the making, Sampson and Sandow for the moment occupied the inside track. For a start he refused to admit that Sandow had defeated him. Days after the competition at the Westminster Aquarium, he was still complaining to newspapers that the judges had not allowed him to go through his normal repertoire in the stage contest. In the Birmingham Gazette of 5 November 1889, he grumbled ‘how any referee can tell me in the face of my challenge what feats I may and may not do is beyond all comprehension; it is his business to see that the feats are fairly done’.

  Nevertheless, in the wake of the newspaper coverage of the events at the Imperial Theatre, the astute Sampson completed his run there and then hired the Royal Albert Hall, advertising the occasion with his usual hyperbole, still billing himself as the world’s leading strength athlete.

  Royal Albert Hall

  Unprecedented attraction and positively for two nights only. Friday and Saturday evenings, Nov 22 & 23. By special arrangement and at the request and express desire of a very large number of influential patrons and friends, C. A. Sampson, the strongest man on earth! After sixteen weeks engagement at the Royal Aquarium, and the most successful on record, will give two of his marvellous exhibitions at the above hall, on which occasion he will be assisted by the elite of the profession. Forming for the evening’s programme one of the most scientific, elegant and recherché entertainments ever witnessed. (Evanion Catalogue, British Library)

  Unfortunately, one of his vaunted supporting acts was soon to get the much put-upon strongman into more trouble. A comic in his show performed a song that offended the susceptibilities of the capital’s licensing committee, somehow reaching the ears of no less a person than Queen Victoria herself. The thought that a lewd ballad could have been sung at the establishment named after her late and much missed husband, Prince Albert, caused her to order enquiries to be made. Her Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, a member of the licensing committee, wrote back abjectly:

  Sir Henry Ponsonby presents his humble duty to Your Majesty and is afraid that he cannot entirely free himself from the affair of the Albert Hall. When asked some time ago if he saw any objection to Sampson performing his feats of strength there he said he did not. He knew nothing about the Comic Songs, etc. with which it is stated the performance was accompanied, but he thought that exhibitions of strength were such as could legitimately be performed there. He now sees to his regret that the entertainments which accompanied it were by no means such as should have taken place at the Albert Hall, and these certainly should not have been allowed.

  Ejected from the Albert Hall, Sampson decided to emulate Sandow and embarked upon a lucrative provincial tour. Throughout he continued to assert that he had been robbed of his title at the Imperial Theatre and took every opportunity to fan the embers of his feud with the Prussian. He told a reporter from the Birmingham Gazette that he was far from satisfied with the result of the recent competition. The interviewer said of the strongman: ‘He is too good a sportsman not to acknowledge that he has met a formidable antagonist, but he declares that he has not been allowed to put him to the test for which he, Samson [sic] stipulated.’

  Charles Sampson’s troubles were not yet over. One afternoon, in a Birmingham theatre, he left his trick barbell screwed to the stage in readiness for that evening’s performance. Politely, an acrobat on the bill, the muscular Frank Boisette, asked Sampson to move the weight, so that he and his troupe could practise. Brusquely Sampson told the acrobat to move it himself. Obligingly the acrobat gripped the bar and tore it from the stage, bringing up several planks with it.

  Poor Sampson seemed to experience more than his fair share of failed tricks. Perhaps he was particularly ham-handed, or it might have been that his overbearing manner so antagonised most of his peers that any mishaps accruing to his name were eagerly repeated and soon became common currency among members of the profession on the circuit. After a time, appreciating that all publicity is good publicity, the strongman stopped trying to cover up his mishaps and actually started enumerating them to reporters in search of stories.

  Among the accidents that had befallen him in the course of his stage performances, he declared that he had burst a blood vessel in his stomach while lifting a heavy weight, and dislocated his thumb and damaged a kneecap while performing his celebrated Roman Column trick. This involved the strongman performing feats of strength while being suspended in an upside-down position against a substantial pillar. Once, he claimed, he had been in a kneeling position supporting on his back a revolving platform containing a dozen elegantly dressed beauties. The platform had collapsed on top of the strongman, breaking three of his ribs and severing a muscle in his right arm. He had then replaced the young ladies with seven polar bears. At the climax of his act, so he claimed wildly, he would wrestle the largest of these animals – twice a night. On one occasion, a keeper inadvertently had left a door of a cage open and the other six bears had rushed out and joined in the fight wholeheartedly, mauling the strongman and smashing a bone in his right forearm, necessitating thirty-seven stitches in the limb.

  A more thoroughly documented catalogue of misadventures during the theatrical tours of Charles A. Sampson occurred when the ever-ambitious strongman decided to include the lifting of an elephant (hired from a local zoo) from the ground as a part of his act. It was a spectacular addition to his repertoire and a sign that, until the arrival of Sandow, Sampson had always been much more of a showman than most of the other strongmen around. But there were a number of built-in risks to such an ambitious policy. In fact, the consequences became known in the trade as Sampson’s Follies.

  In the first place, it was a very difficult trick to pull off. Besides the elephant, it involved the use of an elaborate piece of apparatus and the collaboration of a number of assistants and stagehands. An elephant was positioned on a platform at stage level. Charles Sampson climbed a ladder to a second platform located above the animal’s head. He then shrugged into an impressively powerful set of harness consisting of a labyrinth of chains and leather straps extending down through a hole in the top platform and wrapped around the body of the specially trained elephant below. Jealous rivals were quick to contend that it was only quite a small and exceedingly docile elephant.

  After a great deal of appropriate music and much use of flashing lights and drum rolls, Sampson would place his hands upon his knees, grimace grotesquely and slowly straighten up. As he did so, the harness around his shoulders would tighten and gradually seem to lift the elephant underneath him some 6in. above the stage. At this Sampson would give a great shriek of triumph, lower the elephant back to the stage and then collapse dramatically in a crumpled heap on his platform. Somehow, supported by acolytes, he would always recover in time to take the requisite number of curtain calls.

  It was an open secret, as well as a matter of sheer common sense, in the strongman fraternity, that the elephant was being lifted by a system of concealed mechanically operated pulleys, hoists and other machinery. However, when it succeeded it was an impressive and dramatic presentation, especially viewed from the front.

  The elephant was renowned for behaving impeccably throughout the performance. It was the human element that sometimes went woefully wrong, especially on tour. On one occasion it was the fault of the locally recruited stagehand, who had been trained to stand offstage, poised to operate the lever to start the process of winding the beast off the ground. After Sampson had gone through his opening preamble and the music had reached a climax, absolutely nothing happened. The elephant remained immobile. When Sampson’s assistants rushed backstage to ascertain the cause of the catastrophe, the stagehand, upon whom so much
depended, was discovered lying comatose in a beatific drunken coma next to the lever.

  An even more embarrassing moment befell the strongman. Having performed the routine perfectly, Sampson crashed to the floor of the platform as assistants rushed to his side to revive their boss with brandy. To his amazement, the fraught moment was greeted with roars of laughter instead of the usual applause. The machinery had failed and the elephant seemed to be suspended with no means of support in mid-air.

  Nevertheless, such occasional hiccoughs excluded, Sandow and Sampson had arrived in the public eye at just the right time for the sakes of their respective careers, and were ideally situated to spark off the professional strongman vogue.

  Carefully supervised and embellished by Sandow, controlled details of the new star’s early life began to emerge. He had never had it easy. He claimed to have been the son of an ex-army officer who had become a jeweller, although there is no proof of this. Similarly, his repeated claims to have been a weakly, underdeveloped child were probably all part of his later efforts to sell his popular bodybuilding courses.

  The young Sandow was good at games and took an interest in weightlifting. When he was eighteen he left Konisberg to dodge the draft and became an acrobat in a travelling circus. After several years the circus went bankrupt, leaving the young Sandow adrift and penniless in Brussels. Here he was fortunate enough to meet up with the diminutive but broad-shouldered gymnasium owner, Louis Atilla, who became his mentor. Atilla’s real name was Louis Durlacher. He had been an unsuccessful song-and-dance performer who had graduated to the role of partner to a professional strongman. Like Sandow he was a great believer in self-promotion. To this end, he was seldom seen without an apparently ordinary walking stick, which he would toss casually to a new acquaintance. The stick, reinforced with metal, weighed 25lbs, resulting sometimes in embarrassing results for anyone attempting to catch it.

  Their act had been crude and dull but Atilla learned enough from it to set himself up as a physical training instructor. In those days most strongmen gave exhibitions with barbells, consisting of two enormous hollow iron globes joined together by a long steel bar. In most cases they did not weigh nearly as much as was proclaimed from the stage. At his gymnasium, Atilla came up with the idea of filling the hollow globes with pieces of metal. These made the weights more adjustable for training purposes. As a lifter became stronger and more experienced, he could add more weight to the globes, thus progressively developing his physique and strength. It was a sensible idea and revolutionary for its time.

  At first Atilla’s physical culture classes flourished, but gradually, for one reason and another, the trainer’s pupils tired of the strenuous weightlifting exercises involved in developing their bodies and began to abandon him. Soon even the resourceful Atilla was finding it difficult to scrape a living.

  It was then that, fortuitously, the muscular, eager Sandow came along to work out at the Brussels gymnasium. Atilla could spot a good thing when he saw one. Sandow was intelligent and hard working and, just as important, he was a ‘fast-gainer’, able to pack on extra muscle quickly when he needed to. Atilla urged the young Prussian to become a professional strongman under his tutelage. Sandow was not exactly being overwhelmed with career opportunities at the time, so he accepted

  The year was 1887. Strongman acts may not often have topped the bills but successful practitioners could earn a decent living if they were prepared to travel to secure bookings. Eugen Sandow was handsome, well built and charismatic. There was a fair chance that he might be able to provide Louis Atilla with a reasonable living until something better turned up.

  First there were preparations to be made. Atilla put the eager German through an intensive course of physical development. Although he was only 5ft 8in. tall and his wrist measurement was an unexceptional 7in., Sandow showed that he was indeed capable of sculpting his body to even more impressive proportions. The young ex-acrobat soon put on bulk without losing the definition that made his physique such an attractive one. Atilla also concentrated on developing a stage presence for his pupil, grooming him in readiness for the big breakthrough, which eventually took the form of his contests with Cyclops and then Sampson.

  It was during this period of physical regeneration that the young strength athlete changed his name to Sandow, a corruption of his mother’s maiden name of Sandov. Later it was claimed that the name Eugen had been adapted by the two men from the race-improving science of eugenics. After he had become famous, Sandow adopted the spelling of Eugene for his first name (though he was known as Eugen and Eugene throughout his career).

  At first the new team was a flop. Sandow and Atilla secured bookings for their double act in Antwerp and Rotterdam but miniscule audiences greeted their routines with apathy. The two disheartened men returned to Brussels and almost starved. Staggering on to Amsterdam they found that no one wanted to know them. Sandow even offered in vain to appear at a music hall for the equivalent of fifteen shillings a week. It looked as if the Prussian’s strongman career was over almost before it had started.

  Then, as was to happen frequently in Sandow’s career, the power of publicity came to the strongman’s rescue. Later both Atilla and Sandow claimed to have devised the ploy. It certainly got them off the hook.

  Scattered around the streets of the city were dozens of coin-operated ‘Try Your Strength’ machines. The punter paid and then squeezed a handle with both hands, watching an indicator purporting to display the amount of pressure exerted. One night, after dark, Sandow swooped on three of these instruments in different areas of Amsterdam. Obediently he squeezed the handles as hard as he could. Each device went into convulsions and then erupted, spewing out broken springs and other vital parts. The next night Sandow sallied forth again. This time he destroyed three more machines.

  In a quiet week for news the epidemic was reported with relish in the local newspapers. The local police force was affronted by the suspicion that a nocturnal gang of hooligans armed with hammers had apparently invaded their city. It was decided to place guards on the surviving strength machines.

  On the third night, with Atilla lurking discretely in the background, Sandow approached one of the machines which had escaped his earlier ministrations. He nodded sedately to the suspicious policeman on duty, placed his hands on the grip and squeezed until the tortured appliance collapsed. While the police officer marched a compliant strongman off to the nearest lockup, Atilla was racing away to the offices of the largest newspaper in Amsterdam.

  Their actions sustained enough publicity to secure the double act an engagement at the prestigious Paleis voor Volksvlijt. Here they prospered for a few weeks until the engagement was over. Atilla then secured them a booking at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. Spending almost every penny they had on fares, they sailed for London. The trip, embarked upon with such high hopes, was to prove a catastrophe. Soon after their arrival Atilla injured himself and they were unable to perform as a pair, as contracted, with the theatre’s management refusing to employ Sandow as a solo performer.

  Dispiritedly the two men returned to the Continent. They split up for a while: Atilla returned to Brussels to allow his injury time in which to heal, while Sandow secured temporary employment as an artists’ model, including posing for Aubrey Hunt, a celebrated artist and member of the Royal Academy, as a Roman gladiator. He supplemented his income by giving weightlifting exhibitions and conducting lessons in physical culture.

  Once again times were hard for the young wandering Prussian. One night, as he was passing a café in Paris, a friend from his Konisberg days, a small, out-of-work music hall acrobat named Françoise, hailed him. On the spur of the moment, and acting mainly out of desperation, the two of them teamed up.

  For a few months they toured Europe as the Rijos Brothers, with an ingenious mime act they called ‘L’Afficheure’ (the Billsticker). Sandow played the part of the billsticker, apparently juggling with a doll, portrayed by the tiny Françoise. In the course of their performance S
andow would hurl his partner against the wall, to which the latter would cling and make patterns with his multicoloured costume, imitating well-known posters. The strongman remembered later with pride, ‘It was only after a time that the audience realised that Françoise was not really a rag doll of huge proportions.’

  The Rijos Brothers were definitely small-time, for the most part touring with third-rate circuses and sideshows. Once again Sandow was forced to perform feats of strength on the side. He also wrestled, taking on all comers. The latter sideline broke up the act when Sandow incurred a damaged arm in a bout in Venice.

  In the meantime, the restless Atilla had moved to London and opened a gym in Bloomsbury. He was soon rejoined by a down-and-out Sandow who, while working as a model for Aubrey Hunt and perhaps enjoying a homosexual liaison with the artist, had been given, claimed the young trainer and writer W. A. Pullum, a letter of introduction from Hunt to John Fleming, a wheeler and dealer in London’s sporting world.

  There is some confusion as to the events that followed in London. Accounts, some of them given in forensic detail, state that Sandow reported to the august National Sporting Club in London. He attracted a great deal of attention with his displays of strength and muscle flexing, which culminated in him lifting a surprised portly member of the club above his head.

  In fact, the sporting club was not to open its doors for another couple of years, in 1891. It is possible that Sandow arrived at an ad-hoc meeting of bored aristocrats who later founded the NSC, but there is also a chance that the young strongman turned up instead at the raffish Pelican Club, a gambling establishment for young bloods and old roués, and where John Fleming had served in an administrative capacity.