The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  He was born in Banff in 1870, the son of two schoolteachers. Naturally big and strong from an early age, Bankier started running away from home when he was twelve, and eventually embarked for Canada on a ship called Cynthia, which was shipwrecked off the coast of Montreal. Bankier, not yet fourteen, swam ashore, crossed great swathes of prairie on a train on his own and found work on a Manitoba farm, where he was overworked and underpaid.

  Once again he took to the road. This time he ended up as a labourer in a travelling circus. He studied the repertoire of the tent show’s professional strongman and found that even at his tender age he could emulate most of the weightlifter’s stunts. When the strongman did not recover from a drunken bender in time, Bankier took his place at that evening’s performance. His routine proved so satisfactory that after the strongman recovered Bankier joined his act as an assistant and general gofer. It was during his time with this and other circuses that Bankier became a considerable acrobat. He was particularly adept at climbing a 30ft rope, using his arms only, with his legs extended horizontally below him. As a result of this exercise he developed particularly massive biceps.

  He spent a year at this work and then joined a tent show run by the great William Muldoon, a wrestling champion and a pioneer of physical education in the USA. Muldoon renamed Bankier Clyde Clyndon and billed him as the Canadian Strong Boy. He also taught the youth how to wrestle.

  Always restless and eager to better his condition, Bankier, now a strapping and immensely strong young man, joined a troupe of touring prizefighters, headed by Jake Kilrain, who had unsuccessfully fought John L. Sullivan in the last recorded contest for the world bareknuckle heavyweight title. Under Kilrain’s tuition, Bankier was able to add boxing to his physical skills. At the age of seventeen not only was the handsome young Scot as strong as a gorilla he could offer a variety of honed strongman and combat skills to any potential employer.

  No less a person than Colonel W. F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, the great Indian fighter and cavalry scout, took advantage of this and Bankier toured with the former scout’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders show before returning to Great Britain, after a short stop in Ireland, to do more circus work as a strongman. By now Bankier was working under the name of Apollo. He developed the stunt of lifting one of the circus elephants using a harness lift. Bankier always claimed that, unlike C. A. Sampson and many other strength athletes, all his lifts were genuine, the results of strength and technique.

  On arrival in Britain, Bankier found that Eugen Sandow had established himself as the supreme strongman of the music halls. This always irked the Scot. He considered, perhaps with reason, that he was every bit as strong as the other man and that his physique was certainly a match for that of the world’s strongest man. He developed his own strongman act and soon attained top-of-the-bill status, but in the eyes of the public he always stood in Eugen Sandow’s shadow. This incensed the Scottish Hercules. He took to issuing vitriolic public challenges, always ignored by his rival. A typical example was published in the Glasgow Evening Times:

  Sir – I hereby challenge Sandow to a contest of strength for £100 a side, for which I send £5 now to show I mean business: the contest to consist of weightlifting from the ground, six feats each… This is no bombastic challenge, but simply a desire to prove to the public that there are better athletes in Britain than ever came from Germany… Yours strongly, Apollo, the Scottish Hercules.

  The jingoistic William Bankier always shared the commonly held public belief that one Briton was worth half a dozen foreigners. Later, when he was promoting ju-jitsu and wrestling matches, he caused something of an international furore when he publicly decried the sneaky fighting methods of other nations compared with those of his fellow countrymen.

  With his background and experience Bankier had no difficulty in putting together a music hall act. Like Sandow, he was short and very well formed; being 5ft 6in. tall, weighing 180lbs and with a chest measurement of 49in., he was able to open his act with an effective posing display from a pedestal. For these performances he wore a very skimpy loincloth. Although he was a heterosexual, Bankier, like Sandow, had a considerable gay following which would follow him from theatre to theatre. Changing into a more regulation leotard, Bankier would then go into a display of strength activities. He would support a piano with a number of musicians and a dancer on a plank across his shoulders, lift weights and perform his celebrated lifting-the-elephant display. He was also extremely agile and could jump over the back of a chair holding a 56lb weight in either hand. He would follow this, still holding the dumbbells, by performing a standing somersault. He kept the use of orthodox weights to a minimum, preferring to use everyday objects with which his audience could relate, like anvils and even bicycles.

  Bankier was scornful of the more blatant trickery performed by some of his fellow strongmen and incurred their dislike by expressing his reservations in public, insisting that many of the more spectacular tricks were not nearly as difficult as they appeared. He also claimed, with justification, that many strongmen exaggerated the weight of the pounds they claimed to lift and also their own physical measurements. ‘There are strong men on the stage who claim to lift 300lbs,’ he scoffed in his autobiography, Ideal Physical Culture and the Truth About the Strong Man, ‘but that’s all balderdash!’ He poured scorn on such staples of the strongman’s art like chain breaking and horseshoe straightening, claiming that these pieces of apparatus invariably would had been doctored in advance by compliant blacksmiths in their foundries.

  Apart from Sandow, Sampson and Bankier, few of the pioneering strongmen of the last decade of the nineteenth century were famous enough or possessed enough showmanship and charisma to demand top billing from the start. One other who could, however, was Launceston Elliot. He was a weightlifter and all-round athlete and was the first British winner at the initial Olympic Games of the modern era, held in Athens in 1896. He was a huge, handsome man and his Olympiad victory made him a drawing card on the halls from the start. He owed his unusual Christian name to the fact that he had been conceived in the capital of Tasmania. Not long after his birth in India, his mother died in a fall from a hotel window, where the family was staying. Elliot’s father, a colonial magistrate and a distant relative of the Earl of Minto, then married the receptionist at the hotel and, with some haste, took her (already pregnant) and Elliot back to India. Elliot did not arrive in England with his father and stepmother until he was thirteen. He grew into a strong if temperamental athlete with a pronounced adventurous streak, ready to try his luck at most things. He won several national amateur weightlifting tournaments while still a teenager and was placed prominently in a couple of physique contests. At one stage he became a pupil of Eugen Sandow.

  He took part in the ad-hoc Greek Olympiad, like all the other entrants, by simply turning up in Athens in time for the opening ceremony. The overall competition was not noted for its smooth running. The three yachts which finally arrived for the sailing ceremony were promptly placed in quarantine, forcing the races to be cancelled. The two English representatives who entered for the cycling were working in humble capacities at the British Embassy at the time and there was much debate as to whether these athletes could be considered ‘gentlemen’ because of their inferior positions. In the end, they were allowed to take part.

  Launceston Elliot entered whichever competitions appealed to him. He was eliminated in the first heat of the one-hundred metres sprint, when he finished fourth. However, as the sprints took place on the first day of the Olympiad, Monday 5 April, it has been claimed that Elliot was the first British athlete to compete in the modern Olympics. As he was born in India, did not see the United Kingdom until he entered his teens and was fiercely proud of his Scottish heritage, however, Elliot never made any such assertion.

  Competing in weightlifting, Elliot tied with the Danish entrant Viggo Jensen in the two-handed barbell contest, but the judging panel, headed by the Prince of Denmark, awarded first place to Jensen for
displaying superior style. A few minutes later the same two men contested the one-hand dumbbell lift. This time Elliot won easily, sweeping the weight from the ground to an overhead position without pausing at the shoulder. He was awarded the victor’s silver medal, no golds being issued at this Olympiad.

  The other competitions proved something of an anti-climax for the strongman. In the Greco-Roman wrestling heats he was matched against a much smaller German called Carl Schuman, a gymnast who had already picked up three first places in the gymnastics and a third in the weightlifting. He proved much too good for Elliot, who was disqualified and escorted from the arena for fighting on after the bell. The big man also stormed out of the climbing event when he could not get to the top of the rope.

  Elliot’s subsequent stage act was also out of the ordinary. Falling out with his father, he left the family farm in Essex and started by touring with his wife and pretty daughters in an act choreographed by strongman and trainer Bill Klein. As the distaff side became more and more popular with male audiences he gradually increased his female supporting staff to a nubile dozen. In addition to lifting the usual weights and juggling with wooden clubs, he devised an act called the Spinning Cyclists. Elliot would settle a long bar across his huge shoulders. A cyclist and his mount would be attached by wires to each end of the yoke. Elliot would start by revolving slowly in time with the riders as they pedalled round the stage. As the two men increased speed their cycles left the ground and the strongman started spinning more quickly. A drummer in the pit would increase his tempo and as the curtain fell both cyclists would be spinning through the air level with the strongman’s shoulders.

  It was difficult to top such a display but Launceston Elliot did his best. He concluded each performance with a simulated gladiatorial display, based on those of the arena of ancient Rome. Elliot used a permanent company of eight strongmen for this event, four black and four white. Whenever possible he would enlist another eight gladiators at whichever city in which he happened to be appearing. The display included a bout with cestus, heavy leather riding gloves designed to resemble the deadly steel strips used as fist coverings in the ancient arenas. Such an exciting climax always brought the audience to its feet.

  Unfortunately one night the contest became a little too realistic. Spurred on by the screaming crowd, Elliot bundled into his opponent particularly vigorously. The strongman’s partner, a second-rate professional boxer, fought back with a will. At the end, the two contestants were so severely battered that neither was able to appear at the second house performance that evening. Wisely, Elliot subsequently abandoned the gladiatorial display as a part of his performance.

  Throughout the decade, strongman acts showed no sign of declining in popularity. However, the public was eclectic and the shows had to be increasingly colourful and fast moving. This meant that some would-be professional strongmen fell at almost the first hurdle. Some just were not strong enough. Others were lacking in stage presence. A number possessed a great deal of muscular strength and skill but their chosen stage specialities were mind-numbingly dull.

  One of these unfortunates was an Australian from Ballarat, Tom Burrows, who billed himself as the King of Clubs. Originally arriving in Britain in 1892, alongside a couple of Australian boxers who soon faded from the public’s sight, he secured a post teaching boxing at the Royal Military Gymnasium at Aldershot. There he found that his rather pointless hobby of swinging wooden Indian Clubs amazed his pupils, so he added it to his teaching curriculum.

  The enthusiastic and persuasive Burrows actually managed to get club swinging introduced into the British army’s physical education programme. He then went one step further and became a professional strongman on the halls. In 1895, he set a supervised world record of swinging a pair of 3lb clubs, 24in. long, for twenty-four hours, swinging at least fifty complete circles per minute, with no rests, pauses or artificial aids. Later, on a tour of the world, he set a record of twenty-six consecutive hours of club swinging in Cairo.

  Burrow’s arrival in London with his two lightweight boxers coincided with the launching of the strongman craze on the music halls. He managed to secure a few engagements and even once appeared before Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany when the latter attended an army gymnasium display at Aldershot, but he never managed to become famous. There were two main reasons for this. In the first case his act was definitely unexciting. This was compounded by the fact that his monotonous routine was visibly doing him a great deal of physical and mental harm.

  When music hall audiences realised that the so-called highlight of the Australian’s act, indeed the whole oeuvre, consisted of his standing rooted to the spot for days at a time twirling his clubs busily around his head, at a time when the acts of the best of the top-of-the-bill entertainers seldom lasted for more than twenty minutes, his efforts were met increasingly with boos and catcalls. He was forced to transfer his efforts to private clubs and arcades, where the everyday life of the organisations would carry on around him as Burrows stood almost unnoticed in a corner, going through his act, muttering to himself. His wife or assistants would feed him solicitously throughout on soups and jellies.

  Eventually, so many dreary repetitions of his meaningless but arduous physical movements with clubs weighing over 3lbs each had their effect upon the strongman’s constitution. He began to collapse towards the end of his longer performances and display signs of mental instability. He set a new world record of continuous club swinging for one hundred hours but as soon as he had finished he started tottering about the stage in a delirious state. When people went to his assistance, he struck a close friend and knocked him to the floor. He had to be overpowered by members of the audience until he collapsed into a coma and was carried home on a stretcher.

  In an effort to remain fully awake during his competitions on home territory at Aldershot, Burrows would sometimes be accompanied by the band of the Royal Hampshire Regiment. Should this not be considered sufficient, an elaborate mechanism for the administration of oxygen would be displayed at the rear of the stage.

  In an attempt to break his record of one hundred hours, he collapsed after ninety-seven hours and thirty-five minutes. At the climax he was reduced to crawling piteously about the platform in a stupor, blindly groping for his discarded clubs. The New York Times reported, ‘His wife gave him hot tea and placed ice on his head’. In Edinburgh he collapsed again and had to be brought around with stimulants.

  Later, Burrows undertook a poorly attended tour of the world, taking in the Far East, South America and South Africa. Desperately Burrows sought for competitors against whom he could defend his spurious title of world champion. For a time, he thought he had found one in the American club swinger Henry Lawson. However, a much-feted contest between the two men ended in disaster when the unexpectedly fragile American collapsed after a paltry sixty hours and sank weeping into a chair. Unperturbed, Burrows went on swinging for another six hours and thirty-five minutes. He claimed that during each of these long-distance competitions he lost on average 7lbs in weight.

  Towards the end of his career, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Tom Burrows was thrown an unexpected lifeline by the public’s growing fondness for silent moving pictures. He became a fixture at the primitive cinemas springing up in towns and cities, standing beneath and a little to one side of the screen, swinging his clubs, while the flickering images were projected on the wall above him. His advertising material emphasised that patrons would get full value for their money – ‘one shilling, evening; sixpence, afternoon: Doors will be open to the public all day and all night. First class programmes of pictures will be presented each evening, with Burrows swinging in full view.’ At the same time the management assured the paying customers that their view of the novel electric pictures would not be curtailed for a moment by the club swinger.

  For a brief time Burrows went into partnership with a showman and opened his own cinema in London where he could twirl his clubs to his heart’s content, while his ass
ociate selected the programmes and attended to the business side. Eventually the venture failed and Burrows returned to any halls that would still pick him. This time he took with him a partner, a dedicated ‘long-distance’ pianist called Charles Parnell. Burrows would start swinging his clubs first and Parnell would join in at the piano some time later. They endeavoured to finish their act together in a crescendo of synchronicity. The effect was marred a little because at most halls they were instructed to conclude by eleven in the evening at the latest. The records they claimed for these joint marathons were sixty-two hours and two minutes for Burrows, and thirty-eight hours and two minutes for his accompanist.

  Eventually, Tom Burrows retired to join the great pantheon of other failed strongmen who had misjudged the public’s taste, sharing company with Maciste, the Italian Hercules, whose pièce de résistance lay in opening a tin of sardines with his fingers, and the Birmingham strongman billed as Polias whose offering of lifting a sofa on to his head while his wife reclined languorously upon it may have presented a picture of domestic bliss but emphatically did not pull in the crowds. Harry Houdini, who was touring the halls of the world at this time, was especially scathing of the efforts of one rather puny unnamed Italian strongman whose routine consisted of lying on his back on a platform, raising a heavy barbell to the full extent of his arms, and then releasing the weight and allowing it to crash down on to his chest. Houdini remarked pessimistically that he did not know what became of this particular strength athlete, but he could guess.