by Graeme Kent
Many similar tricks of the trade could be performed with a little practice and ingenuity on the part of the strongman concerned. Breaking a chain was not difficult if one of the links had been specially weakened and then camouflaged over. Other chains could be torn asunder with the teeth when the strongman bit into them, especially if one of the links had been replaced with a duplicate of soft lead with nickel-plating, or had been eroded with prussic acid and then cleaned.
When a strongman placed his head on one chair and his feet on another, while an assistant smashed a stone to smithereens on his chest with a sledgehammer, great care would be taken by both men to ensure that the weight of the stone equally balanced across the strongman’s torso. The bigger and heavier the stone used, the greater was the amount of impact absorbed, especially as the assistant was not driving the sledgehammer viciously into the other man’s chest, but only using enough force to break the stone.
At the same time, interwoven with the inevitable duplicity, a number of strongmen seemed to possess powers that did appear to be out of the ordinary. A case in point was the American William Le Roy. Billed variously as the Nail King and the Human Claw Hammer, Le Roy displayed enormous strength in his jaws, teeth and neck. He could push a nail held between his teeth through a board 1in. thick and withdraw with his teeth a nail hammered through a 2in. plank. He could also twist a 2in. screw into a hardwood plank with his teeth, withdraw it the same way, screw it back in again and then offer a prize to any man in the audience who could get it out with a pair of pliers. Even that professional sceptic and debunker Harry Houdini was forced to admit, ‘I saw no chance for trickery in Le Roy’s act.’
Over the years, on the outer fringes of some of the more reckless strongmen’s presentations, a number of the routines intended to impress audiences seem to have been based more on optimism bordering on recklessness than an excess of technical knowledge on the part of the performers. For years one of the fraternity, billed simply as the Bulletproof Man, toured the halls claiming that his strength was such that no bullet could kill him. He would conclude his act with an assistant shooting at him from point blank range. After this artiste’s death, surprisingly from natural causes, his costumes were examined and it was revealed that his sole source of protection from the one-man firing squad was a concealed jacket packed with tightly ground glass. It had been a miracle that over the years no bullet had been able to penetrate such a relatively flimsy covering.
Martin ‘Farmer’ Burns’s act was dangerous to the point of bordering on the macabre and manic. The burly American wrestling champion was very proud of the strength of his massive 20in. neck and from time to time he would migrate from the grappling ring to the vaudeville circuit with his infamous ‘Long Drop’ moonlighting feat. His props consisted of a six-foot trapdoor drop and a standard hangman’s noose. Burns would stand on the platform with his hands tied behind his back in the traditional attitude of a condemned man. A lever would be released and Burns would plunge into the abyss below. He would remain there, twisting and turning for a timed three-minute span, before being hauled back up to the platform. If the wrestler was feeling in a particularly entertaining mood or wanted to milk the applause he would also whistle ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ as he twisted and turned on the end of the rope.
It became a part of burlesque lore that one night, a comedian waiting in the wings to go on witnessed the sight of a twitching Farmer Burns dangling onstage through the trap door, whistling manfully. He remarked with scorn, ‘All that because he’s too lazy to learn a comic song!’
The sheer outrageousness of Burns’s act was rivalled only by that of another failed American strongman of German origin. His real name was Leonard Borchardt, but he performed professionally as Oofty Goofty. Failing to make the grade as a weightlifter and muscle-flexing exponent, but determined still to carve out a vaudeville career for himself, this man reinvented himself as yet another Wild Man of Borneo in a San Francisco freak show. Covered in tar, upon which were stuck handfuls of horsehair, he was wheeled on to the stage in a cage, gibbering, rattling the bars and shouting ‘Oofty Goofty!’ at the audience.
Unfortunately, the artiste became ill when he found that he could not perspire through the coating of tar on his skin. Taken to a local hospital in this sad state, the attending physicians and nurses could not remove the layer of tar which had congealed, despite their efforts. They did their best by dousing their patient in a solvent and laying him out, as he groaned softly, on the roof of the hospital, until the sun had melted some of the tar. It took the performer another five months of semi-permanent residence in a Turkish bath before he was completely free of his matted covering.
Oofty Goofty, however, had the heart of a trouper. He was determined to secure some sort of work as a performing strongman and, as he pondered over the problem, he took temporary employment as a song-and-dance performer. He learned one song and persuaded a proprietor called Bottle Koenig to allow him to sing it at the latter’s Barbary Coast beer hall.
So horribly did Oofty Goofty perform that in a very short time he was thrown out of the stage door into a cobbled alley. It proved to be a eureka moment for the would-be strength athlete. As he landed on the ground with sickening force, Oofty Goofty convinced himself that he had experienced no pain from his collision with the stones.
Oofty Goofty decided to put his newfound ‘ability’ to good use. He devised another act in which he would sit on a stage without moving and allow himself to be hit or kicked, for a suitable fee. Ten cents would allow a patron to kick him, while for a quarter any member of the audience could strike Oofty Goofty with a stick of his own choice. Fifty cents would allow a wealthier onlooker to belt the performer with a baseball bat. Throughout his new career, Oofty Goofty’s only coherent line of dialogue was a hoarse ‘Hit me with a bat for four bits, gents!’
For a brief period Oofty Goofty even experimented with allowing spectators to hit him with baseballs hurled from any part of the house, often at the same time. This gave him the chance to upgrade his billing temporarily to that of the Human Skittle. After a time, however, he removed this from his act on the grounds that it was proving too dangerous, even by his standards.
Sadly Oofty Goofty had to admit that his performance was not being talked of in the same breath as those of Sampson or Sandow, but he was in show business and earning a living of sorts. It all came to an end, however, when the performer grew too ambitious. In an attempt to publicise his act he had the temerity to challenge the irascible boxer John L. Sullivan. At the time the Great John L. was preparing to defend his title against the urbane former bank clerk known professionally as Gentleman Jim Corbett.
As was his custom, Sullivan was undertaking this particular stage of his preparation in a billiards hall. When Oofty Goofty approached him and challenged the champion to hit him, Sullivan, enraged at being disturbed while he was plotting a shot, swung round and delivered a crushing blow to the entertainer’s body with the thick end of his cue. It was later claimed that the force of the blow shattered the stick into three pieces.
It was the end of Oofty Goofty’s vaudeville strongman act. Sullivan’s swipe had been so fierce that the entertainer sustained a permanently damaged back. Even worse, his spirit had been crushed when he realised that he could after all be hurt, even if the man delivering the damage was one of the fiercest punchers in the business. Oofty Goofty retired from the stage and took up alternative, less onerous, employment cleaning out saloons and stables.
Even in the best regulated of acts things could still go wrong with any performance involving the use of heavy weights and intricate – and sometimes primitive – machinery. Catching a cannonball was an exploit that only the bravest or most foolhardy included in their strength acts. A Danish ex-sailor called John Holtom was one of the first music hall strongmen to attempt it, beginning to perform the trick in 1870. He would stand directly in front of what looked like an ordinary artillery cannon placed a few yards away onstage. For the occasion Holtom wor
e gloves with a pad affixed to his chest. An assistant would load the weapon and fire it. There would be a deafening explosion. Holtom would catch the flying ball and throw it to the ground. There were rumours that the cannon was all noise and no substance, but no one ever attempted to claim the three thousand francs Holtom offered to anyone duplicating his feat. Perhaps the rumour that the always begloved Cannonball Man had lost two fingers during the early days of his act helped to deter prospective challengers.
One of John Holtom’s few competitors with the cannonball stunt was a Frenchman called Louis Vigneron, known as the Cannonball King. Vigneron was a savate or French kick-boxing expert and was also well known on the strongman circuit for his spectacular but undeniably dangerous stunt of hoisting a cannon onto his shoulders and firing it. He claimed that the gun weighed 180 kilos, but this was almost certainly an exaggeration.
One evening, at the casino at Boulogne-sur-Mer, Vigneron was going through his performance. It was a trick that he had accomplished with no problems at least eight hundred times over the previous few years. As usual, he heaved the cannon on to his right shoulder, lit the fuse and then crouched slightly to minimise the effect of the weapon’s recoil as it exploded. On this occasion the weapon did not fire. Vigneron began to place it back on the ground. As he did so, inadvertently he swivelled the piece round so that it was facing his body. Suddenly it exploded, killing him instantly.
A newspaper editorial of the time deplored the constant demand for increasingly dangerous stunts in the world of entertainment: ‘The fate of this well-known performer is in strict accord with that of the majority of individuals who have habitually accomplished feats which strain the ordinary courses of events to the utmost limits of possibilities.’
The Saxon Trip also tended to be a little accident-prone, although on at least one occasion this was fortified by their habit of going off on beer-drinking binges from time to time. One afternoon, all three of them got drunk in a London club. Staggering out of the establishment they hired a cab to take them back to the music hall for the first house that evening. The cabman was doubtful but allowed himself to be persuaded to allow the three burly Germans into his vehicle.
Once inside, the largest of the three, Arno, had to sit on the knees of his brothers. Undeterred by the cramped conditions, all three of the strongmen started singing ‘Deutschland Über Alles’. At the appropriate times in the refrain they also stamped with their feet on the floor of the cab. The tortured base of the cab splintered and collapsed under the pressure. The three inebriated strongmen refused to leave the vehicle and insisted on walking the cab – still inside – to the theatre, while the bemused driver steered his horses. Soon the partly dismantled carriage was being followed by a large crowd.
The inebriated strongmen reeled into the music hall and continued singing raucously in their dressing rooms while the other acts tried to go through their performances on the stage. When the time came for the top-of-the-bill act to appear, the distracted manager begged the happy Germans to calm down and hustled them on to the stage. Somehow the curtain rose to the usual opening martial music. The three men should have been standing rigidly to attention in a gladiatorial tableau – instead, all three men were swaying like trees in a high wind. Arthur stood with a 100lb kettlebell in his upraised arm, while Oscar (the latest addition to the line-up) sank to the floor and lay soporifically at his feet. Meanwhile, Arno looked on with a meaningless beam on his broad face.
They should have moved smoothly into their opening scene. Instead, Arno dropped the kettlebell, destroying several of the stage boards. Vaguely remembering what should happen next, Arno staggered across the stage to commence a teeth grip. He managed to put the leather protective mouth shield mouth into place and secured the appropriate leather strap around a terrified assistant. He kept revolving as the assistant was propelled round and round in the air. Unfortunately, Arno became dizzy and opened his mouth to gasp for air, releasing his grip on the strap. The assistant, still in a leather cradle, went sailing out over the orchestra pit into the audience, where he remained motionless, groaning. The spectators, unsure whether this was meant to be part of the act, but suspecting otherwise, by now were helpless with laughter.
Next in the running order, Arthur Saxon was scheduled to balance a 100lb kettlebell on top of his head and gracefully stoop to pick up two other kettlebells of a similar weight, one in each hand. In his inebriated state, somehow he succeeded in perching the first weight on his head. As he bent to grasp the others the first weight slipped and fell into the orchestra, shattering the piano. The members of the orchestra fled. Arno watched the players disappear and shouted indignantly, ‘Where’s the band? We can’t perform without music!’
Operating on the principle that the show must go on, Arthur then picked up a heavy barbell but lost control of it and dropped the weight, wrecking another section of the stage. A courageous stage manager appeared and begged the three strongmen to abandon their performance. It was too late; the Germans were now beginning to feel quite comfortable. After a brief discussion, they decided to move on to Arthur’s big set piece. This consisted of his lying on his back and supporting a number of men and weights on his hands and feet. After much swaying and manoeuvring, the other two managed to place a 267lb barbell across the prone Arthur’s legs and attach a 100lb kettlebell to each raised foot. After a great deal of vocal persuasion and many appeals to the innate courage of true-born Englishmen in the audience, six volunteers were finally persuaded to sit astride a barbell held aloft at arm’s length by the doughty Arthur. He promptly lost control and dropped the complete load. What was left of the stage was now littered with sprawling bodies and damaged equipment. Finally the curtain was brought down.
As it happened, the resultant publicity did the Saxon Trio nothing but good. The three Germans embarked upon a lengthy, successful and relatively sober provincial tour of an act entitled ‘Strong Men of Today’.
Some time later, the Saxons were involved in another mishap. This one was much more serious than their previous drunken escapade and brought about a temporary halt to their career. Two of them, Arthur and Kurt, were concluding their act by lying on their backs under a large trestle table, extending their legs and supporting the wooden structure as it lay across their feet. A motor car carrying several passengers was then driven along the length of the table. They called the stunt ‘Brookland on Four Legs’, after the famous motor racing venue.
The anatomical principle behind this stunt was based on the fact that the strong bones of their legs would support the table, not the muscles of their thighs and calves. However, the positions they adopted meant that their legs could not be extended fully and had to be reinforced by the two strongmen clasping their knees with their hands.
This night their efforts were not enough to support the weight of the car. Their legs were not braced sufficiently firmly and the table collapsed, bringing down the car with it and injuring both men badly.
Another major casualty among the leading strongmen was Bobby Pandour, the stage name of Wladyslaw Kurcharczyk, a Polish gymnast who arrived in London at the turn of the century to tour the halls with his brother Ludwig in an acrobatic horizontal bar- and hand-balancing act. Pandour was relatively light but very muscular. He aroused the suspicions of fellow strongmen by claiming never to train with heavy weights. He said that his main forms of exercising consisted of constantly flexing and tensing his muscles and running up two flights of stairs carrying his brother.
Another cause of jealousy among the strongmen was the fact that the handsome Pandour was very popular with women. Visitors to Pandour’s dressing room before a performance reported that he was usually surrounded by a bevy of nubile admirers. In 1907, he and Ludwig went on a successful vaudeville tour of the USA. He took advantage of his superb physique by adding a posing routine to the act. The curtain rose to reveal Bobby Pandour balancing precariously on a narrow Roman column about 10ft above the ground. While a bright spotlight shone down on him, Pan
dour would go through his muscle-flexing act. One night, while appearing at a Cincinnati hall he lost his balance and fell to the ground. Pandour was so badly injured that he was never able to perform again.
In most cases, however, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century and at the start of the twentieth, a dexterous strongman with a modicum of common sense, a good stage presence and a ready wit to deal with mistakes and hecklers, could usually rely on himself to sail through most of a well-rehearsed performance with a minimum of effort and few repercussions from disgruntled patrons or faulty equipment.
Unfortunately, matters became a little more borderline when it came to issuing and accepting challenges. A good, robust confrontation from the audience was a staple part of a performance and all the top-of-the-bill strongmen were expected to include one in their routines, with any challenges heavily advertised outside the theatres.
At a certain point during a performance by any of the well-known strength athletes the strongman would usually perform a particularly impressive feat of strength. He would then challenge any man in the audience to duplicate the lift or stunt for a cash prize. As a rule there would be no shortage of local amateur would-be strongmen eager to climb upon to the stage and compete for such a prize.
