The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  Aston turned his mind to embarking upon a paid career when he started visiting touring strongman displays at music halls in neighbouring cities. As a challenger from the audience, he soon developed a reputation among the professionals as a youth to be avoided, especially after he succeeded in shouldering the challenge flour sack presented by Arthur Saxon.

  For a time he toured the smaller halls in a strongman act with his brother, but then settled down in Westmoreland for a time, earning a steady living giving weightlifting exhibitions at summer country shows. During this time he was noticed and commended by such famous strongmen as Hackenschmidt the wrestler and Louis Uni. It was not long before Aston started receiving invitations to join established troupes. After some thought, he started touring with a mixed group of wrestlers and strongmen headed by Madrali, the Terrible Turk. Perhaps foolishly, Aston allowed himself to be persuaded to become involved with the grappling side of the displays, despite the fact that there was some animosity between the wrestlers and the weightlifters. One night his kneecap was smashed in a bout. He still managed to throw his opponent into the orchestra pit, but was put out of action for some time.

  In 1911, two years after he had turned professional – and still irked by the challenge weight debacle – Aston challenged Thomas Inch for the title of Britain’s strongest man. It was a sign of Sandow’s preeminence among his peers that even the brash Inch did not dare to claim that the contest was for the Prussian’s title of the world’s strongest man.

  A few years before, Inch had virtually awarded himself the national strongman championship, but he was so strong and famous that few of his rivals sought to dispute his claim. Inch had never made any attempt to conceal the extent of his success in all realms of the physical culture world and a number of his peers were happy to back Aston when he challenged Inch for his championship. As Aston weighed a few pounds over eleven stone to the Scarborough Hercules’ fourteen stone plus, the bigger man was a strong favourite to win.

  The contest was held at the grandiosely named International School of Physical Culture in the Tottenham Court Road in June. At the end of a series of wins, Aston pulled off a surprise by taking Inch’s title from him with a total weight lifted of 1,215lbs to Inch’s 1,167lbs. Inch was not a good loser. On subsequent occasions he put up heavier totals than the one accomplished by Aston and each time claimed that he had regained his championship in absentia, but this did not deter Edward Aston from billing himself as Britain’s strongest man for the next twenty years.

  Throughout his long career Aston maintained his popularity with audiences and his peers, if not with Thomas Inch, because he always seemed to maintain a sense of proportion. Once, when he had been shown round a steelworks in Barrow on a publicity jaunt, he watched the labourers pushing wheelbarrows loaded with iron ore up steep inclines, and emerged from the factory commenting that he had no business calling himself the strongest man in the country, as he could never do what the steelworkers accomplished day in and day out.

  Those bodybuilders who had patented even the most bizarre of their own particular devices still kept a very strict eye on any efforts by rivals to copy them. Even the mighty Eugen Sandow, who generally kept away from less successful strongmen, swooped hungrily on a competitor when he sued a Hungarian hairdresser called Joseph Szalay who ran a gymnasium in the basement of his London business premises. Sandow accused Szalay of copying Sandow’s Grip Barbell with his own smaller hand gripper. The court found in Sandow’s favour and the court judgment cost ‘Professor’ Szalay a great deal of money. In a rare example of solidarity, a number of strongmen who did not like the way in which Sandow hounded other strength athletes banded together to give a benefit performance for the stricken Hungarian in Camberwell in 1912. Edward Aston and a number of others turned out for the occasion, and all the ticket proceeds were given to the 51-year-old Szalay.

  Throughout his career, there was one rival strongman Sandow would never contemplate meeting in competition: the American Andrew Hall. Hall’s speciality lay in having rocks broken with a sledgehammer on top of his head. For this purpose he wore a close-fitting metal helmet with a flat surface. The boulders were placed on top of the helmet, while an assistant hammered away at them enthusiastically. Optimistically Hall suggested Sandow meet him in a six-event match. Sandow could select any three weightlifting feats for their challenge, while Hall would then ask the Prussian to stand quietly while three stones were smashed on top of his head. Sandow ignored the suggestion and continued to say no.

  Despite his selective attitude to challengers and their challenges, Eugen Sandow soon redeemed himself in the eyes of the public – and his fellow strongmen – if such rehabilitation was needed. Only a month after the petulant claims and counter-claims at the Birmingham Assizes, in September 1901 Sandow organised the finals of his ‘Great Competition’ at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was a nationwide bodybuilding competition and had been three years in the making. The contest had been designed to find the best built of all Sandow’s physical culture pupils in the United Kingdom, ‘to afford encouragement to those who are anxious to perfect their physiques’. Sandow’s gymnasia, with specially selected instructors, were now in operation in most major British cities and were well attended. Writing in the Harmsworth Magazine in 1898, one pupil described his initiation:

  I imagined I should be passed into the gymnasium to swing a dumb-bell for an hour or so, and be invited to drop in again when I was next that way. I was mistaken. Had my object been to enlist in Her Majesty’s forces, the examinations and tests I was subjected to could not have been more extensive or peculiar. I was sounded, measured, weighed, pounded and questioned, the results being solemnly entered into a big ledger, as though it might all be used as evidence against me should the need ever arise.

  Sandow first mooted the competition in the opening issue of a new magazine he issued in 1898. It was called Physical Culture, although the title was soon changed to Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, in order to cash in on its founder’s growing fame. In its pages Sandow announced that a series of provincial contests would culminate in a great final, to be held in the capital. There would be a total of a thousand guineas in prize money, with £500 and a gold statuette going to the eventual winner.

  The final was held on Saturday 14 September. Although the tournament was held at the height of the Boer War and on the same day as the American President William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the hall was packed to its capacity of 15,000 people, with hundreds turned away. It was announced that all proceeds were to be donated to the Mansion House Transvaal War Relief Fund.

  At eight o’clock in the evening the crowd rose to its feet as the band of the Irish Guards played Chopin’s funeral march as a tribute to the dead President. Then, the house lights went out, twenty spotlights were switched on, and fifty boys from the Watford Orphan Asylum marched on. They were followed by displays of wrestling, gymnastics and fencing. Then the sixty finalists from all over the country marched on in leopard skins and tights, and lined up to be assessed.

  The judges of the competition were the sculptor Sir Charles Lawes and the author Dr Arthur Conan Doyle. Sandow was on hand to act as a referee in case of differences of opinion. Slowly the judges walked up and down the lines of muscular men and picked a dozen finalists. There was then an intermission.

  When the curtain rose after the break, Sandow went through a curtailed form of his act, posing, lifting weights and tearing packs of cards in half. He was applauded appreciatively. Next, the twelve finalists came on for the final judging section. Each one stood on a pedestal in turn, giving an exhibition of muscle control for the judges. Finally the winner was announced. He was William L. Murray of Nottingham. Billy Murray was quite a well-known sportsman in the Midlands, having played football as a full-back for Notts County.

  The Great Competition secured enough publicity to satisfy even Sandow. Billy Murray promptly turned professional, touring the co
untry billed as ‘the most perfectly developed athlete of modern times’. With his supporting company he presented a simulated Roman gladiatorial display, with marching, weightlifting, mock fights and posing displays, ending with the whole company presenting a spectacular tableau.

  The only sour note to the whole Great Competition was that the so-called solid gold statuette of Sandow presented to the winner turned out to be made of bronze with a layer of gold plating.

  Even at the height of his career, however, not everyone was a fan of Sandow and his efforts to improve the physiques of the British nation. The playwright George Bernard Shaw, having attended some of the overdeveloped strongman’s displays, put the case for all the wimps and weaklings of the world:

  Whenever I go to hear him lecture he is always saying, ‘Why don’t you get to be like me? and I look at him and I see a magnificent man, so muscular that he can hardly walk. Well, I want to walk!

  Such attacks, no matter how famous and waspish the man launching them, were mere pinpricks to Sandow by this stage. With his magazine, postal courses, bodybuilding equipment, other commercial offerings and sold-out stage shows, the Prussian was indisputably pre-eminent among bodybuilders and strongmen in Great Britain. Others, however, were acquitting themselves well enough in the scramble for crumbs from the Prussian’s table.

  6

  SEX, ADVENTURE AND ROMANCE

  Like many strongmen, including old adversary Charles Sampson, Eugen Sandow spent some time in the USA. In 1893, he was recruited by an American impresario called Henry S. Abbey of the firm Abbey, Schoeffel and Gru, and appeared as a supporting act in a show called ‘Adonis’ at the Casino Theatre in New York. He performed his usual act of posing and allowing horses to run over a reinforced plank balanced across his chest. At first, things did not go too well for the strongman. The show was a dreary one and the strongman’s act was wedged in between two dull and uninspiring sketches. To make matters worse, a heatwave kept the New York audiences away. Sandow also incurred the jealousy of his leading man, an actor called Henry E. Dixey, who was unfortunate enough to appear semi-nude onstage immediately before Sandow’s entrance. The New York World of 18 June 1893, made much of this fact:

  New York has come to look upon Dixey as a fairly well-made young man. When New York has seen Sandow after Dixie, however, New York will realize what a wretched, scrawny creature the well-built man is compared with a perfect man.

  Then, as happened so often in Sandow’s life, he experienced a stroke of luck. In this case it was to transform his future and lead to the second great physical culture renaissance in North America.

  The good fortune came in the shape of Florenz ‘Flo’ Ziegfeld, a young entrepreneur, who hitched his wagon to the strongman’s star and as a result saw his own career take off. He was born in Chicago in 1867, the son of the founder of the elite Chicago Musical College, a private establishment. Flo Ziegfeld did not share his father’s lofty tastes and caused trouble at an early age when he started charging his friends to see what he swore were invisible fish in a bowl of water. A born and highly accomplished liar, he was sent off to a Wyoming cattle ranch by his parents for stretching the truth once too often. He returned chastened to help his father at the college, but was much more interested in ballroom dancing and going to shows than in further refining the musical taste of his father’s pupils.

  At an early age, he was able to come to his father’s assistance in an unusual manner. Ziegfeld senior, revealing an unexpectedly skittish side to his nature, had opened a Chicago nightclub called the Trocadero, hoping to cash in on the crowds attending the city’s recently opened World Fair. The Columbian Exhibition was designed to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The show received its official opening ceremony in 1892, but it was a year later before the first paying customers were allowed in. From this unpromising start the exposition gathered strength and was the largest display of its kind so far witnessed, covering six hundred acres of land, lasting for six months and welcoming over twenty-seven million visitors. The emphasis throughout was on exoticism. Forty-six different countries were represented by stands or displays, and there were hundreds of unofficial sideshows, all lit by millions of Thomas Edison’s new electric light bulbs, powered by generators, turning night into garish, noisy day

  The exposition was crammed with great performers, to such an extent that it came to be defined by the number of talented acts that were denied permission to exhibit their wares on the sprawling site. Young Scott Joplin, soon to be the ragtime king, had to be content with fronting his first band at a saloon (some said brothel) outside its boundaries. The great Buffalo Bill Cody was not allowed to bring his Congress of Rough Riders within the walls. Acting on the principle that if you can’t join them, beat them, he set up his tents on the fringes of the fair and made a fortune.

  Despite the crowds, Mr Ziegfeld senior soon realised that he was out of his depth even in such shallow waters of popular entertainment and hastily handed over the management of his failing club to Flo, begging him to get it running at a profit again. His son responded to the challenge with alacrity. Touring Europe, he booked up acts and transported them back to Chicago. Even with these new acts, he soon decided that his club needed a charismatic headliner to draw in the crowds, preferably one who would work cheaply.

  One night, the young impresario caught Sandow’s poorly attended act in New York. Ziegfeld was not particularly impressed with the strongman’s weightlifting displays, but he noticed that as soon as Eugen Sandow went into his muscle-flexing display, the women in the audience were riveted. Never mind the chain breaking and card tearing; here was the perfect male body to be exploited.

  Acting at once, the showman signed Sandow and bought his contract from the promoter who had imported him into the USA. Disillusioned with his artiste’s lack of success, Henry S. Abbey let him go willingly. Ziegfeld could not afford the salary demanded by the Prussian, so he offered him 10 per cent of all ticket sales, assuring the other man that this sum would far exceed any steady wage that Sandow might have in mind. He was soon proved to be right.

  Before Sandow could open at the Trocadero, Flo Ziegfeld embarked upon a whirlwind publicity campaign to make his charge famous at the Columbian Exhibition. Billstickers pasted hundreds of posters of a semi-nude Sandow on all available walls. As well as newspaper interviews, Sandow casually performed feats of strength in public places to draw attention to both himself and his act.

  Eugen Sandow made his debut at the Chicago Trocadero on 1 August 1893. Ziegfeld’s publicity blitz had worked; the house was packed. The show began at eight o’clock in the evening and meals and drinks were served throughout each performance. Flo Ziegfeld’s talent-spotting tours were reflected in the eclectic form of the performances on offer. The showman was firmly of the opinion that any popular show should contain sex, adventure and romance. All three ingredients were presented on the stage of the Trocadero during the run of Eugen Sandow’s show.

  An acrobat called Astarte performed aerial revolutions, to be followed by Gustave Marschner, ‘the champion trick cyclist of the world’, who was said to be the possessor of a medal valued at £150, won at the Leipzig world championships in the previous year. He claimed to have a repertoire of two hundred cycling tricks. Next came a musical interlude, with Russian dances performed by the Ivanoff Imperial Troupe. There was a gymnastics display from Marko and Dunham, then, at 10.45 p.m., Eugen Sandow, the top-of-the-bill act appeared and went through his routines for an hour. At Ziegfeld’s request he opened with what was to prove the highlight of his performance – the posing routine. He displayed himself in a large upright cabinet lined with black velvet, with spotlights from above emphasising his musculature. His body hair was shaved and he was dusted with white powder, to provide the effect of a living marble Greek statue. An orchestra conducted by Sandow’s friend and companion Martinus Sieveking provided music specially composed by the conductor as Sandow posed in the
form of famous classical statues. He constantly flexed and relaxed his well-defined muscles and even made them dance in time to the musical accompaniment. At the end, Eugen Sandow hurried off the stage to tumultuous applause to change for the strongman section of his act, which followed at once. This had not varied much since his British music-hall tours of the last three years, except that he now also opened a safe with his teeth and claimed that the weights he was tossing about weighed in excess of 300lbs. To justify this claim, at the climax of his act the Prussian hoisted an odd-looking barbell overhead. Instead of the usual orbs, there was an enclosed wicker basket at either end. When he lowered the contraption to the stage the baskets were opened to reveal a man crouching inside each one.

  The first night was a great success, but Flo did not ease up on his publicity blitz. While constantly fine-tuning the strongman’s act, Ziegfeld also sold thousands of photographs of Sandow wearing only a fig leaf – with Sandow’s full approval and cooperation. He also initiated a newspaper discussion as to how the fig leaf might have been kept in place. The general consensus of opinion was that either it was suspended from a wire around Sandow’s waist that later had been airbrushed out of the photographs, or that it had been pasted on.

  For weeks Ziegfeld and Sandow existed in a state of permanent mutual delight at the way in which events were unfolding. At last the inventive 25-year-old Ziegfeld had a suitable and amenable subject for all the publicity stunts he had been dreaming of for so long. Sandow, for his part, realised that in the flamboyant American he had a showman of genius to guide him and transport his performances to the highest levels.