The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  The case and its antecedents took the Prussian on a journey into the past, all the way back to the night when he had launched his career by challenging and defeating Sampson at the Imperial Theatre in London for the title of the strongest man in the world.

  Sarah White, or Lurline as she was better known, had been the woman sitting in the theatre. It was claimed that she had substituted the genuine arm bracelets for doctored ones when they were passed among the audience. She and Sandow had once been friends but were now bitterly opposed and the cause of the dispute was money. Lurline claimed that the strongman was in her debt financially. In the original court deposition, the Water Queen, as she was sometimes billed, claimed that a down-and-out Sandow had borrowed the sum of £11 from her in Brussels when he had been appearing there with his acrobatic act with Françoise. Subsequently, she asserted, the strongman had left the city without repaying the money.

  Some time later, when Sandow was waiting in London to challenge Sampson, he had approached Lurline again. She had been on a music hall tour of England. On this occasion, claimed the Water Queen, Sandow had visited her in the capital on several occasions and had borrowed another £400 from her. She had also fitted the poverty-stricken Prussian out with some new clothes.

  When Sandow had achieved success in vaudeville in the USA, Lurline had written to him, asking for repayment of the debt. The strongman had ignored her. Lurline had written again, calling Sandow a blackguard. Eventually she had caught up with him outside the Casino Theatre in New York. There had been a sharp exchange of words, culminating in Lurline raising a riding crop she had been carrying. Sandow said that if she attempted to strike him he would seize her hand and crush it. The Water Queen then hit him across the face several times with the crop, before the pair had to be separated by onlookers.

  All this and more came out in court. At first, Sandow denied that he owed his accuser anything. Then he heard that Louis Atilla, his former stage partner and trainer, was crossing the Atlantic to give evidence on behalf of Lurline. Sandow began to have second thoughts but, as it happened, Atilla arrived too late to appear in the witness box. The case was postponed and then abandoned when Sandow paid Lurline a sum of money in an out of court settlement.

  It was a sour note on which to end what had been a triumphant three years. Sandow quietly left for London, leaving behind quite a legacy in the USA. He had achieved personal fame and fortune. He had given the national physical culture movement a considerable fillip. He had set thousands of men and quite a few women on the path to improved health and strength. He had taken the Grecian ideal of physical perfection out of museums and archaeological digs and on to the accessible music hall and vaudeville stages and into people’s homes.

  He also left behind him the seed corn for a revival of the professional strongman cult in the USA. His writings and stage displays encouraged others to develop their bodies. He also inspired entrepreneurs who went on to build on his work. Louis Atilla settled in New York, slowly renewed his previous friendship with Sandow and developed a highly successful gymnasium catering to the needs of athletes, businessmen and politicians. The Harvard-educated Al Treloar, who had once been an assistant working in the background of Sandow’s stage act, won the first major American physique contest at Madison Square Garden in January 1904, and used it as a springboard to a lucrative stage career and then a long term as an influential physical culture coach. Having witnessed Sandow’s shows several times in Chicago, Bernard Macfadden took himself from practically slave labour to become a great guru of popular physical excellence in the USA, publishing a string of magazines and books on the subject, including the influential magazine Physical Culture (not to be mistaken with Sandow’s own Physical Culture). The newly named Bernarr (a name more resembling the macho roar of a lion) built a bodybuilding empire and became a wealthy if controversial strength and health guru. Inspired by Sandow’s fame in Europe, Richard K. Fox, editor of the Police Gazette, organised the first national strongman contest in the USA.

  Before this there had been a few strongmen touring the vaudeville halls in the USA and writing about the advantages of exercise before Eugen Sandow ever entered the country. The Prussian’s publicity efforts were to elevate them even further. One of these strongmen was Adrian P. Schmidt, a tiny but fiercely muscled Frenchman domiciled in the USA. He had made his reputation on the halls with demonstrations of the strength of his fingers. Schmidt was able to hook his index digit around a chain above his head and by sheer controlled power haul himself up steadily until he was level with the chain. In 1901 he wrote the bestselling Illustrated Hints for Health and Strength for Busy People.

  Another bodybuilder whose severe visage glowered down from hundreds of American newspaper advertisements at the beginning of the twentieth century was ‘Professor’ Anthony Barker. He had toured the halls billed as the Herculean Comedian with a slapstick strongman duo but had retired from this to found his postal course, under the slogan ‘Why Not Be a Perfect Man?’ He also published a bodybuilding book a year before the arrival of Sandow, under the title of Physical Culture Simplified.

  Perhaps inadvertently Schmidt and Barker had stumbled across a vein that was about to be exploited widely on the other side of the Atlantic: the profitable sharing of their knowledge with the man in the street.

  7

  ELABORATE NONSENSE

  When Eugen Sandow returned from the USA to found his physical culture empire he discovered that many of the professional strongmen that he had left behind him had similar ideas, if on a smaller scale. The strongmen had no idea how long their fame and drawing power would last, so they did their best to cash in on the moment. They sold signed photographs at the stage doors after their shows, some of which depicted them nude in ‘artistic’ poses and had a ready sale among the gay community. They wrote fanciful autobiographies, or had them written for them. Above all, they offered to pass on their secrets of strength to others. Newspapers were filled with advertisements for these mainly spurious bodybuilding courses designed for little men who desired to become big. There was an eager uptake of such printed sheets by members of the public.

  There were reasons for such a large potential market. Most men of the time were physically weak and had poor diets. By the time of the Boer War, England was primarily a nation of town-dwellers. Army recruiting figures for the period, released in 1903, described the condition of those would-be volunteers who had passed a preliminary test and had been forwarded for further physical checks. Over six hundred thousand men were processed through to this second stage. Of this total more than two hundred thousand were rejected as being physically inadequate. Among the men accepted and recruited, another five thousand could not cope with the training. After two years in the ranks another fourteen thousand had been medically discharged.

  Yet there were encouraging signs and stirrings of interest in physical development, especially among the middle classes. Following upon the example of Hippolyte Triat, a retired music hall strongman who opened a gymnasium in Paris in 1847 and charged a fee for membership, others began to open gymnasiums in the larger cities of Europe. Organised sport, with its requirement of physical fitness, started to encourage men and sometimes women to exercise. The Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race became established in 1856 and athletics clubs began to spread. The Matterhorn was scaled in 1854, encouraging mountaineering as a hobby for those who could afford it. By 1863, the first professional football clubs had been formed and matches were being well attended.

  Increasingly there was the example of the Greek Ideal. In the eighteenth century, two Englishmen called James Stuart and Nicholas Revatt spent two years studying architecture and art in Greece. In 1762, they published The Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece, showing the muscular symmetry favoured by ancient Greek sculptors. This started an interest in the artistic depiction of the well-developed gods, as men began to compare their own bodies with those of the marble deities. At the beginning of the next century, Lord Elgin brought the E
lgin Marbles to the British Museum, bribing the Ottoman custodians to release some of the statues of the Parthenon in Athens. This helped spread the philosophy of the Greeks, who believed that the human body could reflect the ideal beauty of the gods, symmetrical in form and heavily muscled. Artists and sculptors of the Renaissance took this up in their idealised depictions of the human form. By the nineteenth century, photographs of heavily muscled models could also be produced.

  The advent of the Young Men’s Christian Association also helped in the promotion of health and strength. In 1841, Sir George Williams created the movement in London and by 1854 there were almost four hundred of these institutions in different countries. Originally intended ‘for the improving of the spiritual condition of young men engaged in the drapery and other trades’, the aims of the movement soon widened. Sir George emphasised the importance of using these institutions for improving the health and strength of their members, saying at an 1864 conference, ‘We must add physical recreation to all YMCAs.’

  These factors, allied to the performances of Sandow and his peers on music hall and vaudeville stages, led to thousands of would-be athletes toiling away to the point of exhaustion in the privacy of their homes over barbells, dumbbells, chest expanders, the long-handled wooden swing implements known as Indian clubs, and many other esoteric forms of apparatus in order to develop the body beautiful. Even when they did not succeed, still they enhanced the fame and bank balances of those supplying their courses and apparatus.

  Most of these publications were catchpenny items designed to part the credulous from their money. Despite the flamboyant public claims for the efficacy of their exercise routines and their insistence that once they themselves had been mere pigeon-chested weaklings, most professional strongmen were aware that the most effective way to develop an outstanding physique was to have been born robust, preferably of big parents, to have developed an above-average bodyweight and mass naturally, and have nurtured it by hard manual work from an early age. A large number of these potential strength athletes were not, however, particularly tall; many of them were only of average height or below. The more fortunate among them would have developed a local reputation for their crude feats of strength in the workplace at an early age and have attracted the attention of an experienced and knowledgeable trainer at a well-run gymnasium. They would have then embarked upon a long-term system of progressive training with heavy weights, often lasting for years, making sure to increase the weight of the barbells and dumbbells being used at regular intervals. At the end of this process of progressive weight training, a few aspirants would emerge with enough strength and savvy to be taken under the wing of an agent or manager and then embark upon careers in travelling circuses and on the music halls and vaudeville theatres.

  Throughout their careers, when they were not travelling, most professional strongmen spent hours every day improving their physiques and increasing their strength. The Russian Pyotr Kryloff, (the King of Kettlebells), a former sailor, who performed regularly on the halls until he was sixty, described a typical day’s training, undertaken when he was at the peak of his music hall career in an edition of Hercules magazine in 1914.

  After waking up, I breathe deep fresh air for 10 minutes, then I practise with rubber bands (chest expanders). I pull them in front of me, overhead, from the back, with each arm, etc. Then I do push-ups on palms or fingers for no more than 100 reps. I run for 12–18 minutes. Jump like a frog: short jumps on toes with deep squat. I take a hot or cold shower. In half an hour I have breakfast: eggs, 2 cups of milk and 1 cup of liquid very sweet tea. I go for a walk. I have dinner at 5 p.m. After 2 hours I train with heavy kettlebells: clean and press or clean and jerk (on alternating days) a 5-pound barbell (80 kg) standing and lying for 50 times (5 sets of 10 reps). Then I press two 32-kg kettlebells for 50 times (5 sets of 10 reps). I squat with 5-pound barbell for 100 times. Then I take stairs with a heavy man on my back. To finish my training I exercise with 20 pounds (8 kg) dumbbells, take them both in one hand when training biceps. After training I take a shower and go for a walk.

  Edward Aston, the British physical culturist, was equally straight-forward about the amount of effort needed to build up an impressive physique. In his instructional book Modern Weightlifting and How to Gain Strength, he described his own training regime, especially before a challenge contest. He would spend the morning walking, have a good lunch and then engage in weightlifting activities throughout the afternoon. After another stroll in the evening he would go to bed early.

  Needless to say, the prospect of such arduous and daunting full-time daily routines would not have attracted the attention and shillings of most novice physical culturists. They wanted to believe that they could develop bulging biceps and swelling chests without having to spend too much time on the process, nor having to buy expensive and hard-to-store cumbersome barbells and dumbbells, the stock-in-trade of genuine professional strongmen.

  Those postal courses which did advocate the use of weights usually concentrated on exercises consisting of repetitions with light weights, whereas what was needed for a professional strongman’s musculature were regular training sessions involving lifting progressively heavier weights.

  The providers of postal courses were only too willing to reinforce their misconceptions. Most of the operatives of the courses were hack journalists or freelance writers. The majority of the strongmen themselves paid little attention to the flimsy duplicated pages being issued in their names, except to take a cut of the profits. Some of them later admitted to having absolutely no idea what strange theories of physical awareness were being propagated under their name. The main selling points of the brochures issued by their writers were to keep the costs down and make the exercises seem easy. Accordingly they were delighted to assure would-be clients that massive bodies could be developed without the assistance of any apparatus, or if special equipment was needed it would be unobtrusive and easy to use.

  One such huckster, Otto Arco, (‘Official Title Holder: The World’s Best Developed Man’) who at 5ft 2in. in height and 138lbs in weight must surely have been one of the smallest of all the muscle men, was at pains in his book How to Acquire Super-Strength to inform potential purchasers that he eschewed the use of barbells and dumbbells in his pupils’ routines. ‘Rest assured I will not try to force the use of them on to you.’ However, Arco (born Nowasielsky) must have appreciated that punters would hesitate to pay the required thirty shillings for a haphazard set of freestanding exercises like push-ups and deep-knee bends and the rest. He assured his pupils that he was in the process of developing a piece of apparatus with which to supplement his course ‘which is absolutely unique in the line of exercising apparatus. Something which enables anyone to master the basic feats – the first principles – of tumbling and hand balancing.’

  A later strongman, J. C. Tolson (Apollon: ‘In All the Wide World No Course Like This’), from Dewsbury, claimed hopefully that ‘My system is beyond ordinary Physical Culture, it is really the Science of Living.’ Tolson, who had copied his stage name from that of the original French Apollon, too, pushed the advantages of his specially designed muscle-building contrivances in his mail-order advertising pamphlet ‘Strength Secrets by the Mighty Apollon’: ‘The appliance I supply with my course conserves energy – it’s the Finest Bodybuilding Appliance of All Time. It can easily be fitted into the pocket and lasts for EVER.’

  In fact, the Apollon apparatus consisted of a number of small steel rods of varying lengths, thickness and pliability. Pupils were requested to attempt to bend these bars, developing the muscles and strength of their arms in the process. Tolson did indeed possess great natural strength in his upper body. He had broken into show business by going up on to the stage when a professional strongman called Samson (no relation to C. A. Sampson) had challenged any member of the audience to bend an iron bar. Tolson had done so and won a cash prize. Reckoning that this was easier than work, the Dewsbury man had followed Samson from town to town, win
ning his challenge prize at each hall in which the professional appeared. Eventually Samson had dropped the challenge from his act, leaving Tolson to turn professional. His postal course and the accompanying lumps of metal lasted much longer than his stage career.

  Alfred Danks, called the great unknown bodybuilder because he seldom appeared in public and never courted personal publicity, devoted a long life to promoting a physical development course based upon the use of the chest expander under the headline of ‘The Danks System Can Transform Physical Wrecks Into Robust Individuals’. An expander consisted of two grips joined by a number of steel or rubber springs, which could be contracted or expanded by exerting pressure on them. Danks did not invent the contraption but he specialised in its development to such an extent that at its peak he claimed that his course and the accompanying equipment were selling at the rate of a thousand a month. The expanders fetched between four shillings and six shillings each. Danks’s tariff for his instructional manuals varied according to the degree of skill and strength possessed by each student enrolling:

  Average man: 8 shillings

  Advanced Physical Culturist: 12 shillings

  Strong Man: 21 shillings

  Like many other similar course providers, Danks also offered a supplement to his course, in this case a bottle of the Danks rubbing liniment for two shillings and sixpence.

  Other strongmen were fortunate enough to be sponsored by established food and drink manufacturers. Almost inevitably Eugen Sandow led the way. After he had expanded his original act of balancing horses on a plank across his chest to his even more spectacular stunt of appearing to carry a horse across the stage, his ever-present business acumen kicked in. For a pecuniary consideration he allowed Murphy’s, a major Irish brewing firm to use photographs of him carrying the horse in an advertising campaign to publicise their strong stout. Other strongmen were quick to emulate him. Before long Edward Aston was writing: