The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  One preparation which I can conscientiously recommend is that known as ‘Bovril’. It is a fact that most leading athletes recommend ‘Bovril’ and nothing can be better either before or immediately after practice than a cup of hot ‘Bovril’. It prevents and dispels fatigue.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, club swinger Tom Burrows had secured a contract to advertise the tonic drink Phosferine. Everywhere he appeared, advertisements for the tonic, accompanied by photographs of the strongman swinging a pair of clubs, would appear. This was the case with the Singapore Straits Times of 21 October 1907, in which he attributed his recent recovery of form to the drink:

  I chiefly attribute this recent improvement to the wonderful beneficial effect which Phosferine has already exerted, both before and after any one of my feats. I must confess that there were times when I should certainly have broken down but for a few timely doses of Phosferine.

  Arthur Saxon ‘after years of experience of diet in general and Hovis in particular’, recommended the inclusion of the brown bread in any athlete’s diet, while the Scottish strongmen Donald Dinnie and Alec Munro for many years advertised the drink Irn Bru. Not to be outdone, Thomas Inch, the Scarborough Hercules, recommended both ‘the valuable properties of Hovis’ and Bovril, ‘the athletes’ stand-by’.

  Most of the apparatus and supplements offered by strongmen and their agents were harmless enough, if not particularly effective, but the implement offered by William Bankier (The Scottish Hercules) would probably have attracted the censure of a modern health-and-safety representative:

  I have a great faith in electricity for keeping the muscles in condition, especially after any hard work. I have invented what I call ‘a muscle developer’ which is useful to anyone who really wishes to go for the sole subject of building up muscle.

  Bankier’s muscle developer was in reality a dumbbell containing electric batteries. These were activated when the user exerted a certain amount of pressure and gave the lifter a mild electric shock, or, as Bankier put it, ‘a stimulation’.

  As an adjunct to his stage performances, the ubiquitous C. A. Sampson did his best to plug what he called ‘massage rings’ as an aid to the development of the muscles of the upper arm. He claimed to have come up with the idea after being wounded while serving in the Franco-Prussian War, although he would only have been eleven years old when it started and a year older at the conclusion of hostilities in 1871. According to this particular old soldier’s account, he had been lying in pain on his bed in a hospital ward when he had had occasion to hoist himself into a sitting position by pulling on two steel rings suspended from ropes dangling from the ceiling. Idly he had slipped his wrist through one of the rings and pulled it up over his biceps. The rubbing of the ring against his injured arm had an amazing effect upon the development of his semi-paralysed limb. As a result, the future strongman had included this system of massage into his training system and kindly shared the knowledge for a fee to anyone attending his exhibitions of strength.

  Later, the always-industrious Sampson started advertising his ‘Roman Column’ apparatus. This was a vertical board on to which the exerciser was strapped and stabilised by wires. Basically the exerciser carried out normal exercises but while dangling from an upside-down position.

  Launceston Elliot, the former Olympian, advocated the use of his spring grip apparatus, two bars separated by a spring which were squeezed in the hand to exert pressure.

  The Contractem

  An Anatomical, Pneumatic, Weightless Dumbell

  Can be carried in the pocket whilst travelling

  As used by Launceston Elliot,

  World’s Amateur Weightlifter

  British Amateur Weightlifter

  No Weight?

  Why????

  Because resistance equals the weight required and is always in

  harmony with strength

  3s.6d medium order 4 shillings large

  With chart of exercises

  The Anatomical Contractem Hand Grip Co. Ltd.

  The Contractem Company was dissolved in 1907, presumably before it could make the fortune of the strongman advertising it.

  It was definitely safer and more profitable to produce postal courses in which little apparatus was used. The trick lay in finding some sort of a hook that would distinguish the lessons from the others in a crowded market. Australian Don Athaldo made his bid for commercial success when he based his Health, Strength and Muscular Power course around a series of aphorisms to be repeated daily by his students. These included such gems as ‘I am now as fearless as anyone, and I fear nobody’.

  Other home fitness courses were based on deep breathing, carrying small rubber balls which had to be squeezed continuously all day, lifting sandbags, wafting in the air a rod with a weight at one end, and extending at arm’s length a wooden pole with a piece of metal dangling from a length of chain. The pole had to be held in both hands at arm’s length and then turned to wind up the lump of metal.

  An optimistic purveyor of a health and strength course was Joe Price of Gloucester, holder of the title of the Champion Blacksmith of England. His muscle-building technique was based on the use of a sledgehammer, which had to be swung in a variety of ways, according to the instructions provided by Price. Whether the sledgehammer was provided or whether the pupil had to find his own implement was not made clear.

  Adrian P. Schmidt, the pioneer of American bodybuilding postal courses advertised what he called his ‘automatic exerciser’. This consisted of a long lever, with a weight attached to one end. The person using the exerciser could select the point at which to hold the bar and lift the weight. The farther away from the weight the point was held, the greater the effort required to lift it.

  Freestanding exercise courses, employing the body’s own resistance, were more popular than those demanding the use of weights. These resistance courses were cheaper and easier to carry out in a confined space. Until the arrival of the much-hyped Dynamic Tension course supplied by the American Charles Atlas from the 1920s, the most popular non-apparatus course was the one advertised by a diminutive German called Max Sick.

  Only 5ft in height, the Continental music hall strongman arrived in Great Britain in 1909 to cash in on the strength craze, which was still flourishing. Sick used weights in his training but was also an advocate of muscle control, developing individual muscles and muscle groups by tensing and contracting them. After years of practising, he reached a stage where he could isolate any one muscle or group and make them appear to dance across his heavily defined body. He linked up with another strongman, Sandow’s one-time apprentice Monte Saldo. Between them they issued the Maxalding bodybuilding course. This consisted of freestanding exercises without apparatus, in which the practitioner adapted the use of his own bodyweight and contraction of individual muscles and groups of muscles in order to develop his musculature.

  A few professional bodybuilders would have nothing to do with issuing courses that promised to reveal hidden methods that would make men out of weaklings. The Scot Donald Dinnie, content enough to advertise Irn Bru, would recommend no fancy training systems. When asked the secret of his success as a strongman and wrestler he replied that it was all due to hard work and oatmeal porridge: ‘I kent nothing about what you call your scientific preparation of athletes. It may be well enough in its way, but I think a good deal of it is elaborate nonsense!’

  8

  LOUIS AND LOUIS

  By the start of the twentieth century, two men stood out as the strongest of the professional music hall and vaudeville stage performers. Unfortunately, one was a dour, shambling, uncommunicative character and the other was so lazy that he could make a sloth look energetic, so neither ever drew the crowds that flocked to see Eugen Sandow’s performances.

  The two men were Louis Uni, who performed as Apollon, and Cyprien-Noé Cyr, who changed his first name to that of Louis because he or his associates thought it would look better on his posters. Both men were born within
a year of each other, Uni in 1862 and Cyr in 1863. Sandow was a few years younger, although he achieved international fame long before the other two.

  Louis Uni was born in Herault in France and grew to be a strong youth who looked older than his years. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home and joined a travelling circus. Before long he was rounded up by the police and returned to his parents. Uni persisted in his efforts to become a professional strongman until finally, and with considerable reluctance, his father put him in the charge of a couple of professional wrestlers, who did their best to harness the burly youth’s strength and turn him into a grappler. However, Uni did not like the rough and tumble of struggling with an opponent on canvas and concentrated on weightlifting, developing his strength and physique still further.

  The plodding strongman did not seek excitement, but out-of-the-ordinary events tended to seek him out. A story he told many times over his long life related to the months he spent in the South of France as an army conscript. One day, the strapping young private was approached by a stranger and asked if he would like to earn a large sum of money for a night’s work. Strapped for cash like most recruits, Uni eagerly agreed. He claimed that the following night he was placed in a cab, blindfolded, and driven for many miles across the countryside. With his eyes still covered, Uni was led inside a house. There the blindfold was removed and Uni found that he was in the bedroom of an elegant, scantily dressed middle-aged woman.

  The woman quickly made it obvious to the young soldier why he had been summoned to the chateau. He spent the night doing his best to respond to the demands of his companion. He was roused before dawn, paid off, blindfolded again and sent back by coach to his army camp.

  When he retold this story over the years that followed, Louis Uni always insisted that he was certain that the lady he had been hired to service so vigorously must have been some childless wife of the owner of the estate, eager to secure an heir for her underperforming husband. Uni, the strongman believed, had been selected for the task because of his outstanding physique. He never attempted to discover the location of the chateau or whether his heroic efforts over the course of the long night had been successful.

  Released from his military service, Louis Uni returned to his strongman routines with travelling circuses. One of these catchpenny institutions went broke in Italy, forcing Uni, who had not been paid off, to walk all the way home. Fortunately there were plenty of other tent shows looking for husky young strength athletes and the Frenchman was soon back in the business. By this time he was happily immersed in this irresponsible, nomadic form of life and even married several times into circus families. His first wife represented a move up the social scale, being a member of a family of lion tamers. His new bride even tried to promote the strongman to the rank of lion handler. Uni enjoyed wearing the gaudy accoutrements of his new trade’s uniform but was extremely apprehensive of the fierce beasts he was supposed to be controlling. In the end he abandoned life with the lions and returned to the comfort and comparative safety of his strongman act. The story issued to outsiders was that Uni’s physique had been so imposing that the cowed lions under his command had refused to perform for him and merely slunk whimpering to the four corners of the cage. Louis Uni’s marriage and his demotion to the lower echelons of circus performers both ended soon afterwards.

  His strongman act, on the other hand, prospered. By the time he was twenty, Uni was beginning to secure a reputation and break weightlifting records. Before long he had remarried and had developed quite a spectacular act. He was invited to appear at the Folies Bergère in Paris, where he used the stage name of Apollon. His act opened on the dramatic outline of a fortress at night, illuminated only by moonlight, and patrolled by the silhouettes of sentries. In front of this stronghold was a door, with heavy iron bars running from the top to the bottom. Suddenly the massive figure of Apollon appeared at the bars in the gloom. He was clad in a cloak, bound by chains and was plainly trying to flee from the castle. He crouched to avoid the sentinels. Suddenly an alarm sounded. Vigorously the sentries started searching the stronghold for an escaped prisoner.

  Desperately Apollon broke the steel bonds about his body and began wrestling with the iron bars of the door. Slowly he pulled them apart and escaped through the aperture, to roars of approbation from the audience. Apollon discarded his cloak, bounded to the front of the stage and went into a posing routine. From this he moved into a weightlifting display involving barbells and dumbbells, juggled with a fifty-kilo block weight, tossing it from hand to hand and over his shoulder, before arching his body and planting his head and shoulders and feet on two chairs, while a piano was lowered with a block and tackle on to a platform supported across his chest and a pianist played a tune on the instrument.

  Apollon then climbed on to a high table and performed a number of balancing acts with heavy weights, while several assistants lay on their backs beneath them. If the strongman were to make a misjudgement or falter with the weights, which he never did, they would crash down on to their heads. He ended his performance by lifting his celebrated Railway Wheels barbell, an enormous pair of train wheels advertised as weighing 36lbs, joined by a thick bar. The strongman had noticed them in a junkyard and included them in his act. Apollon claimed to be able to lift them overhead, but there was no record of his ever doing so. To hoist the contraption to his chest was an impressive enough feat of strength, although there were rumours that for many performances a substitute set of railway wheels, weighing much less than the original ones, were used by the strongman.

  It was always a popular performance and secured for Apollon top-of-the-bill status all over Europe. Only once did it go wrong. After each performance of his opening stunt, in which Apollon pulled apart the iron bars of the fortress door with his bare hands, a blacksmith had to be called in to fix them back into shape. On one occasion the man called in to do this tempered the bars too firmly. Try as he might at first, at that night’s performance Apollon could not move the iron rods. He struggled mightily, while the orchestra vamped and the audience grew restless, while his quick-tempered second wife stamped her foot and hurled insults and fierce exhortations at her husband from the wings.

  Only after a titanic effort did the strongman manage to pry the iron bars aside and slip through them. However, he had exerted so much energy in the process that he was utterly exhausted. Apollon collapsed on to the stage and his act had to be abandoned for the evening.

  Occasionally the strongman overreached himself. A combined music hall and restaurant in Paris soon proved him to be a poor businessman and administrator. His ‘Concerts Apollon’ did not do well, and he was forced to close up.

  He was soon back on the road at the head of a company, presenting a series of sketches set in Ancient Rome, representing gladiatorial displays, exhibitions of strength and even a titillating visit by the victorious warriors to a Roman brothel.

  Uni was always handicapped by his inherent indolence. He had to be roused before he could be persuaded to perform to the limits of his considerable strength. One night in 1892, he was appearing at the Varieties Theatre in Lille when he was tipped off that a rival strongman group, the Rasso Trio, headed by Godfrey Nordman, intended jumping on to the stage to challenge the Frenchman. Determining to give his rivals no quarter, Apollon asked a friend and fellow strongman, Batta, to load up his special thick-handled challenge barbell until it attained a weight of 198lbs. When this had been accomplished, Apollon tested the weight speculatively and declared that it was still not heavy enough. Leaving the stage he ordered Batta to add more weight to the orbs.

  At this stage a wrestler called Paul Pons, who was also appearing on the bill, mischievously suggested that they give Apollon a real workout onstage that night. Accordingly the two overgrown schoolboys crammed the globes with extra iron packing, until the weight reached a staggering 341lbs. Batta and Pons then made themselves scarce.

  At the evening’s performance, the Rassos Trio watched Apollon going through his
usual routine and then left their seats and demanded to compete with the Frenchman in lifting his challenge barbell. Unaware of its true weight, Apollon strode over to the piece of apparatus, grasped it with both hands and hauled it up to his chest. He then proceeded to lift it overhead and hold it there. Concealing any shock he must have been feeling at the unexpected increase in the weight he was bearing, the strongman took away his left hand and held it aloft with his right arm alone. Finally, still maintaining his balance, he stood defiantly on one leg only. When Godfrey Nordman made his attempt, he could only just lift the barbell off the ground before dropping it with a clatter.

  Louis Uni had a long career as a top-of-the-bill strongman in European theatres. In an almost obligatory requirement for contemporary strongmen, almost like the National Service obligations of later generations, Uni came to London and performed at the Royal Aquarium. During his visit he was openly contemptuous of the lifting abilities of his rivals, stating publicly and with some truth that audiences wishing to witness real feats of strength should attend only the performances of Apollon.

  In a lower key, Uni also maintained his wrestling career but at this he was no match for the best of the professionals. At an international tournament held in Vienna, he was disqualified in consecutive contests against Aimable de la Calmette and former fellow performer Paul Pons. In each case Uni protested hotly that he had been cheated, but his complaints were ignored. He lost another match to Ivan Padoubny at Hengler’s Circus in London. Again he refused to accept the verdict and was hustled off the stage by the veteran Tom Cannon on behalf of the management. Uni continued to earn a good living from his appearances as a professional strongman, but as time passed his natural indolence took over. Unless he was fired by circumstances usually he did just enough to get by on the stage, but his natural strength was sufficient for him to retain his top-of-the bill status for decades to come. He was still touring with small strength shows when he was past sixty years of age.