The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  It was the most wonderful and utterly inexplicable exhibition – a genuine phenomenon – ever witnessed in this country.

  Annie polished and enhanced the original routines of Lulu Hurst and added her own slant to them. As well as performing Hurst’s lifting the chair and controlling the umbrella stunts, she would also challenge anyone to take a stout stick – held across the palms of her hands extended horizontally before her, with just two thumbs over the stick – away from her. Annie stipulated only that the volunteers used no sudden jerking movements, nor could they lift her from the floor in order to claim the stick.

  She made a feature of her small stature and centred her act on a stunt in which she defied any man to be able to lift her from the ground or move her in any way against her will. Later she polished this trick, claiming that she could transfer these powers to any boy in the audience, making it impossible for the child to be lifted even by the strongest of men. In an interview with the Midgeville Union Recorder in September 1893, she said:

  I take a small boy and he places his hands in mine gently and after having him look me in the eyes for some moments the gentlemen find it impossible to raise him from the floor.

  She would take the hand of a selected boy and make him look her in the eyes steadily. It was at this stage, Annie claimed, that she transferred her power to the boy. She then released him. As long as the boy kept his attention on her, he could not be lifted from the ground.

  Her show went from strength to strength. Soon Annie had another manager and her own touring revue, ‘The Mistress of Mysterious Power, and Powerful Company’. Her posters continued to concentrate on her apparent vulnerability.

  Tonight!

  Annie Abbott

  The Georgia Magnet

  Will Perform Miracles

  She Weighs Only 97 Pounds

  No One or Two Men Can Lift Her

  No One Can Throw Her Off Balance

  She Has Baffled the Scientists of the World,

  Who Cannot Explain It

  What is the Power or Force?

  Absolutely the Most Wonderful Woman of the Age

  Annie did so well on her tours of the USA that she allowed herself to be booked to perform at the Alhambra in London in 1891. This did not go as well. Annie was seasick all the way across the Atlantic. Her opening nights at the Alhambra were successful enough, causing a British magician, John Nevil Maskelyn, who, as a sideline had invented the pay toilet, to write sourly in an appendix to his book The Supernatural in 1892:

  There has appeared in our midst a young lady hailing from the land of the new religions and wooden nutmegs, professing to possess abnormal powers, in the form of some occult magnetic influences enabling her to perform feats of strength out of all proportion to her physical development. To say that this young lady has set the Thames on fire is a very mild way of putting it.

  The Georgia Magnet was even presented to the Prince of Wales. By November of the same year, however, Annie Abbott was in trouble. Her act was exposed as a series of tricks by an inquisitive and persistent reporter from the London Star. This writer claimed, with the aid of diagrams, that many of Annie Abbott’s feats were performed not by the girl but by a team of perspiring stagehands behind the scenes taking the strain by operating hoists and pulleys connected by concealed cables to apparatus on the stage.

  Audiences at the Alhambra dwindled, but Annie was resilient and persistent. She continued touring Europe for another two years and returned to the USA as popular as ever. She did, however, display a certain lack of local knowledge by appointing as one of her European stage assistants the bellicose Charlie Mitchell. Charlie was a useful man in a street brawl but his association with any venture did not automatically convince onlookers of its honesty.

  Throughout her career Annie Abbott manipulated newspapers and any other publicity sources that came her way. Like Lulu Hurst she claimed that she was possessed by a power that she could not explain. This force, she went on, sometimes caused her excruciating headaches. She gained more attention when she advertised in newspapers, offering a reward to anyone who could rid her of the headaches brought on by her strange gift.

  In 1896, Annie Abbott married her manager, Frank B. Baylor, and retired from show business. It was not the end of the Georgia Magnet, however. For many years after the death of his wife in 1915, Baylor trained and sent forth a stream of Annie Abbotts, in a weird show business human franchise.

  Unlike Lulu Hurst, none of the Annie Abbotts ever divulged the secrets behind their communal act. Other magicians and strongmen who studied the principles behind the performances of the various electrical girls were convinced that the original Annie Abbott and her successors used the laws of physics for their strength tricks. She certainly adopted Lulu Hurst’s knowledge of realigning the stance and bodily positions of her challengers so that they were at a physical disadvantage without realising it, but there may also have been a more mundane reason for her success.

  Annie’s celebrated apparent inability to be lifted from the ground, a number of newspaper exposés claimed, could be traced back to one of the routines of a French illusionist called Robert Houdin, who had been born in 1805.

  Like Houdin, Annie Abbott, said her detractors, placed metal plates in her shoes. Beneath another metal plate on the stage was placed a powerful electromagnet. When Annie was about to be lifted by a strongman, she would drift over to the plate and stand on it. An associate hidden below would activate a switch and the girl would be firmly anchored to the stage for the duration of the would-be lifter’s efforts.

  The transference of her powers by osmosis to a child in the audience was explained away by the fact that the child in question was almost always Annie Abbott’s son Charles who travelled with her, even as far as Russia. On these occasions he too had metal plates inserted in his shoes and always knew exactly where the corresponding metal plate was situated on the stage.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century two of the best known women making public appearances on theatre stages operated on different sides of the world, but each owed her fame to having mastered the Japanese combat system known as ju-jitsu, a form of martial art in which an opponent’s strength and aggression is employed against him.

  In Great Britain, Mrs Edith Margaret Garrud, who was born in 1872, became the first leading instructor in the sport and gave many demonstrations of it all over London, although she was only just 5ft tall. Together with her husband, the gymnasium owner and teacher of physical culture, William Garrud, Edith attended courses of lessons in ju-jitsu given by Sadekazu Uyenishi, one of the first Japanese experts in the art to visit Great Britain. William Garrud soon became an assistant to Uyenishi and, when the latter returned to Japan, Garrud took over the gymnasium and continued to give lessons. His wife Edith became responsible for teaching it to women and children.

  Edith Garrud became very interested in the Suffragette movement, campaigning for the right of women to vote. Members of the organisation were often arrested and manhandled by the police when they protested in the streets. Matters grew worse when the Suffragettes adopted a policy of protest and public disorder to draw attention to their cause.

  In an effort to protect Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the group, and other leading Suffragettes, a group of about twenty-five women known as ‘the Bodyguard’ was selected to maintain order at meetings. They even wore Indian Clubs in their belts. To aid their cause, Edith Garrud volunteered to use her skills to teach this inner circle the arts of ju-jitsu. Her lessons were so effective and well received that Edith then toured public halls in London, giving demonstrations of this form of self-defence to women and urging them to learn how to look after themselves. She appeared at theatres, public halls, clubs and even skating rinks.

  Edith’s reputation spread. She became particularly well known after Punch magazine printed a cartoon showing a triumphant Edith Garrud advancing upon a group of apprehensive London policemen. She told the London Evening Standard:

  I have
already had the pleasure of ejecting one youth from a woman’s franchise meeting and after we have had our new society in full swing for some months we hope to have a regular band of ju-jitsu officers who will be able to deal with all the male rowdies who bother us.

  Edith Garrud divorced her husband but continued giving exhibitions of ju-jitsu and running a gymnasium for women, which became something of a safe haven for militant Suffragettes. On one occasion, half a dozen of her pupils had been demonstrating outside shops in Oxford Street and had fled to avoid arrest by the police. Edith Garrud’s ju-jitsu dojo (or gymnasium) was handily situated in Argyll Place, so they made their way there and explained breathlessly to their tutor that the forces of the law were close behind them.

  Quite unperturbed, the ever-resourceful Mrs Garrud made them take off their top clothes and don their ju-jitsu training attire. She concealed their clothing and a few missiles left over from their shopping expedition under the floorboards of the gym. When the police arrived, Edith met them at the door. After the officers of the law had explained the reason for their visit, Edith replied with a frosty, ‘I have a group of lady students in training. We don’t expect the police to come in here!’

  She would admit only one of the constables, who under the forbidding glares of the instructress and her six pupils, made the most cursory examination of the premises and left, apologising for the unwarranted intrusion.

  In 1907, Mrs Garrud played a leading role in a ju-jitsu instructional film entitled Ju-jitsu Downs the Footpads. Four years later, she choreographed the fight scene for a self-defence instructional play called What Every Woman Should Know.

  Upon the outbreak of the First World War, Emmeline Pankhurst ordered the cessation of militant actions among Suffragettes and the Suffragette Bodyguard was disbanded.

  On the other side of the world, another female ju-jitsu exponent was achieving success. Florence LeMarr, known to her friends and fans as Flossie, was born in New Zealand in 1885, where she became an expert in the recondite sport of barefoot skating. She became interested in physical culture when Eugen Sandow made a successful tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1902 and 1903.

  Florence married an English wrestler, Joe Gardner, who taught her ju-jitsu. Showing a natural flair for the art, together they toured Australasian music halls for eight years, with a sketch involving demonstrations of ju-jitsu. Florence was also an early feminist and she made much of the fact that any woman should be able to defend herself in a male-orientated world. She advertised her act with the slogan ‘No lady in New Zealand should miss this show’.

  Although she was only in her twenties, she called herself the world’s champion female ju-jitsu performer. Her advertising matter announced that Gardner and LeMarr would be appearing in a dramatic production entitled The Hooligan and the Lad, ‘in which it is shown how it is possible for a lady with a knowledge of ju-jitsu to protect herself from ruffianly attacks’. Her act began with the sketch of a demure, inoffensive respectable lady (played by herself ) who was attacked by a thug, using a series of increasingly threatening and potent weapons. Her husband Joe portrayed her assailant. Florence used her knowledge of ju-jitsu to overpower Joe Gardner as he menaced her successively with a stick, a bludgeon, a knife, a chain, a bottle, an iron bar and finally a revolver.

  The sketch was usually well received. It would be followed with Flossie and Joe engaged in an exhibition contest. Finally Florence gave a series of lessons on the finer points of the Japanese art.

  The era of professional strongwomen did not last long, nor, with the possible exceptions of Lulu Hurst and her successor as the Georgia Magnet, Annie Abbott, did they usually top the bills, but they were fascinating women and by making their way as strength athletes in what was regarded generally as being a man’s world, they displayed character and resolve.

  In their male-dominated society they were among the few women who physically and mentally regularly stood up to the male sex in public. Kate Sandwina and a number of her peers wrestled against men and took part in weightlifting competitions with them – often successfully. Lulu Hurst, Annie Abbott and all the other Magnetic Girls delighted in challenging men, singly and in groups, to resist their physical challenges and defied their attempts to overcome them in their stage performances.

  The strongwomen also encouraged other members of their sex to be independent and to think for themselves. Edith Garrud and Florence LeMarr showed in their ju-jitsu exhibitions that women could learn to look after themselves. Lulu Hurst made no attempt to hide her pleasure in matching herself against members of the male sex. Again and again she is recorded as giggling with delight as she impelled men challenging her from the audience to make helpless exhibitions of themselves onstage. Kate Sandwina was always her own woman, whether encouraging women to do away with their corsets or admonishing them, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to drink a daily glass of beer. Annie Abbott made it clear that she might on the surface appear to be a demure, feminine 97lbs, but her abilities – and those of her colleagues – were such that she and they could justly be described, as she was in the Minneapolis Star Tribune of 15 October 1890, as ‘a wonderful woman’.

  Above all, the strongwomen added to the gaiety of nations, both in their public performances and in their lectures and writings. They encouraged other women to be free and lead independent lives, just as these doughty performers so obviously did.

  10

  THE RUSSIAN LION

  Every time it looked as if the strongman craze might falter beneath the weight of charlatans and gimmicks, another theatrical headliner seemed to appear from nowhere to revive the cult. There was no shortage of applicants. After all, posing on the stage of a music hall was infinitely preferable to working in a factory or on a farm or being beaten up on a regular basis as a professional boxer or wrestler.

  Unfortunately, the shrewd Sandow apart, most strongman acts still tended towards monotony. Managers and agents started to cast their nets wider in order to meet the demands of the audiences for new strongmen with fresher and livelier routines.

  A young, brash and ambitious would-be entrepreneur named C. B. Cochran made the necessary breakthrough when he discovered the so-called Russian Lion and kick-started professional wrestling in Great Britain. So far Cochran had dabbled without success in a number of theatrical ventures. After a sojourn in the USA as a secretary to an actor, he returned to Great Britain determined to become a theatrical agent. Cochran had no money and few contacts but possessed enormous energy, a thick skin and a resolve never to take no for an answer. By chance, within a few days of his return he encountered the unsuccessful Estonian wrestler Georg Hackenschmidt.

  Wrestling had existed in the British provinces for centuries. Cornish grapplers wore jackets and gripped one another’s shoulders. Devonshire wrestlers wore straw shin guards and clogs and kicked each other in the shins. Lancashire wrestlers stood well apart, with knees bent and arms outstretched. The Greco-Roman and catch-as-catch-can formats made famous by William Muldoon in the USA had not yet caught on in Great Britain. Its practitioners had to cross the Atlantic to earn a steady living.

  One wrestler, however, had broken on to the music hall circuit, albeit towards the bottom of the bill and usually in provincial and outer London circuits. His name was Jack Carkeek, a smooth-talking American. He was an experienced wrestler with a convincing line of patter and a witty way with hecklers. He was certainly not setting the Thames on fire, but he was making a steady living at the turn of the century with his act. A skilled self-publicist he would keep his name in the public’s eye by sending occasional self-laudatory communiqués back to the USA, exaggerating the state of his success.

  One Police Gazette paragraph supplied by the wrestler provided a slightly optimistic account towards the end of his British tour: ‘He saved his salary, which amounted to nearly £1,000 a week, as he played on average in three or four music halls nightly.’ Even in the dubious event of Carkeek obtaining so many regular engagements, he would have been unlikely t
o have earned much more than a tenth of the sum claimed as a ‘dumb act’ appearing towards the bottom of the bill.

  One night in 1902, all this was to change. In a rare appearance in the West End at the Alhambra in London’s Leicester Square, the 40-year-old American was throwing out his customary challenge to the audience for any man to wrestle with him for ten or fifteen minutes without being pinioned to the stage, when an enormous young man stood up in one of the boxes. It was Hackenschmidt, resplendent in white tie and tails. In front of the amazed audience he stripped off his clothes to reveal that beneath them he was wearing wrestling trunks. Jumping down on to the stage he accepted Carkeek’s challenge.

  Hackenschmidt had been in London for some days but had been unable to secure any wrestling engagements. Later he wrote, ‘I was on the point of leaving England when it came to my knowledge that Carkeek, believing me to have already gone, had challenged any professional wrestler then in London to wrestle with him.’

  George Jowett, later to become a professional strongman, was in the audience that night. In his 1930 book, Strong Man Stunts Made Easy, he described the crowd’s reaction to the challenger’s imposing physique:

  The first murmurs of surprise from the audience became an uproar, with everybody talking at once, thrilled by the marvellous specimen of humanity that confronted them. No wonder! If Hercules had been resurrected before them they could not have visioned a more spectacularly muscled body.

  If the Estonian had hoped for a repeat of the Sandow–Sampson scenario of over a decade ago he was to be disappointed. He was rebuffed firmly by the wily American. Carkeek recognised his would-be challenger at once as the winner of a recent wrestling tournament at the Folies Bergère. Although he was only twenty-three, Georg Hackenschmidt was already a successful wrestler in Europe, although completely unknown in Great Britain. Carkeek was going to have nothing to do with the enormous Russian. As Hackenschmidt described in his autobiography, the American turned to appeal to the audience.