The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  Health and Strength condemned the Polish wrestler for being ‘woefully lacking in enterprise’, but almost incredibly a return bout was arranged for the following Saturday. This time Zbyszko did not turn up. His manager claimed that the grappler’s mother was ill, but others scoffed that the Pole was busily wrestling easier opponents in France. The matter was abandoned with relief.

  The Great Gama’s European foray was almost over. He had engaged in two farcical matches, the jig-time encounter with Benjamin Roller and the protracted bore against Zbyszko. Georg Hackenschmidt was not interested in a contest and music hall bookings had dropped off alarmingly. In an effort to recoup his losses, R. B. Benjamin took his circus to Paris, but there was little interest there either. The troupe was disbanded and the Indian champions returned sadly to their own country, where they remained pre-eminent for many years. Gama retired in 1919, but returned to the ring a decade later for one final strange encounter in India against Zbyszko, whom he defeated in a matter of seconds on this occasion.

  As if in an attempt to show Benjamin and other would-be promoters how the career of a champion should be handled, C. B. Cochran withdrew Hackenschmidt from the halls temporarily to present him to the public in several well-mounted major matches in London. In direct contrast to Gama’s matches against Roller and Zbyszko, the Russian Lion’s bouts were spectacular and lucrative.

  It was generally acknowledged that Hackenschmidt was flourishing because he had the promotional genius of Cocharan behind him. The promoter was particularly shrewd in finding the right opponent for the Russian Lion, and one had just appeared. The newcomer was called Madrali and was backed by Antonio Pierri, a manager and former wrestler who called himself the Terrible Greek. Towards the end of his career he had fought Hackenschmidt and lost quickly. He was cross-eyed and had a bald head. His favourite catchphrase was ‘Pierri is a very straight man’. Cochran considered him about as straight as a corkscrew.

  Believing that the old ways were the best ways, Pierri took the traditional route to challenging Hackenschmidt. He and Madrali appeared in the stalls of a hall at which the Russian Lion was appearing. The two men stood up, wearing long coats, and challenged Hackenschmidt to a bout. Cochran knew that the appearance of the huge and ugly Madrali would fit in with the current desire for strongmen with exotic and enhanced backgrounds.

  As soon as the match was made it caught the fancy of sporting London. Cochran took one of his punts and courageously hired the mammoth Olympia stadium for the night. Pierri did his part, publicising Madrali as hard as he could. There were rumours that this latest Terrible Turk was in fact a Marseilles stevedore of Bulgarian extraction. Pierri would have none of it. Ahmed Madrali, he declared, was the Sultan of Turkey’s favourite court wrestler and had recently been appointed chief bodyguard to his master’s personal harem of four hundred women. What was more, he ate twenty meat cutlets for breakfast every morning.

  London went mad over the forthcoming contest. It was billed as ‘The Greatest Feat of Athleticism Ever Witnessed’. Every ticket was sold weeks in advance, some ringside seats changing hands at twenty-five guineas each.

  Behind the scenes there was considerable mutual antagonism between Pierri and his wrestler, but Madrali was bound to his manager by a cast-iron contract. Pierri doled out £5 a week to his athlete, although he was taking in £100 for his music hall act. To make the meagre stipend look larger, Pierri paid it out in threepenny pieces and coppers. He claimed to feed Madrali on a leg of mutton a day. In reality the leg had to last a week and was supplemented with low-quality rice, purchased by the sackful.

  Madrali was very strong. He weighed 220lbs but hated most forms of training, especially roadwork, almost as much as he detested his manager. On several occasions, a pursuing Pierri found the wrestler playing cards in a pub along the route of his training run.

  Strangely enough, the rather naive Georg Hackenschmidt approached the contest with some apprehension. He started to believe his opponent’s pre-match publicity and genuinely felt that Madrali, who was a favourite in the betting, might beat him. This spurred him into some vigorous training sessions. He did his daily preparation at a public house in Shepherd’s Bush. A feature of his workout was carrying a sack of cement weighing over 500lbs on his shoulders, with a heavyweight sparring partner balanced on top of the sack. He drank eleven pints of milk a day and ate vast quantities of raw fruit and vegetables.

  Throughout their training period, aware of the real source of their incomes, both competitors persisted with their music hall appearances. Hackenschmidt performed twice nightly at the Paragon Theatre in Canterbury, while Madrali headed the bill at the Pavilion Theatre.

  Hackenschmidt’s entourage was not quite as varied but his name alone was enough to draw in the crowds all over the country. As back-up he employed the usual comic singers, soubrettes, illusionists, mimics and tenors, while to make him look good in his wrestling exhibitions were the docile Gunner Moir, former boxing champion of England and heavyweight wrestling champion of the army; Bert Wood, wrestling champion of the navy; and Herr Charles Axa, the champion of Germany. It was announced that in addition to grappling exhibitions and accepting challenges from the audience, Hackenschmidt would lift weights and also appear in ‘instructive and interesting scenes of “Poses Plastiques”’. In the run-up to the much-hyped Olympia match, each strongman would end his stage performance by boasting to an enthusiastic audience of what he would do to the other man when they clashed in the ring in January.

  The day of the match was overcast. It rained most of the morning and afternoon. Hackenschmidt spent the afternoon in bed while Madrali relaxed at a sporting club. That evening, traffic jams extended from Olympia to Piccadilly, one of the capital’s greatest traffic pile-ups so far. The hall was filled hours before the fight. To while away the time, Lieutenant Forrest’s celebrated Light Infantry Band played selected airs, including the acclaimed Entry of the Gladiators.

  Madrali was the first to enter the ring, wearing a brown dressing gown with fur trimmings. Hackenschmidt followed, looking pale and nervous. He was greeted with a great roar of approbation. The introductions of the wrestlers were shouted through a megaphone. There was a puzzling variation to the Terrible Turk’s presentation. Almost as an aside the announcer bellowed ‘No one in the world would ever buy him for a fixed fight!’ Those in the know at the ringside took this to be a sideswipe from Cochran at some of his rival promoters, who were putting on more and more patently rehearsed matches. The two wrestlers shook hands, returned to their corners and shed their gowns. The referee blew a whistle to start the bout.

  It was all over inside two minutes. Hackenschmidt rushed straight across the ring at Madrali. He missed with his first attempts to secure a hold but then clamped a grip around the Terrible Turk’s body. As he felt the breath being squeezed out of his lungs, Madrali stuck his fingers up his opponent’s nostrils, drawing blood. Hackenschmidt jerked himself free and swung Madrali to the ground, falling across him and pinning him to the canvas. The referee blew his whistle to signify that Hackenschmidt had won the first fall. When both men stood up it was apparent the Terrible Turk’s arm was hanging at an awkward angle. It was dislocated. Madrali immediately conceded the match to his opponent.

  At once C. B. Cochran sent the Russian Lion on a tour of the country at an enhanced salary to cash in on the publicity engendered by the bout at Olympia, though not before allowing the Estonian wrestler to return to London for one more match. In June, Hackenschmidt met an American, Tom Jenkins, a one-eyed, illiterate former steel worker. His trade in the dreadful mills had been that of a ‘rougher’ seizing red-hot iron bars in a pair of gigantic tongs and feeding them through rollers. Hackenschmidt won the bout easily and claimed the world title. Then, almost as a last hurrah in Great Britain, he added more kudos to his reputation by throwing a redoubtable Scottish wrestler called Alec Munro.

  Munro, a former blacksmith, was feared not so much for his wrestling ability as for the fact that he was a polic
e inspector in the Govan force, whose proud superiors threatened to close down the theatre should any touring wrestler defeat their man. To keep Munro on his toes, the local equivalent of the Watch Committee also threatened to dismiss their inspector if any of his performances should not come up to scratch. In the event, Hackenschmidt managed to circumvent the threats being issued by competing against an almost tearfully distraught Munro in the open air at Glasgow Rangers’ Ibrox football stadium in the pouring rain, in a best of two falls competition. He threw the policeman in twenty-two and eleven minutes respectively. Sixteen thousand people watched the match.

  Then the Russian Lion made the mistake that was to ruin his career and inadvertently begin the end of the professional strongman era. He parted company with C. B. Cochran.

  Shortly before he gave up trying to establish himself in England, The Indian wrestler the Great Gama issued one final desperate appeal for work. It read:

  A Sensational Challenge India v Japan

  Gama is prepared to throw every one of the thirty Japanese wrestlers now showing at the Exhibition in one hour – actual wrestling time. Gama will guarantee to carry out the contract, the only stipulation being that the men stand five yards apart, and as soon as the signal is given to start they approach one another and begin wrestling. Ten minutes’ rest to be allowed after Gama throws the first fifteen. £100 a side. Gama is also prepared to throw the champion of the Japanese ten times in thirty minutes for £100 a side

  The fact that there were as many as thirty ju-jitsu performers in London in 1910 was a sign of the popularity of the sport on the halls – and it attracted the interest of women like Edith Garrud and Florence LeMarr who took up the martial art and encouraged other women to do so. In fact, exponents of the Japanese wrestling art probably represented the last large-scale influx of professional strongmen to the British music halls. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were few Japanese citizens living in Britain. One of the few was Takashima Shidachi, a representative of the Bank of Japan in London. He practised ju-jitsu and taught it to small groups.

  It was, however, an Englishman who planted the roots of the art in Great Britain. His name was Edward Barton-Wright. He was born in India in 1860 and was one of the great eccentrics of the British Empire, of whom there were a fair few scattered about at a time when much of the globe was coloured red to indicate British possession.

  Barton-Wright worked as an engineer, specialising in the smelting process, in a number of tough mining camps in different parts of the world, and developed an interest in the martial arts of different countries. In 1899, he returned home from Japan and opened a martial arts academy in London. He soon sent for one of his previous instructors, Yukio Tani, to teach ju-jitsu at his institution.

  Barton-Wright’s ‘School of Arms’ in Shaftesbury Avenue concentrated on teaching a form of self-defence called bartitsu. The name was a combination of Barton and ju-jitsu. It was a mixture of a number of different fighting sports of all nations, including boxing, fencing, wrestling, stick fighting, ju-jitsu and the French type of kick boxing known as savate. They were combined by the sport’s originator to be used in conjunction with everyday objects like walking sticks and umbrellas.

  Barton-Wright was not often on the mark with his timing of events but he had chosen the right moment to launch his selfdefence school. The public in general was growing increasingly apprehensive about the growing wave of crime in the rapidly expanding cities. Bartitsu was given an extra fillip when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose to make his master detective Sherlock Holmes an expert in the combat art – even if he did spell it ‘baritsu’ in error, possibly because he miscopied the word from a report in The Times newspaper.

  Where Edward Barton-Wright was less successful was in his quixotic ambition of trying to make ju-jitsu a commercial success on the music halls. The initial effort failed on all levels. When he first broached launching it commercially to his Japanese instructors, many of them recoiled in horror. Most of them were staidly middle class in origin and revered their art. Most of them refused to profane ju-jitsu by performing it on the stage, and some even resigned and went home in protest.

  Yukio Tani, however, was more pragmatic and commercially minded. With a partner, he agreed to give the scheme a try. After much desperate wrangling, Edward Barton-Wright managed to secure the two Japanese a booking at the Tivoli music hall. Their display was a success, but not in the way that Barton-Wright and the two exponents had intended. Members of the audience thought that they were watching a knockabout comedy act and roared with laughter throughout. Tani was furious and refused to go through such a humiliating process again.

  Edward Barton-Wright was seriously worried. His school of arms and his brain-child bartitsu were both in need of some favourable publicity. He arranged to give a display before the Prince of Wales at the Gallery Club, but fell off his bicycle while cycling along a country lane before the show and was too badly bruised to perform on the night. Another display at the Alhambra had to be cancelled because his two principal Japanese instructors had both been hurt while teaching their art to over-enthusiastic pupils.

  Barton-Wright decided to risk everything on a public performance. At his own expense he put on a great bartitsu tournament at St James’s Hall. It was well attended, with representatives from newspapers and magazines present, but the evening proved to be yet another embarrassing fiasco.

  Due to scenes of confusion behind the scenes, the show was late in starting. Finally a flustered Barton-Wright emerged from behind the curtains to announce that the first item would in fact be the one billed as the third; an exhibition of unusual ways in which to use a walking stick to defend against attack followed. Next came an exhibition of ju-jitsu between Sadakazu Uyenishi and Yukio Tani, beginning with a display of falls, causing the reviewer from Sandow’s Magazine to yawn: ‘This display was ingenious, certainly, but in the absence of any real contest failed to carry conviction.’

  A proposed wrestling bout between Uyenishi and the Cornish and Devonshire heavyweight champion did not materialise. No reason was given for this. Instead the evening continued with a catch-as-catch-can wrestling match for a side bet of £5 a-side between A. Cherpillo, the Swiss champion, and Joe Carol, champion of England. A reporter noted disapprovingly, ‘It was in connection with this event that there occurred the unseemly bickering and wrangling which marred the otherwise sportsmanlike conduct of the tournament.’

  This may have been due to the fact that most of the great names in the music hall strongman cult had been attracted to the occasion, each with strong opinions of his own. The editor of the Sporting Life had agreed to hold the stakes and appoint the referee. At the last minute he sent a telegram to the organisers, announcing that the arbiter should be Ferdinand Gruhn, a sparring partner of Georg Hackenschmidt. Uncertain of the provenance of the telegram, Barton-Wright refused to accept him. This led to loud and prolonged wrangling in front of the audience. Barton-Wright took offence at something shouted from Joe Carol’s corner and insisted indignantly that he was a straight man and everyone knew it. Finally, after many names had been proposed and discarded, it was reluctantly agreed that Tom Burrows, the club swinger, would officiate. The ever-present Tom Cannon came forward with a meaningful scowl directed at Burrows and grimly remarked that if he was not satisfied with the judging, he personally would lodge an objection with the stakeholder.

  For some time Carol’s clique, described as ‘particularly obstreperous’ continued to heckle, object and utter threats. All this took so long that two other items on the programme were cancelled to make room for the wrestling bout, which was won by Cherpillo with a fall, after one hour and twenty minutes, in what was described as a steady and occasionally monotonous display by both men.

  Edward Barton-Wright continued to run his academy, although both instructors and students were draining away. He was also beginning to fall out with his star Yukio Tani, finding the Japanese to be dilatory and argumentative. For his part, Tani was still smart
ing from the failed music hall ju-jitsu act so ineffectually masterminded by Barton-Wright.

  The situation changed with the reappearance of William Bankier, the Scottish Hercules. By this time Bankier was running down his theatrical appearances and beginning to concentrate on various entrepreneurial ventures. He still had ambitions to rival Sandow as a physical culture emperor and believed that suitably adapted ju-jitsu exhibitions could be successful as a part of the strongman oeuvre. Bankier persuaded Tani and a number of other ju-jitsu practitioners to leave Barton-Wright and sign up with him as their manager. He was everything that the founder of bartitsu was not: tough-minded, streetwise, practical, efficient and vastly experienced in all aspects of show business. He took over his new recruited coterie of ju-jitsu experts and polished and transformed their acts. Instead of rambling displays of the different throws, Bankier taught his charges how to include the usual popular strongman routines in their performances – breaking chains and lifting weights. He beefed up Tani’s physique with a specifically designed bodybuilding routine and sent him out on to the halls as ‘the Pocket Hercules’ on what was to become an uninterrupted six-month tour of the country.

  For several years the ju-jitsu invasion of the British music halls was very successful. It coincided with the unexpected success of Japan in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese war, leading to a wave of sentiment for the ‘plucky little Japs’ and the increased popularity of their martial arts displays, in which small men symbolically humiliated larger ones.

  The best exponents topped the bills and filled the theatres. Chief among them was Yukio Tani, who adapted well to Bankier’s tutelage. He freely admitted to being only a third-rate practitioner of the art in his own country, but in his matches in Britain he seemed able to paralyse giants. He claimed that only once did he lose a contest onstage, when fellow Japanese expert Taro Myaki defeated him in 1905, although tough Joe Carol was reputed to have overpowered him once in a rough-house match that got out of hand at a theatrical performance. Even the veteran Jack Carkeek took lessons from Tani and included elements of ju-jitsu in his perennial act.