The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  A typical ju-jitsu performance would start with the practitioner giving a quick-fire strength display, breaking chains, splitting planks with the edge of the hand and lifting weights. Then he would start demonstrating the more spectacular throws and falls with a partner. This would be followed by the leading practitioner in the partnership challenging any man in the audience. At first Tani offered £1 for every minute, up to a maximum of five minutes, that any challenger could survive, or £5 to anyone actually defeating him. He became famous for the cheerful smile that never left his face during even the toughest of bouts.

  One week at an Oxford theatre, Tani beat thirty-three opponents, several of them professional wrestlers. On average he fought and defeated about twenty opponents from the audience every week. These adversaries were all required to wear orthodox ju-jitsu jackets, which gave the professional additional handholds for his throws.

  William Bankier called in a number of favours from his strongman peers in order to boost the publicity of his ju-jitsu team. Thomas Inch, weighing 210lbs, wrestled Uyenishi, 70lbs lighter, and described the experience years later in an article in Health and Strength magazine:

  The more I exerted myself the more I fell down, first one way and then the other. I found my strength not the slightest use, and it was evident that Uyenishi knew just how to use it against me.

  As long as Hackenschmidt and Sandow and their imitators, and spin-offs like the ju-jitsu practitioners prospered, so did the music hall strongman acts generally. The cult was even depicted frequently between 1908 and 1910 in a sketch put on by Fred Karno’s famous ‘Mumming Birds’ troupe, one of the most popular comedy acts on the halls. The sketch ended with a drunken swell falling out of a box on to the stage and being forced to fight a professional wrestler, introduced as Marconi Ali, the Terrible Turk. After a hilarious slapstick contest, the fop defeated the wrestler by tickling him and pinning his opponent while he was helpless with laughter. The swell was played by an unknown comedian called Charlie Chaplin, who later was to try his luck in Hollywood.

  11

  FINAL CURTAINS

  When Eugen Sandow tumbled breathlessly on to the stage of the Imperial Theatre in time to defeat Charles A. Sampson in 1889, the music hall and vaudeville strongman cult kicked off. By the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, its star was certainly fading. With a lifespan of about twenty-five years, it was a very fair run in the entertainment world for what had started as a series of clunky curtain raisers, back in the days when Houdini had been one of the first dumb acts to achieve the status of a vaudeville headliner.

  Before the decline set in there were several brief fluttering revivals of strength acts, especially in vaudeville in the USA. With Hackenschmidt on tour, the hub of professional wrestling was transferring from Great Britain to the USA. When Antonio Pierri discovered in France yet another Terrible Turk and, almost inevitably, claimant to the title of the Sultan’s favourite wrestler in the form of Yousouff Ishamaelo, he paused only briefly with him in London before crossing the Atlantic with his latest protégé. Pierri made no attempt to glamorise the shambling wrestler, freely admitting that Yousouff ate like a pig and never washed. The ruthless Pierri treated Yousouff as badly as he had Madrali, paying him only $25 a week and virtually imprisoning the wrestler in a tenement room in the Bowery area of New York.

  In return, Yousouff made matters as difficult as he could for his manager. For all his size and strength he hated fighting. Pierri responded by dressing a hired thug in a policeman’s uniform, ordering him to force the reluctant wrestler into the ring for his bouts at gunpoint. Once, driven almost crazy with hunger and frustration, Yousouff threw an opponent in the first three minutes and then lay sprawled across his prostrate opponent for several hours, snarling menacingly at anyone who approached to try to separate the two men.

  Temporarily things took a turn for the better for the Turk when his contract was purchased by the American showman William A. Brady. Brady changed the wrestler’s image, removing his rags and dressing him in a red turban, baggy green pants and a gold-laced jacket. For publicity purposes Brady encouraged Yousouff to consume gargantuan meals in the windows of restaurants, before sending him on a very successful vaudeville strongman tour.

  Brady also paid Yousouff in gold pieces, which the delighted wrestler kept in a money belt around his waist. This proved the Turk’s final undoing. He was sailing back to Europe on the vessel La Bourgogne, off Sable Island close to the coast of Nova Scotia, an area dubbed by seamen as ‘the graveyard of the Atlantic’, when the vessel sank, with 546 drowned. Yousouff, the Terrible Turk, was one of the casualties. It was said that he was carried to the bottom of the ocean by the weight of the gold in his belt, although this could have been just one final posthumous knee-jerk publicity stunt on the part of the master showman William A. Brady.

  The strongest men on earth lingered on for a while in the USA, but in a much-altered state. Vaudeville and burlesque still drew the crowds in rural areas but in a much less sophisticated form for the audiences. Typical of the new breed of touring strongmen was ‘Mexican’ Billy Wells, who probably came from Italy or the Netherlands. When he had been eight years old, Wells had fallen 15ft from an upstairs window to the sidewalk below, while he had been watching a parade go by. Examining physicians informed the unharmed boy that he had an exceptionally thick skull. Later the youth used this attribute as his entrée into show business.

  Wells developed an act in which men from the audience were encouraged to use sledgehammers to break stones placed on top of his head. For his performances he wore evening dress, with a blanket draped over his skull. He always used stones which were 6–10in. thick and 2ft square. The strongman always claimed that these stones were of the hardest possible quality. He had a long and successful show business career, but could not have claimed to have been underemployed. While travelling with the Barnum and Bailey circus he gave up to twenty-three shows a day. This marathon was exceeded only at Stuart’s Waxworks in Edinburgh, where Wells declared that on a public holiday he had once performed on fifty-three separate occasions.

  Famous athletes had been performing on vaudeville and burlesque stages for decades, but by the beginning of the twentieth century there was a sudden demand for celebrities of all types to make well-paid stage appearances. The heroic William F. Cody, better known as Indian scout Buffalo Bill, had been particularly inept in his early show business career. He was reputed once to have seen his wife in the audience, stop his monologue and shout despairingly, ‘Hello, Mamma, I’m such a bad actor!’ A singer billing himself as Lord Kenneth Douglas Home MacLaine, declared that he was singing in vaudeville in order to pay off a mortgage of £190,000 on his ancestral home in Scotland. A comic appearing on the same bill commented that the peer’s voice was not good enough to pay for a birdbath.

  Boxers had been touring vaudeville since the days of John L. Sullivan, because their stage appearances allowed them to take part in exhibition contests, even in areas where genuine bouts were banned. John L. Sullivan was in the William Cody class when it came to acting. Once the great heavyweight rushed on to the stage roaring ‘I’ll save you, mudder!’ only to be stopped in his tracks when a voice from the upper regions of the hall drawled, ‘Save her? You can’t even pronounce her!’

  Another world heavyweight champion, the British-born Bob Fitzsimmons, a former blacksmith, toured with an act in which he lifted weights, and boxed and wrestled with sparring partners. He ended his performance by shoeing a horse onstage. He had a habit of playing jokes on members of his audience by handing out souvenir horseshoes which were still red-hot. There were few regrets among the patrons of one of his performances when Fitzsimmons was kicked in the groin by the horse he was attempting to shoe.

  Even lesser known fighters like Andy Bowen could earn $200 a week by appearing in a sketch called ‘Fun in a Gym’. Bowen, a gritty New Orleans fighter renowned for his stamina, had become famous when he and Jack Burke had set a world record for the
longest gloved fight in history: 110 three-minute rounds lasting seven hours and twenty minutes, which ended when both contestants were too exhausted to leave their corners. As soon as he had recovered, Bowen was thrust into the hastily written sketch and sent round the variety circuits. His theatrical career did not last long. Occasionally leaving his tour to participate in genuine bouts, he took on Kid Lavigne at the Auditorium Club on 14 December 1894. During the eighteenth round he was knocked down by his opponent and struck his head on the floor of the ring with enormous impact. Bowen never recovered consciousness and died the following morning, shortly before his thirtieth birthday.

  Not all the ex-boxers treading the boards proved to be outright successes. One of them, Leach Cross, known as the Fighting Dentist and unpopular for his persistent bending of the rules within the roped square, admitted, ‘In the theatres it’s the same as when I fight. I pack the house with people who come to see me lose!’

  Another boxer who was subsumed by vaudeville was the notorious Joe ‘Iron Man’ Grim, born Savario Gianonne in Italy, in 1881. Grim was a squat middleweight who often fought heavyweights, and was known for his durability. Over a career of several hundred fights he probably won only about ten, but although he was sent crashing to the canvas on many occasions, he almost always got up and lasted the distance. After he had absorbed his latest thrashing, he would totter to the ropes in his bright pink and blue trunks, wave defiantly to the crowd and through bloodied lips shout ‘I am Joe Grim and fear no man on earth!’

  Bob Fitzsimmons knocked him down nine times but could not put Grim away. In another fearsomely one-sided fight, another former heavyweight champion in Jack Johnson sent Grim tumbling to the canvas on at least eighteen occasions, until ringside reporters stopped counting, but still the Iron Man went the distance.

  Crowds flocked to see Grim’s vaudeville act, in which he gave sparring and training exhibitions, performed feats of strength and allowed spectators to whack him in the stomach with a broom handle. With no more worlds to conquer, or even lose in, Grim embarked upon an extended sea tour of the Pacific with a variety troupe, going through his stage act wherever the vessel docked and picking up the odd bout in the ring whenever he could. In 1909, he fought Malley Jackson unsuccessfully for the heavyweight championship of Tasmania at the Gaiety Theatre in Zehan on the west coast of Tasmania, after suffering twenty rounds of heavy punishment.

  In November of the same year, Grim lost a bout in Brisbane for a sidestake of £30 against Spider Kelly. The referee disqualified the American visitor for throwing his opponent to the floor. In retaliation the Iron Man struck the referee several times. The seconds of both men joined in the mêlée and eventually police were called in to break up the brawl.

  Doggedly, Grim continued fighting until 1913, when he went in against a young unknown called Joe Borrell. True to form, the Iron Man was knocked down in every round, six times in round six. But here he departed from his usual script by actually suffering a knockout defeat. Grim retired from the ring and his vaudeville career also came to an end. There were few bookings to be had for an Iron Man who had revealed that he was no longer made of iron.

  As the numbers of performing strongmen and challenge-issuing wrestlers dwindled in vaudeville and burlesque, so their places were taken by celebrities or eccentrics with weird backgrounds who could offer at least a minimal element of the strength athlete’s routine in their performances. Impresario Willie Hammerstein, father of the Broadway lyricist Oscar, was the first major showman to specialise in celebrity bookings and actively seek out oddities for his shows.

  In 1912, the great Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe was deprived of the pentathlon and decathlon gold medals he had won in Stockholm, because as a youth he had played professional baseball, albeit briefly. A vaudeville syndicate offered him $1,000 a week to tour their theatres with a hastily cobbled together strongman act. Thorpe refused, preferring to become a full-time baseball player.

  Other athletes, however, seized their opportunities. The New York Times of 13 December 1909, reviewed one of them in the following terms:

  Sam Mahoney, the man who likes ice water externally, made his first appearance on the vaudeville stage in New York at Keith and Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre yesterday afternoon. His stage act consists in giving exhibitions of plain and fancy swimming in a tank containing water and large pieces of ice. A light effect to represent the Aurora Borealis adds to the apparent frigidity.

  Most Americans of the period preferred ice as an adjunct to their drinks, but Samuel Mahoney claimed to have swum in it often. He was a swimmer and skilled self-publicist who parlayed a minor talent into a fairly successful show business career. He had moved to the USA from Ireland to work as an engineer, where he supplemented his income by working as head lifeguard at Revere Beach, Massachusetts.

  He made his breakthrough into a series of vaudeville bookings by claiming to have been the second man after Captain Webb to have swum the English Channel, although there was absolutely no record of his having done so. This did not stop his giving detailed accounts of his alleged swim from France in 1908 to reporters when he returned to the USA:

  …at 4.30 a.m. I was a quarter of a mile from the shore, and could hear the shouting of the party on the tugboat encouraging me on. I felt then that I had won, and swam with one long, final spurt with my arms until finally I felt the sloping beach under my numbed feet, and a moment later I crawled ashore, amid the cheers of my friends. (Taranaki Herald, 15 March 1909)

  Mahoney, a natural showman, said that he had remained in the water for twenty hours, during which he covered forty-one miles before he waded ashore near the South Goodwin lighthouse. Novelty-seeking theatrical managers booked him for a substantial tour in which he swam in a glass-fronted tank containing floating pieces of ice, pausing every so often to give a lecture of the benefits of swimming every day in the sea for the development of health.

  He claimed to have developed his own magnificent physique in this way and displayed a testimonial from Dr Dudley Sergeant of Harvard University, declaring that Mahoney was the only perfectly developed man he had ever examined. Sergeant, who tended to be over-generous in his commendations, had said much the same thing a few years earlier when he had run the rule over the touring Eugen Sandow.

  Another entertaining charlatan who talked his way on to the vaudeville circuit for a while was Leopold McLaglen, who claimed to be the world ju-jitsu champion. He was a gigantic 6ft 6in. height and bore a strong resemblance to his brother Victor, who went on to become an Oscar-winning Hollywood film star.

  Victor had also been a circus and vaudeville strongman for a time, as well as a silver miner, railroad policeman, pearl diver, boxer, soldier, circus performer and all-round soldier of fortune as he made his way round the world. His stage act had consisted of being the bearer in an acrobatic act called the Great Romanos, giving posing displays and demonstrating the favourite punches of well-known boxers.

  Leopold was a much more devious character. One of eight enormous sons of a clergyman, he claimed to have studied ju-jitsu at the age of twelve with a Japanese student brought back to England by an uncle who had worked in an overseas legation. In 1901, Leopold served in the Boer War in an undisclosed capacity, although he claimed to have fought in the mounted infantry. He then went off to see more of the world. Somewhere on his travels he claimed to have won the title of ju-jitsu champion of the world, before a crowd of fifteen thousand, a claim scorned by those who knew anything about the art. Undeterred, McLaglen used the title and offered to teach ju-jitsu to anyone who would pay him for lessons. When he ran out of pupils, which seemed to have been soon, he put together a music hall strongman act and started touring South Africa with it.

  His performance consisted of the usual strength stunts, culminating with an exhibition of ju-jitsu and a challenge to any man in the audience. His tour came to an ignominious end when one night a much smaller opponent refused to be cowed by the giant’s bluster and chased McLaglen screaming for help
from the stage.

  In December 1907, the San Francisco Call revealed that the wanderer had surfaced in the USA:

  Leopold McLaglen, who claims the ju-jitsu championship of the world, is training at the San Francisco Athletic Clubrooms for a match with two Japanese experts, which will be held a week from tonight at Dreamland Pavilion… McLaglen does not have to risk his life in this dangerous sport, as he could live at ease should he desire. His father is Right Rev. Lord B. McLaglen, Bishop of Scotland.

  In fact, McLaglen senior, who had been a Nonconformist bishop in South Africa, not Scotland, and never achieved a peerage, appears to have been as feisty and eccentric as most of his sons. A few years later, upon the outbreak of the First World War, the former bishop offered to box six fast rounds with any other clergyman, all proceeds to go to a War Relief fund.

  In the USA, Leopold McLaglen secured a few small-time vaudeville bookings on the west coast but was reduced for a time to working as a cinema doorman in Milwaukee. He then took the first names of two of his boxing brothers, Victor and Fred, and, announcing himself as Victor Fred McLaglen, persuaded a gullible promoter that he was an experienced heavyweight boxer. He was matched against a seriously good title contender called Fireman Jim Flynn, who knocked Leo out in three rounds. This infuriated his brother Victor, who fired off letters to a number of newspapers, accusing Leopold of being a charlatan and besmirching the family name.