by Graeme Kent
To these failed attempts to develop a crowd-pleasing physical routine could be added the efforts of Charles Matthews, a celebrated English long jumper. Realising that he did not possess the musculature to present a strongman act, instead Matthews based his routine on leaping over a piano onstage. This might have been a good trick so far as it went but, as the leaper discovered, it was difficult to build an entertaining fifteen-minute routine around it.
Young Miles’s act consisted of calling up a volunteer timekeeper and endeavouring to walk a mile, round and round the stage, inside eight minutes. The stages were invariably small, and bored onlookers were usually throwing things at the puffing and trundling champion pedestrian long before the allotted time was up.
Perhaps the most off-putting of all the peripheral strongman acts was that presented by the American wrestling champion Martin ‘Farmer’ Burns. Burns had such a strongly muscled neck, developed over hundreds of bouts in which he performed his celebrated wrestler’s bridge, resting most of his weight on his neck and shoulders, that he had the notion of presenting a stage show in which he allowed himself to take a drop from a genuine executioner’s hanging platform, with a rope around his neck, and dangle there for three minutes while he whistled the popular minstrel melody ‘Dixie’. Curiously, Burns may not have died in the process but on most nights his act assuredly did.
Most strongmen, however, made genuine efforts to improve their music hall acts and make them more wide ranging and attractive to the eye. Established strongmen like John Gruen Marx were famous enough not to have to pander to their audiences and could continue with the straightforward weightlifting performances they had been presenting for years. Lesser, more prudent and acquiescent strongmen and their agents who took advantage of the new demand for their services on the halls realised that they would have to spend much time and ingenuity in appearing more powerful to their audiences than perhaps they really were.
Fortunately, through the ages there had been a strong tradition of obfuscation, not to say downright chicanery, in the lengthy folklore of feats of strength. The new arrivals and their advisers and managers could study, emulate and profit from them. It was true that, before Sandow, strongmen had not featured highly on the roll of honour of entertainment for the masses. For centuries, however, in different civilisations there had been legends about such mythical and semi-mythical strongmen as Gilgamesh, Hercules, Samson, Goliath and Milo.
After that, ancient kings and leaders accumulated their own legends of feats of strength, but these were almost certainly the results of court sycophancy and a general reflex eagerness to please the mighty. The Emperor Maximus of Rome was reputed to have drawn a loaded chariot over the ground. William the Conqueror was said to have been capable of vaulting from the ground into the saddle of his warhorse – while he was wearing heavy armour. King Erius of Denmark was recorded as single-handedly overcoming four strongmen in a tug-of-war competition, without even getting to his feet. Robert the Bruce, it was claimed, had slain a giant in single combat while leading the Scots against the English. Peter the Great of Russia acquired the reputation of being able to break coins between his fingers.
From the Middle Ages onwards, the main ways for strength athletes to earn livings from their prowess lay in travelling fairs and circuses or by attracting the patronage of a nobleman or prince. Among the genuine strongmen of history a few emerged from obscurity because of their exceptional feats of strength or colourful private lives, or simply because they were so big that people noticed and remembered them.
One of the first of these giants was Thomas Topham, a carpenter from Islington, London, and later proprietor of a public house. Among his feats in travelling fairs was resisting the efforts of a horse to move him. After his death it was realised from contemporary drawings of the strongman in action that he had employed basic laws of physics and physiology in his tug of war with the horse: Thomas Topham always sat on the ground and pulled on a rope against the horse. By anchoring his feet against two tree stumps or a low wall, the strongman was able to combine his knowledge of carpentry with a basic knowledge of physics. Keeping his arms and thighs straight meant that Topham assumed the role of the longer arm of a lever and so was able to keep the animal in check. On one occasion the tree trunk shattered and Topham was injured.
He also rolled up pewter plates in his hands, lifted two heavy hogsheads of water using the harness system later to become so popular, lifted a 27-stone clergyman into the air, supported five standing men on his body as he lay between two chairs, and bent pokers by striking them against his forearm, a trick gratefully adapted by Charles Sampson over a century later.
Topham was a skilled self-promoter and drew large crowds in his professional capacity but was less successful in his marital endeavours. He was nagged constantly by a shrewish wife, whom he suspected of being unfaithful, and stabbed her in a quarrel in 1749, before committing suicide with the same knife. He had not yet reached his fortieth birthday. His wife recovered.
A considerable amount is known about Thomas Topham because he attracted the attention of a contemporary French scientist and philosopher, and later member of the Royal Society, John Theophilus Desaguliers, who had settled in England when a child in 1694. He wrote copiously about Topham in his book, A Course of Experimental Philosophy. Desaguliers noted that, like some of the strongmen of the following century, Topham scorned any attempt at showmanship: ‘He has shewed [sic] feats of strength; but he is entirely ignorant of any art to make his strength seem more surprising.’
Nevertheless, Thomas Topham established such a reputation during his lifetime that he was not even allowed to rest easily in his grave after his death. The Daily Advertiser of 16 August 1749, reported:
For these few days past there has been a great commotion in Shoreditch parish, an apprehension that a resurrection had begun it, and several witnesses have been examined by the magistrates in relation thereto. Yesterday it was said that Topham, the Strong Man, had, the night before, with the assistance of some surgeons, got the better of his grave, though some eight feet of earth had been laid on him.
Another noted strongman was William Joyce or Joy. A guide book entitled A Journey Round the Coast of Kent, published in 1818, declared that he ‘broke a rope which could sustain thirty-five hundred weights, lifted up 2,240 pounds and was drowned at 67’. During a brief sojourn as a sailor he was allocated a daily double helping of rum because he always did the work of two seamen.
The Strong Man of Kent, as he was called, sometimes displayed his feats of strength before Queen Anne. Unfortunately for his career prospects at court, Joy also moonlighted as a smuggler. He is believed to have drowned while wading ashore carrying some kegs of brandy. Taking advantage of the fact that the giant could no longer be offended and retaliate, the carver of his headstone smugly pointed out how transient was human strength and fitness:
At last lies here, his breadth and length.
See how the mighty man is fallen.
To death the strong and weak are all one
And the same judgement doth befall
Goliath great as David small.
A touring German strength athlete named John Charles van Eckenburg visited many countries with his act, which laid the foundation for his successors for several centuries. He could break ropes and climaxed his act by lying in a wrestler’s bridge with an anvil on his chest while a brawny partner placed rocks on top of the anvil and shattered them with blows from a hammer. This was a trick to be replicated by generations of succeeding strongmen. The anvil was heavy but Eckenburg knew what he was doing. The weightier the anvil was, the more it absorbed the blows from the hammer.
In another stunt, van Eckenburg would break a thick rope. He managed to do this because the rope moved round a cylinder through a metal eye. To the spectators the rope seemed to move smoothly but in fact it was constantly snagging and fraying on the metal. Van Eckenberg concentrated on breaking the rope where it was most shredded and at its weakest.
> Both Topham and van Eckenburg secured good livings from their natural strength but both were outshone by the French strength athlete Barsabas, who was reputed to have rescued the coach of King Louis XIV from the mud by lifting its wheels from the ground, thus earning himself a pension for life from the grateful monarch. Louis Uni, who later achieved fame as Apollon, would also do well from an encounter with the aristocracy.
For most strongmen their physical endeavours were a full-time job but one Italian performer could truly claim to be a polymath. His name was Giovanni Battista Belzoni, known professionally as the Great Belzoni. He was born in Padua in 1778 and, at age sixteen, he entered a monastery in Rome, where he studied hydraulic engineering. He became engaged in political agitation when Napoleon’s army entered Rome, forcing him to flee from Italy and make his way to Great Britain, although his detractors claimed that he was merely fleeing to avoid conscription. Having read a translation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Belzoni had succumbed to an urge to see the world. A big strong man and newly married, he joined a circus and toured with it for twelve years as the Patagonian Samson.
His act went over well almost everywhere. On 28 September 1811, he appeared at the Old Theatre on the Isle of Man. The following day, the Manx Advertiser said that, among other feats, Belzoni ‘balanced a heavy coach wheel on his chin and a boy on a pole 12 feet high’. For his finale, under a flowing cloak he wore an iron cage, while a wide leather belt went round his waist. A number of men clung to him, securing footholds on the belt or cage, while he supported others on his back and shoulders and carried one under each arm. He would then shuffle across the stage with his human pyramid, waving a flag. Sometimes, just for the sake of variety, Signora Belzoni would attach herself to the top of the mobile pyramid, waving a flag like her husband.
Like later strongmen, Belzoni sometimes had difficulties with elaborate stage tricks. Throughout his circus years, Belzoni continued to experiment with his study of waterpower, though not always with complete success. At the Crow Theatre in Dublin he was hired to design and construct for the last scene a hydraulic temple. It went badly wrong, flooding the set and causing the musicians in the pit to flee. The actor playing the part of Harlequin commented philosophically that the accident had the effect of ‘leaving Columbine and myself, with the rest, to finish the scene in the midst of a splendid shower of fire and water’.
Belzoni toured Europe and the Middle East with his act. Finding his way to Egypt he tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Pasha to adopt the strongman’s invention to increase the supply of water to the former’s palace. Nothing if not versatile, Belzoni then followed the suggestion of the British Consul General Henry Salt that he excavate for archaeological treasures and send them back to the British Museum in London – for a price. Belzoni was no intellectual, but he was strong, determined and fearless, with a gift for languages, well able to put down mutinies among his crew with his fists. He took to his new vocation and became equally well known for finding a number of tombs in the celebrated Valley of the Kings and for his ruthless and destructive methods of excavation.
Though he claimed to be engaged in research, Belzoni spent much time robbing tombs in Timbuktu and later died of dysentery in 1823.
Belzoni wrote a number of books but he never mentioned his sideshow years as the Patagonian Giant, perhaps because his circus days did not gel with his newfound wealth and fame as an archaeologist. Most of his new professional colleagues regarded Giovanni Belzoni as an opportunistic rogue. It was claimed that he had taken more loot out of Egypt than Napoleon’s entire invading French army.
However, it was apparent from the Italian’s book Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, that his earlier training as a strongman had sometimes stood him in good stead:
Of some of these tombs many persons could not withstand the suffocating air, which often causes fainting. A vast quantity of dust rises, so fine that it enters into the throat and nostrils, and chokes the nose and mouth to such a degree that it requires great power of lungs to resist it… In some places there is not more than a vacancy of a foot left, which you must contrive to pass through in a creeping posture.
By the nineteenth century, strongman acts were being featured in many circuses. One of the best known of these weightlifters was a Frenchman called Hippolyte Triat, who made a significant advancement to weight training by inventing the prototype of the dumbbell, first built in 1838. This consisted of a short bar joining two globes, which could be lifted with one hand. The first one weighed 185lbs but due to an accident in the foundry one orb came out slightly heavier than the other, making the apparatus unwieldy and difficult to use.
With such an encouragingly vague history of the feats of ancient strongmen behind them, the new breed of strength athletes could be eclectic when they claimed to be carrying on the great traditions of the past. Drawing on the story of Samson slaying an army of Philistines with the jawbone of an axe and the emperor Commodus – ‘conqueror of a thousand warriors’ – they began to introduce mock gladiatorial displays into their performances. Emulating the precedent of Milo travelling a great distance with an ox on his shoulders, they experimented with carefully rigged, in both senses of the word, displays which seemed to involve the effortless lifting of horses and other animals from the ground. Both Polydance of Thessalonia and Hercules were reputed to have grappled with lions, leading to a subsequent ill-fated attempt by Eugen Sandow to do the same. Salvius of Rome was renowned for walking up a ladder carrying 200lbs on his shoulders, 200lbs in his hands and another 200lbs attached to his legs, a feat attempted by nineteenth-century strongmen. In 1905, a German strongman called William Pagel toured with his own circus and climbed a ladder carrying a horse in a harness on his shoulders.
And when there were no more classical examples upon which to draw in order to embellish their acts, the new breed of professional strongmen could always resort to cheating.
4
THE IRON DUKE
Most strongmen embellished the tricks they performed upon the stage but a few went even farther, living their lives under a veil of deception. One such strongman was an American called William Muldoon, who accepted the sobriquet of the Solid Man of Sport, based on a vaudeville comic song. Muldoon, almost single-handedly, transformed professional wrestling in the USA from a squalid, hole-in-the-corner affair to a razzle-dazzle peak of fixed showmanship. He was one of the first to tour the hinterland of his country with polished strongman shows, trained the reprobate boxer John L. Sullivan to a level of fitness beyond the fighter’s wildest dreams or desires, established a physical fitness empire, and ended up as the autocratic Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. He also rewrote his curriculum vitae with such care and attention as to make Baron Munchhausen seem a pillar of reliability. Most important of all, he established the strongman business in the USA. He and Eugen Sandow never met but conducted their physical culture interests virtually in tandem on different sides of the Atlantic.
There had been a few strongmen displaying their wares before the arrival of Muldoon. Most of them attained only local fame, but in the nineteenth century the English bareknuckle champion Jem Mace and his half-Romany cousin Pooley Mace toured the USA in a series of tent shows, giving boxing exhibitions, muscle flexing and weightlifting displays, and posing in the style of the statues of Roman gladiators. Pooley also gave a renowned strongman exhibition, which included hammering an anvil lying upon his chest. He also used a version of beating an iron bar out of shape by striking it against different parts of his anatomy.
Inspired by the idea, P. T. Barnum, the great circus proprietor, and other showmen started scouring the countryside for outsized men. At first they employed them as sideshow freaks in their dime museums and travelling circuses, but there they did not attract much more than a fleeting interest. Perhaps that was because the impresarios all adhered to the same programme of finding someone tall, exaggerating
his height and then declaring that the paragon was capable of extremely far-fetched and completely unsubstantiated feats of strength. Barnum, in particular, had always liked to have strength athletes on his books as adjuncts to his more spectacular acts like the midget General Tom Thumb and the bearded lady Madame Clofillia, and was never afraid to publicise them.
Among the early successes among the big men displayed in his sideshows throughout the second half of the nineteenth century was one especially imported from Fuzhou in China, via a tour of England. Called Chang the Giant, this Chinese strongman was billed as having ‘the strength of Hercules and the beauty of Apollo’. He was about 6ft 5in. tall but was always displayed in flowing robes on built-up shoes. His publicity matter claimed that he was 8ft in height.
Colonel Routh Goshen of Kentucky was billed as the Palestine Giant. In reality about 7ft tall, he was naturally billed as being 8ft 6in. Unlike many giants he was genuinely strong and could pull a heavy cannon across a circus ring. Goshen was married three times, with one of his wives eloping with their lodger. He complained to a local newspaper that she had taken with her a large sum of money, a horse and an educated goat. He missed the goat but Mrs Goshen could go straight to Hades and tell them that he had sent her.
From Cape Breton in Nova Scotia came Angus MacAskill, a genuine giant, over 7ft 9in. tall and weighing more than 400lbs. He was perfectly proportioned and very strong. He emigrated from Scotland with his parents when he was six years old and, until he was a teenager, he was of normal size, until he hit puberty and grew to his later enormous stature. He developed a local reputation for his ability to lift anchors, masts and barrels and was soon recruited by Barnum, the master showman, for a tour of North America and the West Indies. The affable giant looked after his money and returned home contentedly with what was referred to with some awe locally as ‘a snug fortune’. With his savings MacAskill purchased several farms, a mill and a general store, but died early at the age of thirty-eight.