The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  At about the same time that Sandow was coming to the same conclusion back in Europe (having returned from the USA in 1896), Muldoon also did away with pointless weightlifting displays by his strongmen. Instead, he sharpened up their acts, making them devise more spectacular feats of strength like lifting people and animals and bending agricultural implements, which were relevant to country dwellers working with animals and on farms.

  In 1890, the movement received a healthy boost when Richard K. Fox, the editor of the Police Gazette, always looking for circulation boosters, organised the first major international strongman competition in the USA. The winner was to be any man who could lift from the ground a specially cast weight of 1,030lbs. Fox, building on Muldoon’s profitable strongman tent shows was eager to get behind a vaudeville boom in the USA similar to the one instigated by Sandow in Great Britain. To do this in the USA, Fox needed to develop his own stars. By now Muldoon was too wealthy and independent to be employed as an underling, but there was plenty of home-grown talent to recruit.

  Among the entrants were the Italian Luigi Borra, still billed as Milo, and the leading American strongmen of the decade Selig Whitman, Cowboy Samson and Charles S. Jefferson. The competition was won by 29-year-old James Walter Kennedy, from Kentucky. He straddled the weight, held it by its grips and after several attempts managed to lift it several inches from the ground. Afterwards, the winner admitted that he was not a professional strongman but had been naturally strong all his life and had developed his power by rowing.

  Muldoon eventually left the world of tent shows and used his carefully nurtured Republican political connections to secure a prestigious post as chairman of the newly formed New York Athletic Committee, supervising boxing and wrestling in the city. Innate showmanship, forceful leadership and attention to detail gave great impetus to the strongman cult in the USA and were to lay the foundations for the next and even more spectacular great wave of strength athletes in his native country.

  5

  CHALLENGES, FEUDS AND MISADVENTURES

  On 23 April 1904, the Football News commented tongue-in-cheek: ‘It has been conjectured by the late John Huxley, the late Prof. Lecky, and Mr Daniel Leno, sitting in Grand Council, that there are precisely 273 claimants to the title of the “strongest man on earth”.’

  Not a lot had changed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Most of the original strongmen were still topping the bills and garnering acres of publicity. The shameless and brazen Charles. A. Sampson was still billing himself as the world’s strongest man, despite all evidence to the contrary, and by the early 1890s had relocated temporarily to the USA. Achieving success on the vaudeville circuit, he appeared as one of the chief supporting acts at the newly opened American Theatre in New York. Featuring just below the top-of-the-bill acrobatic Frantz family, Sampson performed what were described as ‘a number of remarkable feats of strength’. Also featured were the sisters Belfry, singing serio-comic songs; the two Bostons in a mock bullfight speciality act; and Mlle Anne and her performing pug dolls.

  Sampson was still telling his tall stories to anyone who would listen or publish them in their newspaper columns. He claimed that only recently he had been shot in the hip at a dime museum. Despite his wound, the strongman claimed that he had reached the assailant in Nashville, Tennessee, when Sampson had gone to the assistance of the manager who was being menaced by a thug. He had leapt upon the assailant and hit him on the chin, breaking his jaw in three places. The hooligan had been sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, while Sampson had been fined $250 for hitting the man so hard.

  Still on the subject of the power of his punch, Sampson told one group of local sportswriters that in the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, the strongman had wrapped a silken handkerchief around his hand and knocked an ox unconscious with three consecutive crushing blows. Impressed by the strength displayed, courtiers of the ruler had urged Sampson to challenge the current professional heavyweight boxing champion James J. Corbett for his title. It was true, Sampson conceded, that Corbett might outbox him at first, but as soon as Sampson got close enough to deliver one of his mighty blows, it would all be over for Gentleman Jim.

  He was also, he informed a press conference, in the process of preparing his most spectacular feat of strength to date. Soon he intended to lift a fully-grown elephant off the ground on his shoulders, using no mechanical apparatus at all. The only reason why he was delaying this exhibition lay in the fact that the designated elephant, specially purchased from Hamburg Zoo, had broken a leg in transit.

  Certainly Charles A. Sampson had a silver tongue. By 1898 he was touring Australia with the Rickards Company. On an appearance at Melbourne Opera House in Australia, a stevedore called Adams responded to a tug-of-war challenge issued by the strongman by leading fourteen burly dock labourers up on to the stage and defying Sampson to outpull his team single-handedly. Sampson’s contingency plan, should he be challenged, was to have an accomplice secure his end of the rope to a heavy object in the wings. The strongman had never dreamt that a gang of burly labourers would accept his blithely issued challenge. His tongue went into overdrive as he attempted to talk himself out of his dilemma in front of a hooting crowd. First the strongman haggled interminably over the rules that should govern the proposed contest. Then he insisted that Adams, the stevedores’ coach, should leave the stage, as his presence there was giving the dockies’ team an unfair advantage. After much wrangling, the stevedores and most of the audience lost interest in the whole affair and retired to the nearest bar. The challenge fizzled out, leaving Sampson to lie another day.

  Eugen Sandow, on the other hand, went almost literally from strength to strength. Though not the first strongman to attract a following, he was the first to combine the activities of weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling and out-and-out showmanship into an entertainment routine, transforming him and his more successful imitators into top-of-the-bill performers at music halls, circuses and vaudeville theatres. This led to the great influx of professional athletes on to the world’s stages for a period of almost twenty-five years.

  He never stopped working on his act and included an assistant in his stage routines – albeit briefly. On holiday in Aachen he encountered a massive German labourer called Karl Westphail, working in a quarry, tossing huge boulders effortlessly into the back of a cart. At a height of 6ft 3in., a weight of 370lbs and a chest measurement of 60in., Sandow renamed him Goliath and brought him back to London, hoping to train him in the arts of the strongman.

  They made a well-rehearsed and gratifyingly well-attended arrival back from the Continent at King’s Cross railway station, accompanied by a carefully selected assortment of boldly embossed suitcases and packing cases and other impedimenta. In front of the attendant reporters Sandow and Goliath mimed their horror when they discovered that after their luggage had been loaded there was no room inside the cab for the two strongmen. Accordingly, the pair of them walked in stately fashion behind the laden vehicle through the streets of the capital to Goliath’s new digs, followed by dozens of onlookers.

  Sandow worked hard to incorporate his new discovery into his act, concentrating on his charge’s homeliness. A reporter from the Sunday Times obligingly described Goliath as ‘a huge mountain of flesh and bone standing well over six feet, with a chest measurement of Heaven knows how many inches, and a huge face like a pantomime mask’.

  Unfortunately, the former quarry worker showed no aptitude for his new line of work, being a slow learner and woefully lacking in the slightest vestiges of personality or charisma. The double act was not a success. Sandow described it in his 1897 book Strength and How to Obtain It:

  We wrestled together, and it was his business to make himself the victor. Then, in order to finish me, he took a cannon, weighing 400lbs, and placed it on his broad shoulders and prepared to fire.

  Eventually Goliath ran off with his landlady and formed his own strength duo with her. Sandow was not sorry to see his protégé leave.r />
  The Prussian’s fans soon began to wonder if their hero was beginning to suffer from delusions of grandeur when billstickers started putting up posters in advance of Sandow’s tours announcing that at forthcoming shows the strongman would lift a horse from the ground with one hand. Nevertheless, in the fullness of time this is what he proceeded to do.

  Admittedly the horse was a small one, weighing ‘only’ around 600lbs, but it was still a mightily impressive achievement. However, in this case, as in so many others, the devil lay in the detail, or rather in the technical design of the apparatus used to make the strongman look so good. On the first night, Eugen Sandow used a complicated system of straps and harnesses wrapped around the docile mount, but he definitely hoisted the animal from the ground and walked a few steps with it. Alan Calvert, a bodybuilder writer, explained in Super Strength how the stunt was performed after the horse had been lowered by a block and tackle on to Sandow’s back: ‘Sandow would lean forward and allow some of the horse’s weight to rest on his shoulders.’

  His peers also constantly changed their acts, usually to make them appear better but sometimes in necessary cost-cutting exercises. Monte Saldo, a one-time apprentice of Sandow’s, had a nice line in tearing three packs of cards placed on top of each other in half, with one revolution of his wrists. Before he reached star status, however, he discovered that purchasing three packs of cards for each performance on a twice nightly basis was proving an unsustainable drain on his pocket, so he dropped the trick from his repertoire. To make up for it, he emulated William Bankier’s posing display, wearing the skimpiest of trunks, and emphasised by a full tan body make-up and a set of lights directly above his posing booth, which highlighted his writhing muscles and knowing leers at the audience.

  A spectacular international act was that employed by the German Paul Spadoni, whose real name was Krause. Dressed as a Roman centurion, he would drive on to the stage at the opening of his routine in a chariot pulled by horses. He would leap out, unhitch the horses and lift the chariot and place it on his head. After a time, with audiences falling off, Spadoni decided that a complete revamp of his act was required. Accordingly, he jettisoned the centurion persona and adopted that of a prehistoric caveman, clad in skins and juggling wooden clubs. He would also juggle with six eggs and then break them into a plate to prove that they were fresh and not hard-boiled.

  During his act, Spadoni also twisted iron bars out of shape. One night, after the show, a supporting entertainer took some of the crumpled bars with him to Zenke’s restaurant in Brooklyn to display them wonderingly to his friends, and left them there overnight on a table. The next morning a man delivering ice casually bent them all back into shape and replaced them neatly on the table. There were plenty of naturally strong men walking about, capable of duplicating vaudeville feasts, especially when the equipment had been weakened in advance!

  Luigi Borra, Milo, was equally pragmatic when it came to moving with the times. His particular routine was totally eclipsed by a group of Germans billed as the Saxon Trio. Whatever stunt Milo performed it could be eclipsed with ease by one of the Saxons. Fed up with the jeers of his alienated audiences and the sympathy of his fellow artistes, and beginning to suffer from a persecution complex, Milo disappeared from the music halls altogether for a few months. He reappeared rejuvenated and reincarnated as ‘Brinn, the Cannonball King’, in a sketch entitled ‘Pastimes on a Battleship’.

  Not unnaturally the action was set on the deck of a large vessel of the Royal Navy, with a transformed Luigi Borra as the epauletted officer, assisted by members of his crew. He started the performance by juggling with several rifles. He would then attach bayonets to them and stick these into the deck before performing a handstand on the butts, taking away one arm so that he was balancing solely on the other limb. After a number of other strongman stunts based on maritime themes, Borra concluded his new act by balancing a pole on his chin – a cannon and its attendant gunner were stationed on a platform on the far end of the pole.

  Even those unambitious strongmen who did not care greatly to interfere with the contents of their acts were forced to strive constantly to make them ever more acceptable to audiences. This sometimes called for a certain amount of subterfuge in what was happening onstage. Living and training as they did with heavy weights, professional strongmen possessed power beyond the wildest dreams of ordinary men. Even so, most of them reasoned that there was no point of straining to excess every night when false poundages could be painted on to the sides of weights. At the time, most strongmen were still using barbells and dumbbells with circular hollow ends. These looked impressive but were relatively light and as far as their total tonnage was concerned they could represent whatever their lifters said they represented.

  Those holier-than-thou performers like William Bankier who criticised colleagues for using flimmery flammery in their performances were not well regarded by the lesser artisans in their profession. The common response to any strongman objecting to a certain amount of trickery onstage was ‘Can’t you give the boys a bit of a show?’

  A lot of effort went into providing these displays on the road. Ingenious uses were made of apparently harmless pieces of apparatus. Professor Paulinetti, the stage name of Philip Henry Thurber, could press up into a one-hand handstand on the end of a walking stick, a great feat, but only possible because there was a small socket sunk into the floor of the stage into which he would unobtrusively fit the edge of his cane.

  Similarly, packs of cards could be baked in an oven before a performance and doctored to make them brittle. The strongmen could then tear the cards in half or even in quarters with contemptuous ease. Alternatively, a tiny incision could be made across the side of the pack, which would enable the strongman to secure a grip when he started exerting pressure with his wrists.

  Another staple strongman trick was to pound a boulder into fragments with one mighty blow of the performer’s fist. This, reputedly, had been one of the parlour tricks of the gigantic Roman Emperor Maximus, two thousand years before. In the nineteenth-century halls the stunt was made easier if a limestone rock was soaked in water overnight. The stone would rot without changing its appearance. When it was struck the next day it would shatter most impressively.

  One of the more dramatic strongman stunts was lifting and swinging a partner by the teeth. A specially designed jaw strap was used and a great deal of the strain of the weight was borne by the strongman’s neck muscles.

  Again and again, the more honest strength practitioners of the era insisted that the breaking of coins between the fingers just could not be accomplished by any strongman. Not for the first time, the down-to-earth Edward Aston represented the voice of reason when he wrote ‘to break a penny with the hands alone was simply not possible’. This did not prevent many strongmen including such a trick in their acts, especially as a coin could be partially severed with a file beforehand, causing it to splinter most impressively when substituted for the genuine article by sleight of hand.

  Hammering nails into a board with a fist was another popular trick among the first strongmen and one that could be mastered fairly easily if the nails had broad heads, were extremely sharp and the board was made of the softest possible wood. Sometimes, instead of using soft wood, a particularly meticulous strongman might hollow out a piece of wood and fill the gap with sawdust before painting over it. The great trick, however, lay in the covering used around the strongman’s fists. The performer would explain that this covering was used merely to protect his hands. In fact, the cloth used was not nearly as soft as it might appear to the audience and covered much more of the fist than was strictly necessary, so that in some cases it had all the power of a muffled hammer.

  Another stunt involved a strongman lying impassively on his back on a bed of nails while supporting a partner in a quivering handstand. Spectators were invited to inspect the nails beforehand but in reality the nails made no impact: packed so closely together on the board, they could not pierce the str
ongman’s skin.

  An extension of this trick was for the strongman to bend nails between his fingers and then toss them into the audience for inspection. This action could have its consequences. In the case of one unpopular performer, three professional strongmen situated themselves in the darkened auditorium for one of his shows. When the performer onstage threw the twisted nails in the stalls, the strongmen seated there merely straightened them out and threw them back on to the stage until the performer begged for mercy.

  On a more mundane level, straightening out a horseshoe was commonplace among the average strongman’s repertoire of tricks. In the vast majority of cases, the shoes used were specially constructed for stage use by a blacksmith out of softened metal. In his book How to Develop a Powerful Grip, Edward Aston, one of the more genuine music hall strongmen, admitted as much: ‘There is not a man in the world who can break a brand new horseshoe … I did what all the other performers did, and that was to go to a blacksmith and get the “right kind”.’

  Another popular trick consisted of a strongman writing his name on a wall chart while supporting a weight attached to his little finger. The secrets were to choose a very short name and to hold the chalk and weight in such a way that most of the weight was resting on the forearm, taking the strain off the little finger.

  A strongman lifting a man above his head would always select a light victim, except in the case of Arthur Saxon, a genuine strongman who scorned such deceptions. A diminutive volunteer, or preferably an assistant planted in the audience, would be called up on to the stage. A heavy leather belt would be fastened about his waist and secured under his shoulders. The strongman would grasp the belt at the level of the other man’s chest, bend his legs and then straighten up. If the strongman’s arm was then straightened and locked into place, it was possible for a trained, muscular professional to lift the other man above his head, because most of the weight would be taken on the lifter’s legs. It then remained only for the strongman to march triumphantly around the stage holding the other aloft.