The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  Thirty years later, another female strongwoman appeared on London’s entertainment scene. She performed in an acrobatic act with her husband, the Frenchman Anthony Jacob Duger, perhaps of mixed blood. He was a tightrope walker, performing on both slack and tight wires, and also carried out acrobatic feats on the backs of different chairs.

  Mlle Duger, like many of her predecessors, appeared on posters as the Female Samson. She performed in the intervals while her husband recovered backstage from his wirewalking exhibitions. She was presented to the audience as an entertainer who had given much satisfaction to HRH the Princess Dowager and the royal family of Great Britain. To warm up the crowd and whet its appetite for what was to follow, she started by arranging herself on her hands and feet, with her back arched, while stones were broken with a sledgehammer on an anvil laid across her stomach. Her handbills gave some idea of the pleasures to follow:

  I. She lies with her body extended between two chairs and bears an anvil of 300lb on her breast, and will suffer two men to strike it with sledgehammers. II. She will bear six men to stand on her breast lying in the same position. III. She will suffer a stone of 700lb to lye on her breast and throw it off six feet from her.

  At this stage M. Dugee, presumably much refreshed after his rest, returned to the fray and executed a dance with iron fetters chained to his legs. To end the performance, husband and wife combined to demonstrate a dance called the Drunken Pheasant.

  Some of the female strongwomen had a number of strings to their bows. In 1896, the Strand magazine playfully described one of these performers appearing in London:

  Miss Darnett, ‘the Singing Strong Lady’, extends herself upon her hand and legs, face uppermost, while a stout platform, with a semi-circular groove for the neck, is fixed upon her by a waist-belt, which passes through brass receivers on the underside of the board. An ordinary cottage piano is then placed by four men on the platform and presently the lady’s callous spouse appears, bowing, and calmly mounts upon the platform also presumably in order that his execution might carry greater weight with the audience – and with his wife.

  As Miss Darnett phlegmatically bore the weight of the piano and her husband, the latter then played a series of soothing waltzes by Strauss. Towards the end, without shifting her position, the strongwoman would aid the accompanist by singing a love song.

  Miss Darnett had a rival on the London halls at this time in the shapely form of Mlle Arniotis, who embarked upon a long run at the Alhambra Theatre. Unlike the musically inclined British strongwoman, Mlle Arniotis was an out-and-out strength athlete, although her publicity matter made it clear that she definitely was not over-muscled. Her closing display consisted of lifting a barrel with her teeth, with two ten-stone men perched on the lid. A versatile artiste, she was always prepared to expand her act – if the price was right. When a group of young bucks out for a night on the town bet her £10 and offered to pay for the price of the piano being used in her act, she shrugged, lifted the instrument, carried it to the edge of the stage and threw it into a previously cleared space in the aisle in the stalls.

  Another French strongwoman who was touring the halls of London and most of Europe during this period was Madame Elise. Born in Neuilly near Paris, she later married a strongman and formed a double act with him. Madame Elise was capable of standing on a platform with a 700lb barbell across her shoulders and a man hanging on to each end of the weight. She was said to be able to carry eight men on a bridge placed across her shoulders. This strongwoman was also capable of putting her power to practical use. Once, when travelling through Cornwall in a caravan containing five other female circus performers, the horse drawing the vehicle baulked at the foot of a particularly steep hill. The strongwoman took the beast’s place and used a rope to tow the caravan to the brow of the hill. There is no record as to the whereabouts of Madame Elise’s husband during this particular emergency.

  Several muscular female performers combined acrobatics with feats of strength during their circus displays. One of these was a German-born performer of mixed race who usually appeared under the name of Miss La La, although she was sometimes billed as the African Princess, Olga la Negresse, the Cannon Woman, the Human Gun Carriage and the Venus of the Tropics. Her real name was probably Olga Kaira. Her displays included a high-wire act, performing feats of strength including dangling from a rope and even holding a cannon by her teeth above the arena. She appeared at the London Westminster Aquarium in 1879, but already had become famous with her dazzling displays at the Cirque Fernando in Paris in January of that year, where she had attracted the favourable attention of the artist Edgar Degas, who painted her hanging from a rope by her teeth above the heads of the spectators. A critic in The Era magazine, reviewing Miss La La’s act, made much of her colour at a time when black performers were relatively rare, and speculated dismissively that black men and women were probably ‘superior in the matter of strength to whites’.

  A number of female circus performers used a trapeze as an integral part of their acts to display a combination of suppleness and strength. Madame Ali-Braco balanced a cannon on her shoulders and then performed a little preliminary trapeze work before lifting the cannon from the ground with her teeth while dangling from the trapeze. Even more impressive was the routine of the tiny but extremely tough German Lillian Leitzel, who was a circus acrobat. No one messed with this diminutive waif. She could swear like a trooper and was inclined to strike any tardy stagehand who did not prepare her apparatus to her complete satisfaction.

  Well-educated and cultured, from an early age she nevertheless decided that the circus life was one that she wanted to embrace. Her mother and two aunts had been trapeze artistes and although her grandmother did her best to educate the girl and encourage her to take up a classical music career, Lillian made her own trapeze at home and practised on it daily. When she turned professional, using a rhythmic swinging motion she would hang from a bar high above the ring and pull herself up by one hand, encouraging the crowd to shout out the number of repetitions she could manage in this way. Her record was twenty-seven pull-ups with her right arm and seventeen with her left. She also performed on the rings, impressing the crowds as she plunged and swooped. The onlookers would have been even more impressed if they had known that every time Lillian performed one of her spectacular revolutions she temporarily dislocated her shoulder in the process.

  The trend of strongwomen to move from the circus arena to the music hall and vaudeville stages began in the 1880s and 1890s, when the appearance of the forerunners of ‘laddish’ magazines such as the Police Gazette hit the shelves. This promotion of female flesh transferred itself to the performances of some of the female artistes. There had been exhibitions of semi-nudity onstage since the 1860s, with posing displays of tableaux vivants and poses plastiques, although much of the titillation involved was heightened by the tactful use of lighting and all-embracing body stockings. In 1869, the British dancer Lydia Thompson had taken her troupe of scantily clad British Blondes to the USA and helped to widen the rift between vaudeville and much racier and bawdier burlesque performances. A year later the Folies Bergère had opened in Paris, with its displays of female beauty.

  There was a sudden craze for the forerunner of striptease performances when variations of Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils started being performed on many music hall bills. This glorification of the female form was emphasised even before Flo Ziegfeld instigated his upmarket displays of female fresh, known as girlie shows. The beautiful Australian swimmer, Annette Kellerman, was so famous for her form-fitting one-piece bathing suits cut well above the knee that she was actually arrested by the Boston police for appearing in public wearing one. She had retired from active competition to headline vaudeville and music hall bills, protesting that the voluminous costumes of the day hindered her chances of breaking fresh world records: ‘I might as well be swimming in chains!’ Even so, she set a world record for swimming a mile in twenty-eight minutes. There was no doubt, however,
that it was the swimmer’s shapely form that vaudeville audiences wanted to see, not her expert demonstration of the new-fangled trudgeon stroke.

  Billed as the Diving Venus, the Australian appeared at a London music hall to perform her Mermaid Show in a glass-sided tank. The manager had placed a dozen large mirrors around the tank. When asked for the reason for this action, he had replied trenchantly, ‘What are we selling here? We’re selling backsides, right? So, if one backside is good, a dozen backsides are even better!’

  Few if any of the circus strongwomen making the transition to the halls in the wake of the bare flesh movement could boast the attractive lines of Annette Kellerman and Lydia Thompson, but the admittedly rather bulky new arrivals did their best to make their shows sexy as well as awe-inspiring.

  Kate Brumbach, who performed as Sandwina, after Eugen Sandow, was born in Vienna in 1884, one of fourteen children of a professional strongman and woman act.

  Although she was a hefty lady, she was quick to point out that at a weight of 200lbs all her measurements were in proportion. Performing as Sandwina (her publicity material on posters claimed that she had once outlifted Eugen Sandow in a weightlifting contest, but there is no evidence of this) she was soon being billed as the strongest and most beautiful woman in the world and made much of her physical attributes. On one well-advertised occasion she arranged for a group of doctors to examine her at Madison Square Gardens in New York. They declared Sandwina to be the perfect physical specimen. At a height of 5ft 9in. tall, her chest measurement was 44in. and her waist 29in. She had a hip measurement of 43in. and her flexed right bicep was 14in.

  As a child she worked in her parents’ travelling act, performing acrobatics and twisting steel bars and horseshoes out of shape. By the time she was a teenager her father had given her featured billing, offering any man who could defeat her at wrestling a prize of one hundred marks. In this way Kate, who was a romantic at heart, met her much-loved husband Max Heymann. He was nineteen at the time and a professional acrobat, while Kate was sixteen. In their contest, Kate threw Max so hard that he bounced off the ground before lying prostrate. It was a case of love at first sight. As Max slowly recovered and started twitching on the floor of the circus ring, he looked up at his conqueror, who was gazing down solicitously at him. As Max wrote in later years, ‘I knew that never before had I been in the presence of such loveliness… Then she lifted me in her arms as though I was a toy doll and carried me inside her dressing tent.’

  After a time, the pair formed a double act. They were married in 1910 and split from Kate’s parents’ troupe. They left Germany for the USA where, with two assistants they toured as the Sandwinas. Eventually they were spotted by bookers and joined the Ringling Brothers’ Circus, with Kate billed as the Iron Queen. She lifted weights and juggled with cannonballs. Forty pounds heavier than her husband and partner, she would throw him overhead and then catch him, holding him aloft in one hand. Their theatrical bills, which may have lost something in their translation from the original German, read ‘she tosses her husband about like a biscuit’.

  Josephine Schauer was even stronger than Kate Sandwina but did not possess the German’s charisma or striking looks. It is not sure whether she was born in Hoboken, New Jersey or in Germany but she married a professional strongman in Paul Blatt, the Hoboken Hercules. Blatt had been looking for a partner for his act and had heard of the feats of strength of the large neighbourhood girl and deliberately set out to find her. They rehearsed their new act, fell in love and married, touring Europe and the USA together from 1899 until 1910, when she retired.

  Josephine took the name of Minerva for her professional appearances. She went through the usual routines of breaking horseshoes and chains with her hands and even catching cannonballs after they had been fired, although the firing mechanism of the gun being used had been considerably modified and the velocity of the projectiles was not quite as explosive as Minerva would have her audiences believe. Her pièce de résistance lay in lifting a man who was seated in a chair, and holding him out at arm’s length ahead of her.

  It was as a lifter of heavy weights that she excelled. At the Bijou Theatre in Hoboken in 1895, using a harness lift she succeeded in hoisting a total of 3,564lbs from the ground. Challenging and defeating another strongwoman, Victorine, in 1893, Minerva achieved great fame, with Richard K. Fox, editor of the Police Gazette, presenting Minerva with a belt embossed with golden dumbbells and seventeen silver plates. The magazine also bestowed upon Minerva the title of the world’s strongest woman.

  Neither Sandwina nor Minerva concealed their appetites for food and drink. Kate Sandwina admitted that there was nothing to beat a good bottle of beer or a fine bottle of wine. Minerva was even more candid about her regime in an interview published in the San Antonio Daily Light of 15 August 1892:

  Eating is about the principal part of my existence, and I always have the best I can possibly procure. For breakfast I generally have beef, cooked rare; oatmeal, French-fry potatoes, sliced tomatoes with onions and two cups of coffee. At dinner I have French soup, plenty of vegetables, squabs and game. When supper comes, I am always ready for it, and I then have soup, porterhouse steak, three fried eggs, two different kinds of salads and tea.

  Most of the leading strongwomen came from the USA or Continental Europe. Only one strength athlete from the British Isles made any sort of impact on the music hall circuit. Her name was Kate Williams, although sometimes she was known as Kate Roberts. She was born in Abergavenny in Wales in 1875, the daughter of an Irish preacher who had settled in Wales. Kate showed early talent as an athlete and when she left school at the age of fifteen to work in a local tannery she enrolled at a local gymnasium in order to keep fit.

  The gymnasium was run by a small-time music hall strongman called William Roberts, whose stage name was Atlas. Under his tutelage, Kate Williams began to specialise in strongwoman tricks and was soon appearing at local fairs. The costume that she wore was scanty enough to be described as shocking for its time, although her male audiences grew with every performance. Causing a local scandal, she and William Roberts fell in love and ran away together – Roberts was already married, with a young family.

  At first, Kate appeared in Roberts’s music hall troupe, ‘The Society of Athletes’. Soon, however, the girl had developed such a reputation for her strength and good looks that she and Roberts joined together as a double act on halls in London and the provinces, appearing as Atlas and Vulcana. It soon became clear that Roberts employed many tricks in his act, earning the contempt of his peers and audiences. But no one disputed the ability of his partner. A pretty, normal-looking woman, she was still able to lift heavy weights and carry a small organ on her back. She could lift a weight of over 120lbs over her head with her right hand. She was possibly the first strongwoman to perform the Tomb of Hercules stunt, hitherto the exclusive province of male strength athletes. She would lie backwards on the stage supported on her hands and legs, staring at the roof, while a platform was placed across her stomach. Then, at her command, two horses would be led onto the platform and left standing there.

  She was also adept at publicity stunts. In 1901 she gathered a large crowd in London’s Strand when she lifted one end of a carriage stuck in the mud, while policemen replaced a shattered wheel. Genuinely courageous, she once stopped a runaway horse in Bristol, saved two children from drowning in the River Usk and in a blaze at a music hall rescued a horse belonging to an equestrian act.

  Though never starring on the halls, there were a number of other strongwomen acts, most of whom had their own impressive specialisations onstage. Athleta, a Belgian girl, paraded around the stage carrying a bar upon which clung four men dressed as soldiers. She came from a circus family and handed on the tradition when her daughters Brada, Louise and Anna continued the act after their mother’s early retirement. Sasha Padoubney, the sister of the famous Russian wrestler, Ivan, claimed to be the women’s world wrestling champion and challenged all comers in the 1880s
and 1890s.

  Charmion, whose real name was Laverne Vallee, performed the usual strongwoman act but opened her performance with a startling stunt which made her name. In a variation of Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils, she dressed in ordinary Victorian clothes and swept backwards and forwards above the stage on a trapeze, stopping at the end of each graceful arc to remove an item of clothing. The curtain would be lowered before the final garment could be discarded and dropped.

  One who did have great success, and who undoubtedly became the most famous strongwoman of all time was just fifteen when she commenced her music hall career. Her performance was genuinely sensational, at least at first. Later she suffered considerable obloquy at the hands of audiences and the press, halting her career after only two years.

  Her name was Lula Hurst, although for stage purposes she usually appeared as Lulu Hurst, the Georgia Magnet. She was born in Polk County, Florida, in 1869, the daughter of a farmer and church deacon, a wounded veteran of the Civil War. Later, to heighten the drama of her feats of strength, writers and illustrators depicted her as a mere slip of a girl, although she seems to have grown to a fair size as a teenager. One newspaper report described her both tactfully and accurately as a typical country girl, approaching 6ft in height, with lovely hair growing down to her shoulders. Less gallant observers referred to her as stout.

  One night, while an electric storm raged outside, Lula was sharing a bed with a visiting cousin. Suddenly there was a strange popping noise in the room and some items of furniture and clothing started to move. The next morning, the girls told Lula’s parents what had happened. As confirmation of this, for the rest of the week heavy articles in the house seemed to move of their own volition without anyone being near them.