The Strongest Men on Earth

by Graeme Kent

  News of the phenomenon spread around the neighbourhood. A committee of local dignitaries, including Lula’s father, was formed to investigate the strange occurrences. It was generally agreed that all the bizarre goings-on seemed to centre around Lula Hurst. A theory was formed that during the storm Lula had been struck by lightning and now possessed electrical powers which she could harness to do her bidding.

  Other, larger committees of scientists and doctors were brought together to ponder over the matter. Steadfastly, Lula Hurst was able to demonstrate her powers to all of them. By this time she even appeared to have widened her range, effortlessly lifting from the floor a chair containing a large, heavy man. Starting with a demonstration of table rapping at a local spiritualist meeting, she began to appear nervously at church and civic social gatherings to exhibit her newfound gifts.

  Inevitably, the story reached the newspapers. Equally inescapably, the showmen followed. Lula’s parents were persuaded to accompany their daughter on a tentative tour of the vaudeville halls. Paul Atkinson, a stage manager taken on to mastermind the tour, proved to be efficient and loyal, and later married Lulu, as she was now known.

  The initial tour was a great success. Lulu was promoted to top of the bill and her itinerary was expanded. She appeared in Washington, Boston and New York, to considerable acclaim and packed houses. In two years she travelled more than 20,000 miles by train. She even visited Great Britain. Everywhere she went, audiences agreed that her act was a strange one. Nothing like it had been seen on the halls before, which may have accounted for the act’s success. At the beginning of her brief stage career, Lulu owed a particular debt of gratitude to Henry Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who took up her cause and made Lulu front-page news.

  A typical show would start with Lulu waiting onstage with her father and Paul Atkinson. The young girl always wore a colourful dress. The stage manager doubled as a slick compère and was described in one newspaper as ‘he of the perennial smile’. Atkinson introduced Lulu and asked for male volunteers from the audience to come up on to the stage to assist with the demonstration. By the time Lulu was well known there was no shortage of would-be helpers. If a celebrity in the audience could be induced to come up and take part, that only added to the fun.

  Once sufficient men had gathered nervously around Lulu, the show could begin. The first scene usually consisted of Lulu holding one end of an ordinary umbrella and one of the male volunteers clutching the other, with instructions to cling on for dear life and prevent Lulu from attacking him. Atkinson would then give the word to commence. The umbrella at once seemed to take on a life of its own. While Lulu seemed to exert only the gentlest of pressure on her end, the umbrella started writhing furiously. The volunteer did his best to maintain his grip but within seconds he was being belaboured by the umbrella and knocked to the floor, while the parasol continued to thrash him. An endearing part of the act was Lulu’s habit of giggling happily as she demonstrated her superiority over her male challengers.

  When the audience had finished laughing and cheering, Atkinson urged another man to take the place of the one now cowering on the ground. Again Lulu touched her end daintily. This time the umbrella gave a great leap. While the volunteer clung on to it, the girl released her hold and the umbrella seemed to send the man flying halfway across the stage, where he fell down with a crash. Sometimes Paul Atkinson would call out ‘Behold the power of the electric umbrella!’ or words to that effect.

  These were only the preambles to an evening of female dominance. With one man gripping a walking stick horizontally between two hands, Lulu would place her open hands on the centre of the cane, without seeming to push at all. The cane would start jerking uncontrollably, tearing itself from the man’s hands and sometimes felling him.

  Stunt after stunt followed. Lulu would hold a heavy man effortlessly above the ground in a chair. She then repeated the performance standing on a set of weighing scales. Although Lulu weighed 140lbs and the volunteer was often in excess of 200lbs, the needle on the enlarged scale showed only around 175lbs instead of the 300lbs-plus it should have displayed.

  One volunteer recounted his experiences when he picked up a chair and held it firmly in both hands, with the back of the chair against his chest. Lulu then placed her hands calmly over the volunteer’s. In the New York Times (6 July 1884), the man wrote:

  I have wrestled and sparred and worked hard in the athletic way on many occasions, but I never struggled so desperately in my life as I did with that chair. I found it impossible to control it and was thrust backwards and whirled around… During all this time I did not feel any undue pressure from Miss Hurst’s hands, although the chair felt positively bewitched.

  Lulu defied large men to lift her from the ground, lifted a chair while four men pushed down on it with all their might, balanced on one foot while a man endeavoured unsuccessfully to push her over, held a broomstick and defied anyone to push it through her hands, and performed many other stunts which seemed to prove that she was either incredibly strong or possessed of strange powers. It was all so overwhelming that the New York Times wrote with mock severity on behalf of the beleaguered male population:

  This must be stopped, or there will be no such thing as safety outside a monastery.

  Lulu Hurst even performed her tricks before the inventor Alexander Graham Bell at his home and then in his Washington laboratory. The erudite inventor of the telephone was at a loss to explain the reasons for her accomplishments. On another occasion she gave a private demonstration to the actress Lillie Langtry at New York’s Madison Theatre. The game English actress must have tried to engage with Lulu in some of her physical endeavours, because she emerged from the theatre with her dress torn and her lip cut, complaining of bruising and stiffness. The only other thing she would say in response to the questions of waiting reporters was ‘That is the result of wrestling with the Georgia Wonder!’

  Perhaps Lulu’s greatest feat occurred at the Brooklyn Theatre in New York, when she took on the famous former sumo wrestler Matsuda and other athletes before a full house. Altogether there were twenty men on the stage, led by the wrestler, all determined to beat the Georgia Magnet, the title under which she was almost always billed (although she was also known as the Georgia Wonder and the Georgia Marvel). Lulu started with her usual challenges with umbrellas, walking sticks and billiard cues, sending the volunteers flying in all directions. Finally she was faced by Matsuda and four other men. Matsuda sat gingerly in a chair, held aloft with both hands by Lulu, while his four associates pressed down hard on its arms. Desperately the four men tried to force the chair from Lulu’s hold and down on to the stage. They might as well not have bothered. Within minutes, as the crowd screamed its approval, the chair, together with its occupant and helpers, was bucking and rearing all over the stage.

  Finally an exhausted Matsuda gave up, jumped down from his seat, bowed stiffly and led his helpers off the stage with as much dignity as they could muster, leaving Lulu, still holding the chair, to accept the audience’s rapturous applause. A newspaper reporter present noted:

  The audience went wild in their wrought-up enthusiasm over this wonderful and exciting scene.

  For almost two years the Georgia Magnet could do little wrong. Then, almost abruptly, Lulu’s act began to disintegrate. Suddenly she was no longer the golden girl. Sharp-eyed newspaper correspondents and disloyal stagehands began speculating on the causes behind the Electric Girl’s apparently almost supernatural abilities. A plethora of imitators began to flood the halls, also claiming to be Georgia Magnets. Some of them even called themselves Lulu Hurst, though most of these did not have the original Lulu’s dexterity and stage presence. Unfairly, audiences grew disillusioned, feeling that the Georgia Magnet had been overrated.

  The tide, once it had turned, was inexorable. A killer blow to Lulu’s future was struck when the august New York Times, once her ally, gave her an excoriating review on 13 July 1884:

  ‘The Phenomenon
of the Nineteenth Century’, which may be seen nightly at Wallack’s, is not so much the famous Georgia Girl, with her mysterious muscle, as is the audience which gathers to wonder at her performance. It is a phenomenon of stupidity, and it only goes to show how willingly people will be fooled, and with what cheerful asininity they will help on their deceivers.

  On an appearance in London, Lulu was particularly plagued by the attentions of a local engraver called Thomas Johnson. He seemed to have studied her act in forensic detail and to have worked out how every stunt was accomplished. He harassed Lulu by constantly appearing onstage and challenging her.

  The Electric Girl suffered her reverses with surprising level-headedness. After all, she had had a good run for her money – or rather for other people’s box office contributions. It was estimated that over two years in those happy income-tax-free times she had accumulated a total of at least $50,000 and perhaps as much as double that amount. Additional income had been earned from advertising soap, cigars and even farm equipment, the last appearing under the slogan of ‘as strong as Lulu Hurst!’ She had also attracted the love of a good man in the devoted Paul, whom she had married on tour. And she was still only seventeen.

  The Electric Girl, now plain Lula Hurst again, cancelled a proposed tour of Europe with few regrets, dissolved the act and returned home with her new husband and her parents. She and Paul bought a house in Madison and settled down. There followed twelve years of contented silence. Then, in 1897, when she had almost been forgotten, Lula published her autobiography. It was a sensation and went into a number of editions. The account of her life and theatrical tours was an anodyne and airbrushed enough version of history, but for some reason, perhaps in order to purge her conscience, Lula added a section in which she was amazingly frank about the so-called ‘secrets’ behind her stunts.

  According to Lula or Lulu Hurst, the whole extended episode had been an improvised amalgam of a bored, bright, self-confident girl of above-average physical strength stumbling almost unconsciously upon a stream of events which at first she had hardly understood, then had merely gone with, finally realising that she had a chance to achieve fame and fortune. Added to that, she had been fortunate in obtaining the assistance of a shrewd father and boyfriend, both practical men devoted to her. There had been no supernatural aspects to her gifts; she had merely adopted what she termed ‘unrecognised mechanical principles’.

  It turned out that practically the only genuine thing about the events which initiated Lula Hurst’s strange and lucrative journey to fame was the electric storm raging on the night that the girl’s visiting cousin was sharing her bed with her. Most of the other events were prompted merely by Lula’s mischievous imagination and a desire to torment her cousin, who was plainly terrified by the storm outside.

  As the other girl cowered sobbing under the bedclothes, a smirking Lula did her best to increase her terror. Discovering that the headboard of their bed was loose, Lula squirmed round and started rocking it against the wall with jerking movements of her feet, producing the strange popping sound that was soon to intrigue the earnest investigating committees. She was aware that her cousin had turned her head away and closed her eyes tightly to ward off any evil spirits. This made it easy for Lula to hurl pillows and cushions and small items of furniture about the bedroom, at the same time screaming that they were being moved without any physical assistance. By the end of the storm, the cousin was convinced that she had seen everything that Lula had claimed to witness and backed up Lula’s story with complete conviction. With devilish ingenuity, for several days Lula continued her persecution of the credulous other girl, by taking her clothes from her trunk and hanging them on picture rails and other projections around the house, all the time asserting that they had been moved by some supernatural force.

  When it came to demonstrations of her apparently outlandish gifts to the local investigators, Lula was motivated by a wish to avoid getting into trouble for playing such cruel practical jokes on her cousin. At the same time the easily bored farm girl living in an isolated area was also intrigued to see just how far she could go before her interlocutors discovered the truth, as she was sure they would. She must have been an utterly convincing actress; when she talked of the ‘power’ that was taking her over, most of her listeners believed the wide-eyed, outwardly straightforward and ordinary lass appearing before them.

  From spiritualist acquaintances she heard about the process of table rapping, in which an unseen presence beats out a message on a surface. Lula was an intensely practical girl. She investigated the table in her parents’ lounge, subjecting it to a detailed scrutiny. By a process of trial and error she ascertained that a table could be encouraged to produce the effect of raps at an intersection of joints and mortices, where there might be gaps to be exploited, especially if the wood should be dry and thin in this area. If she could just find the right spot to press, the table could almost seem to come to life under the slightest pressure she exerted, giving off reports of sounds as loud as a pistol shot.

  It was the same when Lula started putting her first act together. By chance she had stumbled across the principle of resistance techniques. With her intelligence and ingenuity, and allied to the practical assistance provided by her father and Paul Atkinson, she soon developed these techniques into a most original vaudeville routine. In effect, like performers going back to Thomas Topham and John Charles von Eckenburg, and even earlier, she based her performance on utilising the principles of the fulcrum and the lever, cleverly disguised.

  In her autobiography, she also explained how she had carried out the feat of lifting a heavy man in a chair with two more men seated on his lap. For a start the chair was constructed to give the lifter every advantage, with a round edge and a curved and rounded back. Automatically, the man seated in a chair would grasp the arms of the seat and place all his weight on his feet. Lulu would then exert a horizontal thrust, without doing any lifting, using her knees as points of support for her elbows. As soon as a slight movement was exerted, the hardest part of the work was over. When Lulu stopped pushing, the chair would move, the equilibrium being destroyed. Before it could be established again the chair was relatively easy to lift some 6in. off the ground.

  In this candid fashion Lulu explained effect after effect in her book. Everything depended upon getting the volunteers onstage into the right state of mind and the correct bodily positions. Once they were worked up to a suitable state of excitement their imaginations took over. With the Georgia Magnet’s unobtrusive prompting, the positions of their bodies were so strained and unnatural that they could rarely exert their full force in the direction they wanted throughout the different tricks. She quoted the words of a perceptive panel of doctors who had witnessed one of her performances: ‘It is the experimenters (i.e. the volunteers), not the subject, who knock themselves, the chairs, canes, umbrellas, etc., about.’

  Lulu provided examples. A man holding a billiard cue horizontally above his head in a manner dictated by the girl could be pushed around by the girl’s open hand because the volunteer was then in a state of unstable equilibrium. Again, once a subject started struggling with the umbrella he was holding, the force of the air beneath its folds was enough to drive it into all sorts of positions, often appearing to be belabouring the panic-stricken volunteer. All that Lulu had to do was utilise the power of leverage and release her contact with the umbrella or stick when she felt the volunteer pushing, and increase it when she saw that he was giving way in the other direction.

  In every stunt the volunteers did the Georgia Magnet’s work for her by losing their balance after they had been placed in contorted and unnatural positions. This applied in particular to Lulu’s celebrated trick of appearing to hold a chair casually aloft while four large men, straining frantically, could not push it back down on to the floor. The volunteers were all off balance and were devoting all their strength to regaining that balance, although they believed they were endeavouring to get the chair back down on t
o the stage.

  Lulu Hurst’s strongwoman act had many imitators. One of the most successful was Dixie Annie Jarratt, who was born in 1861. It is likely that she and her husband saw Lulu Hurst’s act in Milledgeville, Georgia, where they lived in 1884, and between them were able to work out the stratagems behind the Georgia Magnet’s tricks. Within a year Dixie, aided and abetted by her husband Charles Haygood, was touring locally with a pirated version of the Electric Girl act. She was using the stage name of Annie Abbott and, to heighten the resemblance with her predecessor, was calling herself the Georgia Magnet while advertising that her performance was based on the supposedly mysterious propensities of electricity.

  Soon she was on her own. One day in 1886, her husband Charles, a deputy town marshal of Milledgeville, got into an argument over prohibition with a man who accused the deputy of having insulted his brother. Without warning, the man produced a revolver and fired two shots at Charles Haygood at point blank range, killing him at once. The killer was later tried and acquitted.

  That left the newly named Annie Abbott, still in her twenties, with three children, one of them only recently born, and no form of subsistence except what she was earning from her occasional local stage appearances. In an effort to make ends meet she stopped performing only in Georgia’s halls and started appearing all over the country, wherever anyone would employ her. She had selected the right moment. Her performance became a polished and entertaining one. Young Annie Abbott filled the vacancy left by the recently retired Lulu Hurst. In addition, she had the sense to play upon her sex appeal. Unlike Lulu Hurst, who looked capable of flooring a man with a single punch, the slight Annie concentrated on femininity onstage and off. For her performances the fragile girl wore skirts so short that they almost revealed her calves, and blouses with bare arms. A contemporary report on her act in the Minnesota Star Tribune of 15 October 1890 stated: