A great weight lifted the history of the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association

ABSTRACT

Despite its longevity as an Olympic sport, Olympic weight-lifting has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention, an observation made all the more confusing when one considers weight-lifting’s inclusion at the 1896 Olympic Games and its rich nineteenth century history. The dearth of studies on weight-lifting outside of the United States can be found in the paucity of histories on individual national federations. This is certainly the case in Great Britain where BAWLA (the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association) was founded in the early 1900s. This article provides the first comprehensive history of BAWLA’s foundation and, in doing so, establishes the reliance that British weight-lifting had on European weight-lifting in terms of athletes, organisers and inspiration. In doing so it tracks the shift from strength performances in an informal setting (music halls, gyms, circuses etc.) to standardised sporting practices. First founded in 1901, BAWLA ceased operating before re-emerging in the 1910s. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First it discusses BAWLA’s creation (in both instances) and, more importantly, highlights its European relationships. The article thus stresses the transnational influences existing in British weight-lifting and physical culture during this period.

KEYWORDS:

• British Amateur Weight-lifting Association
• weight-lifting
• British history
• physical culture
• sporting federations

This is an article about the first governing federation of British weight-lifting, the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association (henceforth BAWLA). In 1891, the first recognised international weight-lifting competition was held in London. Five years after, a British athlete, Launceston Elliot, became one of the first Olympic weight-lifting champions when he competed at the inaugural 1896 Athens Games. Soon after, a British Amateur Weight-Lifting Association was created which, although rising and disappearing in several cycles, nevertheless marked itself as one of the first of its kind in a European context. This happened concurrently at a time when Britain was one of the world’s most important hubs for physical culture, strength, and health cultures. Much has been written on the physical culture movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and Britain’s role within it.¹ Likewise later works have examined the role of the British Empire in the dissemination of fitness practices between the metropole and her colonies.² British strength and fitness history was significant then in both a domestic and an international context. This was especially true of the early history of British weight-lifting. Reflecting the broader cosmopolitan nature of the British physical culture movement, many of those involved in the early establishment of British weight-lifting came from mainland Europe. Likewise, many of the athletes who competed in these competitions were either trained by, or were themselves, foreign émigrés. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First it tracks the establishment of the British Amateur Weight-Lifting Association in the early twentieth century, which is first time that this has been attempted within a scholarly context. Building on this, the article next argues that BAWLA, and British weight-lifting in general, influenced, and was influenced by, broader developments in European weight-lifting.

Before delving any further, it is useful to highlight the different tributaries of the physical culture movement. While the most general expression of physical culture during this era could be labelled as ‘keep fit’ exercise i.e. those men and women who took to gymnasium cultures to improve their health (defined sometimes separately or sometimes simultaneously with reference to physical appearance, weight loss, more energy etc.), two other components existed.³ They were the strength performers and, the focus of the current article, the strength athletes. Strength performers were those individuals, either side of the Atlantic ocean, who made their fame in theatres, music halls or vaudeville stages demonstrating fantastical feats of strength. In the case of some, like Eugen Sandow, this meant carrying a small horse across a stage or, in the case of Victorina, carrying a cannon.⁴ For strength performers, strength was important but it was often unverified. That is to say no one accurately measured their implements nor where they often competitive events. Strength athletes, by contrasts, competed against others in competition, under strict rules and the eye of a referee. Their weights were verified and rankings were drawn. A strict division between this three disciplines (keep fit, strength performer and strength athlete), rarely existed in practicality. Arthur Saxon, for example, was both a strength performer and athlete in the early twentieth century but it is useful for the purposes of this article to pinpoint our focus on strength athletes, and their competitions, from the outset.⁵

This article thus addresses a clear but obvious gap in sport and physical culture histories, namely the origins of British weight-lifting. More than that, it highlights the transnational nature of weight-lifting in Britain and the channels of communication – both physical and print – which existed during this time. Despite the importance of Britain within the sport of weight-lifting, and late nineteenth and early twentieth century physical cultures, comparatively little has been written on its history. Historian David Webster, in a series of popular histories, did a great deal to uncover the individual and institutional biographies of early weight-lifters while Gherardo Bonini published a critically important work on the previously mentioned 1891 London weight-lifting contest.⁶ Outside of these texts, some further biographies exist while David Fahey’s republication of early weight-lifter and athletics organiser E. Lawrence Levy provided some further contextual histories of British weight-lifting.⁷ Much of the historiography on weight-lifting in Anglophone journals has focused on the United States, and indeed a great deal of that has been conducted by John Fair. Through biographies and individual articles, Fair has done much to advance the study of weight-lifting from the mid-twentieth century onwards.⁸ It is the early twentieth century, precisely the period when weight-lifting began to be codified and formalised that warrants historical study.

At present, only one study has looked at BAWLA during this period, but that was in a tangential way. Conor Heffernan’s work on Irish international weight-lifting in the late 1910s and early 1920s studied the difficulties Irish weight-lifting associations faced in organising owing to the country’s fraught political situation. In this study, BAWLA, and its rules, were presented in the backdrop.⁹ In a different context, John Fair’s study of the battle for legitimacy among American weight-lifting federations briefly mentioned the inspiration these federations drew from outside associations like BAWLA.¹⁰ Peng Han Lim’s research on Malayan and Singaporean weight-lifting from the mid-twentieth century likewise mentioned BAWLA but, by this point, the Association was well established.¹¹ While the International Weight-lifting Federation has published several celebratory histories in the past, substantial historical work on the foundation of weight-lifting associations has been absent.¹² This is especially curious given the saturation of historical studies on the organisation and codification of other sports. Weight-lifting contests began in the late 1880s, and were part of the inaugural Olympic games, but competitions did not have a globally agreed upon set of rules until the 1920s. Studying this topic provides insight into British sporting histories, global histories of weight-lifting, and associational cultures.

First the article situates the establishment of BAWLA within the broader context of British and European physical culture and weight-lifting in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. This includes some commentary on the 1891 competition previously studied by Bonini. Next the article examines the creation of BAWLA, including a short-lived iteration in the early 1900s and sets its creation against the broader European weight-lifting environment. This section stresses the difficulties British weight-lifting faced in establishing a legitimate governing presence. Finally, the article explores deeper interactions between British and European weight-lifters on the eve of the Great War and the final establishment of a sustained BAWLA organisation. While BAWLA was a British association, this article makes clear its intersections with European norms, athletes, and cultures.

British and European physical culture

The sport of weight-lifting in the mid to late nineteenth century suffered from a distinct lack of identity and organisation. It was often seen as an adjunct to health or strength performances within the burgeoning physical culture movement which advocated exercise as an alternative to medicine, or a source of entertainment in the strongman vaudeville and circus acts. Defined by Michael Anton Budd as a ‘late nineteenth and early twentieth century concern with the ideological and commercial cultivation of the body’, physical culture has often been understood as a precursor to modern health, fitness, and wellness cultures.¹³ During this period physical culture encompassed physical exercise, dietary concerns, sport, and alternative medicine. These worlds, alternative medicine, strength shows, and popular health were incredibly transnational in nature, the ramifications of which shaped the origins of British weight-lifting.¹⁴ Before exploring more generalised efforts to standardise weight-lifting in more degree in the nineteenth century, it is worth providing some cursory comments on the general physical culture environment of the nineteenth century.

Despite the claims from some proponents that physical culture was ‘discovered’ during the late nineteenth century, it is more accurate to say that European and American societies had become increasingly familiarised with the concept of dedicating some portion of time in one’s day to physical exercises designed to strength or rebuild the body.¹⁵ Distinct from sport, the nineteenth century fascination with ‘purposive exercise’, that is exercise carried out with some form of physiological goal in mind, was initially labelled gymnastics and callisthenics before the term physical culture was applied ubiquitously from the 1880s onward.¹⁶ In Britain the ‘physical culture boom’ is typically traced to the arrival of Prussian strongman Friedrich Wilhelm Müller (later Eugen Sandow) in the late 1880s. Sandow, and his mentor, Louis Atilla, arrived in London in 1889 to challenge a fellow strongman in a feat of strength. Sandow won in spectacular fashion and, as traditional narratives go, Britain became fascinated with muscle-building.¹⁷ Importantly for this article, Sandow’s journey to London was not unique. In fact, Sandow was one of many influential fitness figures who made London their home during this period.¹⁸

Preceding Sandow in the 1880s was fellow Teutonic strength performer Victorina, who may hold the distinction of being Britain’s first popular strongwoman. Others who travelled to England in the 1880s and 1890s included the Germanic ‘Saxon trio’, the leader of which, Arthur Saxon, was regarded as one of the strongest men of the age. The great Estonian wrestler, George Hackenschmidt, whose bouts with Frank Gotch gained worldwide attention, likewise came to London.¹⁹ Where individuals did not make England their residency, many came on short-lived sporting tours. Quebecois strongman Louis Cyr travelled to England during this period to prove his strength against some of the strongest men in the world.²⁰ Likewise a number of Indian wrestlers, including Gama the Great, came during this period to test themselves against European wrestlers and, in doing so, challenge claims about Hindu and Muslim effeminacy.²¹ While these individuals were certainly the ‘headline’ acts, they were joined by dozens and dozens of performers who didn’t attract the same attention.

Why was England such a popular destination? While the ‘sporting boom’ (by which numerous sports underwent a newfound organisation of codification) during the nineteenth century in England has been well covered by historians, less attention has been directed towards a similar occurrence in English physical culture.²² From the 1890s to the Great War, Britain was arguably the world’s most important physical culture hub. The music hall scene provided ample employment for strength athletes, either as the main performer or as a body on the card. Britain’s imperial links facilitated the movement of athletes, but also the movement of books, magazines, nutritional supplements, and exercise materials.²³ Finally, Britain’s already existent sporting economy began to embrace physical culture as physical culture books and products came into production. Using Sandow as an example illustrates the potential riches to be made. In 1898 Sandow created one of the world’s first dedicated physical culture magazines which, by 1902, could be found in South Africa, alongside his workout equipment.²⁴ Weight-lifting benefitted from this explosion of interest, as many of those named classed themselves as weight-lifters and strength performers and physical culturists, but the official development of weight-lifting came through a different pathway.

In Continental Europe during the 1870s and 1880s, weight-lifting was more a spectacle than a sport, though it was here that efforts to formalise some form of weight-lifting competitions first emerged in a tangible way. This is not to deny the importance of strength performances, as indeed many of the most famous strongmen and women performers from this era came from mainland Europe. This is instead to say that weight-lifting clubs and associations were littered throughout the mainland, especially in France, Austria and Germany.²⁵ Many strength performers joined these clubs, practiced weight-lifting and used it as a foundation for their shows. The interplay between circus or stage and competition was something which greatly influenced the early days of weight-lifting the sport, as opposed to weight-lifting the practice.²⁶ Webster previously found that strongmen from Germany and Austria travelled to London seeking fortune and fame and brought the continental tradition of circus strength acts to Great Britain within the music hall circuit.²⁷ Performers, such as the German Saxon Trio and the Italian Cosimo ‘Romulus’ Molino, came over to make their name, wowing the British public with their feats of strength and skill long before Eugen Sandow became a household name. Importantly, many of those who migrated to England also brought with them a tradition of legitimate sporting contests in weight-lifting as well. Returning to our previous trifurcation of physical culture into health concerns, strength performances and competitive weight-lifting it is clear that strength feats and weight-lifting were interlinked. In 1890 Austrian weight-lifters and organisers established the Osterreicliisclie Atileteii Brriid which arranged national championships as early as 1901. Germany followed suit, setting up a federation for the governing of ‘heavy athletics’ in 1891 which can be viewed as the precursor to the International Weight-lifting Federation (henceforth IWF), which still acts as the sport’s global governing body.²⁸ The influence of these bodies in England was not subtle either. In a 1910 article with Health and Strength, Britain’s oldest weight-lifting magazine (established 1898), organisers explicitly cited the influence which continental European weight-lifting had, and continue to have, on British weight-lifting when it came to the actual organisation of the sport.²⁹

Despite lagging behind their European counterparts in governance, Britain played host to what is now considered by the International Weight-lifting Federation, the sport’s global federation, to have been the first ever international weight-lifting competition.³⁰ In 1891, a series of weight-lifting contests were organised at Cafe Monica in London's Piccadilly Circus which served as the impetus for the standardisation of championship events. The contest’s composition belied the European influence in English weight-lifting. The first took place on January 26th and saw twelve lifters vie for the title of English amateur champion. The title went to Birmingham schoolmaster, Edward Levy, who bested future Olympic winner Launceston Elliot in a series of eight lifts.³¹ The match was notable for including one barbell lift — a rarity in England at the time. The Sporting Life reported with admiration that Englishmen had always been famed for their strength but had so far failed to match their American and German counterparts at barbell feats because they had focused their attention on dumbbells. ‘Now that the amateurs of Albion have taken to it’, they crowed, ‘they will soon force their Transatlantic and German rivals to alter the figures in their record books’.³² The event received a less favourable write-up on the Continent. Austrian newspaper, Ellgemeine Sport Zeitung, mocked the substandard strength of the Englishmen who failed to lift over 50.2 kg with their left hands.³³

Undeterred, another bout was determined for 6th March, which pitted amateurs and professionals against one another. Thirty-four contestants entered, but only nineteen took to the stage to compete. Only fifteen were able to best the first challenge of lifting a 56 lb. dumbbell in each hand to arm’s length above the head. A mere five managed to put up 84 lb. in the same manner.³⁴ The next day’s newspapers reported the event’s poor attendance and wondered if the ‘fickle British public’ had tired of the ‘strongman craze’ which referred to the growing importance of strength feats (irrespective if they were held in theatres in legitimate competition) in England.³⁵ The public’s lack of interest may have been less to do with fickleness, and more to do with the haphazard nature of these tournaments. Without formal organisation from a dedicated weight-lifting governing body, the competitions were often long, drawn out, and lacked standardised lifts or means of verification.

The competition was governed by the London Athletic Institute in association with the Cumberland and Westmoreland Amateur Wrestling Society and included side-events such as fencing and wrestling.³⁶ On the 28^th of March, competitors from Britain, Vienna, Italy, Brussels, and Berlin, lined up to test their strength in a selection of eight dumbbell lifts. The results were judged by the number of repetitions the lifter managed with a determined weight, rather than an aggregate of poundage. This first day of competition was not a resounding success. Out of seventeen entrants, only eight took to the stage. The only American competitor withdrew at the last moment due to an injured arm.³⁷ Fresh from his recent victory as ‘Britain’s Amateur Weight-Lifting Champion’, Edward Levy easily defeated his opponents.

The separation of dumbbell and barbell lifts into separate events was a major turning point in the sport’s history and shaped the future of modern weight-lifting. In the late nineteenth century, the barbell was still in its rudimentary form, appearing little more than a dumbbell with a slightly longer bar. Gherardo Bonini has argued that during this contest, ‘the great new concept emerged: the true scientific speciality of weight-lifting had to be performed with a barbell’.³⁸ This marked a move towards barbells as the weight of choice for standardised competitions. The barbell allowed for unity of lifts and made for a greater consistency of weights. Barbells also had the added advantage of, once disc loading barbells became a reality, being far more adjustable than dumbbells.³⁹ They also allowed much heavier weights to be lifted. Finally, the introduction of barbells meant that lifts no longer had to be scored by aggregate poundage but rather by the total amount lifted in one movement. Critically in the aftermath of the event the first effort to establish a formal British weight-lifting association was made.

Early efforts and early failures in the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association

The international championship caught the attention of the British public and provided the impetus for English lifters to see their sport as more than a side-show, though it took another decade for a serious attempt to be made to organise British weight-lifting. An aborted effort had been made in February 1890 to rescue the sport from the disinterested governance of the Amateur Gymnastic Association. In 1892, Gilbert Elliot, father of future Olympic champion Launceston Elliot, made another effort to create some form of formalised association. In a letter to Health and Strength magazine he proposed a change that would prove instrumental to the sport of weight-lifting – the separation of ‘feats of endurance’ from ‘feats of tour de force’.⁴⁰ Competitions had generally featured a mix of repetition lifting (how many times could a weight be lifted without rest) and one rep maxes (how much weight could be lifted once). This distinction was an important one in the way competitions would come to be scored. Nothing came of the suggestion. In the interim period between 1892 and 1901, weight-lifting competitions in England were a hodgepodge of endurance events and one rep maxes (wherein the heaviest weight lifted once is the winner). More broadly, the sport continued to advance. In 1896 weight-lifting was included in the inaugural Olympic games which saw Britain’s Launceston Eliot and Denmark’s Viggo Jensen both win events. Showing the disarray within the sport at the time, Edward Levy had travelled to Greece to compete but, upon arrival so vehemently disagreed with the rules governing the event that he refused to take part and, instead, acted as an official.⁴¹ At this time weight-lifting was included as part of the track and field events which furthered its vague status as a sport. It was absent from the 1900 Olympics in Paris and returned in 1904 in St. Louis. While further study is needed on the sport’s absence from Paris, former IWF president Gottfried Schödl noted that when the IWF was officially founded in 1905, the inaugural meeting made no mention of the 1896 or 1900 Olympic Games.⁴² While World Championships on a regular (but not annual) basis began in 1898 with the Vienna games, dissension existed in the sport concerning which lifts and categories to include. Influential Italian weight-lifter and organiser Marquis Luigi Monticelli-Obizzi was a key figure in pushing for some form of standardisation from 1895 onwards, but tensions existed regarding which country’s rules should be adopted by all.⁴³ These debates and meetings were held both privately, and in sporting magazines such as the English Health and Strength or German Kraft und Gewandtheit.

While British weight-lifting remained largely immune from these debates due to the reluctance of officials to participate in them, the sport was not without its controversies at this time due to its crossover with entertainment. As many weight-lifting athletes also drew a living as strength performers in the music hall, it was common for deception to enter contests. One such example of this came in 1893 when Eugen Sandow claimed that Arthur Saxon cheated in competition by using a mercury loaded barbell as opposed to a solid barbell. The difference here lying in the fact that mercury, as a liquid, caused the barbell to become unevenly weighted when lifted as the liquid shifted from one end to the next. Sandow went so far as to sue Saxon for this chicanery.⁴⁴ The problem was that Saxon had done nothing of the sort and Sandow was, as often happened, protecting his reputation. As Sandow biographer and physical culture historian David Chapman later recorded, Sandow’s claims hinged on the public’s ignorance of what constituted an accurate lift within the sport.⁴⁵ Away from slander, it was a common occurrence for weight-lifters to use inflated numbers when lifting weights, to use implements that required a specialist knowledge that only the owner possessed (such as a chain with a hidden weak link or an object that could be easily lifted at a certain angle but not another) or to use different rules regarding a completed lift.⁴⁶ Returning, briefly, to Sandow, he lost a weight-lifting contest with Hercules McCann in 1890, in front of the Marquis of Queensbury, but disputed McCann’s victory.⁴⁷ The controversy centred on whether Sandow had fully lifted a weight overhead or if he had only appeared to do so. Such was the confused state of British weight-lifting, and the chicanery surrounding weight-lifting feats that Hopton Hadley, editor of Health and Strength magazine, published a ‘tips and tricks of strongman’ book in the early 1900s to showcase the many ways strongmen deceived the public, judges, and each other.⁴⁸

To be viewed as a legitimate sport, weight-lifting had to standardise and, once more, European athletes played an important role in this process. Returning to Monticelli-Obizzi’s efforts to standardise the sport from 1896, magazines in England and Europe had become meeting places for ideas. It is notable then that it was a European weight-lifter and coach in England who helped spawn early efforts at standardisation.⁴⁹ In September 1901, Joseph Szalay, a Hungarian barber and prominent physical culturist, held a meeting at his London gymnasium-cum-barbershop which welcomed opinions from luminaries such as 1896 Olympic medal winner Launceston Elliot and the president of London Central Weight-lifting Club, a Mr. Von Lum.⁵⁰ Szalay took part in the 1891 competition as an athlete and, in the intervening period, had established himself as one of, if not the most, influential coach in British weight-lifting. His gymnasium, at 12 Cullum Street London, was one of the first sites to visit for strongmen and weight-lifters travelling to England and where the regular trainers were a verifiable who’s who of British weight-lifting including Launceston Elliot. Critically Szalay was also a regular contributor to Health and Strength magazine and held deep ties within the weight-lifting community. By November 1901, the editor of Health and Strength magazine Hopton Hadley and ex-champion lifter Montague Spencer were elected as office-bearers and the decision to confine governance to amateur competitions was made.⁵¹ The first iteration of the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association (BAWLA) was born.

From 1901 to 1902, when the first BAWLA competitions were held, Health and Strength magazine reportedly widely, and gushingly, about the competition. Targeted towards ‘amateurs for the present’, reporting on BAWLA made clear that the organisers (which included Szalay, Von Lom, a Mr. H.M. Nunn and treasurer Hopton Hadley) sought to legitimise the sport and distinguish it from the more popular, but infinitely more controversial, strongman/strongwoman scene.⁵² A cursory background of the individuals involved speaks to the competitive/legitimate strand of strength sport at this time. Szalay, as noted, ran a successful weight-lifting and physical culture gymnasium, wrote to debunk strongmen and women feats of strength and adjudicated weight-lifting competitions. Vom Lom ran another London weight-lifting gymnasium and oversaw competition while Nunn and Hadley were involved in documenting strength sports and feats in Health and Strength magazine. In line with some of the conversations being held in Europe, the sport was divided into five separate weight classes and, competitions centered on four basic movements.

1. Right Hand from ground to Shoulder and up.

2. Left Hand from ground to Shoulder and up.

3. Two Bells from ground to Shoulder and up.

4. One Bar-bell from ground to Shoulder and up.⁵³

The creation of weight classes was significant. Previously athletes were oftentimes placed against one another without reference to their bodyweight. This placed lighter weight athletes at a disadvantage compared to their heavier counterparts who, oftentimes, were capable of handling much heavier weights. While not an infallible rule, a truism in strength sports is that ‘weight moves weight’, i.e. the more bodyweight one has, the more weight they are capable of lifting.⁵⁴ Separating on weight classes accounted for any disadvantages.

While the organisers did not cite a single incident in their desire to create BAWLA, they nevertheless stressed the need to create some form of uniformity within the sport. This uniformity marked a combination of British and European cultures. As Schödl previously made clear, British weight-lifting in the late nineteenth century was known in mainland Europe to be a hub for dumbbell pressing overhead as opposed to barbell movements. Seeking a midpoint between the two – especially given the volume of European weight-lifters who came to Britain for contests – BAWLA gave the option of either dumbbell or barbell pressing.⁵⁵

The association began very strongly with a series of tournaments and divisions. In 1902, they planned to hold a grand world championship in London and even attracted the chocolate makers, Cadbury’s, to furnish the event with a handsome trophy.⁵⁶ The involvement of Cadburys represented something of a coup for the new organisation. Whereas competitions between professional strongmen and women were often promoted as a mixture of sport and entertainment — as evidenced oftentimes by the involvement of theatre promotors, involving Cadburys placed the sport on the same rung as football or rugby, for example, which also had links with the then paternal employer Cadburys.⁵⁷ Szalay took the innovative approach of dividing lifters into five distinct bodyweight categories. Before this time in England, it was acceptable for two weight-lifters to compete against one another regardless of their weight. Although not always true, the heavier an athlete was the heavier the weights they were typically capable of lifting.⁵⁸ In later decades, complicated statistical models were used to compare the strength of athletes of various bodyweights against one another and, even then, such comparisons are often controversial.⁵⁹ Dividing divisions across classes simultaneously eliminated any advantages lifters may have while also acknowledging the fact that weight-lifting was popular enough to accommodate so many divisions. Although only one international competitor took part, and certain English lifters such as W.P Caswell and Tom Pevier stayed away out of loyalty to the Amateur Gymnastics Association (who were embroiled in a dispute with BAWLA over the governance of weight-lifting), the event was a success.⁶⁰ Judging that night, alongside Szalay was Percy Longhurst, as catch-as catch wrestler of note during this era. While the event was a success, in 1904 the organisation disbanded, and Britain once again found itself outstripped by continental advances.

Ironically, it was Eugen Sandow who appears to have been partly to blame. In 1903 Sandow brought Joseph Szalay to trial concerning copyright infringement. In 1897 Sandow began marketing a patented spring grip dumbbell. Soon after, Szalay marketed his own spring grip dumbbell which, although distinct from Sandow’s in several respects, was deemed by Sandow and his agents to be a direct imitation.⁶¹ In court Szalay was found to have breached Sandow’s copyright and forced to pay him a large sum. Although Szalay’s name sporadically appeared in Health and Strength in the months following the court’s decision he effectively disappeared from British weight-lifting.⁶² It was not until 1912, when Szalay was discovered by a former athlete of his to be living in penury that he returned to the weight-lifting scene (and even then, it was as recipient of monies raised in his honour).⁶³ Szalay had been a pivotal figure in helping to organise British weight-lifting from the rules employed to the gathering together of key individuals. His downturn in fortune appears to have had a clear impact on BAWLA’s running. In the United Kingdom, weight-lifting contests post-1903 fell under the remit of a diffuse number of associations such as the Cumberland and Westmoreland Amateur Wrestling Society and the Amateur Gymnastics Association and were often haphazard affairs as recorded in Health and Strength magazine. By 1910, the A.G.A had failed to hold a competition for almost a decade and were derided in the pages of Health and Strength magazine for their failures.⁶⁴

While England struggled to find its feet, European lifters continued to modernise and standardise the sport. Many strongmen felt that world and European titles were not legitimate, due to a lack of standardisation across competitions. Franz Kraus, the Vice President of the Austrian Österreichischer Athleten-Club-Verband, complained in 1901 to a German journal that such contests were invariably organised by a single nation and favoured local lifts. This put foreign athletes at a distinct disadvantage.⁶⁵ The Italian aristocrat, Marquis Luigi Monticelli-Obizzi, concurred with these sentiments, and in 1896 attempted to broker an arrangement between Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands to standardise competition lifts. He argued that the lifts used to determine international titles should be familiar to all nationalities, and endurance exercises should be done away with.⁶⁶ While BAWLA was disbanding, European athletes recognised the need for an official international governing body. The lack of unity within the sport came to the fore when two competing World Championship competitions took place in Berlin and Duisburg in 1905.⁶⁷ A circular letter was sent out to all European weight-lifting clubs and associations by the executive director of the German Athletic Federation, August Köttgen, calling for the creation of a World Federation to standardise lifts, judging, rules, and prizes and create a syndicate of championship events which athletes could not compete outside of. What can now be considered the founding meeting of the IWF took place on 10th June 1905 in Duisburg, and hosted delegates from Germany, Holland, and Italy, while Russia, Switzerland, and Denmark wrote letters of support for the motion.⁶⁸

The Amateur-Athleten-Weltunion (Amateur Athletic World Union) was by no means universal. The Italian Monticelli-Obizzi, alongside Albert Stöllz and August Köttgen, from the German Athletic Federation, and the Dutch Georg and Walter Van Elst took the reigns of weight-lifting tournaments in Holland, Italy, Germany, and Denmark. Switzerland and Sweden expressed interest but remained characteristically neutral.⁶⁹ France, Germany, and Britain preferred to retain control of their own rules and regulations although, in the case of Britain, clear confusion existed between who controlled the sport. The constitution, drafted in 1906 stipulated that official international championships had to abide by A.A.W rules. Approved competition lifts were the right-hand snatch, left-hand snatch, two-hand press, and two-hand clean and jerk.⁷⁰ While the A.A.W seemed like a pioneering force in modernising the governance of lifting, there problems from the start. Germany was criticised for taking unilateral decisions without the consent of other members and withdrew their participation in 1907.⁷¹ Weight-lifting was not included in the programme of events for the 1908 Olympics. This marked one of three times that weight-lifting was not included as an Olympic event (the other games being 1900 and 1912). The sport’s lack of clarity over the exercises used clearly hampered its international and Olympic standing. For British weight-lifters in Health and Strength the 1908 exclusion was particularly worrying given that the Games were held in London.⁷² Furthering this anxiety was the fact that while European associations had emerged, Britain was without a clear governing body.

The re-emergence of BAWLA

After the first failed attempt to establish a British governing body, British weight-lifting appeared to be in a state of disarray. This was especially the case after the 1908 London Olympics which featured no weight-lifting event. Health and Strength magazine – which styled itself as the ‘National Organ of Physical Fitness’ – bemoaned the ‘singular lack of organisation’ and that ‘the foreigners have all this time been allowed to have things their own way’.⁷³ While British organisers steadfastly refused to submit themselves to continental associations or rules, they were clearly influenced by the sport’s broader association culture. Remarkably Health and Strength’s explanation for why weight-lifting failed to appear at the 1908 London Olympics, despite appearing in St. Louis in 1904, was a combination of internal critiques around British weight-lifting and vague complaints about how Europeans were running the sport. What held true was that British weight-lifting was, by this point, disorganised. Where competitions existed, they were formed through challenges in Health and Strength or, more commonly, Sporting Life. The problem here was that challengers often chose the lifts for once off competitions and rules were hotly contested. A national-wide body was needed and Health and Strength became the prime site for organisation. There are several reasons for this. The magazine had a previous BAWLA iteration through writers and the editor of the magazine. More importantly, the magazine, despite focusing on a more generalised sense of physical culture, nevertheless depicted itself as a keen patron of weight-lifting as sport.

In 1909, a flurry of letters to the editor were published in Health and Strength’s editor from agitated weight-lifters who bemoaned the lack of clear governance in competitions. A reader, signing himself as A.G.W, wrote that at a recent competition in the Agricultural Hall, a recent bent press world record was awarded to a lifter referred to only as Holliday, despite the placement of his hand on the floor to assist with the lift. ‘It may be the Continental way’, A.G.W sniped, ‘but I believe I am right in saying that it would not have been allowed in any contests under the A.G.A rules’.⁷⁴ Sadly, the A.G.A had failed to organise any contests in the last decade. There was, according to the writer, a clear case for a British Weight-lifters’ Association which could control competitions within Britain and its colonies.⁷⁵ On this point, it is worth distinguishing further between continental and British lifts. Depending on the lift in question, continental lifting typically allowed more leeway in terms of using momentum or allowing other body parts to be involved in an exercise as the writer bemoaned here. A ‘British’ bent press would have not included the hand on the thigh and crudely distinguished, ‘British’ lifts tended to focus on much stricter form than ‘continental’ lifts. This continued to be an issue well into the interwar period. When South African strongman Herman Goerner toured England in the 1920s he had a world record in the deadlift disqualified for failing to do it ‘English style’ (which in this instance meant heels together rather than heels apart).⁷⁶ Although it may seem trivial in weight-lifting competitions to focus on such minutiae, John Fair’s research on the removal of the military press from the Olympics stressed the impact that momentum and body positioning could have in advantaging some athletes over others.⁷⁷

A June 1910 championship to find ‘Britain’s Strongest Man’ provided the impetus for the reformation of BAWLA. The contest came about when weight-lifter and strongman performer Thomas Inch issued a challenge to determine the British Heavy-Weight Champion. Health and Strength eagerly reported the dawn of a new age for British weight-lifting, claiming that the ‘immediate result of the great tournament’ must be the ‘exaltation’ of weight-lifting to its ‘proper place among our British sports’.⁷⁸ There was a consensus among the weight-lifting fraternity that this could not be done without a strong governing body. It was announced that a meeting was scheduled in London for October 25th, 1910, at the Holborn Restaurant on Caledonian Road to settle the matter. Maurice Deriaz, the Swiss strongman, welcomed the move in Health and Strength as he claimed that the Continent had a ‘means of certifying our records that there’s no getting away from’ and which BAWLA would ‘I presume, establish in your country’.⁷⁹ Despite statements made about the need to establish a British association distinct from the continent, British weight-lifting often used endorsements and encouragement from continental associations and athletes to justify certain actions. This irony appears to have been ignored at the time.

BAWLA was re-established to address the ‘chaos’ of British weight-lifting which lacked ‘any definite … rules’, and to put it on an even footing with the Continental associations which were far advanced in terms of ‘uniform arrangement[s]’.⁸⁰ The ‘Parliament of Lifters’ that BAWLA was composed of was seen to be more representative of the interests of lifters from London and the Home Counties than the United Kingdom, but nevertheless included an array of continental strongmen such as Max Sick and Louis Attilla, and received letters of support from the Baron Knobledorff von Breckenhoff and Eugen Sandow.⁸¹ Thus lay bare British weight-lifting’s ambivalent relationship with Europe. On the one hand European athletes were both pivotal in providing support and, in the case of Max Sick, were praised when they broke British weight-lifting records.⁸² On the other hand, there was a clear anxiety to distinguish British and European rules.

Returning to BAWLA’s re-emergence, a letter from Fred Collins to the editor of Health and Strength welcomed the newly established committee. He complained that in the past he had attempted to form an association but had been met with apathy and egotism.⁸³ His experiences seem to echo the issues that occurred on the Continent, with the German Albert Stolz making unilateral decisions about the by-laws and constitution of the A.A.W.⁸⁴ While BAWLA may have had an inauspicious start, the second iteration of the association seemed to possess a coherence that, by then, its continental cousins lacked. That is not to say, however, that it was without its problems.

After the initial meeting in October 1910, BAWLA decided that there would be two BAWLA branches – one governing professional and one amateur athletes. The amateur versus professional split was not, of course, uncommon in British sport and could be found everywhere from football to lawn tennis.⁸⁵ What distinguished British weight-lifting was that it was, largely, free of class connotations. The amateur weight-lifter was not praised for their ‘love of the game’ in the way that the amateur footballer was.⁸⁶ The bifurcation between amateur and professional had far more to do with the chicanery and showbiz often associated with professional strongmen. The professional strongman, as discussed earlier, was often associated with sleights of hand ranging from specialised equipment to deception concerning the weights lifted.⁸⁷ The separation between amateur and professional was a shrewd move by BAWLA to help legitimise amateur weight-lifting – free from the music hall – with popular strongmen. The amateur association was decidedly more decisive than its professional brethren and went from strength to strength, while the professional branch failed to make progress. This failure was hugely influenced by economics. While it was never explicitly mentioned, there was likely an additional tension surrounding amateur versus professional athletes. As is well documented, Victorian and Edwardian sports often struggled between these two classes with the accusation often made among amateur athletes that professionals were mercenary and/or not playing ‘for the love of the game’. BAWLA’s amateur athletes often alluded to this with reference to the purity of their weight-lifting contests and love of the sport. Such rhetoric ignored the very real consequences facing professional athletes if they lost.⁸⁸ If a professional strongman (and it was men BAWLA concerned itself with) lost in a legitimate contest to a fellow strongman, they could no longer claim to be the strongest man in the world, city, town, or village. Hence no real incentives existed.

For amateurs, decisions over championship lifts seemed to be a major sticking point. In November 1910, Thomas Inch gave a talk to the committee in which he declared that more than six lifts were ‘ridiculous’, but less than four would be unfair. He argued that the lifts needed to be carefully selected to ensure fairness and test the all-round strength and skill of athletes. He recommended the four that had determined his own British Heavyweight title – one-handed clean; two-handed clean; one-handed snatch; one-handed anyhow – as a ‘test [of] both strength and science’. If six lifts were to be chosen, he advocated for four clean lifts, and two ‘Continental’ lifts – such as the dumbbell swing or snatch – ‘considering this is England home of the clean lifting’.⁸⁹ This concession to the continent shows that BAWLA was not an insular enclave, but the eventual agreement reached within the organisation belied its fractious components. Neither six nor four lifts were chosen but rather forty-two approved lifts were agreed upon. While some repetition existed – a left hand press overhead and a right-hand press overhead were treated as two distinct lifts – the agreement caused a great deal of confusion in competition.

In late 1910, discussions were also held surrounding the establishment of championship rules was taken with a firm eye on international competitions. This international outlook was echoed by the calls for a ‘Proposed British Empire Lifting Championship’, which was intended to take place during the coronation year (1911) in a celebration of Britannia’s might. The event never got off the ground, but its intent showed that BAWLA saw itself as ‘a national, in fact an imperial’, movement which would control ‘weight-lifting throughout the British Empire’.⁹⁰ From the outset, it planned to have branches across the United Kingdom and colonies and ultimate affiliation with all weight-lifting clubs. It decreed that any new record attempts would have to be verified and witnessed by two members of the BAWLA committee to stand.⁹¹ While this may have seemed an ambitious ploy, it highlighted BAWLA’s reliance on Health and Strength once more.

In 1906 Health and Strength announced the creation of a Health and Strength League whose motto, ‘sacred the body as thy soul’ was emblazoned on pins to be worn by the magazine’s readership which, critically, was found throughout the British Empire.⁹² In later decades the League’s benefits also included assistance from the magazine on how to establish, and successfully operate ‘Health and Strength gymnasiums’. Heffernan’s work on Tom Burrows, an Australian Indian club swinger from this period, cited Burrows’ ability to use Health and Strength’s global readership to book tour dates and build relationships with the magazine’s readers in South Africa.⁹³ Likewise Francois Cleophas’ excellent work on South African physical culture in the mid-twentieth century has discussed the linkages which existed between South Africa and England. This included athletes, as evidenced during the 1948 Olympics when South African weight-lifter Ron Eland represented Great Britain due to South Africa’s racial politics.⁹⁴ Health and Strength was crucial in keeping the Empire connected. The magazine was likewise available in Canada, Australia, India, and New Zealand as evidenced by the volume of submissions sent from these countries. While the Proposed British Empire Lifting Championship did not materialise, domestic competitions continued to welcome lifters from outside of England. Critically these lifters now had a set of guidelines to shape their involvement.

In March 1911, the rules governing BAWLA championships were finally ratified after months of debate. BAWLA decided that there would be five competition classes: bantam weight (8 stone and under); feather-weight (9 stone and under); light-weight (10st 7lbs. and under); middle-weight (12 stone and under); heavy-weight (no limit). Athletes would perform three lifts: a left-hand clean, a right-hand clean, and a two-hands clean. Winners would be decided by aggregate poundage. The first amateur competition to take place under association rules occurred in March, at the German Gymnasium in London, and was refereed by prominent professional lifter, Thomas Inch.⁹⁵ It was a significant milestone for the association, although this level of formalisation came several years after similar developments in continental associations. The event was well attended but, in Inch’s eyes, was in many ways a fiasco unbefitting the reputation that BAWLA sought to cultivate for itself. By this point Inch had established himself as one of Britain’s most influential weight-lifters and it wasn’t too long before he began to self-style himself as the ‘father’ of British weight-lifting.⁹⁶

In a write-up for Health and Strength on the event, Inch derided the lifters for their lack of familiarity with the rules, which seemed cruel given that the organisation itself seemed to struggle with these guidelines. He decried the ‘regrettable ignorance’ of the competitors who seemed unaware of what constituted a ‘clean lift’. He also criticised the time wasted in changing and checking weights.⁹⁷ The old-style shot-loading barbells could take upwards of half an hour to adjust – leading to long periods of waiting around for both audience and athletes. The solution, he believed, was for all athletes to use the same disc-loading barbell that would be verified for weight before the event. A disc-loaded barbell – which is the style used in the modern Olympic games – allowed for weights to be added or removed with relative ease and rapidity.⁹⁸ On this point, Inch’s complaints weren’t unwarranted. The competition lasted 10 ½ hours and went on until the early hours of Sunday morning, testing the patience of even the most devoted of weight-lifting aficionados, particularly when the lifts on display were ‘disappointing’.⁹⁹

Despite this lacklustre initial outing, the British Amatuer Weight-lifting Association continued. The establishment of the association in 1910 gave weight-lifting ‘the legal recognition and establishment of a sport that has for years had many adherents but no court of appeal’.¹⁰⁰ The amateur branch was singularly active and held weekly meetings wherein they set about organising touranments, ratifying records, and establishing affiliations across the United Kingdom.¹⁰¹ The professional branch of the BAWLA appeared to lack the momentum and organisational zeal of its amateur counterparts.¹⁰² While BAWLA’s amateurs had eagerly set about holding their own tournaments, it took the professionals until 1912 to stage a championship. The competition was divided into an unweildy nine categories, beginning at 8st and increasing in 7 lb. increments. Even the lifts seemed less streamlined than the amateurs. Athletes were asked to perform five different lifts: two-hands anyhow; one-hand anyhow; one-hand clean; two-hand clean; dumbbell snatch or swing. They were given three attempts at each lift, and fifteen attempts overall.¹⁰³ A major improvement on the first amateur competition, however, was the use of disc-weights provided by the association which Inch, as previously noted, had promoted.

The outbreak of the Great War had an indelible impact on British weight-lifting. In the first instance many of the foreign weight-lifters and strength athletes who had proved sources of inspiration and organisation within the sport were either vilified or, in the case of several high profile names, were forced to return to the continent after several years absence. Arthur Saxon (who was both a weight-lifter and a profressional strongman), known in Britian as one of the strongest men in the world, was forced to return to Germany during the War despite marrying a British woman and holding a residence in England since the 1890s.¹⁰⁴ The Alien Restrictions Act of 1914, and a growing sense of xenophobia swept through BAWLA and British weight-lifting as a whole, removing many athletes. Like other sports, weight-lifters were also encouraged to enlist, with Health and Strength playing a key role in this process. During and after the War, the magazine proved itself to be a staunch supporter of Britain’s involvement and, for many years published articles encouraging men to build their strength to become better soldiers.¹⁰⁵ When men began to demobilise in 1919 and 1920, in particular, the magazine began to switch back to more recreational pursuits.

Did BAWLA survive the Great War? Yes and from 1916 onwards the association even began to host weight-lifting events as evidenced in Heffernan’s previous work on the difficulties Irish weight-lifters faced in creating an Irish Amateur Weight-Lifting Association from 1916 to 1919. In a remarkable twist of fate, Irish weight-lifters looked to BAWLA for support and inspiration in how to organise the sport in much the same way that BAWLA had intially looked towards the continent.¹⁰⁶ What then, accounts for BAWLA’s survival? The answer appears to lie in its coherency. Whereas the early iteration of BAWLA failed owing, in part it seems, to a dependency on Josef Szalay and a lack of formal guidelines, this later version had established a list of rules, different divisions, and some form of clarity for athletes. Its strength was found in the fact that during the inter-war period, BAWLA not only surived, but thrived, as evidenced by regional and national competitions, the creation of dedicated weight-lifting magazines unaffliated with Health and Strength and, eventually, the emergence of British weight-lifters who competed in world championships. Despite the organisation’s often jingoistic messages and notions, its survival owed a great deal to foreign influences.

Conclusion

British weight-lifting occupies a strange role in the history of weight-lifting. While the continent is often given credit for the founding of modern weight-lifting, one can look back to London in 1891 for the early origins of the sport. The first international competition at the International Hall in Piccadilly Circus provided the impetus for the sport to be taken seriously. Its inclusion in the 1896 Olympic Games, and its subsequent removal from the following games programme, proved that both national and international governance was needed. In this respect it was the continent, and not Britain, where innovation was found in the associational cultures necessary for weight-lifting to truly become a sport. Europe was instrumental in organising the first international federation, and European lifters and coaches ultimately helped to shape BAWLA’s second, and ultimately successful organisation. Continental lifters such as Joseph Szalay and Arthur Saxon were crucial to the success of BAWLA, but ultimately the organisation – despite its ambitions to spread to the colonies – lacked the ambition and global perspective of the IWF. While BAWLA remained an insular organisation, the IWF took the innovations of 1891 and used them as a launchpad for the modernisation and globalisation of weight-lifting. In this, a clear splinter emerged in the world of physical culture between the strongmen and women who exhibited feats of strength in informal settings (circuses, music halls, vaudeville, gyms etc.) versus those who took part in standardised sporting practices. While many strongmen and women inhabited both worlds in the early twentieth-century, the two settings moved further apart as the century progressed.

Nevertheless, Britain was home to many of the innovations that led to the standardisation of competitions. The use of disc-weights, body weight categories, and aggregate poundage while not unique to BAWLA, were significant steps towards standardisation in the sport in general. While BAWLA’s own messaging in Health and Strength magazine may have viewed itself as distinct and separate from European weight-lifting, in general, the two were intimately linked. The goal of future work is to truly unpick these connections now that the history of BAWLA has finally been written. What then, is to be learned from BAWLA’s creation? The first is that the physical culture movement in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England proved both critical and detrimental to weight-lifting’s formalisation.

It brought more individuals to weight-lifting but its music hall origins meant that the sport was often viewed suspiciously. Next, the global history of the physical culture movement in England meant that multitudes of athletes came to England and, in a development often missed in previous works, took up critical positions in association cultures like BAWLA. Finally, weight-lifting’s early history was a hodgepodge of different rules and exercises. This has been studied previously in the United States but not yet in Britain. Even more work is needed in studies of weight-lifting at the Olympics where rule changes continued into the 1920s. The weight-lifter’s success is predicated on their ability to execute lift after lift with monotonous regularity. Repetition is the sport’s true success principal. Writing poetically, BAWLA too thrived on repetition. Repetition of competitions, of rulebooks, and of at times acerbic writings helped the organisation to finally form and function, years after continental weight-lifting took shape.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy Boucher

Lucy Boucher is a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, studying physical culture in twentieth century Britain and America.

Conor Heffernan

Conor Heffernan, lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University, writes on physical culture in Ireland, Britain, America and India. His recent books include The History of Physical Culture in Ireland and The History of Physical Culture. In 2023 Conor's latest book, Indian Club Swinging and the Birth of Global Fitness will be released.

Notes

1 Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: NYU Press, 1997); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain 1880–1939 (Oxford: OUP, 2010); James D. Campbell, 'The Army Isn't All Work': Physical Culture and the Evolution of the British Army, 1860–1920 (London: Routledge, 2016).

2 Charlotte Macdonald, Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935–1960 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013); Caroline Daley, ‘Selling Sandow: Modernity and Leisure in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand,’ New Zealand Journal of History 34.2 (2000): 241–61.

3 It is worth pointing out, at this point, how complex the language of fitness can be. Thomas E. Murray, ‘The Language Of Bodybuilding,’ American Speech 59.3 (1984): 195–206.

4 Caroline Daley, ‘The Strongman of Eugenics, Eugen Sandow,’ Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (2002): 233–248; Conor Heffernan, ‘‘A Strong Woman’s Troubles’: Victorina and the Strong Woman in Victorian Britain,’ Women's History Review 30, no. 3 (2021): 354–74.

5 Much of this is covered in Graeme Kent, The Strongest Men on Earth: When the Muscle Men Ruled Show Business (London: Biteback Publishing, 2012).

6 David Webster, The Iron Game: An Illustrated History of Weight-Lifting (Glasgow: John Geddes, 1976); Gherardo Bonini, ‘London: the Cradle of Modern Weight-Lifting,’ Sports Historian 21.1 (2001): 56–70.

7 David Fahey, E. Lawrence Levy and Muscular Judaism, 1851-1932: Sport, Culture, and Assimilation in 19th-Century Britain (New York: Edwin Mellon, 2014).

8 He has also sporadically examined earlier periods such as John D. Fair, ‘The Iron Game and Capitalist Culture: A Century of American Weight-Lifting in the Olympics, 1896–1996,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport, 15.3 (1998): 18–35. Fair is prolific within this field. For reasons of expediency his critical work on American weight-lifting is taken to be John D. Fair, Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1999).

9 Conor Heffernan, ‘The Iron Rusted and Decayed in Our Clubs’: the Failure of Weight-Lifting in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland,’ Sport in History 41.3 (2021): 387–408.

10 John D. Fair, ‘George Jowett, Ottley Coulter, David Willoughby and the Organization of American Weight-lifting, 1911–1924,’ Iron Game History 2.6 (1993): 3–15.

11 Peng Han Lim, ‘Modern Weight-lifting and Emerging Communities of Malayan and Singaporean Weight-lifters during Pre-Second World War and Post-War British Colonial Rule, 1900s–1959: Competing in the Asian Games, Empire and Commonwealth Games, and Olympic Games,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 36.4-5 (2019): 407–29.

12 The most extensive being Gottfried Schödl, The Lost Past. A Story of the International Weight-lifting Federation, 1905–1992 (Lausanne: International Weight-lifting Federation, 1992).

13 A direct lineage is drawn in Jesper Andreasson and Thomas Johansson, ‘The Fitness Revolution: Historical Transformations in the Global Gym and Fitness Culture,’ Sport Science Review 23.3-4 (2014): 91–112.

14 In a different context see these interactions in Ivo van Hilvoorde, ‘Fitness: the Early (Dutch) Roots of a Modern Industry,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 25.10 (2008): 1306–25.

15 See Alexander Wallace Jones, Fifty Exercises for Health and Strength (London: Health and Strength, 1909), 9.

16 Jan Todd, ‘Reflections on Physical Culture: Defining our Field and Protecting its Integrity,’ Iron Game History 13.2 (2015): 1–8.

17 David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 28–33.

18 Kent, The Strongest Men on Earth, 3–23.

19 Matthew Lindaman, ‘Wrestling's Hold on the Western World before the Great War,’ The Historian 62.4 (2000): 779–97.

20 Josh Buck, ‘Louis Cyr and Charles Sampson: Archetypes of Vaudevillian Strongmen,’ Iron Game History 5.3 (1998): 18–28.

21 Heffernan, Conor. "What’s Wrong with a Little Swinging? Indian Clubs as a Tool of Suppression and Rebellion in Post-Rebellion India." The International Journal of the History of Sport 34.7-8 (2017): 554–77.

22 This very phrase was used in Mike Huggins, The Victorians and Sport (London: A&C Black, 2004), 6.

23 Sebastian Conrad, ‘Globalizing the Beautiful Body: Eugen Sandow, Bodybuilding, and the Ideal of Muscular Manliness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,’ Journal of World History 32.1 (2021): 95–125.

24 Patrick Scott, ‘Body-Building and Empire-Building: George Douglas Brown, the South African War, and Sandow's' Magazine of Physical Culture,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 41.1 (2008): 78–94.

25 This was noted by American barbell manufacturer and weight-lifting enthusiast, Alan Calvert in Alan Calvert, The Truth about Weight-lifting (Philadelphia: Milo Barbell, 1911), 4–9.

26 David Webster, The Iron Game: An Illustrated History of Weight-Lifting (Irvine, Scotland: Webster, 1976), 11.

27 Ibid., 11–13.

28 Gherardo Bonini, ‘London: The Cradle of Modern Weight-lifting,’ Sports Historian 21, no. 1 (2001): 59.

29 ‘The Proposed Weight-Lifters’ Association,’ Health and Strength, October 1, 1910, 330.

30 Bonini, 56. In 1989 three new world championships were officially recognised, the first being in London 1891 and the numbering of subsequent championships was reshuffled.

31 ‘The Amateur Weight-lifting Championship,’ The Newcastle Guardian, January 31, 1891, 7.

32 ‘Weight-Lifting – Strong Amateurs,’ Sporting Life, January 26, 1891, 3.

33 Allgemeine Sport Zeitiifig, February 15, 1891, 171, quoted in Bonini, 60.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 ‘Wrestling – Revival of the Easter Sports,’ Sporting Life, March 12, 1891, 3.

37 ‘International Amateur Weight-Lifting Championship,’ Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, March 30, 1891, 3.

38 Bonini, ‘London the Cradle,’ 62.

39 The history of dumbbells and barbells is expertly covered in Jan Todd, ‘The Strength Builders: A History of Barbells, Dumbbells and Indian Clubs,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 20.1 (2003): 65–90.

40 ‘Weight-Lifting Competitions,’ Sporting Life, February 22, 1892, 4.

41 Schödl, The Lost Past, 9–14.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 107–8.

45 Ibid., 108.

46 This is humourously covered in Graeme Kent, The Strongest Men on Earth: When the Muscle Men Ruled Show Business (London: Biteback Publishing, 2012).

47 Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 38–40.

48 Tricks and Tests of Muscle. By the Editor of ‘Health and Strength.’ (Revised edition.) (London: Health and Strength, 1908).

49 Schödl, The Lost Past, 24–5.

50 ‘The British Amateur Weight-Lifting Association’, Health and Strength, 6.11 (1901), 286.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Bodyweight is partially related to strength within the sport. See Michael H., Stone, Kyle C. Pierce, William A. Sands, and Meg E. Stone, ‘Weight-Lifting: A Brief Overview,’ Strength & Conditioning Journal 28, no. 1 (2006): 50–66.

55 Schödl, The Lost Past, 22–28.

56 ‘Amateur Weight-Lifting Championships,’ Health and Strength 4.6 (1902), 320.

57 See the extensive John Bromhead, ‘George Cadbury's Contribution to Sport,’ Sports Historian 20, no. 1 (2000): 97–117.

58 Gill A. Ten Hoor, et al. ‘A Benefit of Being Heavier is Being Strong: A Cross-Sectional Study in Young Adults,’ Sports Medicine-Open 4.1 (2018): 1–9.

59 Lyle H. Schwartz, ‘Reflections on Strength, Gender, and Lifting Formulas,’ Iron Game History 4 (2005): 30–2.

60 Webster, The Iron Game, 39.

61 ‘Sandow v. Szalay,’ House of Lords Parliament Office, Appeal Cases, series 3, O-S (1905), ref. HL/PO/JU/4/3/535.

62 This included advertisements for his controversial dumbbell. ‘Aids to Physical Culture,’ Health and Strength 10, no. 4 (1905): 467.

63 ‘London Weight-Lifting Club,’ Health and Strength 10, no. 1 (1912): 6.

64 ‘Monster Weight-Lifting Tournament,’ Health and Strength 6, no. 25 (1910): 632.

65 Schödl, The Lost Past, 24–5.

66 Ibid, 27.

67 The Berlin competition was declared the first World Championship, and indeed it was not until 1989 that the IWF recognised the 1891 event in London as the first official ‘World Championship.’

68 Schödl, The Lost Past, 36–42.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 58.

71 Ibid., 58–60.

72 Ibid.

73 ‘Monster Weight-Lifting Tournament,’ 632.

74 ‘The Need of an Association to Govern Weight-Lifting,’ Health and Strength, October 16, 1909, 420.

75 ‘A Weight-Lifters’ Association,’ Health and Strength, October 16, 1909, 419.

76 Edgar Mueller, Goerner the Mighty (Arkansas: O'Faolain Patriot, 2012), 70–1.

77 John D. Fair, ‘The Tragic History of the Military Press in Olympic and World Championship Competition, 1928–1972,’ Journal of Sport History 28.3 (2001): 345–74.

78 ‘Monster Weight-Lifting Tournament,’ 632.

79 ‘What the Weight-Lifters’ Association May Do,’ Health and Strength, October 15, 1909, 392.

80 ‘The Proposed Weight-Lifters’ Association,’ Health and Strength, October 1, 1910, 330.

81 See ‘The Editor Talks’ and ‘British Weight-Lifters’ Association,’ Health and Strength, November 5, 1910, 461.

82 Maxick, Muscle Control or Body Development by Will-Power (London: Health and Strength, 1910), 12–33.

83 ‘Apathy in the Past,’ Health and Strength, November 5, 1910, 462.

84 Schödl, The Lost Past, 58.

85 Dave Day and Samantha-Jayne Oldfield, ‘Delineating Professional and Amateur Athletic bodies in Victorian England,’ Sport in History 35.1 (2015): 19–45.

86 This reached its zenith with Corinthians football club. See Chris Bolsmann and Dilwyn Porter, English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game (London: Routledge, 2018).

87 Again see Kent, The Strongest Men on Earth, 5–23.

88 Dave Day and Samantha-Jayne Oldfield, ‘Delineating Professional and Amateur Athletic Bodies in Victorian England,’ Sport in History 35, no. 1 (2015): 19–45.

89 ‘Proposed Championship Lifts,’ Health and Strength, November 26, 1910, 552.

90 See ‘Proposed British Empire Lifting Championship,’ Health and Strength, December 24, 1910: 708; ‘Britain’s Strong Men Combine,’ Health and Strength, January 28, 1911, 82.

91 ‘The Editor Talks,’ Health and Strength, January 8, 1911, 82.

92 Neil Carter, Medicine, Sport and the Body: A Historical Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 25.

93 Conor Heffernan, ‘Born Swinging: Tom Burrows and the Forgotten art of Endurance Club Swinging,’ Sport in History 39.1 (2019), 45–73.

94 Eland’s story is expertly told in Francois Cleophas, ‘Creating a Decolonising South African Physical Culture Archive: A Case Study of Ron Eland, in Critical Reflections on Physical Culture at the Edges of Empire, ed. Francois Cleophas (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2021), 11–20.

95 See ‘The B.A.W.L.A,’ Health and Strength, March 4 (1911), 274; ‘B.A.W.L.A – Their First Weight-Lifting Championship Tournament,’ Health and Strength, June 24, 1911, 612.

96 ‘The Father of British Weight-lifting,’ Health and Strength, February 22, 1919, 91.

97 Thomas Inch, ‘The Amateur Weight-Lifting Tournament,’ Health and Strength, July 1, 1911, 10.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100 ‘In the World of Weights,’ Health and Strength, January 6, 1912, 5.

101 See ibid, and ‘The Professionals in Conference,’ Health and Strength, April 20, 1912, 389.

102 ‘In the World of Weights,’ Health and Strength.

103 ‘The BAWLA Tournament,’ Health and Strength, July 13, 1912, 44.

104 English language studies on Saxon have yet to be fully written by academics. His up to date life story is discussed in an online collaboration between the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center of Physical Culture and Sport Studies (at the University of Texas) and Rogue Fitness. See ‘Saxon Trio,’ Strongman Project. https://strongmanproject.com/features/18 (Accessed 23 March 2023).

105 Conor Heffernan, ‘What Demobilised Men Want’: Physical Culture and Post-War British Masculinity,’ in Sport and the Pursuit of War and Peace from the Nineteenth Century to the Present eds. Martin Hurcombe and Philip Dine (London: Routledge 2023), 187–206.

106 Conor Heffernan, ‘The Iron Rusted and Decayed in Our Clubs’: The Failure of Weight-Lifting in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland,’ Sport in History 41.3 (2021): 387–408.