For reasons that I will happily discuss later, I was recently in London with my family and had a to-do list of physical culture-related materials that I wanted to check out. First, there would be a meal at the German Gymnasium. This was one of the first public gymnasiums to open in nineteenth-century London and has been given a second life as a trendy restaurant whose menu pushes the boundaries of what the gym’s owners would have deemed healthy. In other words, it was going to be incredible.
Next, I was going to train at Physical Culture. This is a London-based gym, that opened in 1928 and is still in operation today. Not only does it embody the kind of no-nonsense gyms I love to train at, it is replete with unique machines and the owners have a keen sense of its own history. In other words, I was going to have an amazing time, regardless of how my own training went.
Last, but not least, there was Eugen Sandow’s grave. The ‘first modern bodybuilder,’ Sandow is the reason why so many of us train. He helped to initiate a body culture and gym appreciation at the dawn of the twentieth century which endured and eventually strengthened, into the multifaceted gym cultures we currently enjoy. This list, combined with maybe a cheeky visit to the Wellcome Library to check out their physical culture selections, was the stuff of dreams.
I say that because none of my dreams came true! Although we did have an amazing holiday so I guess there is a silver lining. What I had planned as an article about Sandow’s grave and my experiences of it will instead be an article on Sandow’s grave and why it is so significant. Rather than view this as a ghoulish or macabre article, I encourage you to see it for what it really is, evidence of my strangeness made manifest. With that in mind, let’s go grave hunting (not in a literal sense… the British banned that several centuries ago).
Why Sandow’s Grave
Without rehashing it too much, especially as Rogue Fitness produced a documentary on Sandow that explains it in far greater detail than I ever will, Sandow is one of the most important figures in the history of fitness. That is quite a bold statement to make but it is one I can happily stand by. From the 1890s to the 1910s, Sandow was a global fitness icon. He sold products around the world, rubbed shoulders with literal royalty, and managed to position himself as an expert on health despite having no discernible education to write home about. To use an annoying term from the present age, he was also the first fitness star to go viral in a time before the internet or television. For bodybuilding fans, he also hosted the first modern bodybuilding show in 1901 and edited one of the first explicit bodybuilding magazines.
Accepting Sandow‘s importance, the next question is why should I visit, or want to visit, his grave. Aside from my own interest in death and the otherworldly, which I blame entirely on George Romero’s zombie movies capturing my subconscious at an early age, I wanted the opportunity to acknowledge my own personal debt – both personal and professional – to Sandow.
There is, I believe, an odd recency bias within the fitness industry. Because the target audience for fitness tends to be teenagers and those in their twenties, the cultural history of weight training seems to be limited to the past decade. Speaking with younger lifters, some will struggle to name a legend from even 15 years ago, never mind the Golden Age of bodybuilding or beforehand. While Arnold Schwarzenegger remains well known, those who preceded him, like Sandow, are often lost to time.
In effect, I wanted to pay respects to someone whose legacy is, often I believe, relegated to the Mr. Olympia statue. I also wanted to see his headstone because of its troubled past.
Sandow’s Family Drama
From his marriage to Blanche Brooks in 1896, to his death in 1925, Sandow was one of the most famous people in the world. He toured widely, had an extensive commercial empire and, as is clear from following his career, was a man who thrived on business. While we don’t know the exact causes, it is clear that Sandow and Blanche were estranged by the time of his death, aged 58. The evidence was the lack of a gravestone at Sandow’s burial plot.
Historians have, of course, speculated on this. The first great Sandow biographer, David Chapman, suggested that Sandow died of syphilis following a string of infidelities, this was disputed by later Sandow biographer David Waller. Rather than seeing Sandow and Blanche at odds, Waller suggested that it was the financial difficulties Blanch found herself in following Sandow’s death that explained her odd behavior. As Waller reports, the two seemed to be in a harmonious relationship until at least 1914, although they were in such financial straits that a month after Sandow died, their family home was sold.
What is clear is that Blanch was clearly uncomfortable with Sandow’s legacy for some reason. His gravesite remained effectively abandoned for nearly 80 years and, for the rest of her life, Blanch gave no interviews whatsoever about Sandow. There was, at one point, a short-lived campaign in Health and Strength magazine to crowdsource money for a Sandow gravestone but this was nipped in the bud very quickly by Blanch who made it clear to organizers that she was not on board.
This same strife always explains, in part, why we have no personal papers for Sandow despite his extensive professional life. Incidentally, on this front, Sandow is not alone. There is another well-known (although not by Sandow standards) British physical culturist from this era whose wife supposedly burned all their personal papers after they died as an act of revenge. Let it never be said physical culture isn’t interesting.
It is impossible to know why Sandow’s grave was left unattended for so long – although I do subscribe to Chapman’s account of Sandow’s life and behaviors. What is clear is that it took until 2002 for some small marker to be laid at Sandow’s grave and 2008 until a Sandow stone was put down.
The Sandow Gravestone
So who helped to recognize Sandow’s legacy? The answer lies in a Sandow super fan, Thomas Manly. Manly is the author of the 2002 novel, For the Love of Eugen whose plot revolves around a Sandow admirer whose devotion is so strong it miraculously brings Sandow back to life (in ghost form at least). The book is hard to track down and, on discovering its existence in researching this article, I am now furiously trying to find it.
The one review I found for the book, from Valentin in October 2003 reads
Final Thoughts
I learned far too much about gravesites and commemoration in preparing this article. That being said I do think there is something culturally and spiritually significant about preserving the gravesites of key men and women from the history of physical culture. These sites allow us to pay our respects to those who came before us and, in the egotistical world of strength, remind us of the Greco-Roman memento mori or, remember it is inevitable that you will die.
Before that though, eat, lift, and be merry.
Hello Conor!
I first became aware of the Great Sandow when I was about 12 or 13 (ca. 1953-4) when I bought a spring-loaded chest pull at a nearby sporting good store. (I really wanted a weight set, but my mother couldn’t afford it.) On the box was a heroic image of The Great Man, draped in a leopard skin (as I recall) and in bold letter was the inscription “SANDOW: THE GREATEST STRENGTH BUILDER OF ALL TIME!” A few years later I was reading the memoirs of famous African big game hunters, and a few of them were practitioners of “Sandow exercises.” The thought has occurred to me in recent years that if Sandow had lived to a good old age, our lives would have overlapped.
I get the strong feeling that Sandow was a stinker. I think of his very unsportsmanlike unwillingness to accept that Arthur Saxon had beaten him fair and square, and his victory in his lawsuit over Saxon was a travesty of the much vaunted “British justice”), but do I have to tell an Irishman about that?! The fact that the purportedly solid gold statue of himself that was presented to Billy Murray at Sandow’s Great Competition turned out to be merely plated does nothing to improve my opinion of him. I know he also sued his erstwhile mentor Leo Durlacher/Professor Atilla although I have never learned the particulars of that lawsuit. Can you possibly enlighten me on this? I think it’s fitting that Sandow got his comeuppance from a teenage girl–a nice Jewish girl, no less! I have often thought my second wife could have played Katie Brumbacher/Sandwina in a movie. She stood over 6’1″ and weighed about 220#. She had a strong athletic background and was quite shapely for her weight. It proved to be an unhappy union, and we were together less than nine months. (Wife Number Three and I just celebrated our 29th anniversary, I’m pleased to say.)
Last year I was chatting long-distance with my old friend from Oxford the eminent Catholic scholar-priest Fr. Ian Ker shortly before his death. He had been studying T.S. Eliot and had learned that Eliot was disciple of Sandow. He wondered if I had ever heard of the latter. “Oh, yes indeed!” I replied.
I follow your unease with Sandow Jan. He seemed a great, wonderful, propagandist for Physical Culture but someone with a shrewd eye and ability to protect his copyright above all else.
From David Chapman’s book, some of the court case stemmed from Atilla sending him a threatening letter, although I haven’t seen the breakdown. That could actually be a lovely idea for a next research project
https://www.google.ie/books/edition/Sandow_the_Magnificent/79QappH54EYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Sandow+Attila+New+York+lawsuit&pg=PA54&printsec=frontcover
I gather from the Chapman book that Sandow’s sometime flame “Lurline the Water Queen” and Attila conspired to rig Sandow’s famous contest with Charles “Samson” Sampson in Sandow’s favor by substituting chains and straps that he could easily break and coins tempered that he could easily bend them. Lurline the Water Queen later spilled the beans, and Attila confirmed it. (This may have been why Samson Sampson exclaimed, “It is all humbug” as he rushed from the stage.) Sandow and Attila seem to have had an on-and-off relationship. There are those who suggest that Sandow was gay or, more probably, bisexual. (I always thought a lot of his poses seemed rather suggestive of that.) Did you perchance see that curious movie “The Power of the Dog”? In that, the discovery of a cache of old magazines featuring Sandow and his fig leaf revealed that the brutal, hyper-masculine Phil was not what he seemed. Of course, if possession of muscle magazines were strong evidence of homosexuality, I’d have surely died of AIDS back in the late 1980s!
To say I was excited to see Sandow in Power of the Dog was an understatement. My poor wife had to listen to me credit its historical accuracy and inclusion for far too long!
Yes that’s correct – although it was meaningless in the grand scheme as every strong athlete was accused at one point or another by individuals. Sandow was just the most libelous!
“My poor wife had to listen to me…”
LMFAO
I’ve been married for 43 years, had dated her for 2 years before marrying, Connor. I’d been bodybuilding for about 7 years before I met her.
My wife has NEVER shared my passion for bodybuilding; in fact, she’s the typical woman, who’s always loathed exercise, hates dieting, has given a sputtering effort a couple times through the last couple decades at losing weight and getting fit but quits soon, lol I’ve never at all pressured her or shamed her or such about health or fitness – – my opinion is that adults know what to do without being scolded or preached to, and get to choose what they want. Point is, bodybuilding and related are the last topics she’s interested in hearing, lol
HOWEVER…as you can guess from my long-winded posts and comments, I am a man of far-more-than-many words, and am so in person as well as in writing…so…she has had to endure (SUFFER!) my exhausting bodybuilding diatribes and monologues through over four decades. She once quipped, as I was beginning one of my several to someone at a get-together, “Joe…if you want, you can sit this out this time – – I’ve heard you explain that same point so many times that, against my will, I have it memorized!”
Haha I am in a similar boat. My poor wife has to suffer with my hobby (collecting bodybuilding history) and my job discussions (also history of bodybuilding!). I think I need to branch out eventually…
I
I’d have to take issue with Joe’s comment to the effect that the typical woman loathes exercise, hates dieting, etc. Admittedly, women who exercise the way we do, i.e., with heavy resistance exercise, are still comparatively uncommon, but certainly much more common in recent decades than when I got into the game 60-odd years ago. On the other hand, there are many fitness modes that women practice far more than men do: dance (e.g., “dancercize,” “Zumba,” “jazzcercise”, etc.), yoga, spinning, and assorted other bodyweight and calisthenic exercises. Women are also often avid runners, cyclists, tennis players…and so it goes.
Of the three women I have been married to, my present (and I trust last!) wife was a fitness devotee when I met her. A few years later (when she was in her 50s), she was proclaimed the strongest woman in her gym and encouraged to compete in senior bodybuilding. She regularly trains with a Peloton machine, dumbbells , resistance bands and other gear and has avidly taken to the “unconventional fitness” equipment I have brought into house: Indian clubs, macebells, kettlebells, etc. People often assume she is my daughter. I find this humiliating since she is a scant five years my junior! My second wife had been an NCAA basketball star. My first wife had been a competitive fencer. Looking back, I am very glad that madwoman didn’t skewer me with one of her epees (or whatever she used)!
A few years back, the beautiful wife of one of my oldest and closest friends, when we were discussing fitness at dinner party we were hosting, exclaimed, “I hate kettlebells!” Fifteen or 20 years earlier, probably no one but I would have even known what a kettlebell was!
Jan, you’re correct and I acknowledge I’m wrong about “typical”.
I should have qualified and said, “my wife is like the majority of women I’ve observed through my life among my own immediate (we have six children, three of them daughters) family and daughters-in-law, my sisters, my extended family, my female friends, and my female acquaintances….”
One of my married daughters, age 30, was a competitive powerlifter in her mid-twenties and, later, a physique contestant.