You're Dead to Me - Victorian Bodybuilding (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Vanessa Heggie and comedian Darren Harriott to learn about the bodybuilding boom of the 19th and 20th centuries.The latter part of the 19th century saw the beginning of a fitness craze where the seeds of the modern-day gym and fitness culture were sown. But physical fitness also tapped into other parts of the psyche of British society at the time. From concerns over the fighting fitness of the British army to the racist pseudoscience of eugenics, this novel leisure activity tells us a surprising amount about the societal and intellectual currents that existed in this period.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Caitlín Rankin-McCabe Written by Emma Nagouse, Caitlín Rankin-McCabe and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve HankeyYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are lunging in our leopard print hot pants, tensing our abs and flexing our biceps as we bulk up on the early history of bodybuilding. And joining me to get historically hench are two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's Associate Professor in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Birmingham's Institute of Applied Health Research. You may have read her long-running science column in The Guardian newspaper or her recent book, Higher and Colder, on the physiology of extreme exploration. It's Professor Vanessa Heggy. Welcome, Vanessa. Thanks so much for inviting me, Greg. Great to be here. And in Comedy Corner, he's a fantastic comedian, writer and presenter. You'll have seen him on all the TV shows like Live at the Apollo, Love Island, After Sun, Celebrity Mastermind, Roast Battle, Mock the Week or heard his podcast, Shame is Delicious.

And recently, he dazzled the nation with his ice skating skills on Dancing on Ice. The range on this guy is Darren Harriot. Welcome, Darren. Thank you for having me. This is exciting. I can't wait to work out with you. Well, revise down expectations. I can barely lift my three-year-old daughter,

let alone proper weights. So I saw you on Dancing on Ice in some fetching gold hot pants. And I thought to myself, there's a man who doesn't skip leg day. Are you into your lifting? I do, yeah. I've always loved weightlifting. It was my uncles. My uncles were really into bodybuilding in the 90s and then i used to read their magazines and then i've been

i've been weight training for probably about oh nearly 20 years sort of just interested in the culture i i listened to podcasts on bodybuilding youtube video i spend a if i was to add up how many hours i spent listening and watching bodybuilding, it's embarrassing. I don't want to add it up because it would upset me. I would go, you could be doing anything else, Darren. You've got a career. Why are you listening to a bunch of men talk about how many carbs they eat? So, what do you know?

We start, as ever, with the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And when I say bodybuilding, perhaps your mind fills with images of Arnold Schwarzenegger posing at his peak in his tiny pants. Or if you're a bit younger than me, maybe you're going to be going to, I don't know, The Rock or Chris Hemsworth, pumping iron in their motivational fitness apps. And if you enjoy the competitive stuff, there is no greater feat of corporeal culture than the world's strongest man competition. Incredible telly. But in terms of the history of bodybuilding, who came before Arnie? What brought

on the bodybuilding boom of the 19th and early 20th century? And is there a dark side to the idea of the perfect bod? Let's muscle in and find out. And a word of caution, today we will be discussing body image, food restriction and dieting. So if you're not in the right headspace to hear that, then why not check out another episode. But we're going to start a conversation with the basics. Professor Vanessa, where does bodybuilding start? Well, we can find resistance exercise and cultures of bodily improvement all over the world, in the Middle East, in China and India. The modern traditions of bodybuilding usually look back to ancient Greece

and specifically to Milo of Cretona from the 6th century BCE. He's often referred to as the father of progressive resistance exercise. He was a multiple Olympic champion in the wrestling and he was famous for apparently carrying a calf on his shoulders every day until it grew into a full-sized cow and he was strong enough to carry it around the Olympic Stadium and then kill, cook and eat it. What a show-off. Vanessa, not everyone in the ancient world is bench pressing cattle. Do they have iron weights? Do they have standard dumbbells? Yeah, the earliest known sort of dumbbell-like pieces of equipment are called the halteres and they are made of stone or of metal. There is also evidence, which is specifically from a mosaic in Sicily, that Roman women also trained using the halteres.

We have less evidence of weight training after the fall of the Roman Empire, although there are still lots of traditions of heavyweight lifting, mostly for show and demonstration. And then in the 18th century, the American founding father, Benjamin Franklin, wrote a letter to a friend when he was 80 years old, saying the secret to his long life was no wine, but also a daily exercise of the dumbbell. But we really only see bodybuilding take off in a big way in the late 19th and 20th centuries. So Benjamin Franklin, he's lifting weights at 80. I love that. I mean, it sounds like the Greeks were really quite into it, men and perhaps women exercising.

But we're going to be talking about really the 19th century today. So Darren, deliberate muscle building had been sort of limited to circus performers and military barracks. If I say to you, what do you reckon the first modern gym looked like? How old do you think it is? What do you see in your head? I think it would be quite small. I feel like it would be lots of resistant stuff,

similar to what you'd get at my primary school, where there's a rope that you would probably pull up. I feel like some sort of ladder. I feel like they would have those dumbbells, the ones with the big circles on the end. Something that you would lift up in a deadlift motion whether it was like a barrel or something like that because I'm thinking of like especially in the early 1900s I think I know I know who the next guy is oh I'm actually quite a fan of this guy interesting if it's him when I

think of the king of bodybuilding I think of this one guy Eugeneugene sando that's the guy that i think of yeah yeah yeah yeah and i know him because in the mr olympia competition the big sort of biggest bodybuilding competition you win sandoz and the trophy is a big sandoz trophy that is him doing his legendary pose this is great knowledge darren honestly we don't need to do the podcast anymore we just sort of that's it now pal. I'm done. I mean, Vanessa, we asked Darren about gyms and then he gave us a whole lecture

on the history of Eugene Sandow. But, you know, his guesses was quite... He said small, he said ropes, he said ladders. What are we talking about

in terms of the history of the gym? Gymnastics was already established in the 19th century, but it's a French man, Hippolyte Triat, who really commercialised the gym as a space. He opened his first gym in Liège in the 1830s, and then a very successful one in

Brussels in the 1840s. And then in the 1850s, he had one in Paris. So it had equipment like ropes and trapezes, but it also had a complete collection of weights, so dumbbells and barbells and also Indian clubs. Triat was a circus performer, so his gyms were also sort of theatrical spectacles. Audiences could watch the show in the galleries that were located around the sides of the room, and entrepreneurs all over began to imitate his success with these gyms. The gym that opened in Liverpool in 1865 claimed to be the largest one in the world.

A local satirical magazine referred to it as the Emporium of Muscularity on Myrtle Street. Oh! These gyms, they had sort of spectator sections. They could mark you out of 10, Darren, like I'm dancing on ice. I'll tell you this, Greg, that's how you get injured. The last thing you need is a bunch of people watching you. Oh yeah, put an extra 10 kg on there, I've got this.

I mean, Vanessa, how does something normally restricted to circuses or military training end up in these new urban locations? How come Liverpool's got a fancy new gym? Well, it is the Industrial Revolution. Economic and social changes mean there's a rising middle class with more money to spend and more leisure time. And by the time we get to the end of the 19th century, the labour reforms mean that even the working classes actually get some time off as well. But they're expected to use it in productive and healthy ways. But it's interesting, right? This is a technological shift, the industrial revolution, you've got the invention of the weekend, suddenly there's leisure time,

and there's lighting, which means you can do stuff at night. So technology is shifting social patterns and what people do with their free time. And the brainchild of the new machines that people are using is a guy called Gustav Zander. Vanessa, who's Zander? He's Swedish, right? Yeah. Zander was born in Stockholm in about 1835. And he explored the connection between body mechanics and muscle building whilst he was at medical school in the early 1860s. And he very quickly established a therapeutic Zander Institute in Stockholm, which was a state-supported institute that used his machines to try and help workers to correct physical impairments. The broader Zander Institutes

that he set up and the equipment in them are remarkably similar to the modern fitness centre. They were open to both men and women, and they had lots of different machines all in quite a small space. These machines were huge comparatively to modern day equipment, but they look a lot like 20th century equipment in their functioning and in their appearance. And Zander is part of that move away from more natural gymnastics and natural movement and simple equipment to much more complicated machines and technology. So the 19th century, Vanessa, is clearly a time of profound technological and social change, as we well know. But there's, as well as the progress and the kind of optimism, there's also big anxiety. I mean, historians of the 19th century really are aware of this. We see it in diaries and newspapers and all sorts of media. People are anxious about stuff.

Definitely. So the mid to late 1800s is a time of European imperial expansion, and sport and physical culture plays a really big part in convincing white Europeans of the superiority and the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race. So to be strong and to be athletic was seen to be modern and civilised. It's part of national identity, national self-definition and national cohesion. But at the same time, this modernity leads to anxieties about things like office work being too sedentary, that technology is going too fast, that society is changing too rapidly for people to keep up with it. Part of this change is also the role of women. So particularly middle class women are asking for more rights. And this leads to a concern about a degrading and feminizing, in some cases, society. And in that, gay and queer people are also seen as a particular threat to robust masculinity. And modern science is often brought in to solve this problem of apparently weak or feminised men using things like scientific diets, exercise technology,

but also the rhetoric of thinking about the body as a machine, a machine that has to be properly moulded and properly fed with the right fuel. Darren, how do you think the British Army and Navy gets sucked into this big fitness movement? Do you think they're on board? I mean, how could they not be on board? In the Army and the Navy, a lot of it is all about fitness and discipline. Yeah, I'm going to say yeah. If you say no, Greg, I'm going to lose my head.

Luckily, you don't have to lose your head. We're all good here. But actually, this is an interesting moment of real tension. Right at the end of the 19th century, in Britain in particular, there is this big anxiety that the British army is losing its edge, right? During the Second South African War, which is 1899 to 1902, doctors and politicians and newspaper columnists all started to express real concern about the health and physique of their troops. And there's this idea, this sort of fantasy that men had been

stronger and fitter back in the past, and that all this social change had caused deterioration in not just like physical health, but also racial health. The phrase racial health is horrible. I know, right? You're like, oh God, here we go. Here we go. Yeah. And we're now teetering into the realm of eugenics, which is the worst realm to teeter into. I mean, eugenics is... Very quickly, Vanessa, how do we define eugenics as a pseudoscience? Eugenics was the science of trying to improve the human race through a range of different principles, including selective breeding, in order to try and purify it of racial elements, but also physical and mental disabilities that the proponents of it,

such as Francis Galton, who coined the phrase, didn't think should be in the human race. I mean, obviously, the history of eugenics turns into absolutely the worst, horrific things. And, you know, we're a comedy show, so we'll not go down that road right now. But actually, that brings us to someone Darren has already mentioned, Eugen Sandow, whose name is literally Eugenics Sandow that's literally his name he chooses it as well it's not it's not his birth name he was described as the world's perfect man and you've already told us Darren that he's still an icon to this day what do you know about him briefly yeah I just know that especially in bodybuilding termsbuilding terms, there's a few legends. There's Eugene Sando, who's almost like a mythical legend, who really, he's the closest to what a modern bodybuilder is.

You know, he worked on his whole body. He looks really good. You see pictures of him. He's very ripped. He's very cut. He worked on his diet. Yeah, and he wrote loads of books about working out. And a lot of it is still relevant today.

I don't know why you invited me. I'm completely pointless here. You're not pointless at all, Vanessa, but it is amazing to hear that Eugene Sandel, you know, he's a guy who, I mean, is born in 1867 that he still talks about now, right? Let's hear about his origin story. There's a certain element of self-romanticisation here. He's born in Prussia. He's not called Eugene Sandow as a boy, is he? No, he's called Friedrich Muller. And his story is that he was born pale and skinny. He was a sickly kid. He was beaten up by playground bullies. And his father took him to Rome when he was a kid and he became inspired by those muscular classical statues there. And he began to swing dumbbells in

private and also go to the gymnasiums we've talked about in order to gain there. And he began to swing dumbbells in private and also go to the gymnasiums we've talked about in order to gain confidence. And then after a quarrel, apparently with his father, he decides he's going to support himself as a strong man, but he's refused any employment by a bunch of theatres in Amsterdam. And it's around that time that he decides to rename himself as Eugene, meaning well-born or good genes eugenics. Yeah, good genes Sandow. It's a little bit like, oh, no. How do you think he gets noticed as an aspiring strongman, Darren? Didn't he have competitions, open invites, stuff like that, to show off his strength to people?

That's definitely what he does a bit later on. But to get noticed early on, he does something a bit more sneaky. He basically launches a campaign of viral vandalism, Vanessa, doesn't he? Yeah, again, according to Sandow, he wandered around Amsterdam at night, wrecking all of the strength testing machines that you could find and put a coin in. And then rewards were offered for the apprehension of this gang of thugs who were presumed to be responsible for all this damage. And he turns himself in and demonstrates that no, he'd just been using it in the right way, but he was so strong, he left the handle hanging off hanging off the machine and apparently he was then immediately given a job by a theatre

in Amsterdam to be a strongman. So he's pretty savvy but he runs away from Prussia so he doesn't have to do Prussian military compulsory service. He ends up in Belgium, he ends up in France but he rocks up in London and this is where the myth is going to be made Darren. He makes a huge entrance. Vanessa how does he get noticed in London? The audience goes wild. He wins the competition. He flexes, he poses, he wears this tiny leopard skin loincloth. He also claims he can move every single muscle in his body individually. I imagine he was like limping as well, just like Willy Wonka does at the beginning and then just does like a forward roll. Look at me. I mean, he's obviously in great shape.

He can lift a piano on his head while a guy's playing piano. That's ludicrously strong. But he's also a bit of an erotic fixation for not just ladies. Oh, undoubtedly. There is clearly a sexual element to all of this, particularly as he moves from being admired for his performance, lifting things to being much more admired for his looks as it was shared in the photographs.

And it's definitely not just women who want to see or touch his perfect body. Among his followers, there are plenty of men as well. And there is very clearly a queer subculture around bodybuilding, even at this time. So for example, a man named Edmund Gosse was so enthralled by Sandow's nude photos that he actually sneaked them into the funeral of poet Robert Browning at Westminster Abbey. And Sandow himself, some people have suggested might possibly have been bisexual or even gay. We can't be sure of his sexuality, but we do know that his body was very much a business. So when he toured the USA as a publicity stunt, he actually charged people about $300 to come backstage and touch his muscles. Yeah. Passing around photos of him.

Wow. Well, smuggling in nude photos into a funeral in Westminster Abbey is quite a weird move. Oh, come on, Greg. We've all been bored at a funeral. Come on. We've all wanted to get photos of a muscular man

and have a look at the back. And $300 to touch his biceps. He's pretty savvy on the marketing front. He's a celebrity. He knows how to sell himself. You know, Darren's mentioned already, he wrote books. He wrote more than books, didn't he, Vanessa? Oh, yeah, definitely.

He also started up a major magazine, started in 1898, the Physical Culture magazine. But he did loads of other promotional stuff. He went on world tours. He had his own food supplements. He had workout devices. He ran a cocoa company. He also trained British troops for battle to take us back to the military angle. And he was appointed as a scientific advisor on physical culture to the British monarch sometime in the late 1910s. So he honed his own body and he also made ways for other people to try and replicate his physique, including, as we've already mentioned, several

books. I've got to ask though, he had so many things going on. Who's his agent? Do you have an email? I just want people to pay me $300 to touch my muscles. All right. So the Physical Culture magazine is 1898. What else is happening in terms of body image and anxieties? And who's his customer base as well? The magazine Physical Culture sought to promote bodybuilding and physical culture, particularly as a respectable middle class activity. And as well as all the articles you'd expect about exercise and fitness and lots and lots of photos of Eugene, it also has contributions and letters from men who are desperate to try and imitate his success.

So there's a lot of anxiety around body image you can see in these letters. Yeah. I mean, Darren, you host a podcast about shame and about these issues. And these are very familiar tropes. I had a lot of issues in my youth with body image. I was a very, very skinny guy. I still am. And a lot of people still feel these pressures. There's still that pressure in the modern fitness world now, isn't there? The idea of feeling shame. Oh, yeah. yeah, completely. Especially with social media now as well. There is so much talk around body issues,

especially even also with women in the bodybuilding world, even more than men normally now. Yeah, absolutely. So let's stay with Eugene Sandow. He is the big star in this field. And his next promotional gimmick in 1901 is called The Great Competition. So The Great Competition in particular was a key purpose for the physical culture magazine. The goal was to find the best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland.

And Sandow explained the prize was not for the person who had the largest muscles, but was specifically for those whose judgment is most symmetrical and even so in order to win a medal in the qualifying rounds men are judged on the following criteria which are general development equality or balance of development the condition and tone of the tissues general health and condition of the skin and the top 60 men who are successful in this first round are then invited to join the final round at the royal albert hall in london and apparently there were,000 spectators when it happened on the 14th of September 1901, and they had hundreds more people turned away at the door. Can I just say that criteria, everything he described, the balance, the tone of the muscle,

the conditioning is all what they look for in modern bodybuilding. It's exactly what the judges look for. And that was over 100 years ago. It's the same thing. Do you know anything about the atmosphere in there? I'm just thinking it must have been absolutely wild. 15,000 people at this event that they've probably never seen before. And there's so many people in there just losing their mind over these physiques, just going crazy. It's a big deal, isn't it? We see there's a lot of newspaper coverage. Now Sandow, you know, his career does twilight. The First World War makes things complicated for him

because he's Prussian, he's German, suddenly they're the enemy. He's sort of ageing out a little bit. We get him sort of fading into the wings a bit. So who steps up next? Is it Charles Atlas next or have we got someone in between? So in the late 1920s, we'll get Charles Atlas. But before him, we actually have another American called Bernard Adolphus McFadden. And he changes his name in a way that's quite difficult

to explain just through audio. But it's changed to Bernard McFadden. He's American. He has a motivational slogan, which is not my fave, Darren. Do you want to guess what it is? Okay, it's not eat, sleep, repeat. It's not no pain, no gain. These are good slogansans but his is slightly more judgmental his is weakness is a crime don't be a criminal i don't hate it i don't hate it weakness is a crime don't get that sounds like a crossfit bros ideology right there all right vanessa he's a character let's put it that way. What do we know of Bernard McFadden? So aside from Sandow, he was also one of those strongmen who commercialised popular eugenics.

And in the accounts we have of a lot of his activities that come from his wife, Mary Williamson McFadden, in her memoir, there are some really notable anecdotes about some of his stranger behaviour. So first, he met this Yorkshire lass and married her after she won the Great Britain's Perfect Woman contest, which he actually judged. I get slightly bad vibes about him already from that, but also he's quite controlling over his wife's body because they do a sort of act together.

It doesn't sound like a very happy marriage or a quite controlling one. I think it probably was. They married in 1913 and they separated in 1932 and eventually got divorced in 1946. So it definitely faded after time. They did do stage acts together and Mary talks about some of them in her biographical writing.

So one of them was where she had to jump on his bare stomach from a high table and he was incredibly controlling, not only over her sort of exercise and performance, also over her food intake yeah wow yeah yeah because for him she was the perfect woman she won the perfect woman competition it was all about body image so it sounds like she was more of just an accessory for his business i guess so bernard mcfadden bit of a problematic guy he also started a fitness magazine. And Darren, do you know what it was called? And bear in mind that a couple of years earlier,

Eugene Sandow had started a fitness magazine called Physical Culture. So what is Bernard's magazine called? Muscles Make You Happy. It'll be something like that. Muscles of Joy. Muscles of Joy. It's a great guess. The real answer is in order to differentiate himself from the magazine Physical Culture,

McFadden launches Physical Culture. Wow. Yeah, he literally just steals the name. And yet, weirdly, his magazine is, I'm going to use the word, surprisingly feminist. What? Is that okay, Vanessa? Yeah, you would not necessarily understand his relationship with his wife by reading his magazine. It was, for example, very anti-corset and he was very against what he called prudery,

which is what prevented women from getting good birth control information. Wow. So this is a bodybuilding magazine that's taking a political stance. It's quite interesting. Well, I'm team Bernard now, apparently. I mean, I thought he was a wrong one, but it turns out he's actually quite progressive. Vanessa, we talked about Mary Williamson McFadden.

Are there other women in bodybuilding in this late 19th century, early 20th century time? I mean, obviously, I'm aware it becomes professionally much more gender equal than 1970s and 80s, but what about in the 1920s and 30s? So they definitely are strong women at the turn of the century. And often their performances are more of a side hustle to their role as wives or daughters of performances in a similar way to Mary McFadden. There was, however, also Katie Sandwina. So she was formerly called Katharina Brumbach.

And after beating Sandow in a weightlifting competition in New York City in 1902 she then changes her name to reflect this to Katie Sandwina um but it might not be a positive story because she was born to a family of circus performers and it's likely that it was actually her dad who was exploiting her strength to earn money by betting on her in these sort of feats of strength against men I bet Sandow still talks about that to this day. Wherever he is, he's like, can you believe it? I bet you top my base of all the things. The nuance window!

This is where Darren and I guzzle our protein shakes as Dr. Vanessa powers through an uninterrupted two-minute set with lots of reps on anything she likes to tell us about today's episode. So I'm going to get my stopwatch up. Without much further ado, Professor Vanessa, can we have the nuance window, please? Whenever we talk about physical culture, improving performance, fitness, including things like bodybuilding, we always need to ask fit for what? So one of the criticisms sometimes levelled at bodybuilders is that they were fit for nothing. This wasn't functional fitness they were building, it was just something for display or for vanity, that looking good was not necessarily the same as being healthy or strong.

And in fact, early bodybuilders were sometimes criticised for their effeminate concern about how their bodies looked rather than what their bodies could do. And this is part of the reason why many bodybuilders still incorporated feats of strength, like Sandow carrying the piano, or other health claims like McFadden's vegetarianism. And that was to show that as well as looking good, their bodies were also fit for purpose. Fit for what purpose though?

And that's the question that reveals the prejudices and assumptions about bodies and about people of the time. So again and again, reformers campaigning for women's right to take part in exercise, including bodybuilding, also argued that it makes them better breeders. Even if the exercise was supposed to make them healthy and strong, the purpose of their health and strength was the raising of more babies. More abstractly, you can be fit for the future. So bodybuilding was one way to counter the negative effects of modern and future society.

So especially if you're using technology and science to do it. But it also makes you fit for consumer society. You buy the magazine, the machine, the high fibre chocolate drink. Your body is a visual representation of the sort of consumer culture you take part in. You are a walking advert. And finally, fit for what also points out that you don't just get fit for yourself. You're expected to get fit for bigger ideals. You get fit so that you can keep working in the factory or the office to keep the economy going. You get fit to fight so that when the call-up comes for the army, the country can indeed find enough men who have big enough chest measurements.

More recently, you get fit so that you're healthier and you aren't going to cost the NHS too much. So while the bodybuilders could be criticised for being too self-absorbed, concerned only with how fit they looked, asking fit for what also reveals a lot of anxiety about being fit to protect the nation or in the darkest connotations fit to preserve the future of the race phenomenal thank you Vanessa that's that's absolutely fascinating I mean do you enjoy it Darren if you do you feel you've learned some extra stuff I've loved it yeah I've learned so much more I came into this going right I know Eugene Sando but I've learned so much, especially Sandwina. It's great.

And Bernard. I'm obsessed with Bernard. I'm going to do a bit of research on Bernard. He doesn't sound like a nice guy, but weirdly progressive. Some of his views about women. All right. Well, all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the historical heavyweight, Professor Vanessa Heggy from the University of Birmingham.

Thank you, Vanessa. I've had a great time. Thank you. Pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we had the dazzling Darren Harriot. Thank you, Darren. Thank you. I'm off to the gym. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we flex our pecs at another historical subject with two different intellectual beefcakes. But for now, I'm off to go and buy a leopard print three-piece suit in the stiffest of tweed, which I'm going to wear in the gym

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