A Tale of Counterfeit Hackenschmidts

Today, while doing some research in some of the many digital archives accessible via the British Library, I absent-mindedly began a ritual that I have undertaken more or less every time I have been given access to a notable archive in the past two years; I began searching for records relating to George Hackenschmidt.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, or who have had the (mis)fortune to have caught me in the pub after a particularly focused period of research, will know that the life and times of Hackenschmidt have become something of a key research interest, or what some might less generously call an obsession, since I began work on my book back in June 2020. 

Dealing as it does with the history of Kayfabe, and with how wrestling came to evolve into its current form, George Hackenschmidt casts a large and hulky shadow over the first chapter, and I began to feel like in some sense I knew the man, that I could take some personal grievance with how he has been somewhat mistreated by the historical record, remembered as either a failure at the end of his career, or as one side of an ampersand, forever wedded to his most notorious opponent, Frank Gotch. Hackenschmidt and Gotch, Gotch and Hackenschmidt. A byword for wrestling's ancient past. 

But while Frank Gotch passed away, all too young, in 1917, George Hackenschmidt lived a long and eventful life after his in-ring career came to an unedifying end in Chicago in 1911. He lived to the grand old age of ninety, surviving internment in one World War and the Nazi occupation of France in the Second, and embarked on an unlikely post-wrestling career of writing and lecturing on philosophy. He passed away in 1968, his wife Rachel following in December of 1987, having married a man who had his first wrestling match in 1896, and living long enough to have conceivably watched the first WWF Survivor Series.

When I go trawling through the archives, increasingly, I set the publication date sliders a little later than you might expect - 1912 and onwards. The wrestling career of George Hackenschmidt is widely documented, and I've spent years acquainting myself with the key matches, the important dates, locations, opponents, and what the public thought of the Russian Lion (in short: an adopted national treasure in England, an effete foreign interloper in the United States, particularly after daring to challenge Frank Gotch). What intrigued, and continues to intrigue me, were those subsequent decades - what did the man once touted as the strongest man alive get up to once there were no more opponents to fell? What does a World Heavyweight Champion do, for almost sixty years, from a well-to-do West Norwood townhouse? And what of Rachel, the pretty French vintner's daughter who met George in Paris, and didn't know that he had been a wrestler until she happened on photographs of her new beau clad in the tiniest of trunks in an old newspaper? 

What's hard to overstate is the level of George Hackenschmidt's celebrity in England at the height of his fame. For decades after his death, any obituary or character profile of an old wrestler in the English press invariably described them as a man who faced Hackenschmidt, while Frank Gotch's death saw him eulogised in the Manchester Guardian as simply, "the man who beat Hackenschmidt". He was a headline attraction at the music hall, front page news, and a bonafide celebrity, but more than that, the name "Hackenschmidt" was common currency, an everyday byword for strength, the body beautiful, and grappling - stories abound of children prone to tussling with their friends and siblings being admonished as "little Hackenschmidts", brawlers in pub fights as "would-be Hackenschmidts", while well into the 1930s and '40s, newspapers could refer to "the Hackenschmidts of industry" without the need of an explanatory aside. Even as the old Russian Lion found his way into the "Where Are They Now?" columns, he was still fondly remembered as a shining star of a bygone age. 

Aside from the general public and newspaper columns, Hackenschmidt's name was a surprisingly common frame of reference for writers and entertainers of the time - while Hackenschmidt may have reflected bitterly that it was his one-time strongman rival, Eugen Sandow, that got namechecked by James Joyce in Ulysses, old George could at least bask in the glory of being a favourite of George Bernard Shaw, and having his name appear in a song by music hall great George Formby Sr. (father, of course, of the younger Formby of "When I'm Cleaning Windows" fame), and no fewer than three short stories, one poem, and multiple articles by P.G. Wodehouse. Joyce may have been famously inventive and avant-garde when it came to the English language, but you never saw him rhyme "bitterly" with "Hackenschmidtily", did you?

Not only that, but Hackenschmidt lent his name to a racehorse and to a particularly aggressive pony assigned to Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition to the geographic South Pole, one of the first casualties of that sadly doomed voyage. In one of those strange moments of symmetry that history is wont to produce, the foul-tempered colt wasn't the only connection that voyage has to professional wrestling - the Terra Nova's second-in-command, Edward "Teddy" Evans, who made it within 150 miles of the Pole but returned to England with the last supporting party, during which voyage he nearly died from scurvy, was later festooned with titles and a peerage, becoming the first Baron Mountevans of Chelsea; as Admiral Lord Mountevans, he lent his name and credibility to the rules that governed British wrestling from 1952 until the late 1980s, and which became synonymous with "World of Sport".

So while, understandably, newspaper coverage of George Hackenschmidt peters out when his career comes to an end, he was still a man of renown, and while too clean-living and private to trouble the gossip pages, was still enough of a curiosity to sneak into the news from time to time - "remember that heavyweight wrestler? Well, now he's a philosopher who loves talking about Shakespeare" was always good copy for a slow news day. His name pops up in the occasional interview - usually to publicise his books, though often the topic of wrestling is broached, and Hack is never less than scathing of the modern game; everything after the First World War is faked, he says, he turned down an offer to referee Atholl Oakley’s first post-War tournament, and even in his 80s he fancied his chances against the likes of Bert Assirati. Goodness knows what he would have made of Big Daddy, who first rose to fame as a muscled Adonis during Hackenschmidt's own lifetime, but became a household name after George's death, a fat, smiling, middle-aged man in a leotard made of out his wife's sofa, and whose Wikipedia entry still erroneously claims that he was trained by George Hackenschmidt.

It's unlikely, then, that Mr and Mrs Hackenschmidt were popping down to the nearest civic hall to watch the matches, or tuning into World of Sport every Saturday - doubly so, as several interviews conducted in the Hackenschmidt family home remark on the absence of a television - but sometimes their social engagements made it into the newspapers; Hackenschmidt may have resented the direction that wrestling went in after his time, but he remained genial and friendly with his fellow grapplers, spending at least one holiday with his 1905 opponent Tom Jenkins, and dropping in on the Zbyszko brothers, but as far as athletics was concerned, his passions remained in running (he was running seven miles a day into his eighties), weightlifting, and amateur wrestling, and he was regularly received as an honoured guest, and sometime coach, for amateur wrestling teams both in the UK and the US.

It was in weightlifting circles that one of Hackenschmidt's more intriguing public appearances was recounted, in 1961, when the USSR's bespectacled weightlifting champion Yury Vlasov competed in London. There, Vlasov was handed his trophy by his childhood hero, an 83 year old George Hackenschmidt who, from his front row seat, was heard to remark, "marvellous" under his breath. Like Hackenschmidt before him, Vlasov became a man of letters, writing multiple novels, short stories and essays, before entering politics. Regrettably, his political career saw him lurch ever further rightward, from the post-Communist liberalism of his early campaigning to, once in power, a harsh pivot towards nationalism, authoritarianism, and antisemitic scapegoating.

That question of politics was something that troubled me in trying to get inside the head of George Hackenschmidt. The more I started to feel like I knew the man, the more there was a nagging voice in the back of my head about what this man might have believed; his philosophy, as recounted in his books, is complex, often impenetrable, and frequently contradictory, in one moment he's the arch-individualist and in the next arguing in terms of mutual aid that could have come straight from Kropotkin. I found it unlikely that a man of his intellect had never publicly expressed his thoughts on politics, but those thoughts were hard to come by. As a self-styled philosopher and a physical culturist of the early 20th century, there was every risk that his beliefs would intersect with some thoroughly unsavoury theories of the time - many was the physical culturist who embraced eugenics and fascism; see my earlier post on Bernarr MacFadden for just one example.

There is a regrettable passage in Hackenschmidt's first book, The Way To Live In Health & Physical Fitness - written in 1911, before the World War 1 internment that turned his focus to philosophy - in which "Russian Jews" are singled out, accused of neglecting physical exercise in order to shirk military service, though it's perhaps worth noting that this is preceded by Hackenschmidt claiming that "the Jews as a people are one of the healthiest in the world" and that many prominent athletes were Jewish, so - certainly by the standards of the time - it's difficult to tar the man as an antisemite, per sé. Particularly so if wrestling promoter Jack Pfefer is to be believed - a proud Jewish refugee, arriving in America as part of a Russian Opera Company in order to escape the pogroms and Civil War in Russia, Pfefer always proudly claimed Hackenschmidt as a great Jewish wrestler himself, a claim that has subsequently been repeated by Bruce Hart. Not the most reliable pair of sources, though nor is it one I've been able to personally refute - save for the fact that a memorial plaque for Hackenschmidt hangs in West Norwood Church; the absence of a grave a mystery, and one that a different faith may hold the key to. The same idle speculation could suggest a reason, similar to Pfefer's, as to why Hackenschmidt never returned to Russia after the Revolution, amid the complicated legacy of antisemitism both in Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Hackenschmidt's only connection to the land that claimed him - he was, in fact, Estonian - in his later life was perhaps that one meeting with Yury Vlasov, and a visit, in the company of Rachel, of 4'9" comedian and variety performer Wee Georgie Wood, and Polish acrobat and variety performer Serge Ganjou (whose brother George discovered Cliff Richard, for those of you playing Unlikely Degrees Of Separation), to see the Red Army Ensemble at the Royal Albert Hall. I'm sure they made quite a troupe, though Georgie Wood's column in The Stage sadly doesn't record for posterity what the Hackenschmidts made of the evening's entertainment.

Some more of Hackenschmidt's politics did, eventually, come to light, in his borderline unreadable tome Man and Cosmic Antagonism to Mind and Spirit: The Psychical, Physical, Mental and Spiritual Related To Physiological Processes; buried somewhere therein, Hackenschmidt lays his cards on the table as what Joseph McCarthy's FBI would have termed a "premature anti-fascist". That is to say, he had the temerity to oppose fascism, and the so-called National Socialism of the German Nazi Party, several years before the outbreak of World War 2, and before it became politically expedient to do so; a grave sin in the eyes of the anti-Communist Witchfinder Generals of the FBI, who feared a Red under every bed, and tarred the likes of Orson Welles and Vincent Price with the same brush, but an admirable moral  imperative to anyone familiar with the notion of empathy. That said, Hackenschmidt also opposed Communism and collectivism, seeing it as getting in the way with his ideal view of community, which was a space that allowed all men the scope for individual self-improvement, through which communal improvements would surely follow through man's connection with the Cosmos, a philosophy he at least notionally saw as a form of Socialism, and reserved some of his harshest words for what he called the "parasites of Capitalism", those who do nothing to obtain their wealth and influence, yet are "safeguarded in their ownership by the laws and institutions of power". It seems my worries about my research topic's politics were somewhat assuaged, from what sense I could make of them.

It was in today's research that I happened on a familiar strain of anecdote, the fortuitous chance meeting. In this instance, it was while trawling through the archives of Billboard, where I found the obituary of one Harry Bentum - husband of diving champion Bench Bentum, Harry had been a successful promoter and manager at a number of carnivals, theatres, and second-tier travelling circuses, and, according to his obituary, began his career as a showman thanks to a chance encounter with George Hackenschmidt at Circus Busch in Berlin. The meeting reportedly happened in Hamburg, some forty years prior; possible, but unlikely. The obituary doesn't clarify whether Hackenschmidt was working on the circus (which, in my opinion, he wouldn't have been in 1910) or merely a punter, but it also leaves out another little detail, and that is that if Hackenschmidt was aware of young Harry Bentum at all, he would have resented him entirely. That is because, in all the accounting for Bentum's career, there's a pretty significant chunk left out, and which it's only through my own prior poring over the archives of The Stage, Variety and Billboard that I had become aware. 

That is, Harry Bentum hadn't always gone by the name Harry Bentum. For many years, he had laid claim to the Light Heavyweight Championship, touring America as a wrestler, under the name Young Hackenschmidt, and it was under that name that he began his career, and was a regular correspondent with Variety. While working as an entertainer on United States military camps, he seemed to have either actively claimed, or failed to dissuade others of the notion, that he actually was George Hackenschmidt, despite being a good 100lbs lighter. If there was one thing about modern wrestling that George Hackenschmidt hated more than its turn to acrobatics and fakery (which, in a more accommodating mood, he sometimes at least conceded would be acceptable entertainment if packaged as such rather than mis-sold as sport), it was wrestlers conspiring to make money off of his name, or his implied endorsement, and on more than one occasion he saw fit to print open letters in English newspapers denouncing the phony Hackenschmidts plying their trade on the wrestling circuit, making it clear that no member of his family was actively wrestling. Whether he knew that there was a cottage industry of counterfeit Hackenschmidts in the United States, I don't know.

Aside from Harry Bentum's Young Hackenschmidt, Farmer Burns' trainee John Berg of St. Louis, Missouri didn't even wait for George to hang up the boots, billing himself as Charles Hackenschmidt from as early as 1909, even doing so in a match with Frank Gotch. In time, he too would take on the name of Young Hackenschmidt. Joe Turner of Maryland had a stab at it too, calling himself Young Hackenschmidt for a series of matches in 1910, even fighting a Young Beell, lest veteran wrestler Fred Beell feel left out of the name-borrowing craze. Perhaps most egregiously, not only did Turner not wait for the real deal to retire, he had actually at least once wrestled against the genuine George Hackenschmidt. Another Young Hackenschmidt also went by the names Bert Shores, Bert Warner and J.C. Maynard, and was one of many wrestlers caught up in the arrests of the notorious Mabray Gang of fight-fixers and conmen - and you'll have to wait for the book to come out to hear that fascinating story!

Canadian strongman, weightlifter and physical culturist George F. Jowett, kept quiet his own by-line in wrestling, during which he claimed to have held any number of lightweight and bantamweight championships, all under the name of Little Hackenschmidt. He wasn't the only one at it; over in the UK, mimicking the same "open challenge" format that George Hackenschmidt made his music hall debut in, a chap from Lincoln named Henry O'Brien adopted the Little Hackenschmidt name at the tail end of wrestling's music hall era, routinely printing challenges and advertisements in the press, and managed to stay in the business into the mid-1930s, as both wrestler and promoter. In the mid-20s, his open challenge in the want ads of the local papers had grown to include a call for "3 strong men for the Wrestling Horse" - the mind boggles. Boy Hackenschmidt, meanwhile, claimed to be a pupil of George, and offered a silver cup to any boy of his age and weight that could throw him on stage at the Westminster Theatre.

Between the 1930s and the early 1950s, a mystery American wrestler - that is to say, I've yet to find any evidence tying them to any other ring name - did away with the mock-ambiguity altogether, and wrestled simply as George Hackenschmidt, amounting to nothing like the career heights of his namesake, only able to boast of holding the Wisconsin Middleweight Title for a cup of coffee, though he did compete against one of wrestling's most delightful early gimmicks - so for any bemoaning wrestling's embrace of the weird and wonderful in this century, lest we forget that in 1934 a phony George Hackenschmidt competed against K.O. The Man From Mars, or Einar Olsen as his mother called him. One of his final opponents was George Arena, who in the tail end of his career took to piggybacking on another famous name, under the guise of Gorgeous George Arena. In 1938, this phony Hackenschmidt scored a win over The Bat to earn his mask - not, it perhaps goes without saying by now, the famous and influential luchadore that all but invented the theatrical masked luchadore trope, nor El Santo, who began his own career as The Bat II, but a journeyman wrestler of the 1930s who managed to lose the same mask on at least three separate occasions.

Back in the circus, Jack Rice of the St. Louis Post Dispatch wrote following Hackenschmidt's death of an interview he conducted with Brandy Johnson, a ticket-seller for the Sells Floto Circus. Johnson claimed that Hackenschmidt had competed for the circus' after-show, at the age of 48. Johnson, in his telling, was the circus' plant, there to step up and take on Hack's open challenge should nobody in the audience fancy their chances. He spoke glowingly of Hackenschmidt, "one of the finest men I ever knew" - the only problem is, George Hackenschmidt never worked for Sells-Floto Circus, and certainly wasn't wrestling anywhere at the age of 48, in the 1920s. Frank Gotch, incidentally, had wrestled for Sells-Floto. Leaving out the possibility that Brandy Johnson was lying, and that he was genuinely working under the mistaken belief that he had wrestled George Hackenschmidt, could he have wrestled one of America's litany of Young Hackenschmidts? Or was our brazen phony George plying his trade under circus tents before taking it to the ring? There are other possibilities - a Nebraska wrestler named Herman Hackenschmidt was already being described as a veteran in the 1920s, and seems to have taken to circus appearances by the '30s, could that be our 48 year old Hackenschmidt? Was he the same Herman Hackenschmidt who appeared for the Yankee Robinson Circus in 1919, replacing Marin Plestina in an advertised match with the great John Pesek, or fought all-comers for Howe's Great London Circus in 1921? Or was it the allegedly German Joe Hackenschmidt who wrestled out of Pennsylvania in the early '30s? 

There was also a Bruno Hackenschmidt wrestling in Europe between 1911 and 1914 - a scant thirty seconds of footage of one of his matches has even survived to this day, a filmed encounter from 1911 against Austrian weightlifter Josef Steinbach. With so many false Hackenschmidts out there, I'm uncertain whether to accept this as George's actual brother Bruno. In interviews later in life, George was adamant that he was the only wrestler in his family - but given that Bruno was reported dead in Berlin in April 1917, he may have meant the only surviving member. I believe that, like George, Bruno was imprisoned during the first World War, but wasn't as lucky as his brother to survive the War, but I've yet to find concrete evidence.

NOTE: Subsequent research, and the release of some of Hackenschmidt’s previously unpublished writings since this post was first written, have helped shed some light on all this. I can’t be certain, as I’m relying on machine translation from Estonian, but the Bruno in the 1911 footage is the real deal, but George largely took a dim view of him wrestling. Bruno passed away while a prisoner of war, possibly by his own hand.

Last, and decidedly not least, is Miss Jean Hackenschmidt. Billed sometimes as the daughter, and sometimes niece, of George Hackenschmidt, Jean was no such thing; George and Rachel had no children, and no niece named Jean that I know of. She toured the theatres of the UK with The Imperial Troupe Of Lady Wrestlers through the 1930s, issued old-style open challenges, and billed herself as the National Jiu-Jitsu Champion, while other wrestlers in the troupe were promoted as "catch wrestlers", by which means they were able to skirt around various regional bans or just plain old misgivings about women's All-In Wrestling, by dressing it up as a different sport entirely. Jean Hackenschmidt took her act to wrestling booths along the British seaside, and to such glamorous events as Hull Fair, and was clearly primed to be the breakout star of the Imperial Troupe, insofar as the wrestling scene of the mid-30s could allow for female stars. 

Jean seems to disappear from the record, however, around 1936. Her last appearance in the newspaper archive is in The Wiltshire Times, when Adam King, promoter of the Imperial Troupe, was arrested when his "showman's lorry" was pulled over for speeding, and the driver was found to be driving without a license. King claimed that the vehicle belonged to Jean Hackenschmidt, "one of his lady wrestlers", and that appears to be her last appearance in the public record, save for a seven page "art book" alleging to depict a 1936 match between Jean Hackenschmidt and the incredible strongwoman and wrestler Ivy Russell, of Croydon. The book in question being a work of women's wrestling fetish artwork places paying any money whatsoever for it beyond the scope of even my research capabilities, and I'd lean very heavily towards believing that such a match never took place. That said, who's to say that Jean Hackenschmidt wasn't a pseudonym once used by one of Ivy Russell's opponents and then abandoned later in her career? With such a paucity of information available on the history of women's wrestling in the UK, with women's wrestling banned in much of the country for decades (and, in London, until 1987), and banned on television for the entire run of World of Sport, there's little way of knowing who's who, and what really happened to Jean Hackenschmidt. Perhaps she was Peggy Parnell or Florence Mason by another name.

That is likely only scratching the surface when it comes to counterfeit Hackenschmidts, and it's easy to see why it would have got George's goat, though to be fair to many of them, it's unlikely that all of the Young and Little Hackenschmidts were intended to con audiences necessarily, so much as to draw comparison to a familiar name - though the Hackenschmidt name on a poster certainly didn't hurt, and for the likes of our phony George and Miss Jean, implying that it's a little more than just a name was certainly a viable strategy.

I feel I should apologise to the ghost of George Hackenschmidt, for once again, a comparison is coming with Frank Gotch. Because Hackenschmidt wasn't alone in being pastiched, ripped off, and having others trade on his name. Long before the likes of Karl Gotch or Simon Gotch took his name in tribute, there were at least five separate wrestlers named Young Gotch wrestling throughout the 1930s, one of whom also dabbled as Joe Gotch. George Harben tried the name George Gotch on for size in the 1930s, while Walter Grebek tried any number of names, Jan Gotch among them, and Vanka Zelezniak maybe felt that Nick Gotch was a little more palatable for American audiences. There was even a Lil' Abner Gotch, a confusing combination of references if ever there was one. Though unlike George Hackenschmidt, Frank Gotch never lived to see any of the wrestlers who piggybacked on his name.

One last thing - Frank Gotch had his own answer to Jean Hackenschmidt, too. Frances Ballard, who wrestled in the 1950s as Hillbilly Kate, worked for a time as Francis Gotch, teaming with - who else - Gorgeous Georgia. 

P.S.: In amongst the Young Gotches and the Young Hackenschmidts, spare a thought for the borderline unresearchable American wrestler who toiled away in the 1930s under the name, "Young Hitler".

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