Eugen Sandow is acknowledged as the founding father of body-building. An international celebrity who was considered ‘the beau-idéal of athletic elegance’, Sandow not only transformed notions of male beauty, but also popularised the practice of exercising for health and fitness across society.
FROM PRUSSIA TO LONDON
Sandow is commemorated with a blue plaque at 161 Holland Park Avenue in Kensington, where he lived from 1906 until his death in 1925. By the time he moved here, he was already famous thanks to his legendary music-hall performances, world tours and constant self-promotion. While living here he continued his transformation from strongman to respected Edwardian businessman.
Sandow grew up under the name Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in East Prussia. He left Prussia in about 1885 and made his first appearance on a London stage in 1889 at the Royal Aquarium, where he successfully completed challenges set by strongman Charles Sampson. Sandow was cheered back to his lodgings in Leicester Square and became a London sensation. He went on to complete a sell-out season of performances at the Alhambra where he awed audiences with his finale act, ‘Tomb of Hercules’, in which he balanced a board on his shoulders carrying not only weights but also his manager.
AMERICAN TOUR
In 1890 Sandow toured Britain and continued to dominate his field. Three years later he travelled to America and dazzled the crowds at the World Fair in Chicago during a six-week run which brought in receipts of $30,000. He spent much of the next four years touring America, even appeared in an ill-matched contest with an aged and infirm lion in San Francisco. It was during this time that he met and married his wife, Blanche, with whom he had two daughters.
BUSINESSMAN
In 1896, burnt out by the strain of such a hectic schedule, Sandow suffered a breakdown and returned to England. Recuperating in London, he opened his own gymnasium, the Institute for Physical Culture in fashionable St James’s, in 1897 and grew his commercial empire by promoting his fitness regimes and products in books and magazines. He also devised the first major body-building contest, which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in 1901.
After more overseas tours Sandow settled in London and capitalised on his mail-order business. In 1906 he was able to buy the lease of 161 (formerly 61) Holland Park Avenue, thanks to a generous gift from an Indian businessman, Dhunjibhoy Bomanji, whose health had improved dramatically after he had adopted Sandow’s regime. This grand four-storey end-of-terrace house – which was named Dhunjibhoy House after his benefactor – was his home for 19 years.
Sandow’s latter years were overshadowed by financial and marital difficulties, caused in large part by his philandering, and by an unedifying court battle over claims about his personal fitness. When he died, aged 58, at his home on 14 October 1925, his wife refused to have a marker placed on his grave at Putney Vale Cemetery.