George F. Jowett

23 March 1891 – 27 July 1969 · Bradford, Yorkshire → North America

George Frederick Jowett was a competent professional lifter who became, in his second career, the most prolific writer of strength manuals in the English-speaking world. Between 1925 and 1940 he produced roughly thirty courses, books, and pamphlets, and through the Milo and Jowett Bureau mail-order businesses he reached more amateur trainees than any of his contemporaries.

Origins

Jowett was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in March 1891. He was a small, sickly child — the autobiographical sections of his books emphasise this, in the convention of the period — and took up lifting in his teens after seeing a Saxon Trio performance. He worked as a blacksmith's apprentice and as a steelworker before turning professional, and emigrated to Canada around 1913. He served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War and settled in Pennsylvania after demobilisation.

The work

Jowett competed as a professional lifter through the 1920s, particularly in the bent press and the one-arm Olympic lifts at middleweight. He won the Canadian heavyweight wrestling championship in 1924 — a less famous result than is sometimes claimed; the field was small. From the mid-1920s onwards his energies shifted decisively toward writing. He served as editor of Strength magazine briefly in the late 1920s after Calvert's departure, then founded the Jowett Institute and the Jowett Strength Bureau, both mail-order businesses. He wrote for Strength, Muscle Builder, Strength & Health, and a number of British strength periodicals.

Notable feats

Jowett's contest figures, recorded in ACWLA and Canadian amateur reports through the 1920s, include:

• Right-hand bent press of approximately 256 lb (116 kg) at a bodyweight of 175 lb (79 kg).
• Two-hands clean and jerk of 280 lb (127 kg).
• Heavyweight Canadian wrestling title, 1924.
• Various exhibition lifts of anvils, dumbbells, and "odd" implements through his stage tours.

"The man who has a regular hour, a regular bell, and a regular bar will leave a mark. The man who has a thousand methods will leave none of them."

Method

Jowett's training writing, viewed as a body of work, is uneven. The Jowett courses — Moulding a Mighty Arm, Moulding a Mighty Chest, Moulding a Mighty Grip, and a long series in the same vein — are repetitive and oriented toward selling the next instalment. His longer books — The Key to Might and Muscle (1926), Muscle Moulding (1928), Molding a Mighty Back (1930) — are better, with reasonable instruction in the Olympic lifts and accurate descriptions of the bent press. Strongmen Over the Years (1940) is, for its date, a serious attempt at strength biography and is still cited in the historical literature.

Legacy

Jowett's importance is less methodological than commercial. His mail-order businesses, alongside Earle Liederman's, established that there was a mass market for strength training in the English-speaking world that did not require the customer to attend a gymnasium. By 1930 he was writing for tens of thousands of subscribers, the great majority of whom would never set foot in Klein's Gym or the York Barbell Club but who corresponded with Jowett's office, ordered his courses, and worked through them at home with whatever equipment they could afford. The mail-order boom of the late 1920s and 1930s — Jowett, Liederman, Atlas, Calvert's lingering Milo line — was the scaffolding on which post-war American lifting culture was built.

Disputed and unresolved

Jowett's biographical writing about his own past is unreliable in places. The story of the sickly Bradford child, redeemed by a chance encounter with a wandering strongman, recurs across his books in slightly different forms; the recurring details (the pawnbroker, the iron rod, the "rejection notice" from the army) are the literary furniture of the genre rather than verifiable fact. His professional lifting figures are reasonably documented; his promotional autobiography is not.

Some of the strongman portraits in Strongmen Over the Years repeat figures from Edmond Desbonnet and from Calvert without independent corroboration; Jowett's book is a useful summary of what was believed in 1940 but should not be the only source for any individual claim.