Arthur Saxon

28 April 1878 – 6 August 1921 · Leipzig, Germany → London

Arthur Saxon — born Arthur Hennig — was the eldest and strongest of the three brothers who toured as the Saxon Trio for nearly two decades. His best bent press, recorded in London in 1905, is generally given as 371 lb (168 kg). It is still the figure that anchors any discussion of the lift's upper limit.

Origins

Saxon was born in Leipzig in 1878 to a working-class family. He began performing in his teens, joining a small acrobatic troupe in Saxony, and by 1897 had teamed up with his younger brothers Hermann and Kurt to form the Saxon Trio. The act trained in Leipzig under the strongman Carl Abs and a strength promoter named Anton Riedel. By 1900 the brothers had moved their base to England, where Arthur lived for most of the rest of his life.

The work

The Saxon Trio's act was built around Arthur. The two younger brothers performed acrobatic and partner stunts; Arthur did the lifting. The signature piece was the bent press performed with a barbell, with one or both brothers seated on the ends of the bar — a presentation that was both genuinely heavy and difficult to load fraudulently because the human ballast was visible. They toured the British music halls, the Continent, and made several visits to North America in the early 1900s.

Saxon's most famous public episode was a contest with Eugen Sandow staged in Sheffield in 1898. By the Saxons' account, Arthur out-lifted Sandow with a bent press at a weight Sandow could not match. By Sandow's account, the bell had been re-rigged for Saxon between attempts. The matter went to court — the Saxons sued Sandow for misrepresentation in his publicity — and the verdict was equivocal. The episode is one of the most documented strongman disputes of the era and is recounted at length in Chapman's Sandow the Magnificent.

"The bent press is not a lift of strength alone. It is a lift of structure. The man who has not been built to it cannot be talked into it."

Notable feats

Saxon's lifting figures, unusually for the period, are reasonably consistent across British, German, and American sources. The numbers most frequently cited are:

• Right-hand bent press of 371 lb (168 kg), reported at the Apollo-Saal, London, 1905.
• Two-hands anyhow lift of 448 lb (203 kg) — bent press of a 336-pound barbell to overhead, then a 112-pound kettlebell pressed up beside it with the free hand.
• One-hand snatch of 195 lb (88 kg).
• One-arm swing with a thick-handled dumbbell of around 220 lb (100 kg).

The 371-pound figure was attested by witnesses including Thomas Inch, who later wrote that he saw Saxon make the lift on more than one occasion, and Edward Aston, the British amateur champion of the next generation. No bent press has been credibly performed at this weight since; the lift itself was effectively retired from competition in the 1930s when the IWF ceased to recognise it.

Method

Saxon's training, as set out in The Development of Physical Power (1905), was direct, almost severe. He worked the bent press itself as the test, with assistance work confined to one-arm dumbbell pressing, the two-hands clean, and odd-object lifting — sandbags, anvils, chairs held at arm's length. He warned repeatedly against light, repetitive dumbbell drill of the kind Sandow had popularised, calling it "exercise without resistance enough to do anything." He believed in heavy work performed for low repetitions and ample rest, and against the kind of measured posing for the camera that was beginning to dominate the field.

Legacy

The Development of Physical Power is the most direct training manual to come out of the music-hall era and is still in print. The bent press, as a contested lift, is largely associated with Saxon: the 371-pound figure is the benchmark and almost everything written about the lift cites him. Several of his lifts and physical measurements were also used by Alan Calvert and Ottley Coulter in their later assessments of credible historical strength records.

The Saxon Trio's stage act ended with the First World War, which interned Hermann and Kurt as enemy aliens. Arthur, who had married an Englishwoman and was variously described as British or German depending on the venue, continued to perform sporadically in the 1920s. He died of pneumonia in Leipzig on 6 August 1921, at forty-three, while visiting family.

Disputed and unresolved

The claim that Arthur Saxon performed a bent press of 385 lb at the German Strongmen's Convention is repeated in several twentieth-century sources but is not in The Development of Physical Power itself; the 371-pound figure is the one Saxon stood behind in print. The further claim, sometimes seen, of a 400-pound bent press, has no contemporary documentation.

The Saxon brothers' relationship to the early IWF and to organised weightlifting was distant: their lifts were performance lifts, not contest lifts under fixed rules, and were judged accordingly. The scholarly literature treats Saxon's figures as the best available evidence of what the bent press was capable of, while reserving final judgement.