Further Research: Jean Hackenschmidt
PLEASE NOTE: This piece first appeared as an exclusive on my Patreon page in November 2022, but I have released it for free now to make up for the lack of new content in the past two months.
In my earlier post, looking at the phenomenon that I dubbed "Counterfeit Hackenschmidts", I touched on the story of one Jean Hackenschmidt. Variously claimed as either the daughter or niece of George Hackenschmidt, she appeared briefly in the English 'papers during the 1930s, advertised as a wrestler, and sometimes as the National Jiu-Jitsu Champion, appearing as an additional attraction on the bill at wrestling and boxing shows, and then she mysteriously vanished from the public eye. Her last appearance in the newspapers was as a scapegoat when Adam King, promoter of a troupe of female wrestlers, was charged with a variety of vehicular offences.
Google, and some trawls through the archives, got me nowhere. I knew full well that Jean wasn't a relative of George Hackenschmidt, but who was she?
The only clue came in an issue of Wrestling Revue, in which readers in 1969 could, for the price of 50 cents, read of "A Partnership Forged In Hell" between The Blue Demons and Mario Galento, a blood-soaked J.C. Dykes claiming "Funk and Slaton Tried To Murder Me", and a biography of Blackjack Lanza titled "I Live With My Hate". Or else readers in the UK could pay 3 and 6 to turn to the two pages dedicated to British wrestling, the "Names, Notes and News From The British Wrestling Scene" penned by a young man named Brian Dixon, then but a humble referee, more than a year away from founding All Star Wrestling.
Buried away in the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover, though, were the words "JEAN HACKENSCHMIDT". I had been burned before - my research on Mr. Wonder briefly hit a brick wall when the magazine advertising a feature on him on their front cover turned out to only mention him in passing, in a single sentence, but I took a gamble, and ordered a copy.
Today, it arrived from Australia, and I flicked through it. The articles are the usual hyperbole, though the historical content is fascinating for the recency in which it's able to cover the likes of Jack Curley and Lou Daro, who now feel like ancient history - a photo sent in by British wrestling historian Mohammad Hanif shows a line-up of young wrestlers all posed around a very dapper looking Ernest Roeber, the caption asking "can any of you old timers recognize any of these grapplers?". Roeber died in 1944, his last match wrestled somewhere around 1901; these must be very old-timers indeed.
But what of Jean Hackenschmidt? As it happens, it's Mohammad Hanif who covers her story too.
There's no indication as to her real name - even if unrelated to George, I find it hard to believe she was a genuine Hackenschmidt - but there is a sense of her backstory. She was Scottish, and began her career as an actress, before taking an open audition at Glasgow's Empire Theatre to join Adam King's Troupe as a wrestler, where she became known as The Wrestling Tigress; perhaps a small nod to George Hackenschmidt's moniker of the Russian Lion.
There, she wrestled Tillie Tinmouth, one of Adam King's star attractions, a weightlifting champion from Sunderland, nicknamed "The Girl Samson". Tillie had competed as a weightlifter in 1932 against Ivy Russell, who a salacious bit of niche self-published smut suggested also wrestled Jean Hackenschmidt against all evidence offered by the historic record, but went on to greater success as a touring wrestler for the Imperial Troupe, wrestling in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, and often performing an "open challenge" routine, taking on all-comers. In 1933, she lost to a mysterious masked woman, who described herself as a "well-known athlete and swimmer, whose parents disapproved of her wrestling" - answers on a postcard!
Jean Hackenschmidt, so Mohammad Hanif claims, was able to defeat Tillie Tinmouth to earn a spot as the top lady wrestler of the Adam King Troupe. More on that later.
Under the guidance of King, Jean became a star in England and in Paris, where she joined Sandra Porter - one of many claimants to the title of Women's World Champion following the retirement of Cora Livingston - and her troupe of Parisian wrestlers, touring all over France, the French Riviera, and Monte Carlo. There, aside from Porter herself, Jean is listed as having wrestled and defeated Betty Grafln and the Irish Champion Nina Shiron, "and many others", before challenging Rosa de Louvre for the Women's European Championship, which Hackenschmidt allegedly won in a mere 16 seconds.
Other opponents came and went - G. Olie of Holland (most likely actually Chris Oli, as recorded in other accounts of Adam King's troupe, usually billed as C. Oli), French champion Helen du Pont, and Signorita Bornachini of Spain - and an All-In rules match against Madam Lolo de Geneve. Having earned the European Women's Championship, she planned to travel to America, with every intention of challenging for their version of the World Title. The outbreak of World War 2 put paid to her plans of an American tour, and she never wrestled again, putting her time and much of her property to charity work and supporting the merchant navy during the war.
It's evident from the tone of Hanif's article that, whoever she was, Jean Hackenschmidt was a name remembered fondly, yet she has almost entirely vanished from the historical record. Wrestling history is little recorded, and women's history even less so. As a result, the name not just of Jean Hackenschmidt, but of all of the opponents listed are completely lost to time. Of the opponents mentioned here, the majority have left no further impression on the historical record.
One note of personal interest, however, was the location of Jean Hackenschmidt's match with Nina Shiron. As a former resident of Jersey, and a member of Channel Island World Wrestling's roster for a decade, it came as some surprise to see "Guernsey's Trade and Industries Exhibition" mentioned in the American wrestling press of the 1960s. This one, I feel, deserves further research.
What, then, of Adam King? His name pops up fleetingly in the 1930s as promoter of a women's wrestling troupe - one of perhaps only one or two in the United Kingdom. Mohammad Hanif described him as a "Russian impresario", albeit one based in Scotland, and he strikes me in that regard as something of a Jack Pfefer figure - prepared to experiment, try anything, and thumb his nose at wrestling traditionalists if there's money to be made by doing so.
Adam King, billed as the "lightweight champion of Russia" made his first advertised wrestling appearance in the UK when he defeated Jack Sandow, the lightweight champion of Yorkshire, at Leeds Hippodrome on Saturday 25th July 1908, on a show headlined by Yukio Tani, the great Japanese jiu-jitsu instructor who travelled to Europe, and England in particular, to teach, but soon found it easier to make money as a professional wrestler in open challenges.
The following year, Adam King again appears on the undercard for a Yukio Tani show, this time in Edinburgh, and this time claiming Edinburgh as his hometown, emerging victorious over the British Army middleweight champion, James Dunbar.
By 1911, Adam King's own selling point was that - borrowing liberally from Yukio Tani - he billed himself as the "Jiu-Jitsu Champion of Europe" at the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition, and took on a number of hand-picked Japanese challengers, before taking his open challenge on the road, even if the Manchester Courier described his displays as "unconvincing", and with "the finer points of catch-as-catch-can wrestling at a discount". Convincing or not, King had found a grift that would see him through the next quarter of a century.
By the 1930s, King had found a new twist on his Jiu-Jitsu formula, and began billing himself as the World Jiu-Jitsu Champion in interdisciplinary contests against boxers - in Belfast in 1933, he faced boxer Jack O'Brien across three rounds and, on the same night, fought middleweight boxer Tom Connolly in a catch-as-catch-can wrestling match. The following night, the matches were reversed, with O'Brien trying his hand at wrestling, and Connolly in the mixed rules Jiu-Jitsu vs. Boxing encounter.
All the while, King was mucking in as a referee on All-In rules bouts, and as a sign of how wild and unpredictable wrestling was getting, seemed to be forever in the wrong place at the wrong time - he had a knack for getting caught between two wrestlers, or having a wrestler shoved into him, knocking him through the ropes to the floor. Proof that there's nothing new under the sun, least of all when it comes to pro-wrestling.
By 1935, Adam King had his meal ticket. He put together his troupe of women's wrestlers, allegedly gathered from all over the world, and worked against the prevailing winds that were turning on All-In Wrestling by promoting his events as clean and classy, and of cultural import, skirting around taboos and outright bans on women's wrestling by performing on variety and theatre bills rather than on wrestling shows, and by foregrounding his alleged Jiu-Jitsu experience. Well into his 50s, he still competed on his own shows, and in June 1935 the Cornish Guardian described both King and Jean Hackenschmidt giving Jiu-Jitsu exhibitions together, with King billed as the former Jiu-Jitsu World Champion (at least having the humility to strip himself of his vanity title).
Is the Jiu-Jitsu connection what encouraged Adam King to promote Jean Hackenschmidt as his star attraction, or was Jean being the star attraction sufficient reason for King to pass on his own credentials to her? Is there something else there, in the fluidity of King's Russo-Scottish claimed identities and the apparently Scottish Jean being given the working name of Russia's most famous wrestling export?
In January 1934, Adam King defeated Alec Munro, the Scottish champion, mere days after the death of Munro's uncle, the other Alec Munro, a former champion wrestler, strongman and, brilliantly, two-time Olympian tug-of-war medallist who had lost to George Hackenschmidt in 1908. That same show - part of F.A. Lumley's International Circus and Carnival in Edinburgh - also boasted one of the first documented appearances of King's troupe of lady wrestlers, claiming prior tours, exhibitions and open challenges in France, Germany, Holland, and Switzerland.
On the bill was Catherine O'Hara of Ireland, described as the leader of the troupe and the middleweight champion, Eva Croft of South Africa, Daisy Mackaill of Edinburgh, Chris Oli of Holland, and Betty Garstang of Canada. Daisy Mackaill is also described as giving jiu-jitsu demonstrations alongside Adam King, as Jean Hackenschmidt would in the months and years to come.
But wait - there's one other name mentioned in this article from the Edinburgh Evening News; one Jean Irvine of Wales, who won the European Championship in a record time of 16 seconds. Given that Jean Hackenschmidt, according to the Wrestling Revue, won that very same title in 16 seconds, I think we may have found our woman.
It is under that name, Jean Irvine, that she appears headlining the Empire Theatre in Motherwell, twice nightly from 22nd January 1934, offering £2 to any local lady that could last five minutes with her, and £5 to any who could defeat her, while Adam King and Daisy Mackaill gave jiu-jitsu demonstrations to show "how a lady can overpower any man in the street". It's as Jean Irvine that she headlined Edinburgh's Waverley Market Carnival with a match against Eva Croft - referee Adam King becoming "an involuntary third contestant", to no small surprise.
By 1936, Jean Irvine had become Jean Hackenschmidt, and a reliable regional attraction, if not the sensation that Wrestling Revue suggests.
In an interview with the Western Morning News in June 1937, ahead of an appearance at Plymouth Hoe Fair - credited simply to "a woman reporter" - Jean's backstory differs slightly to what the Wrestling Revue reported thirty-two years later; in this telling, young Jean Irvine was born in Glasgow, and became a professional dancer at 14, touring all over England, Scotland, Wales, and continental Europe, but was so taken by the female wrestlers she saw in a Glasgow theatre that she couldn't help but try her luck against them. In a quotation, "Hackenschmidt" claims;
"My father hated the idea of my touring as a dancer at first, but he is quite reconciled to it now. He used to be a wrestler in his young days himself, and his father was a blacksmith, so I suppose strength runs in the family".
Not so unusual an anecdote, you might think, but it suggests either a coincidence or a bit of playful kayfabe being deployed - for George Hackenschmidt's father had been a blacksmith, and was Jean not here alluding to the famous name she profited from, and that more than once she had been billed as the daughter of?
The article goes on to recount how Jean's commitments meant that she wrestled on average 10-12 times a day, and at rush periods had given as many as 37 exhibitions in a single day, and how outside of the theatre she wrestled with men more often than women, having recently made short work of a member of the Plymouth Rugby team.
A Glasgow Jiu-Jitsu Champion, and a Wrestling Tigress taking the name of a Russian Lion; Jean Irvine was forgotten to history, but can be remembered in some small way here, at least.
