George F. Jowett

23 December 1891 – 11 July 1969 · England → Pennsylvania → Ontario

George F. Jowett was an English-born strongman and lifter who did more as an organiser, editor and writer than as a competitor. He edited Strength magazine, co-founded the American Continental Weightlifting Association, ran his own mail-order institute, and by the 1950s was being called "the Father of American Weightlifting".

Origins

Jowett was born in England on 23 December 1891. He emigrated to Canada in 1911 and served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. In 1923 he moved to Pennsylvania, where he performed as a strongman and lifter; that September he competed against other strongmen at a police meet in Pittsburgh, and by 1927 newspapers were carrying his billing as the "world's strongest man".

The work

Jowett's real career was on the page and in organisation. He joined the staff of Strength magazine, published in Philadelphia by the Milo Bar-Bell Company, in the early 1920s and edited it from 1924 to 1927. With Ottley Coulter and David P. Willoughby he founded the American Continental Weightlifting Association (ACWLA) and served as its president. He directed the Breitbart Institute of Physical Culture in New York and in 1927 founded his own Jowett Institute of Physical Culture, selling courses by mail. In 1932 Bob Hoffman recruited him to do most of the editorial work on the new Strength & Health; he left in 1934, angered by Hoffman's support for the Amateur Athletic Union over the ACWLA as the governing body of American lifting.

Notable feats

Jowett was billed in his performing years as a strongman and claimed a range of stage and competition lifts, but no reliable record of his contest figures has been established from contemporary sources, and the numbers that circulate should be treated as unverified. His lasting achievements are institutional: the ACWLA, the editorship of Strength, and his share in the launch of Strength & Health.

Method

Jowett's training writing is extensive and uneven. His mail-order courses — the "Molding a Mighty" series on the arm, chest, grip and back among them — were designed to sell the next instalment. His books include The Key to Might and Muscle (1926), The Strongest Man That Ever Lived (1929), a popular life of Louis Cyr, and The Atlas of Anatomy and The Science of Exercise Specialization (both 1938).

Legacy

Jowett's importance is organisational and commercial. Alongside Earle Liederman and others, his mail-order business helped establish a mass market for strength training at home, and his work for the ACWLA and on Strength and Strength & Health helped shape American lifting between the wars. He later founded the Body Sculpture Club in England. He and his wife Bessie had a daughter, Phyllis, and lived in later life at Riverside Heights, Ontario; he died at Winchester, Ontario, on 11 July 1969.

Disputed and unresolved

Jowett's accounts of his own early life and lifting, like much autobiographical writing in the physical-culture trade, served his courses and should not be taken at face value. His biographical writing about other strongmen, including his book on Cyr, repeats figures from earlier writers without independent corroboration; it is a useful record of what was believed at the time but should not be the only source for any individual claim. Even basic details vary: his birthplace is often given as Bradford, Yorkshire, but this has not been confirmed from records, and his middle name is given differently in different sources.