bicep

The Internet provides a few tantalizing hints to who Billy Wood may have been. He may have been the British wrestler William Wood, who won the silver medal in the lightweight (up to 66kgs) division of the freestyle wrestling competition at the 1908 Summer Olympics. Link: Wikipedia article on 1908 Olympic wrestling. Or maybe he was the Billy Wood who was Britain's middleweight wrestling champion in 1909 (middleweight being at least 76kgs, he'd have had to pack on quite a bit of weight in a year if William and Billy were the same guy.) Link: Google html cache of a big .pdf, with suitable highlighting. Or (and?) was he perhaps W. (Billy) Wood, styled "Welterweight Champion of the World" in a book about wrestling published by W. Foulsham & Co. of London sometime around the 1930s? The book, with text by E.J. Harrison, features posed photos of W. Wood and C. Law, illustrating wrestling holds. This book shows up for sale on the Internet in various editions. Link probably soon to die: A recent ebay UK offering of the book.

greatness

There are a lot of web pages mentioning Constant Le Marin, but most are in French or German. Somebody who reads either (or both) could come up with more information about him than I can. What I've been able to glean from various sites is that he was a Belgian professional Greco-Roman wrestler, and his birth name was Henri Herd. He appears to have been popular in Russia before WWI, and might have fought on a Russian wrestling team. He had at least one bout with Stanislaus Zbyszko, at Chicago, on February 24, 1913. I also found a reference to a Belgian wrestler named Sailor Constant (an English translation of Constant Le Marin) wrestling former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in 1933. The same guy, perhaps? Both he and Johnson would have been getting on in years by then. He's also listed at BoxRec as having had a single boxing match (which he lost), against Angel Rodriguez, at Montevideo in 1916. One of the French web pages is a brief biography of his niece, Cécile Brusson, which has a couple of photos of him, one in his WWI uniform. Here's Google's automatic translation of a paragraph from it: "One of the Herd son, Henri, was an impressive athlete who, since 1904, won tournaments in Greco-Roman. He chose to fight under the name of the Constant-Marino, a tribute to the prestigious champion Namurois Constant-le-Boucher. Why marine? Because he had the ambition to "beyond the seas and oceans" the name of the school liégeoise control. He did, in fact, winning from 1908 to 1914, prestigious tournaments in Canada and South America, and it was four times world champion won his discipline and four belts of gold."

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Almost Anything. FOUR SEASONS COMP. Get entering., and we'd love to have this added to the group!

That is the definition of barrel chested.

John Lemm was mentioned as wrestling champion of Germany and Switzerland in a New York Times article of December 11, 1910 (in the second of two articles in a .pdf avaiable here) The article mentions that Lemm had recently won a tournament held in London. Though it might or might not date from the time of that tournament, this photo bears the stamp of a London photographer of the era: P.W. Luton, 34 New Cross Rd., S.E..

Thanks for the information. We found a reference to Percy William Luton in Pritchard's A Directory of London Photographers, 1841-1908, p. 83, so will add his name to the source data and reload the description.

Great vintage .