Roll up, roll up ... wowing British audiences

As Sandwina grew older, she added even more breathtaking and elaborate elements to her performance. There were the staples, of course: bending iron bars, juggling cannonballs, holding a cannon on her shoulders, straightening horseshoes and tossing her husband around like a feather.

By the time she came to Britain to star at the Olympia Circus and on tour in 1927, she had developed “the Human Anvil” which involved lying on a bed of nails with the anvil on her chest and inviting audience members to hit it with sledgehammers. But that was only the warm-up for the main attraction, “The Bridge of Might”, in which she supported wooden ramps across her torso while 12 “Roman centurions” and two on horseback crossed “the bridge”. Little wonder that the Hull Daily Mail wrote after seeing her at the Tivoli Theatre: “Her claims to be the world’s strongest woman seem to be justified.”

After retiring in 1941, Kathi and Max opened a bar and grill in Queen’s, New York, where she could be persuaded by regulars to prove age had not diminished her ability to buckle metal or hoist her husband. Anyone foolish enough to be surly or rowdy would find themselves swiftly thrown out.

Sandwina died in 1952 from cancer and is buried in Mount Richmond Cemetery, on Staten Island. The fame of “The Sensation of the Century” has not endured, nor has her trade, but Sandwina was that rarest of performers, a woman who subverted the preconceptions of the age.