Bizarre life and times of Daredevil who tackled Niagara falls in a barrel
Exactly 100 years ago this week, a slightly-built and unassuming barber from Bedminster climbed into a barrel bobbing on the waters two miles upstream of Niagara Falls – and made his voyage into local legend. Eugene Byrne looks at the bizarre life and times of Charlie Stephens.
‘IF I thought there was a chance I would be killed I wouldn’t attempt to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel. I don’t expect to be as seasick as I was coming from England on the boat.”
This was the culmination of Charlie Stephens’ life, and nothing was going to stop him.
The date was July 11 1920, and he was a very unlikely-looking celebrity. He was 58 – an old man by the standards of the time – and five feet seven inches tall. He was slightlybuilt and quietly spoken.
Fifteen years previously, a newspaper interviewer had said he looked as though he belonged in a TB sanatorium. Time and the First World War had not improved him.
“But supposing you don’t come back,” a newspaperman pressed the point. “I mean, suppose they don’t find you when you go over. Then what?”
“No use supposin,’” replied Charlie Stephens.
“You does it, or you doesn’t. I bets I does.”
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There can’t be too many BT readers who haven’t heard of Charlie Stephens, the “Demon Barber of Bedminster” who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Born in Bristol in 1862, he eventually became a barber, though he sometimes also called himself a hairdresser. Research by BT also reveals that earlier on in life he was calling himself a “master baker”, but that obviously didn’t work out.
Up until 1920, he liked to tell everyone what a charmed life he’d led, and the newspapers happily helped him build the legend. Once he had become a part-time showman he knew the value of stories. Modern showbiz is no different.
So at the age of five, we are told, he went down with some mysterious illness and was thought to have died.
There he lay, in his coffin, when the doctor arrived to write out the death certificate. The doctor decided to check a couple of things and opened the lid to see the boy staring out at him, very much alive.
When he was older, Charlie is said to have saved a young woman who had intended to take her life by lying on a railway track. He snatched her away in the nick of time, the train passing so close that it ripped her skirts off.
On another occasion he fell into a river, he said. He was unable to swim but told himself to keep calm, and grabbed onto a piece of wood which kept him afloat.
By the time he was 21, Charlie was working as a miner in the South Wales coalfields when he was almost hit by a runaway coal truck.
“That settled me,” he told a newspaper. “If there was anything that could frighten me it would have been that adventure.”
“When I saw an advertisement asking for a man of nerve to make parachute jumps, I made bold to reply and then began my career as a tempter of fate.”
In the showman’s style of the time, he called himself ‘Professor’ Stephens and would make daring parachute descents from balloons wearing a distinctive red coat.
He boasted that he could shave a man in three seconds flat, and would do so in a cage full of lions at the Coliseum on Park Row and other venues.
He jumped off the Forth Bridge, stood with sugar cubes on his head to be picked away by marksmen, and lay down on stage with an apple balanced on his throat while it was cut in two with a single swipe of a sword.
It’s the incidental details that are compelling. A paragraph in a Bristol paper from the early 1900s tells us that he shaved some men in a cage full of lions, and afterwards went up to one of the animals and kissed it on the lips.
Small wonder that someone once said Charlie would never die unless someone shot him.
He had married Bedminsterborn Annie Tucker in 1886, and though she had apparently once gone up 5,000 feet in a balloon she does not appear to have shared his taste for adventure. But then she did eventually have a lot of children to bring up. The extra income generated by Charlie’s dare-devilry probably came in very handy.
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Charlie Stephens’ ambition to go over Niagara Falls went back years before he made the attempt. In the early 1900s he and his family were living at Ferndale in the Rhondda Valley where he had a hairdressing business and he told a local paper there of his ambition, but stipulated:
“Some interested sportsman or some bioscope [ie movie] company must offer a purse of money that I deem suitable.
“I have a gift, the gift of fearlessness, and it is my duty to profit by it.”
But then the Great War got in the way.
Again, Charlie’s luck held. He enlisted, even though he was well over military age, and served for three and a half years. The records suggest he was invalided out and later received a disability pension, but whatever the wound or disability was it didn’t stop him now realising his ambition.
Before Charlie’s attempt on the Falls, two other people had successfully done it. In 1901, American school teacher Annie Edson Taylor went over in a barrel and emerged from it declaring: “No one ought ever do that again”.
Cornish-born circus stuntman Bobby Leach repeated the feat in a steel barrel in 1911. He had owned a restaurant, and for years had been telling customers that anything Annie Taylor could do, he could do better.
He, too, lived to tell the tale, though arguably he didn’t do it better than Annie. She had come out of her barrel with a few cuts and bruises, while he had to spend six months in hospital waiting for numerous broken bones to mend.
By 1920 Charlie and his family were back living over his shop in West Street, Bedminster when he started making preparations for his great project.
The barrel was made by a firm in Bath from stout Russian oak, and it was padded on the inside and fitted with a little electric light and an oxygen mask. There was a harness inside to hold him in place. It was ballasted to keep it upright in the water with lead weights.
The cost was something over £20 – the equivalent of two months’ wages for a skilled working man, and, ever the showman, Stephens put the barrel on show at the Empire Theatre in Old Market, charging the public to come and look at it.
By the time he reached America, he had negotiated with a film company to record the stunt – for £20.
Despite saying he’d only do it for a big payout, the sums involved seem disappointing. Charlie was not going to make that much money from his stunt. Perhaps he was anticipating that money would follow his global fame if he succeeded, or maybe at the age of 58 he just saw it as a fitting end to his career.
Bobby Leach strongly advised him against it, begging him to at least test the barrel first by sending it over the Falls unoccupied. He was particularly anxious about the weight Charlie was planning to use in the barrel because in addition to the 170lb of lead in the bottom he was now proposing to ballast it even further with a blacksmith’s anvil to which his feet would be strapped.
Charlie dismissed Leach’s warnings, suggesting that it was probably just professional jealousy.
The last letter he had written to Annie and the children back in Bristol ended: “I am not wishing you all goodbye, but only so long till Sunday. What a day that will be for me.”
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Early on the morning of Sunday, July 11, 1920, Charlie Stephens arrived at Snyder’s Point, about two miles upstream of the Falls.
There were not many people around, which suited him fine. He did not want anyone else trying to stop him. There were just a few helpers and supporters, the film crew, and a handful of spectators.
Bobby Leach was there, too. Perhaps he made one final attempt to talk Charlie out of it, but if he did it was to no effect.
He crawled into his cask and quoted from the Bible: “Cast they bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days.”
He must have believed that milk and honey were round the corner. Or at any rate over the edge of the Falls.
At ten minutes past eight that morning the barrel was launched and floated its way down the river.
Bobby Leach, certain that a tragedy was about to take place, did not stay to watch.
After a few minutes it looked as if a hoop had been snagged off the barrel but it was now too late to stop.
The barrel soon dropped over the 167ft cliffs and disappeared.
Unknown to the spectators, which by now numbered a few hundred, the barrel fell through the roaring waters and straight to the bottom of the river, smashing into splinters at the foot of the Falls.
Neither Stephens or the barrel were seen for hours - it looked hopeless, then someone shouted “There it is!” - but it was only a piece of broken black stave. Hours later more debris was washed ashore and carried off by morbid onlookers.
All that they ever found of him was a small piece of his rib, and a right arm on which was tattooed “Forget me not. Annie.”
What was left of Charlie was buried in an unmarked local grave. The film company sent Charlie’s £20 fee to Annie in Bedminster, but she had to send it straight back to pay for the burial.
Within a month of the tragedy, 19 other people had applied for permission to ride over Niagara Falls in barrels.
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Interviewed by the Post back in the 1980s, his last surviving child, his daughter Viola Cogan remembered kissing her father goodbye as he set off from Temple Meads with his barrel.
“He had no fear at all, nothing frightened him, not pain or danger or anything. He even used to pull his own teeth out.
“We were supposed to get a telegram, but we never did. The whole street knew about it before us. My mother and I were in the living room of the shop when in came my cousin and said: ‘Auntie Annie! Uncle Charlie’s been killed.’
“They’d all read it in the paper, and we didn’t know. It was dreadful.”
The story made it into newspapers around the world, so Charlie Stephens had, in a horrible way, achieved the global fame.
Soon, though, he would just be a footnote in the annals of those who had attempted stunts at the spectacular waterfalls on the border of Canada and the United States.
But he was never forgotten in Bristol, and Bedminster in particular. Charlie Stephens has been remembered all along as an eccentric, or perhaps as one of those glorious failures the British so love. Had it not been for his spectacular exit from this world he would barely even be known to students of fairground and music-hall stunt performers.
If you are a regular BT reader, you will have heard of him (there have been articles about him in BT and the Post often enough down the years!) But so have plenty of other native and adoptive Bristolians.
He pops up in all those books about quirky local history and is one of the first figures from local history that newcomers learn about. Anyone’s list of Bristol’s ten greatest eccentrics would feature Charlie Stephens in the top three.
In death, he achieved an immortality that he would never have gained had he just gone into quiet retirement.
Back in 1988, Viola Cogan remembered Charlie as a kindly, mild-mannered and loving father. She hated the ‘Demon Barber’ nickname as it made him sound like the bloodthirsty Sweeney Todd.
“I get very cross if anyone says anything funny about him.
“He wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t a demon.
“He was a daredevil and there is a difference”.