Kate Williams, known as Vulcana, was a world-famous strongwoman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but she has slipped out of history since then. When Rebecca F John came across her she knew she had to tell Vulcana’s extraordinary story. Here she does just that, and wonders why Vulcana was forgotten. Was she “too much herself” for polite society?
There weren’t many women lifting weights recreationally in the late 1800s. The fashion, amongst women, and also amongst middle-and-upper-class men, was decidedly not for muscles.
Muscles, after all, indicated physical labour. They belonged to men who worked fields and mines. They belonged to women who scrubbed their own sheets. The rich enjoyed frail, pale bodies: soft waists that could be tightened into tiny corsets; skin unlined by the rays of the poor-man’s sun.
Kate Williams, then, was something of an anomaly. Was she unique? No. But she was rare.
As a young teen, Kate started lifted weights in a gymnasium opened in her hometown of Abergavenny by one William Roberts – a strongman. She must have shown early talent, as by the age of 15, William had invited her to perform as a strongwoman at the Pontypool Fête. This was, reportedly, her first public appearance.
Reportedly is a word I will likely have to use again and again when talking about Kate, because Kate soon became a figure whose fact and whose fiction are practically inseparable all these years later. Aged 16 she left Abergavenny for London, where she would perform with William Roberts’s troupe of strong people. That’s true.
Soon, William and Kate reinvented themselves as Atlas and Vulcana, the brother and sister strongperson act – a ruse that would remain in place until after their deaths. That, too, is true.
There is documentation which shows them appearing at theatres across the UK – London, Edinburgh, my hometown of Swansea – and further afield. Much further afield. Paris, Algiers, Australia. Vulcana was a phenomenon: a woman so strong that she could lift a grown man above her head one-handed.
This claim is not unsubstantiated. Photographs exist. Kate won hundreds of weightlifting medals. But what of the other stories? Who was this woman who I discovered accidentally, while researching an earlier book, and fell in love with?
William, it seems, was a master promoter. There are various accounts of Kate stopping a runaway horse in a Bristol street, hauling drowning boys from a Welsh river, extricating a man from beneath a toppled cart in London, apprehending a pickpocket, storming into a burning Edinburgh theatre to release the horses trapped within.
Can we believe all of these stories? Who could say? But I’d like to. Kate Williams might just have been a superwoman.
Whether completely factual or not, these feats undoubtedly made good newspaper copy. Who could resist attending the performance of such a woman at their local theatre?
There are truths about Kate I do know to be accurate. I know that she was a vocal opponent of corsetry. I know that she encouraged women to take exercise and thereby make their bodies and their minds strong.
Run, swim, box, she implored. Cast off your corsets. Let yourself “take in those deep breaths; the wearing of stays restricts the expansion of the body, and does harm. What I say is, it is an advantage to leave them off sometimes, and thus teach the spine to support itself, allowing, at the same time, the other muscles to rely upon their inherent strength.” These words are recorded in contemporary newspaper and magazine interviews.
I also know that William and Kate, the brother and sister act, were in fact lovers. William was 12 years Kate’s senior and married with a number of children when they met, but evidently the two fell in love as they travelled around the world together.
The result: four children of their own. Or perhaps six. Accounts vary, but in writing this novel, I was lucky enough to meet with Kate’s great-granddaughter, Jane, who provided me with invaluable images, documents, and family stories about Kate and William’s love affair. By Jane’s account, there were certainly four children belonging to the pair – Nora, Mona, Arthur, and William – and this is the account I have stuck to in shaping my narrative.
Similarly, Kate’s birth date is contested. Many have it as 1874, while Jane thinks 1876 might be as likely, and again this is the date I have adopted. We have both searched in vain for Kate’s birth certificate. It is probable that Kate and William lied about her age in newspaper reports and articles. They were inventing a childhood, after all, which they had spent together as siblings, encouraged in physical pursuits by their understanding parents.
Kate’s dark features against William’s fair hair and light eyes must surely have been questioned by some. As, too, their cobbled-together shared history. If these details were contested, though, I have seen no record of it. On the whole, William’s PR spin seems to have lasted their lifetimes.
How and why this woman has largely slipped out of (particularly Welsh) history, I can’t imagine. She was powerful, forthright, opinionated, beautiful, successful… And perhaps that’s why. Perhaps her story didn’t suit the wider narrative of the time. Perhaps she was just too much herself.
I knew the moment I laid eyes on her – her confident pose; her bright and intelligent eyes – that I had to write about her, and now here she is, in novel form. Vulcana. My love letter, perhaps, to a woman who has inspired me to stand straighter, to shout louder, to be stronger.
I hope her extraordinary story will offer that same inspiration to the countless women who, a century and more later, are facing the same questions and problems she did: Should she continue working when she became a mother? Who truly had ownership of her body? Was she everything a woman should be?
To that last question, I can imagine Kate answering in only one way: Yes, everything, and more.
Vulcana by Rebecca F John is published on 4 May, 2023.
Rebecca is the author of four previous titles for adults, Clown’s Shoes, The Haunting of Henry Twist, The Empty Greatcoat, and Fannie, and one middle-grade novel, The Shadow Order. She has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Costa First Novel Award. She lives in Swansea with her partner, their son, and their dogs.
Images
- Vulcana (Kate Williams): provided by the author
- Vulcana lifting another woman above her head): provided by the author
- Vulcana posing with a fan): provided by the author
- Atlas Vulcana, Family Strong act, the first professional act to perform at the New Pavilion, Morley, taken 4 December, 1911: Morley Community Archives via Wikimedia (public domain)
