I’ve written about Lord Patrick Lansdowne before. He’s the farm boy from Ohio who became a British aristocrat in wrestling trunks. Lansdowne was the first to don a cape and monocle and look down his nose at the unwashed masses who came to the matches. He was also the inspiration for Lord Leslie Carlton and Gorgeous George.
According to most biographies on Gorgeous George, George Wagner read about Lansdowne in Variety and found the inspiration for the character that would make him famous, but it now appears George Wagner had a much closer look at Lord Lansdowne than previously reported.
On August 31, 1937, George Wagner made his debut for the Allen Athletic Club in Louisville, Kentucky. Wagner defeated Dutch Schultz in one of the warm up matches while Lord Lansdowne (billed as Lord Finnegan; promoter Heywood Allen had a Vince McMahon-like thing for changing people’s names!) won the main event against Bert Rubi. Two months later the two appeared at the Columbia Gym a second time; Lansdowne defeated Bobby Bruns, and Wagner lost to Turpentine Grimes.
There are no photos in the Louisville Courier-Journal archives to show definitively that George Wagner from Atlantic City (as he was billed) was the man who became Gorgeous George, but Wrestlingdata.com shows that Wagner was working in Lexington, KY and Columbus Ohio in September of 1937 with many of the same wrestlers used by the Allen Club at the time.
Wagner worked a few more dates for Allen in September of 1937, and he likely crossed paths with the Ohio native a few more times. Whatever interactions they had in the locker room have been lost to history, but character Lansdowne created and George perfected continues to inspire wrestlers to this day.