shall therefore describe it as if the early version were still in my current act.
Both cabinets are brought on to the stage, either by scene-shifters, assistants or in some cases volunteer members of the audience and both are shown to be empty. Volunteers are allowed to step through them, open not only the doors but the hinged rear walls, and peer into the wheeled space below. The cabinets are rolled to their respective positions and closed.
After a short, humorous preamble (delivered in my French accent) about the desirability of being in two places at once, I go to the nearer of the two cabinets, the first, and open the door.
It is, of course, still empty. I take a large, brightly coloured inflatable ball from my props table, and bounce it a couple of times to show how vigorously it moves. I step into the first cabinet, leaving the door open for the time being.
I bounce the ball in the direction of the second cabinet.
From within, I
From within, I
As the ball enters my hands the first cabinet collapses, the door and three walls folding out dramatically to show that it is completely empty.
Holding the ball I step forward to the footlights, and acknowledge my applause.
Let me briefly rehearse my life and career up to the last years of the century.
By the time I was 18 I had left home and was working the music halls as a full-time magician. However, even with help from Mr Maskelyne, jobs were hard to find, and I became neither famous nor rich and did not earn my own place on the bill for several years. Much of the stage work I did was assisting other magicians with their performances, but for a long time I paid the rent by designing and building cabinets and other magical apparatus. My father's cabinet-making training stood me in good stead. I built a reputation as a reliable inventor and
In 1879 my mother died, followed a year later by my father.
By the end of the 1880s, when I was in my early thirties, I had developed my own solo act and adopted the stage name Le Professeur de la Magie. I regularly performed The Transported Man in its various early forms.
Although the working of the illusion was never a problem, I was for a long time dissatisfied with the stage effects. It always seemed to me that closed cabinets were not sufficiently mysterious to raise audience expectations of peril and impossibility. In the context of stage magic such cabinets are commonplace. I gradually found ways of elaborating the illusion; first to boxes that looked barely large enough to hold me, later to tables with concealing flaps, then finally, in a bravura move to 'open' magic, much applauded in magic circles at the time, I used flat benches on which my body could be seen by everyone in the audience up to the moment of transformation.
In 1892, though, came the idea I had been seeking. It happened indirectly, and the seed it sowed took a long time to germinate.
A Balkan inventor by the name of Nikola Tesla came to London in the February of that year to promote certain new effects he was then pioneering in the field of electricity. A Croatian of Serbian descent, with an allegedly impenetrable foreign accent, Tesla was to deliver several lectures about his speciality to the scientific community. Such events occur fairly frequently in London, and normally I would take little notice of them. However, in this case it turned out that Mr Tesla was a controversial figure in the USA, involved in scientific disputes about the nature and application of electricity, and it ensured him widespread reporting in the newspapers. It was from these articles that I was to glean my ideas.
What I had always needed was a spectacular stage effect, partly to highlight the effect of The Transported Man, and partly to mask its working. I gathered from the news reports that Mr Tesla was able to generate high voltages which could be made to flash and spark about, harmlessly and without incurring burns.
After Mr Tesla had left to return to the United States his influence remained behind him. It was not too long before London and other cities began supplying small amounts of electricity to those who could afford to buy it. Because of its revolutionary nature, electricity was often in the news, being applied to this task or solving that problem, and so on. Some time later, when I heard that Angier was mounting an imitation of The Transported Man, I began to think I should develop the illusion once again. I realized that without much difficulty I could probably apply electricity to my requirements and began a search through the obscure stocks of London scientific dealers. With the assistance of Tommy Elbourne, my
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I will backtrack a little. In October 1891 I had married Sarah Henderson, whom I had met while I was taking part in a charity show performed in a Salvation Army hostel in Aldgate. She was one of the volunteer helpers, and during the interval in our performance she had sat informally with me while we both drank tea. My card tricks had amused her, and she teasingly challenged me to perform some more for her alone, so that she might see how I did them. Because she was young and pretty I did so, and greatly enjoyed the bafflement I saw in her eyes.
However, this was not only the first time I performed magic for her, it was also the last. My skill as a prestidigitator simply became irrelevant to our feelings about each other. We became walking-out companions soon after our meeting, and it was not long before we admitted to each other that we were in love. Sarah has no background in the theatre or the music halls, and in fact was a young woman of not inconsiderable birth. It is a testament to her devotion to me that even after her father threatened to disinherit her, which of course he eventually did, she remained true to me.
After our marriage we moved to rented rooms in the Bayswater area of London, but we did not have long to wait before success smiled on me. In 1893 we bought the large house in St Johns Wood where we have lived ever since. In the same year our twin children, Graham and Helena, were born.
I have always kept my professional life separate from my family life. During the period I am describing I practised my profession from my office and workshop in Elgin Avenue, and when touring shows took me abroad or to remoter parts of Britain I did not take Sarah with me. When based in London, or when between shows, I lived quietly and contentedly at home with her.
I stress my contented domestic life because of what was soon to happen.
Shall I continue?
I think I must; yes. I suspect I know to what I am referring here.
I had been advertising in theatrical journals for a replacement lady assistant, because my existing young woman, Georgina Harris, was planning to marry. I always dreaded the upheaval caused by the arrival of a new member of staff, especially one so important as the stage assistant. When Olive Wenscombe wrote and applied for an interview she did not seem immediately suitable, and her letter went unanswered for some time.
She was, she said in her letter, twenty-six. This was a little older than I would have liked, and she went on to describe herself as a trained
The work of magician's assistant is not one to which many people are suited. A young woman has to possess certain physical characteristics. She has to be young, of course, and if not naturally pretty then she has to have pleasing features that are capable of being made up to look pretty. In addition she has to have a slim, lithe and strong body. She has to be willing to stand, crouch, kneel or lie in confined places, often for several minutes at a time, and on release appear perfectly relaxed and unmarked by her period of enclosure. Above all, she has to be willing to endure the unusual demands and strange requests made to her by her employer, in pursuit of his illusions.
