Authors: Christopher Priest
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
ingénieur
of stage illusions.
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
ingénieur
, I eventually managed to build stage equipment for The
New
Transported Man. I was to go on adding to and improving it for years afterwards, but by
1896 the new effect had permanently entered my stage show. It caused a commotion of
acclaim, ringing cash tills and fruitless speculation as to my secret. My illusion worked
in a blinding flash of electrical light.
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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
danseuse
who had moved over to the work of magical assistant. Many illusionists do employ dance
artistes because of their fit and supple bodies, but I have always preferred to employ
young women with specific magical experience, rather than those who took it up simply
because a job had been offered to them at some time in the past. Nevertheless, Olive
Wenscombe's letter came during one of those times when good assistants were hard to find,
and so I finally made an appointment with her.
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.
Olive Wenscombe's interview took place, as did all such, at my workshop in Elgin Avenue.
Here, in opened cabinets and mirrored cubes and curtained alcoves, were laid bare many of
the incidental secrets of my business. Although I never made a point of showing any of my
staff exactly how a trick was worked, unless of course that knowledge was crucial to their
part in it, I wanted them to understand that each trick had a rational explanation behind
it and that I knew what I was doing. Some stage illusions, and some of those that I
performed, used knives or swords or even firearms, and from the auditorium looked
dangerous. The New Transported Man, in particular, with its explosive electrical reactions
and clouds of carbon discharge, regularly scares the wits out of the front six rows at any
performance! But I wanted no one who worked for me to feel at risk. The only illusion
whose secret I guarded fastidiously was The New Transported Man itself, and its working
was concealed even from the young woman who shared the stage with me until the moment
before the illusion began.
It should be clear from this that I do not work entirely alone, nor does any modern
illusionist. In addition to my stage assistants, I had working for me Thomas Elbourne, my
irreplaceable
ingénieur
, and two of his own young artisans, who helped him build and maintain the apparatus.
Thomas had been in my employ almost from the start. Before he worked for me he had been at
the Egyptian Hall, under Maskelyne.
(Thomas Elbourne knew my most guarded secret; he had to. But I trusted him; I had to. I
say this as simply as possible, to convey the simplicity of my belief in him. Thomas had
worked with magicians all his life, and nothing any more surprised him. There is little I
know about magic today that I did not learn from him one way or the other. Yet never once,
in all the years I worked with him — he retired several years ago — did he ever explicitly
reveal the secret of another magician to me or to anyone else. To call his trust into
question would be to question my very sanity. Thomas was a Londoner from Tottenham, a
married man without children. He was many years older than me, but I never discovered
exactly how many. At the time Olive Wenscombe began working for me I assume he must have
been in his middle or late sixties.)
I decided to employ Olive Wenscombe almost as soon as she arrived. She was neither tall
nor broad, but had an attractive and slim body. She held her head erect as she walked or
stood, and her face had well-defined features. She was American-born, and had an accent
she identified as East Coast, but had lived and worked in London for several years. I
introduced her as informally as possible to Thomas Elbourne and Georgina Harris, then
asked to see whatever references she might have brought with her. I generally gave
references a great deal of weight when assessing an applicant, because a recommendation
from a magician whose work I knew would almost certainly gain the applicant the job. Olive
had brought two such references with her, one was from a magician working the resort towns
of Sussex and Hampshire, whose name I did not recognize, but the other was from Joseph
Buatier de Kolta, one of the greatest living performers. I was, I admit, impressed. I
quietly passed de Kolta's letter to Thomas Elbourne, and watched his expression.
“How long did you work for Monsieur de Kolta?” I asked her.
“Only for five months,” she said. “I was hired for a tour of Europe, and he let me go at
the end of it.”
“So I see.”
After that, employing her was something of a formality, but even so I felt I had to
subject her to the usual tests. It was for these that Georgina had come along, as it would
not be right to ask any applicant, even one as experienced as Olive Wenscombe, to
demonstrate her abilities without the presence of a chaperone.
“Did you bring a rehearsal costume with you?” I said.
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“Then if you would be so kind—”
A few minutes later, wearing a body-hugging costume, Olive Wenscombe was led by Thomas to
a few of our cabinets, and asked to take up position inside one. The production of a
living, healthy young woman from what appears to be an empty cabinet is one of the
traditional stand-bys of magic. To bring off the effect, the assistant has to insinuate
herself into a concealed compartment, and the smaller this compartment can be the more
surprising the effect of the illusion. Careful choice of a voluminous costume, and one
that is made of bright colours and has glittery ribbons sewn into the fabric, to catch and
reflect the limelight, will enhance the mystery. It was obvious to us all that Olive was
well versed in secret compartments and panels. Thomas took her first to our Palanquin
(which even by that time we rarely used in the act, since the trick had become so well
known), and she knew exactly where the hidden compartment was and promptly climbed into it.
Thomas and I next asked her to essay the illusion known as Vanity Fair, in which a young
woman is apparently made to pass through a solid mirror. This is not a difficult illusion
to perform, but it does require agility and quickness of movement on the part of the girl.
Although Olive said she had not taken part in it before, after we had shown her the
mechanism she showed she could wriggle through with commendable speed.
There remained only the need to test her for physical size, although by this time I think
both Thomas and I would have rebuilt some of the apparatus for her had she proved too
large. We need not have worried. Thomas placed her inside the cabinet used in the illusion
called the Decapitated Princess (a notoriously tight fit for most assistants, and
requiring several minutes of uncomfortable immobility), but she was able to climb in and
out smoothly, and said she would not find it distressing to be kept inside for as long as
required.
Sufficient to say that Olive Wenscombe proved herself most suitable by all the usual
tests, and as soon as these preliminaries were concluded I retained her at the customary
wage. Within a week I had trained her to perform in all the illusions in my repertoire
where she would be needed. In due course, Georgina left to marry her beau, and Olive took
her place as my full-time assistant.
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How neat it all seems when I write it down, how calm & professional! Now I have written
the “official” version of Olive, let me under our Pact add the ineradicable truth, the
truth I have so far concealed from all those who matter most. Olive nearly made a fool of
me, & the true account must be appended.