To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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In the Flesh
Epilogue: Dear Reader
In which the author considers how one may keep history alive, and begins a pen-pal correspondence with an English professor in Connecticut.
Chapter One
The Magic of Letters
Lot 512. Walker (Val. A.) An extensive correspondence addressed to Bayard Grimshaw, 1941 and 1967–1969, comprising 37 autograph letters, signed, and 21 typed letters, with a long description of Houdini: ‘His water torture cell simply underestimated the intelligence of the onlooker, no problem to layman & magician alike,’ describing a stage performance by him where Walker was one of the people called on to attach handcuffs, and another at which he fixed Houdini in his own jacket, continuing with information about his own straight jacket, his ‘Tank in the Thames’ and ‘Aquamarine Girl’ escapes, and other escapology, including a handbill advertising ‘The Challenge Handcuff Act’, and promotional sheet for George Grimmond’s ‘Triple Box Escape’.
est. £300 – £400
Bloomsbury Auctions is not in Bloomsbury but in a road off Regent Street, and since its inception in 1983 it has specialised in sales of books and the visual arts. Occasionally these visual arts include conjuring, a catch-all heading that offers a glimpse into a vanishing world, and many other vanishing items besides, as well as sleight-of-hand, mind-reading, contortionism, levitation, escapology and sawing.
On 20 September 2012 one such sale offered complete tricks, props, solutions for tricks and the construction of props, posters, flyers, contracts and letters. Several lots related to particular magicians, such as Vonetta, the Mistress of Mystery, one of the few successful female illusionists and a major draw in Scotland, where she was celebrated not only for her magic but also for her prowess as a quick-change artiste. There was one lot connected with Ali Bongo, including letters describing seventeen inventions, and, improbably, ‘a costume description for an appearance as The Invisible Man’.
There were three lots devoted to Chung Ling Soo, whose real name was William E. Robinson, born in 1861 not in Peking but in New York City (the photographs on offer suggested he looked less like an enigmatic man from the East and more like Nick Hornby with a hat on). One of the letters for sale discussed Chung Ling Soo’s rival, Ching Ling Foo, who claimed that Chung Ling Soo stole not only the basics of his name, but also the basis of his act; their feud reached its apotheosis in 1905, when both Soo and Foo were performing in London at the same time, and each expressed the sort of inscrutable fury that did neither of them any harm at the box office. In order to cultivate his persona, Chung Ling Soo never spoke during his act, which included breathing smoke and catching fish from the air.
Between 1901 and 1918 Soo played the Swansea Empire, the Olympia Shoreditch, the Camberwell Palace, the Ard-wick Green Empire and Preston Royal Hippodrome, but his career met an unforgettable end onstage at the Wood Green Empire – possibly the result of a curse laid by Ching Ling Foo – when his famous ‘catch a bullet in the teeth’ trick didn’t quite work out as hoped. On this occasion, his gun fired a real bullet rather than just a blank charge, and, as historians of Soo are quick to point out, his first words on stage were also necessarily his last: ‘Something’s happened – lower the curtain!’ Among the lots at the Bloomsbury sale were letters from assistants and friends of Soo claiming he had been born in Birmingham, England, at the back of the Fox Hotel, and that the death may not have been an accident. ‘We who knew Robinson,’ wrote a man called Harry Bosworth, ‘say he was murdered.’
But the stand-out lot was the one involving the Radium Girl, the Aquamarine Girl, Carmo & the Vanishing Lion, Walking Through a Wall and the origins of sawing thin female assistants – the items relating to the life of Val Walker. Walker, who took the name Valentine because he was born on 14 February 1890, was once a star performer. He was known as ‘The Wizard of the Navy’ for his ability to escape a locked metal tank submerged in water during the First World War (a feat later repeated in the Thames in 1920, witnessed by police and military departments and 300 members of the press). After drying himself he received offers to perform all over the world. He subsequently escaped from jails in Argentina, Brazil, and, according to information contained in the auction lot, ‘various prisons in Spain’.
Walker was the David Copperfield and David Blaine of his day. He appeared in shows at Maskelyne’s Theatre of Mystery, next door to BBC Broadcasting House, the most famous European magic theatre of the time (perhaps of all time), surprising audiences with swift escapes from manacles, straitjackets and a 9-foot-long submarine submerged in a glass-fronted tank at the centre of the stage. And then there was the trick with which Walker secured his place in magical history: Radium Girl. This was known as a ‘big box’ restoration illusion, a process in which a skilled woman enters a cabinet and is either sawn in half or penetrated with swords, and then somehow emerges unscathed. Walker’s role in this trick is fundamental; he is believed to have invented it in 1919, building the box himself and devising the necessary diversions and patter to make it the climax of his show.
The trick is one we’ve seen on stage or television for 95 years: an empty box on casters is displayed to the audience, its sides and base are banged, an assistant climbs in and is secured by chains, the door is closed, knives or poles are inserted into pre-drilled holes, followed by sheets of metal that seem to slice the woman into three parts (feminists have consistently placed this trick in their Top Five). Weaned on cynicism and trick photography, we have become blasé about such things today, but Radium Girl was once quite something. The sheets and poles and swords are then (of course) all pulled out, the door is opened and the chains removed, and the woman is smiling and whole.
Britain’s secret weapon: Val Walker contemplates his escape.
The Radium Girl illusion.
But then something even more dramatic happened: Walker got bored. He grew tired of the touring. He became envious of the acclaim and riches poured upon those he considered lesser talents, among them Harry Houdini. So one day Walker just quit. His professional disappearing act was, as might only be expected, an impressive feat: he gave up his Magic Circle membership in 1924, resumed his work as an electrical engineer, moved to Canford Cliffs, a suburb of Poole in Dorset with his wife Ethel, had a son named Kevin, and was never seen on a stage again. His gain, one imagines, but magic’s loss.
At the end of September 1968, several decades after he retired from magic, Walker made one final appearance at a convention in Weymouth. But he came as a fan, not a star, and he had a particular purpose for being there, to see the Radium Girl performed one more time. The magician was a man called Jeff Atkins, and Walker had rebuilt a new cabinet especially for him that summer in his garden. And it really was a last hurrah: Walker died six months later of a chronic and progressive disease (probably cancer), and many of his secrets went with him.
But not all: some of his letters remain, and are the source for much of the material you have just read, gleaned from browsing the files at Bloomsbury Auctions the day before the sale. His letters provide news of his great entertainments, but of a personal life that appears to have been conducted with modesty and decorum and a great care for others (until the end, as we shall see).
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