ENTERTAINMENT

The Grand Order of Lady Ratlings

Location: 13 Streatham Common South, SW16 3BT

Magicians

In 1813 a troupe of Indian magicians performed in Britain for the first. Their dexterity in Pall Mall was a sensation. At the time British magic was moving from the fairground to the theatre.

Davenport's

Davenport s Magic Shop was founded in 1898 by Lewis Davenport, a music hall magician. The business is older than the Magic Circle. In 1984 it moved to Charing Cross Underground Arcade. In 2020 it closed because the arcade was being redeveloped. The business continued to trade.

Location: 7 Charing Cross Underground Arcade, Strand, WC2N 4HZ (yellow, grey)

The Magic Circle

The Magic Circle has prestige rather than power. The organisation expelled its first president David Devant (n Wighton) (1868-1941). Having become unable to work any longer, he wrote a book Tricks For Everyone: Clever Conjuring With Common Objects (1910) about secrets that he had created. It was permissible for members of the Circle to publish books. However, the book was serialised in a magazine and it was for this that he was expelled.

Location: The Centre for The Magic Arts, 12 Stephenson Way, NW1 2HD (red, pink)

Flat 1, Ornan Court, 2 Ornan Road, NW3 4PT

Website: https://themagiccircle.co.uk

Jasper Maskelyne

Jasper Maskelyne was a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. He commanded the Magic Gang, a unit that succeeded in misleading Field-Marshall Rommel about the deployment of Allied troops at El Alamein.

Nevil Maskelyne

In 1908 the popular magician Nevil Maskelyne (1863-1924) predated Murphy's Law by several decades. He declared that whenever it a new trick was performed for a public audience for the first time, what could go wrong would wrong.

The Vanishing Elephant

Charles Morritt (1860-1936) was a Yorkshireman who was an associate of John Neville Maskelyne. In 1878 he devised a vanishing cabinet trick in which a donkey disappeared. Houdini bought it along with several others. In 1918 he used a large cabinet at New York's Hippodrome Theatre to make an elephant disappear. He performed the trick only the once.

Punch & Judy

A plaque in front of St Paul's Covent Garden commemorates a Punch & Judy show that was given by one Pietro Gimonde in the mid-17thC. This was the first known performance of one in England. It was recorded by the diarist Samuel Pepys. Each May there is an annual Punch & Judy Festival in the churchyard.¹

Location: 40 Henrietta Street, WC2E 8RF (blue, orange)

¹. The Punch & Judy pub is at the western end of Central Market Building, existing at both basement and first-floor level.

David Backhouse 2024