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GRAND ILLUSION

THE WAR MAGICIAN MYTH

"Myth is invulnerable to mere facts" Barthes

In the early 1990’s at a magic auction in Sydney, Australia, I bought a box load of stale magic magazines for a throwaway price. On the long train journey back to the Blue Mountains, I sifted through numerous bundled back-copies of IBM's Linking Ring. I began reading a fascinating two-part article by John Booth on the amazing wartime career of Major Jasper Maskelyne. Namely, The Mystery of "The War Magician" and The Most Heroic Sized Illusions in Magic History.

In his revelatory 1985 column, Booth described how he met with Maskelyne in Kenya in 1954, but was not aware of the significance of Maskelyne's wartime achievements until he came across The War Magician by David Fisher. Booth was captivated: "Few books in the past decade have intrigued me so intensely as this one...Masterfully written, almost like a documentary novel, replete with conversation and verifiable historical detail..."

After initial misgivings, Booth seemed confident that the events described in The War Magician really had taken place. In a closing quotation, Booth genuinely believed that Jasper Maskelyne deserved belated recognition as the world’s master illusionist: "he will go down in history not only as the last performer of the great conjuring family of the Maskelynes but as the prime designer and performer of the greatest illusions in human history."

Inspired by Booth’s enthusiastic article, I tracked down Fisher’s out-of-print book. I found The War Magician fascinating but seriously flawed. Fisher appears to have 'novelised' the Maskelyne material into a military adventure with comic elements: Mission Impossible meets Dad’s Army. Certain incidents seemed too dramatically convenient. I was reminded of Sheridan Morley's warning about David Niven's unreliable Hollywood anecdotes: "the truth was often rearranged to lead up to a better punchline... Even the best and most famous of the stories tend to fall apart when double-checked"

Have the wartime adventures of Jasper Maskelyne been similarly exaggerated? Or is there a kernel of truth to the tale?

As historical research, the book is frustrating because it lacks footnotes, fails to cite sources, and has no information on how scenes were reconstructed. Without this scholarly underpinning, there is no way of backtracking and validating the material once doubts set in.

Fisher also makes no mention of Ultra, the secret intelligence gathered from breaking the German ENIGMA codes. This omission is curious for a book published as late as 1983.

In 1949, Jasper Maskelyne 'wrote' an account of his wartime career entitled Magic-Top Secret. Booth suspected Fisher's book was based not only on this earlier version but on further unpublished material, perhaps compiled by Maskelyne during his retirement in Kenya. This sounded plausible. Fisher never met or corresponded with Maskelyne. He wrote the War Magician several years after Maskelyne’s death. The level of detail does suggest an extra source.

In 1993, two significant developments influenced my research.

Firstly, I finally tracked down a rare copy of Magic-Top Secret in an English library and arranged it to be brought to Australia on a loan.

I would soon be able to compare Maskelyne's original account with Fisher's later version.

As we shall see, there are important discrepancies — not minor oversights , but major inconsistencies —between the two accounts.

Secondly, at my son’s birthday party in the Blue Mountains, I met up with Angela Maskelyne, the granddaughter of Jasper Maskelyne. (Angela happened to be a friend of my partner, Niekie Hoving.) I asked Angela if I might contact her father, Alistair Maskelyne. Permission was granted.

I duly assembled a ten-page letter which contained a critique of Fisher’s book and a list of blunt questions about Jasper Maskelyne’s wartime activities.

When I began my research, Alistair Maskelyne, Jasper's son, was in his mid-sixties, and had retired to Queensland after a long career as a commercial airline pilot. Would he be willing to talk about his family's past ? I knew already from his daughter Angela that he might be sensitive to enquiries from an outsider and might not wish to discuss his father's memoirs or Fisher's book. I realised that my letter, critical of the accepted accounts, could easily be interpreted as an attack on his father's reputation. The name Maskelyne is revered in the magic world. Edwin Dawes' classic book The Great Illusionists regards the Maskelyne family as" a dynasty that has no parallel in the annals of British conjuring and one which , in presenting a theatre of magic continuously in London for sixty years, cannot be matched anywhere in the world."

I therefore was not sure what reaction I might get from Jasper Maskelyne's son. He might abruptly dismiss my letter as amateurish conjecture. He might regard me as an impertinent upstart for questioning the legend.

Fortunately, Alistair Maskelyne was receptive and sympathetic to my enquiry.

Within days, I received an astonishingly detailed seven-page typewritten response which confirmed my suspicions but also threw up surprises:

"You certainly opened a can of worms with your well-researched enquiry bringing back to me a world of memories, not all of them welcome."

Alistair Maskelyne is not interested in the misinformed eulogising about his late father. He is critical of the way Fisher has elevated his father's war career by developing the myth of The War Magician. He would prefer to set the record straight, warts and all:

"My answers to you will be as truthful as I can make it, rendered less than accurate only by the passage of time and failing memory."

To tackle the enigma of The War Magician, we need to go back further, beyond Magic-Top Secret and begin with White Magic, a purported history of the Maskelyne dynasty published in 1936.

Alistair Maskelyne provided an interesting anecdote about the book's provenance. In 1935, Jasper Maskelyne was in dire financial straits. Two years earlier, after an argument with his brothers, he had quit St. George's Hall , their London theatre base, and had embarked upon a solo career. After initial acclaim, his touring magic show began to lose momentum. At this time, his wife and two children were living in a rented cottage in Surrey and finding it hard to make ends meet. "My father continued his music hall tours. The money was not good, and I recall being quite incredulous, as a small boy, that he should get so much financial respect from British firms acquainted only with his family reputation, and not with his real situation, which often meant that my mother had no funds to pay the grocery bill at the end of the month."

"Father was keen to get additional money by any reasonable means, and an opportunity was presented when a "ghost writer" offered to write an "autobiography" of Jasper Maskelyne. This was accomplished , and published as ''White Magic' in about 1936. I read, as an interested party, but found little there that was related to truth, because the ghost writer had happily invented whole sequences outside of the essential history. My father seemed not to mind these fictitious events. This book was the precursor of ''Magic Top Secret' by the same author in 1946."

(INSERT PHOTO OF JASPER MASKELYNE AND HIS WIFE IN FRONT OF THEIR CAR, LONDON 1939)

The letter now proceeds with information of great relevance:

"Magic Top Secret: This was a ghost written largely fictional account of my father's western desert experiences. When I was given a preliminary draft to read , my comment to father was "there is so much overdramatised fiction here that it is obviously untrue. Can we get it rewritten to present your wartime feats on the lines of a serving officer?"

The ghost writer's reply: "there were thousands such. It would never sell".

This was the book stumbled upon by Fisher some thirty years later and made up as the 'War Magician', with the aid of my father's diaries he borrowed but never returned from my Uncle Noel.

"It follows that this book is not 'Maskelyne's own account', merely the ghost writer's endeavours to boost my father's recollections."

He is strongly dismissive of the early work : " You will not miss anything by being unable to get a copy of 'Magic Top Secret', a load of rubbish, which however forms the base for Fisher's work, which has to be an improvement, although it, itself, is much a work of fiction."

"Fisher did not ever meet my father: my father died in 1973, as you correctly surmise, and all of Fisher's reconstruction is based on the first poor work plus my father's diaries which were voluminous. I sighted these diaries in England in 1973 at the home of my Uncle Noel. My father had recently died in Kenya , and his diaries were left to Noel. All of the illustrations in the book were extracted from the diaries."

(In the follow-up letter, Alistair Maskelyne expanded on this mystery of the missing diaries :

"While talking about the diaries borrowed and not returned by Fisher , it should be put on record that in fact they really comprised press cuttings and photographs, and could not be designated as diaries in the real sense. Chronologically they were in a proper time sequence, but many pages were given over to pictures of young ladies, some rather attractive, appearing or disappearing from boxes or hammocks.)

Alistair Maskelyne then gave the following pithy answers to my questions:

How reliable is Fisher's account of Maskelyne's activities?

"Fisher's account is only 40% reliable: all the personal relationships and much of the sequences are fictional."

Does it belong to the genre of creative non-fiction ?

"Definitely creative non-fiction"

Is The War Magician based on Maskelyne's own diaries/notes?

"Yes, based on my father's notes but strung together with imagination not fact."

How reliable/objective was Maskelyne himself ?

"Unfortunately my father was most self creative in his own imaging. All of his geese were swans. He was financially irresponsible, and always most happy to enlarge his purse by any means that seemed timely even if not quite reputable. He left England and migrated to Kenya in 1950 to escape the clutches of the British Taxation authorities, he owed more money than he could pay. The tax was never paid, and he died in Kenya without returning."

Were the anecdotes reconstructed and polished to have greater impact on the narrative?

"Obviously Fisher did a good job in reconstructing and polishing."

After receiving this letter, I began to wonder about the reliability of mainstream magic history. Were other classic accounts of famous magicians riddled with dubious ghost-written material ? Have historians of magic fallen victim to tainted sources? Have they carelessly regurgitated legendary material? Have they become unwitting accomplices to a fabricated record ?

Journalists, authors, publishers,book reviewers, documentary makers, film producers, Hollywood stars, celebrity magicians, and magic historians have all swallowed the sucker bait and succumbed to the seductive tale of The War Magician. Even professional military historians have uncritically recycled several aspects of the Maskelyne myth.

In contrast , I believe Jasper Maskelyne's overblown status as a clandestine war wizard needs to be drastically overhauled. Many of the claims made by David Fisher will need to be heavily revised: the desperate magical duel with the Imam; the dramatic search for an enemy radio transmitter hidden in King Farouk's palace; the construction of an elaborate decoy site to protect Alexandria from aerial attack; the miraculous 'vanishing' of the Suez Canal; the perilous 'lost in the desert' episode; the visit to Camp M in Canada. All these crucial ingredients of the Maskelyne myth will be subjected to critical bombardment. Even Maskelyne’s alleged involvement in the famous deception plan at El Alamein will be seriously questioned.

A damning pattern will emerge: Fisher exaggerates Maskelyne's contribution to the see-sawing North African campaign . He takes liberties with the chronology, makes frequent factual errors and manipulates the cast of characters so as to bolster Maskelyne's status as a war magician.

Fisher’s main source, Magic Top-Secret, will be exposed as a semi-fictional document. Fisher reshapes this tainted material, makes further embellishments and then presents these outlandish tales as true events without providing independent corroboration.

By the end of this Genii article, you may well conclude that The War Magician is an opportunistic distortion of the record; and that Fisher has played fast and loose with history.