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TO SEE THROUGH A SOLDIER

Magic-Top Secret and The War Magician are contaminated works. How then can we properly assess Maskelyne's contribution to camouflage and deception operations in World War Two?

Firstly, an obvious preliminary approach is to compare the two accounts side by side. This technique has been surprisingly overlooked by experts. The authenticity of key episodes can be judged against the pattern of discrepancies, omissions and contradictions found in the two sources.

A second approach is to track down the writings of significant characters such as camouflage experts Geoffrey Barkas , Steven Sykes, Julian Trevelyan and escape gadgets pioneer Clayton Hutton.

A third related method is to analyse recent works on tactical and strategic deception. These provide valuable clues, even though their references to Maskelyne are patchy and prone to error.

Finally, Alistair Maskelyne's direct comments and responses to my queries have been extremely useful. Where possible, independent confirmation will be sought.

In the past year, based in London, I have chased up further important leads :

In the British Library , I pieced together the literary clues and finally unmasked the identity of the ghost-writer behind Magic-Top Secret.

In the National Archives, I came across declassified documents, drawings and photographs which shed more light on Maskelyne’s involvement in camouflage & decoy work and escape & evasion training.

Alistair Maskelyne has now acquired a copy of his father's army record. This handwritten document provides an objective chronology of transfers and promotions.

Jasper Maskelyne’s intriguing correspondence with Twentieth Century Fox in the mid 1960’s has also emerged.

Finally, the motherlode of Maskelyne material — the fabled wartime album— has resurfaced at Paramount Studios.

By combining these old and new sources, we can construct a more accurate picture of Jasper Maskelyne and his wartime activities.

TAILORED SCRIPT

The War Magician begins with Jasper Maskelyne "dressed in his finest Harry Hall suit" trying to enlist in the Officer Reserve. This description caught my attention because Alistair Maskelyne wrote in his first letter: "my father had a contract with a well known London tailor, Harry Hall, by which means he was given a huge number of tailor made suits free, in return for the rights to display large posters of him dressed in this apparel in every London tube rail station." This accurate detail serves as a sharp reminder that the War Magician is not a complete fabrication. Fisher's book is a curious combination of truth, fiction and falsehood.

Like many of his contemporaries, Maskelyne was at first ignored by the army bureaucracy. After several disappointments, Maskelyne eventually joined the Royal Engineers in October 1940.

Fisher's account of Maskelyne's recruitment is suspect. He claims Maskelyne met with Churchill's scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann , and impressed him with his theory of war magic. I find it far-fetched that Maskelyne could meet face to face with an important official at such a critical stage of the war. This meeting is not recorded in Magic-Top Secret. The dialogue in Fisher's account sounds scripted.

After the successful interview, Maskelyne returns home to farewell his wife. This awkward departure scene reads like badly written romance fiction: "You look beautiful," he said ....They made love tenderly and fiercely and both of them laughed and cried and whispered enduring promises..." Fisher mistakenly gives Jasper's wife the name 'Mary', but her real name was Evelyn. On the night Jasper Maskelyne was preparing to leave for camouflage training, his wife and their two children were already in New Zealand.

Alistair Maskelyne informed me that "with the outbreak of war, and the further decline of my father's finances, it was decided that my mother, accompanied by my sister and myself, should travel to New Zealand, to live with an uncle while my father would seek an army job. Because of his lack of education beyond secondary school, my father had at first little luck in his application for a commission... Our travel was funded by my parents, largely by the sale of the small Ford car of my mothers, and the larger Vauxhall that my father drove, plus the furniture from our rented house in Thames Ditton, Surrey, not far from Hampton Court ... To my recollection we arrived in NZ in May, 1940 and our stay lasted almost three years."

DOCUMENT TAMPERING

Jasper Maskelyne reported for duty at the newly created Camouflage Development and Training Centre (CDTC) based in Farnham Castle. His service record gives October 14th, 1940 as the arrival date.

According to Hartcup, author of Camouflage (1979), three hundred people applied for only thirty places, so the selection process was competitive.

The following passages are suspiciously similar:

Fisher: "Besides the magician Maskelyne, the group included Victor Siebel, a well-known couturier, painters Blair Hughes-Stanton, Edward Seago, Frederick Gore and Julian Trevelyan, designers Steven Sykes, James Gardner and Ashley Havindon, sculptor John Codner, Oxford don Francis Knox, at forty-two the oldest recruit and an animal-camouflage expert, circus manager Donald Kingsley, zoologist Hugh Cott, art expert Fred Mayor, who decorated his room at the Castle with Rouaults and Matisses from his London gallery, and Jack Keeler, a West End set designer. Among their other classmates were a restorer of religious art, an electrician, two stained-glass artisans, a magazine editor, a Punch cartoonist and a Surrealist poet."

Hartcup: "The artists ranged from the avant-garde to the traditional and included the painters Blair Hugh-Stanton, Edward Seago, Frederick Gore and Julian Trevelyan, who since his experience in civil camouflage had been approved for a commission by Buckley, and the designers Steven Sykes and Ashley Havinden. Others connected with the arts were Gabriel White, later a pillar of the Arts Council and Fred Mayor, who decorated the rooms with Rouaults and Matisses and other modern masters from his London gallery."

Significantly, Hartcup includes the name Jasper Maskelyne : "There was the conjurer Jasper Maskelyne who, on account of recent events, had just had an unsatisfactory season at the seaside resorts he usually frequented." He then makes reference to Hugh Cott, an expert in animal camouflage , and Roland Penrose, the surrealist painter.

Fisher almost certainly lifted his Farnham list from Hartcup and then creatively inserted the name 'Frank Knox'.

THE MAN WHO NEVER WAS

All the other names on the Farnham list are real people, but Knox is a fictional creation.

Professor Frank Knox, described as an Oxford don and animal camouflage expert, shares rooms with Jasper at Farnham and becomes his confidant. Later, as a key member of the Magic Gang in Egypt, Knox contributes to several camouflage projects. His tragic death in a plane crash supposedly inspires Maskelyne to develop fireproof paste for aircrews.

Knox surprisingly does not appear in Magic-Top Secret.

Mindful of Alistair Maskelyne's warning that many of the personal relationships recorded in The War Magician were fictional, I pressed him about this character. If Knox really did exist, surely he would have been mentioned in one of the wartime letters, especially after his gruesome death?

Alistair responded : "Frank Knox I cannot help you with: the name just doesn't ring a bell, as, for that matter all the other names of the so-called Magic Gang: not wishing to be negative, but I really think they were created by one or other of the ghost-writers to flesh out their story."

Interestingly, there is an important clue, easily overlooked, in the preamble to The War Magician : "The events described in this book are true. Everything Jasper Maskelyne is credited with doing he actually accomplished. Some of the characters are composites, and the names of others have been changed for legal reasons."

Such brazen mendacity! I would suggest the following brutal caveat: "The events described in this book are false. Most of what Jasper Maskelyne is credited with doing he didn’t actually accomplish. Most of the characters are cardboard composites, and their names, activities and conversation have for the most part been invented for the sake of narrative convenience."

TRICK OF THE EYE

Fisher, expanding on material in Magic-Top Secret, portrays Maskelyne as the Farnham camouflage genius whose creations baffle Army Chief, Lord Gort. Maskelyne miraculously hides a machine-gun post; he then conjures up a German battleship on the Thames. These impressive open-air illusions are uncritically regurgitated by later commentators. Alas, there is not a shred of evidence that these stunning tricks ever took place. The battleship illusion is complete fiction.

In his memoirs, Indigo Days, Julian Trevelyan paints a more mundane picture of Maskelyne's abilities : "The course included others who has espoused camouflage for one reason or another. Jasper Maskelyne's connection with it was obvious, since disappearing was his profession and he was called in when anyone wished anything to become invisible. He entertained us with his tricks in the evenings, and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to apply his techniques to the disguise of the concrete pill-boxes that were then appearing everywhere overnight. He was at once innocent and urbane, and he ended up as an Entertainments officer in the Middle East.”

(Insert rare photos of dummy heads and artificial trees from World War One)

Trevelyan's account of the Farnham course is more detailed than Maskelyne's: "We learnt the camouflage techniques of the 1914 war, where plaster trees were erected in the night to hide snipers, and where dummy plaster heads were popped up above the trenches to draw enemy fire and to pin-point the enemy snipers' nests."

(Insert Camouflaged Pillbox Photo disguised as ruin and add this caption:

TROMPE L'OEIL (TRICK OF THE EYE)

A PILL-BOX DISGUISED AS A RUIN, 1940.

THIS PHOTOGRAPH APPEARS IN TREVELYAN'S MEMOIRS.

AFTER COMPLETING THE FARNHAM COURSE, TREVELYAN MET UP WITH OLIVER MESSEL , A FAMOUS SET DESIGNER FOR FILMS AND THEATRE. MESSEL CREATIVELY DISGUISED DEFENSIVE OUTPOSTS AS GYPSY CARAVANS, HARMLESS HAYSTACKS , RAMSHACKLE RUINS AND PICTURESQUE THATCHED COTTAGES.)

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How closely does The War Magician copy Magic-Top Secret?

Some lines overlap: "If I could stand in the focus of powerful footlights and deceive attentive and undisturbed onlookers separated from me only by the width of an orchestra pit, then I could most certainly devise means of deceiving German observers a mile away or more, or perhaps 15,000 feet up in the air, or on Nazi warships at sea." (Magic-Top Secret)

"If I can stand in the focus of powerful footlights and deceive an audience only the width of an orchestra pit away, I can certainly deceive German observers fifteen thousand feet away in the air, or miles away on land." (The War Magician)

Examples like these are infrequent. Fisher usually paraphrases the earlier material.

Sometimes he alters the chronology, the context and the content.

WHITE LIES OVER DOVER

A confusing aspect of both accounts is the claim that Maskelyne participated in camouflage and deception operations in southern England during the Battle of Britain.

After the humiliating evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940, the British appeared to be on the verge of defeat. Vital weapons and equipment had been abandoned in France. Fear of imminent German invasion led to the creation of rudimentary defences.

In retrospect, these flimsy measures appear Pythonesque. Dummy sheep, packed with dynamite, were supposedly positioned in open fields along the most vulnerable stretches of coastline, in readiness for unsuspecting enemy gliders.

In the official records, there is a pathetic photograph of a gun-position disguised as a solitary ice-cream stall on an English beach. Hardly an impregnable barrier against invasion.

Fortunately, such amateurish 'Dad's Army' schemes were never put to the test under battle conditions. These idiosyncratic, futile gestures at least gave the Home Guard something to do.

Maskelyne and his ghost-writer absurdly claimed that these desperate countermeasures amounted to the "biggest magic show in history". Fisher also called this "the greatest deception ever attempted" .

In the mid-1960’s, Twentieth Century Fox commissioned two American writers to produce a screenplay based on Magic-Top Secret. In one letter to Jasper Maskelyne they pretentiously write : "We are using as our microcosm of your work, Dover Beach.”

This line may have have caused Maskelyne discomfort because there is no evidence that he ever did camouflage work at Dover Beach or worked on any coastal defence in England.

Four independent sources, including his army record, confirm Maskelyne arrived at Farnham in mid October, 1940. Any claim that Maskelyne was involved in camouflage before this date is untrue. In the summer of 1940, Maskelyne had not even joined the army, let alone begun specialised training. By the time he had completed his Farnham course, the perceived threat of invasion had receded.

MIRACULOUS APPEARANCE IN EGYPT

The next important stage in Maskelyne's career was his transfer to North Africa. Again there is confusion. When did he actually arrive in Egypt?

The Maskelyne myth is extremely powerful. Secondary sources carelessly place Maskelyne in Egypt by the autumn of 1940. The book, Trojan Horses, claims that Dudley Clarke called upon the services of Maskelyne at the battle of Sidi Barrani against Mussolini's troops in December 9th 1940: "They started to construct , at great speed, dummy Cruiser tanks and heavy field guns. In reality, the guns were lengths of drainpipe filled with chemicals that produced loud flashes...Maskelyne hired teams of native workers who drove their camels and horses relentlessly to and fro, trailing chains that whipped up the sand and suggested the incessant movement of large armoured columns."

According to Fisher, Maskelyne was still at Farnham. In this example, Fisher is correct.

Small-scale deception operations designed to exaggerate British military strength were carried out in November and December 1940 against the Italians. However, these schemes did not involve Jasper Maskelyne.The celebrated magician had not even left English soil.

Even Magic-Top Secret makes this major blunder when it describes the effects of Maskelyne's tank camouflage "Not only had the huge Italian offensive been spoiled before it had begun, but the Italians, outnumbering Wavell's troops by five to one, were in pell-mell retreat...That offensive, which undoubtedly saved Egypt, was a masterpiece of bluff and daring."

I queried such discrepancies with Alistair Maskelyne and he replied: "My father arrived in Egypt in 1941."

Geoffrey Barkas' account, The Camouflage Story (1952) supports Alistair's assertion: "On 10th March, 1941, a draft of twelve camouflage officers reached Cairo, all of them captains and all trained by Buckley in England. The first I knew of their arrival was an urgent telephone message from Jasper Maskelyne. "Please tell Major Barkas," it read," that I am stranded here with eleven other officers and that we have no money at all. The fact of their financial plight was no great surprise, for almost all of us in the Andes (their passenger ship) had also run out of cash, but I confess that I was disappointed. A magician of Maskelyne's skill, I thought, should have been able at will to cause ten piastre pieces to stream from the nose and ears of the nearest field cashier."

When I asked Alistair Maskelyne about this 'shortage of money’ anecdote, he regarded it as credible: "I never knew my father to be any other way."

Steven Sykes in Deceivers Ever - The Memoirs of a Camouflage Officer (1990) writes about the same voyage on the Samaria : "Other camouflage officers on board included Peter Proud, Robert Medley, John Codner and Jasper Maskelyne, the internationally renowned stage magician." According to Sykes, they set sail on 4th January 1941.

Fisher at least got the year right. Unfortunately, he erred with the departure and arrival dates. Fisher has Maskelyne depart from Liverpool onboard the Sumaria (sic) on January 19th and arrive in Egypt mid April 1941 (a month later than other accounts).

The Army service record states Maskelyne embarked for service overseas on 5th January, 1941 and disembarked Egypt 3rd March, 1941. However, Sykes says air-raid threats led to their convoy being dispersed several miles off-shore. The camouflage party finally disembarked 10th March and caught an afternoon train to Cairo.

The Middle East Camouflage Report in the National Archives confirms that Maskelyne and eleven other trained camouflage officers arrived 10 March 1941. This is consistent with Sykes and Barkas' recollections.

DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

The War Magician and Magic-Top Secret include an implausible 'poisoned gift' episode. En route to Egypt, Maskelyne supposedly receives either a box of chocolates or a tin of sweets after the ship docks at Sierra Leone. He suffers from stomach cramps, develops a dangerous fever, and almost dies. Later, he suspects that German agents might have poisoned him. This is surely paranoid or grandiose speculation. A more obvious theory is that he was struck down by acute dysentery or food poisoning.

Alistair Maskelyne wrote : "Your appraisal of the "poison gift" account is quite right: my father was ill on that voyage, but I believe it derived from eating fruit bought in the local market at Accra, so was more mundane, and much less dramatic. An attack of dysentery is unpleasant, but not good story value."

Another improbable anecdote is that of Captain Page writing a song for the onboard variety show. Maskelyne is so impressed he urges the fledgling composer to contact a music publisher. The song, 'White Cliffs of Dover', quickly becomes famous.

Fisher is surely mistaken. This classic was written by two Americans, Burton and Kent.

Steven Sykes' memoirs merely states that during the sea voyage someone wrote a "catchy song, an alternative White Cliffs of Dover" for the ship's pantomime.

Maskelyne’s film notes from the 1960’s include the following retraction: “I have doubts, looking back, whether the song which was written for the show was the actual one which became a wartime favourite sung by Vera Lynn. I was desperately ill at the time and never saw the panto or heard the song.”

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HE MAKES ARMY VANISH.

Stage Magician — Made Girls Disappear —Hides Wavell's Men from Air

From PAUL BEWSHER; Daily Mail Reporter

AN ARMY CAMOUFLAGE SCHOOL, Wednesday

A famous illusionist, member of the world's best-known family of illusionists, has been sent to Egypt — to help make the British Army disappear. He is Jasper Maskelyne, now Lieutenant Maskelyne of the Royal Engineers, a camouflage officer and one of several attached to our forces in the Middle East.

Lieut. Maskelyne, instead of making beautiful girls vanish on the stage, is using his skill and practical craftsmanship to render men, tanks, and guns less conspicuous.

Practical common sense is the secret of camouflage.

I learnt that today at this Camouflage School of the British Army — the existence of which has itself been very carefully camouflaged...

This extract from an article in the Daily Mail (Thursday, April 13th, 1941) undermines the view that Maskelyne's camouflage mission to the Middle East was top-secret.

On the contrary, the British Army seem to have openly made use of the Maskelyne name. In this example, propaganda and public morale were deemed more important than tactical secrecy.

(Insert cartoon from Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung)

In April 1941, a cartoon image of Jasper Maskelyne appeared in the French edition of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung.

Magic - Top Secret claims that Maskelyne's name had somehow been leaked to the Germans via a spy ring that ran from Turkey through the Balkans down to Egypt. Subsequently, a female spy in Cairo was arrested and executed by firing squad.

The English have an appropriate word for this: bollocks.

Maskelyne's Mata Hari fantasies are pure drivel. There is no need to postulate a treacherous spy ring. The Germans simply read the Daily Mail article and responded with a sneering put-down.

"In peace time , he can make beautiful young girls disappear. Now, in Egypt, he runs a military camouflage school.... But the German army topped it all  last year by making the British army disappear from Europe. And this time it wasn't  just a boast.  The British army disappeared completely, and  forever. "

Jasper Maskelyne wrote 'FAME!" in capital letters above the page.