Bunkum & Bullsh*t - The Magic Maskelynes
In the business we call show, particularly in its peripatetic and often disreputable early years, performing was often a family trade. Buster Keaton made his stage debut at the age of three as part of his family’s vaudeville act, kicked and thrown around the stage by his father, aided by a suitcase handle sewn into young Buster’s clothes. Circus history is littered with multi-generational acts, some dating back six or seven generations, and to the very birth of the form; as the old joke goes, when the strongman and the bearded lady were expecting a baby, and the midwife asked whether they hoped to have a boy or a girl, they replied, “we don’t mind, so long as it fits in the cannon”. Professional wrestling gave the world the Hart family, the Von Erichs, and countless Lucha Libre dynasties.
For many travelling entertainers, it was a simple matter of practicality - when life was spent on the road and getting paid gig-to-gig, settling down and sending the kids to school simply wasn’t an option, and with two parents in the trade, the easiest solution was to take baby along for the ride and get them schooled in quick-talking, stunt-riding or trapeze. For many circus performers and, later, for professional wrestlers, there was another concern - the precise techniques required to pull off the family act could be a closely guarded secret, passed down from generation to generation, so that no rivals could learn the trick to a successful hair-hang, iron jaw or, in the case of the Von Erichs, Iron Claw.
So too, in stage magic, as with the family I’ll be looking at today.
John Nevil Maskelyne - The Magician Who Took On The Spiritualists
The first of the Maskelyne dynasty of magicians was John Nevil Maskelyne, an English watchmaker and inventor - aside from all manner of trick cabinets, mirrored boxes and other accoutrements of the magicians’ trade, he invented an improved typewriter, and the bane of many a Londoner caught short on an afternoon stroll; the coin lock for public toilets, that gave us the euphemism “to spend a penny”. John was born in Cheltenham in 1839, erroneously claiming throughout his life to be descended from former Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, and, along with regular collaborators George Cooke and David Devant - the first President of the Magic Circle - was one of the most renowned and successful conjurers of his, or any, age.
J.N. Maskelyne came to prominence on the London stage in the 1860s; before the dawning of the twentieth century saw music hall and vaudeville turn into a more metatextual form, where demonstrating how tricks were performed, or how the proverbial sausage was made, was all part of the act. The world of magic that Maskelyne entered was one still steeped in mysticism - these were not, as fellow watchmaker-turned-illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin would famously describe the ideal conjurer, “actors playing the part of a magician”, but often charlatans purporting to possess genuine magical abilities. While the likes of Robert-Houdin and John Henry Anderson were expert showmen, adept enough to have taken magic from carnival backlots to the theatrical stage, many of their contemporaries were content to smear themselves in greasepaint and tie on an ill-fitting turban, or a false Fu Manchu moustache and “oriental” robes to present themselves as wandering mystics from the mythical East, or else they were phony mediums riding the first wave of American spiritualism, performing seances, channelling voices, and dripping ectoplasm all the way to the bank.
Harry Houdini, later in life, turned his attentions on the spiritualist craze, giving lectures and publishing books and pamphlets exposing their techniques as mere conjuring tricks - famously, he gave his wife a codeword known only to the two of them, and asked that she attempt to contact him every year on the day of his death, October 31st, believing that only by passing on their secret code would mediumship be proved legitimate. James Randi, one of the patron saints of modern scepticism, took up the mantle in the mid-1980s and worked tirelessly to debunk mediums, psychics, homeopaths, and bullshittery of all stripes, taking his hero Houdini’s lead and offering a cash prize, eventually reaching one million dollars, for anyone who could prove themselves to have genuine psychic or supernatural abilities under laboratory conditions. I have one of the early advertisements for Randi’s challenge framed, serving in some small part as either inspiration or a reminder as to why I began writing Bunkum & Bullshit in the first place.
But before Randi, before even Houdini, there was Maskelyne. And, unusually, he didn’t turn his magical know-how to the task of debunking spiritualists late in his career, it was the entire impetus for donning the magician’s top hat and tails in the first place.
Before John Nevil Maskelyne ever set foot on a stage, he attended a performance in Cheltenham by the Davenport Brothers. Iras Erastus Davenport and William Henry Davenport were a pair of New York vaudeville magicians who, on hearing stories of their fellow New Yorkers the Fox sisters, “mediums” whose seances and use of “rapping” noises to fake communication with the dead had largely birthed the modern spiritualist movement, saw an opportunity for an easy grift. Performing around the world with a “spirit cabinet” containing bells and musical instruments that were allegedly played through communication with spirits while the brothers’ hands were tied, they were an absolute sensation. It was, of course, a simple vaudeville trick.
On witnessing the Davenports’ act, John Nevil Maskelyne saw right through it. His enquiring mind and engineering know-how simply wasn’t to be fooled by a parlour trick dressed up with smoke and mirrors, particularly when a fault in the equipment allowed him to see Ira throwing musical instruments around inside the cabinet despite having his hands tied, and so he enlisted his friend George Cooke, then working as a cabinet maker, to build a replica of the Davenports’ “spirit cabinet”. Promising the public that he would expose how the spiritualists performed their magical feats, he sprinkled showmanship and comic turns around a reproduction of their routine, and he and Cooke were an instant success. Taking their show on the road, Maskelyne and Cooke ended up at the newly renovated Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, once regularly used for lectures and performances by spiritualists, but now to become known as the home of London’s leading lights of stage magic and debunking of spiritualist tricks. From their first appearance in 1873, Maskelyne and his troupe performed at the Egyptian Hall for an astonishing 31 years until it’s demolition in 1905, after which he relocated to St. George’s Hall off Regent Street, performing as “Maskelyne’s Theatre of Mystery” for several more years, until Maskelyne’s death in 1917.
John Nevil Maskelyne was a pioneer in the field of magic, developing many illusions that were not only huge successes for himself, but would be purchased, stolen, co-opted, and built on and refined, by colleagues, rivals and subsequent generations of conjurers and entertainers alike - his work at the Egyptian Hall in particular inspiring the pioneer filmmaker Georges Méliès. Among the tricks and routines pioneered by Maskelyne included levitation, a multitude of disappearing acts, and the creation of two clockwork “automata” - Zoe, who could draw and write, and Psycho, a whist-playing, cigarette-smoking “robot” later purchased by Harry Houdini.
While many “automata” of Maskelyne’s time and earlier - such as the chess-playing Mechanical Turk - relied on hidden compartments, allowing a concealed assistant to manipulate the “machine” from within, Maskelyne made a great show of demonstrating how there was no such hidden trickery inside Psycho.
Currently residing in the British Museum, there is still no consensus on exactly how Psycho was operated, but it was a likely through a combination of bellows operated by compressed air from beneath the plinth on which it stood, and Maskelyne’s assistant reading cards and signalling from backstage.
While obviously not a true automaton, it was undeniably an incredibly impressive feat of engineering married to expert showmanship.
Throughout his career on stage, John Nevil Maskelyne never abandoned the rationalist instinct that prefigured his entry into the world of magic. He founded committees dedicated to the investigation, and inevitable debunking and exposing, of anyone claiming to possess genuine supernatural abilities, and wrote extensively on the subject in books, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets, and provided evidence in fraud cases against mediums. With early psychologist Lionel Weatherly he wrote a book offering rational or scientific explanations for supposedly supernatural events, and alone wrote a hugely influential book exposing the cheats and tactics of card sharks, that remains in print to this day. Towards the end of his life, he reserved his ire most of all for Theosophy - the faux-religion that managed to amalgamate all manner of nineteenth century occult concerns, mixing Orientalist and colonialist appropriation of Eastern religions with American spiritualism with a belief in the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis, with problematic ideas of race, and, most of all, with copious amounts of plagiarised content from other occult and religious works. It was a religion that should by rights have died with its founder, the charlatan and self-styled mystic Madame Blavatsky, but instead has left its tendrils throughout New Age movements, pseudohistorical and archaeological beliefs, and the over-arching meta-conspiracies of the likes of David Icke, to say nothing of Nazi race science, believers in Atlantis, and all manner of appropriated and bastardised misrepresentations of “ancient” or “Eastern” thought.
In his time, John Nevil Maskelyne took special aim towards Theosophy, writing extensively on the hypocrisies of Blavatsky, the lies that litter her career, the plagiarism in her writing, the simple magic tricks passed off as divine acts, and the voluminous piles of bullshit she claimed of a mystical Tibet - though Maskelyne’s own descriptions of Tibet were insulting and often racist, his aim was to debunk Blavatsky and her followers’ claims of an enlightened society governed by magical monks practicing telepathic communication on the astral plane.
He took his lifelong dislike of frauds and deception to his grave, passing away in 1917, aged 77.
Nevil Maskelyne - History’s First Hacker
John Nevil Maskelyne Jr., known as Nevil, was born in 1863 and soon apprenticed in the family business, following in his father’s footsteps as a magician and inventor, working with his father on multiple inventions and the development of new magic acts, and participating in the marathon residency at the Egyptian Hall. In 1906, he was named President of the Magic Circle, a post he held until his death in 1924, just seven years after his famous father, at the age of 61.
Nevil wrote eloquently about magic, both the mechanics of tricks themselves and the art of showmanship - the latter in a book I read recently, On The Performance of Magic, which, flowery language of the time aside, would serve equally well as an instruction manual for almost any performing art today.
Like his father, Nevil was more than a mere magician, he was also an engineer and inventor of no slight ability, and a modernist to a tee. He employed Morse code on stage, as a means to discretely communicate with assistants in ever-more elaborate tricks, giving the appearance of near-instantaneous telepathic communication. For even flashier tricks, he invented a transmission device to light gunpowder remotely and, away from the stage and the Magic Circle, began experimenting with wireless communication over wider distances, successfully sending a radio signal from land to a hot air balloon in flight.
There was one major problem standing in the way of Maskelyne’s research, however, and that problem was Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor and engineer soon to be credited with the invention of the radio. In 1903, Marconi was the proud inventor of a form of wireless telegraph system, and promised that his system was entirely secure and confidential. Marconi had already, in 1901, successfully sent the first wireless signals across the Atlantic, and been awarded a patent for the wireless telegraph, stymieing Nevil Maskelyne’s own efforts in that direction.
Perhaps funded by the Eastern Wireless Telegraph Company - understandably miffed that the significant investment and miles worth of cables they had installed for the previous telegraph system could seen be rendered redundant - Nevil Maskelyne sought to trip up his Italian rival and, to do so, he would become history’s first hacker.
On June 1st 1903, Marconi was to demonstrate the security and accuracy of his wireless telegraph by sending a message in Morse code from Poldhu Point in Cornwall to John Ambrose Fleming at London’s Royal Institute, some 300 miles away. The message came through - a series of chirrups and chirps representing the dots and dashes of the code, but Fleming and his assistants realised that something was up. Rather than the message they were expecting from Marconi, they had received the single word, “Rats”, repeated over, and over, and over. After a brief pause, they received a second message, a verse beginning, “there was a young fellow from Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily”.
Fleming cried foul, and the press had a field day mocking Marconi’s failure. Fleming wrote to The Times asking their readers for help in uncovering the perpetrator of what he called an act of “scientific vandalism”, but he needn’t have bothered - Nevil Maskelyne was proud of his achievement, and boasted of it in his own letter to the same newspaper. He explained how he had erected a makeshift radio antenna, and used it to intercept Marconi’s signals and replace them with his own, without arousing suspicion. It was, in Maskelyne’s eyes, a public service, exposing the security risk and lack of confidentiality in Marconi’s technology.
For Marconi it was an embarrassing but minor setback - in 1909 he would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his achievements - and for Nevil Maskelyne, it afforded him a footnote in the history of radio and communication, as an Edwardian gentleman hacker, an unlikely combination of music hall magician and public service hacktivist.
Miscellaneous Maskelynes
Nevil Maskelyne had five children, at least four of whom followed into the family’s line of business.
The eldest, Clive, was born in 1895 and, like his father before him, was soon put to work in the family trade, assisting his father in the construction of mechanical illusions, continuing the particular Maskelyne family trait of combining a flair for performance, an eye for a good trick, and engineering know-how. After decorated service in the First World War, Clive took to the stage himself and, following Nevil Maskelyne’s death in 1924, became managing director of Maskelynes Ltd., the company through which the family managed the St. Georges Hall on Regents Street and published books and try-at-home magic kits, as well as the new President of the Magic Circle.
Soon thereafter, Clive Maskelyne took to South Africa, where he toured to tremendous success, while also writing books and articles on the art of magic as his father and grandfather had before him. In 1928, Clive took a break from his touring schedule to take on an assignment as a wildlife film-maker, recording wild animals to later sell as stock footage to other film-makers. Unfortunately it was while on one of these film-making voyages that he contracted pneumonia, dying at sea aged just 32.
Mary and Noel Maskelyne also performed at St. Georges Hall, though unusually Noel only began his magical career after their father’s death, having previously worked as an electrical engineer. They often performed together, developing a number of illusions, as well as magic-infused theatrical skits and sketches, into the 1930s. Noel was the last of the Maskelyne family to ply his trade at St. Georges Hall, and by his death in 1976 had been the last surviving male magician of the Maskelyne line. When Mary passed away on March 10th 2000, the working members of this magical dynasty had finally breathed its last.
But there was one more child of Nevil Maskelyne who made headlines, and cast a long historical shadow….
Jasper Maskelyne - The War Magician
The dapper and moustachioed Jasper Maskelyne - looking for all extents and purposes like Private Walker, the shifty spiv of Dad’s Army (or, if wrestling fans prefer, like catch wrestling pioneer Karl Gotch, of whom few photos exist where it doesn’t look like he’s trying to sell you a hooky watch) - was the leading light of his generation of Maskelynes, combining stagecraft, close-up street magic, a knack for a grand theatrical gesture, and an eye for a publicity stunt. He, like his predecessors, published books of magic tricks and appeared on film performing feats of escapology and some of his signature tricks - conjuring fire seemingly out of thin air to light a cigarette, and swallowing razor blades.
He was a music hall sensation at the outbreak of World War 2, and that is where we find the most astonishing feats of Jasper Maskelyne’s life.
In a ghost-written (and long out of print) autobiographical work named Top Secret and in David Fisher’s 1983 biography The War Magician, Jasper Maskelyne’s military exploits are laid bare - a proud and patriotic Englishman, Jasper simply could not bare the thought of standing on the side-lines, or worse yet, performing trite light entertainment shows, while his countrymen fought and died for their freedom against the scourge of Nazism. No, this magician wanted to see action, and enlisted at the earliest opportunity.
As told in The War Magician, Maskelyne was tasked with heading up a small team within the Camouflage division in Egypt. There, along with a motley crew of artists, experts in animal camouflage, fellow magicians and other assorted misfits, Jasper designed canvas covers and constructions to disguise trucks as tanks and vice-versa to mislead the German military. War Magician goes on to credit Maskelyne and his compatriots, dubbed “The Magic Gang” with all manner of astonishing wartime achievements - using phony airstrips and landing lights to lead German planes off course, and disguising entire harbours and canals with little more than smoke, mirrors and good old-fashioned English know-how and elbow grease. Elsewhere, Maskelyne is credited with aiding in the phony sabotage of the de Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield on behalf of the double-agent Eddie Chapman, or “Agent Zigzag”, who the Nazis believed was working for them as a spy.
For my Channel Island readers looking for a local history angle, Eddie Chapman began the war imprisoned in Jersey, where he had arrived after fleeing arrest for blowing up a bank safe in Edinburgh - he was already serving time in prison for an unrelated burglary in Jersey when the Nazis occupied the island, and through an extraordinary set of circumstances was able to secure his freedom and begin working for the Allies as a secret agent, while also convincing the Nazis that he was doing the same for them. While serving time in a Jersey prison, Chapman met Eric Pleasants, a former professional wrestler who found work as a potato picker in Jersey, but was imprisoned during the Occupation for stealing from empty properties, and subsequently deported to a German internment camp, where he converted to the Nazi cause and joined the Waffen-SS, soon collaborating with British fascist John Amery and William Joyce, the notorious “Lord Haw-Haw”. Surviving the war, Pleasants returned to his native Norfolk, where he worked as a masseur and martial arts instructor, and even returned to professional wrestling in his fifties. He died in 1998, and Chapman in 1997.
One might question, however, how Jasper Maskelyne could have been involved in the 1943 faked destruction of a Hertfordshire factory while stationed in Egypt. While the de Havilland fakery doesn’t appear in The War Magician, there’s plenty of other tales of derring-do, spy-craft, heroism and ingenuity that raise similar questions, and struggle to pass the Baloney Detector test.
Indeed, even while reading The War Magician, it doesn’t take long for suspicions to raise. It is written in a novelistic style that was once all the rage in popular history - entire conversations that couldn’t possibly be known to the author are recounted verbatim, characters’ innermost feelings and motivations are spelled out, and this, even more than the ludicrous tall tales of magical duels with Imams, colonialist depictions of Egyptians believing the magician in their midst to be a literal wizard, and the crediting of Jasper Maskelyne with almost singlehandedly besting Erwin Rommel in the desert, make it difficult to take seriously, and it’s a wonder that anybody ever did. But take it seriously they did, with the book receiving glowing reviews across the board with few dissenting voices, and its central narrative repeated as fact all over the internet.
It’s not carelessly that I referred to individuals depicted in Fisher’s book as “characters”. Not content with borrowing liberally from the already unreliable (and now long out of print) Magic: Top Secret, Fisher extrapolates whole new stories of adventure and heroism in his book alleging to be an “amazing true story”, and to that end, in his depictions of “The Magic Gang”, invented entirely new members of Maskelyne’s camouflage unit for purely dramatic purposes - most egregiously of all, inventing the character of Frank Knox, Jasper’s begrudging right-hand man, purely to kill him off to allow Maskelyne a struggle in the third act. It’s a grotesque move in a book masquerading as non-fiction, and insulting to the countless millions who genuinely lost their lives in World War 2.
One review in Mayhem Rockstar Magazine claims that The War Magician is clearly marketed as historical fiction, and that’s an argument I would dispute. The truth is more ambiguous; the US release of the book, by Blackstone Publishing, is marketed as “based on a true story”, or “fact-based”, weasel words that gesture towards acknowledging the book as fiction without outright saying it, while many of the pull-quotes from reviews emphasise the truth of the book. The UK situation is even worse - the paperback copy is heralded as “the incredible true story of the illusionist who changed the course of the war”. It is found, as I discovered my copy, in the non-fiction and WW2 history sections of book stores. This is not a book being sold as fiction, and should not be excused on those grounds.
That’s not to say that there’s no shreds of reality in Fisher’s book. It is true that Jasper Maskelyne trained as a camoufleur - a field in which poet and fellow camouflage officer Julian Trevelyan described Jasper’s efforts as “rather unsuccessful” - and that he helped develop James Bond-esque gadgets and concealed weapons intended to aid soldiers in escaping capture, and it is true that he served as the head of an experimental camouflage unit near Cairo. It is there that the similarities come to an end.
It is largely thanks to the work of magician and historian Richard Stokes in systematically debunking many of Maskelyne and Fisher’s claims - through meticulous research and through conversation with Maskelyne’s son and former members of the camouflage unit - that we know how little of their claims are true, but some are simple enough to have not required that amount of work. Jasper Maskelyne claims that his transfer to Egypt and work in camouflage was a closely guarded secret, and that word of it getting out to the Germans was a scandal, but it was anything but - it was heralded in Daily Mail headlines, and defunct tabloid newspaper Reveille joked in 1941 that “he has gone to end the shortage of rabbits out there by producing some from a brass hat”. Far from a closely guarded secret, it was something of a PR exercise from the beginning, and quickly became the stuff of tabloid jokes and gossip column asides.
In reality, many of Maskelyne’s efforts were either marginal, flawed, or simply did not work. Far from being moved to an elite, self-contained unit experimenting in ambitious acts of military stagecraft, his period of command was short-lived and he was relieved of his duties within a few months after failing to come up with the goods. For the remainder of the war he was little more than troop entertainment, putting on magic shows to amuse his fellow soldiers - The War Magician attempts to frame these acts as either distractions from the real task at hand, or, in its more outlandish Boy’s Own Adventure moments, as fronts for elaborate acts of espionage, but they were in reality the lot of an entertainer in wartime, to keep morale up and provide momentary distraction from the grim reality of the situation.
Jasper Maskelyne was a chancer, a fantasist, and a liar who was content to allow other people’s fictions about him to go unchecked, and to use his charisma and fame to claim credit where it wasn’t due. With the secrecy afforded to him by wartime and foreign climes, he constructed a self-aggrandizing myth that, decades later, David Fisher was all too happy to not only swallow whole but to exaggerate further. The Guardian wrote of him that his vanity made his lack of recognition intolerable, and that he died “an embittered drunk”. That is a version of events that scans with the portrait of Jasper Maskelyne that is conjured, so to speak, by the interviews with his son, Alistair, between 1997 and 2005 by Richard Stokes.
In a short post-script to The War Magician, Fisher sums up Maskelyne’s post-war career by claiming that he struggled to return to the stage because post-war audiences had little appetite for magic shows, and so he relocated to Kenya where he worked as a driving instructor.
The truth is rather grimmer. Maskelyne returned to London with an ego inflated by his new military rank, styling himself as Major Maskelyne, and insisting on being addressed as such. Far from the tin Spitfire fetishism and Blitz-worshipping death cult of subsequent generations, those Londoners who had actually lived through the war had no desire to be reminded of it, least of all from a stage magician who had largely coasted through the conflict on his fame and never faced combat - the memories were too recent, the losses too raw, the injustice too hard to bear.
Despite this, the Maskelyne name carried weight, and he was able to still perform to some modest success in the short-term, only dwindling over time as word of mouth spread.
In 1947, Maskelyne’s wife Mary, the mother of his children, died from terminal cancer. The following year, Jasper, in the words of his son, “quickly found a lady in a small nightclub”, who shared with Jasper, “a liking for the bottle”. By some accounts, Maskelyne had already taken up drinking with his new beau in Soho nightclubs while his wife - to whom The War Magician depicts Jasper and a devoted and doting husband - was terminally ill. Largely estranged from his children, and increasingly estranged from an audience that had already begun to dwindle even before the war, Maskelyne was forced to perform in ever-smaller venues, and in more out-of-the-way towns, a lifetime away from his family’s heyday. Desperate for work on the stage, and short of an assistant, he employed an aging stripper to ply his trade in an increasingly tawdry magic show, and when she too walked out on him, she was replaced by a “glamorous assistant” who turned out to be an American soldier wanted for desertion, plying his trade as a female impersonator in the hope of evading arrest. 31 years at the Egyptian Hall, this was not.
Faced with a mountain of debts and unpaid tax bills, Maskelyne and his new wife - also called Mary - moved to Kenya around 1950, and after an attempted tour of South Africa in the style of his late brother Clive, settled in Nairobi. There, he made a habit of spending his days in hotel bars clad in full military uniform, and drinking away the ample profits of the driving school he opened on gin. The War Magician and other sources make passing notes to Jasper Maskelyne leading a police squad during his time in Kenya - the details usually left out are that he lead this force during the Mau Mau Uprising, during which tens of thousands were interred, tortured and murdered by the British occupying forces, in some of the worst and most violent excesses of British colonialism. Was this the military command that Jasper Maskelyne had long dreamed of?
As a final note on the inaccuracies and embellishments of The War Magician, in writing repeatedly of Jasper Maskelyne’s devotion to his wife and children, Fisher consistently uses the name not of the mother of Maskelyne’s children, but of his second wife. Jasper’s surviving family were upset by this, and complained to the author after publication. In the 2004 reprint, this error has not been corrected.
Why Does It Matter?
It’s striking that the first of the Maskelyne dynasty imbued his performance with pursuit of truth and rational explanation, and one of his final descendants painted their life with myth-making, self-aggrandizement and bullshit. One wonders what the first John Nevil Maskelyne would have made of the claims of his grandson, and those who happily profited from continuing his line of bullshit.
It's reasonable to ask why any of this matters. There was a time when every pub up and down the country could reliably count at least one World War 2 fantasist among their regulars, what's one more?
War, and this one in particular, is fertile ground for mythmaking, reinvention, and plain old bullshit. They say that the first casualty of war is the truth - fittingly, a quote misattributed to half a dozen people at least - but it's not only through the propaganda of wartime that truth suffers; there's a line of bullshit that persists in peacetime too. It's the desperate small town fantasists who claim incredible military exploits that they can't prove, safe in the knowledge that the remoteness and secrecy of war affords them the perfect alibi, it's the opportunity to prop oneself up with unverifiable tales of heroism, or, for Eric Pleasants, to claim in a licensed biography (co-written, oddly enough, by old friend Eddie Chapman) that his membership of the SS was purely an act of self-preservation. For Jasper Maskelyne, it was the opportunity to shake off the embarrassment of failing to serve his country with distinction, and of his much-vaunted magical and engineering expertise being useless in the face of a very real threat. One recurring motif in David Fisher’s book is Jasper's fears of not living up to the family name, and that is perhaps one of the only truths therein.
Bullshit is always a two-sided coin; it cannot survive in a vacuum, it requires a believing listener or reader as much as a dishonest speaker or writer. Maskelyne's, and later Fisher’s, claims would have withered on the vine without a legion of credulous critics, amateur historians, and content aggregators content to take them at face value and repeat them without question.
It speaks to the place that World War 2 inhabits in the national imagination, as a near mythical conflict - not World War 1's elevated family squabble between colonial powers, or the complex and often transparently dishonest military interventions of the late 20th and 21st Century; World War 2 lives on in public memory as a genuine battle of good and evil.
That casting of war in black and white moral terms has always provided the raw materials for explaining complex geopolitical issues in magical and occult terms - to explain the horrors of Nazism, countless writers have attempted to frame Hitler as something more or less than human, providing occult and esoteric explanations for his actions and for his role on history’s stage. On the Allied side, amateur anthropologist, crackpot historian and founder of Wicca, Gerald Gardner, and arch-publicist magician Aleister Crowley both either offered their supposed magical powers in service of the war effort or retroactively took credit for military achievements, while any number of lesser magicians laid claim to misleading senior Nazis through the unorthodox means of phony horoscopes.
Rather than being treated with the disdain and ridicule of, say, Uri Gellar claiming to combat Vladimir Putin's nuclear weapons with his telepathic powers, the notion of English magicians battling Nazi Germany in a kind of occult Western front has become part and parcel of the World War 2 story. Another subgenre of World War 2 mythmaking is the notion of plucky little England outsmarting Hitler's military machine with a litany of madcap, hare-brained schemes; the James Bond gadgets of Ian Fleming, vastly ambitious acts of spycraft and espionage, the incredible work of Alan Turing and his associates at Bletchley Park in decoding Nazi ciphers, and countless operations in deception, doublethink, and trickery; phony messages, false invasions, planted misinformation. It is unsurprising that somebody like Jasper Maskelyne, from a dynasty of engineer magicians, would fit so comfortably at this cross-hatch of magic, deceit, engineering wizardry, and national mythmaking.
I mentioned earlier that I realised almost immediately when reading David Fisher’s The War Magician that it was bullshit, but it's important that I make a distinction here. The book didn't pass the smell test, and instantly raised some red flags. But all that meant is that I suspected it to be untrue. It is only through the exhaustive dedicated research of historians like Richard Stokes that those suspicions could be confirmed, and the truth be given space to assert itself.
That is perhaps the lesson to learn from this tale, and I hope from the Bunkum & Bullshit series as a whole. It is vital and important to develop an instinctive sense for when someone is attempting to mislead you, for misinformation and bullshit, but it is equally important to be able to call upon that same sense at will, when instinct is not enough. The significance of work of historians like Stokes isn't that he tells us that Jasper Maskelyne and David Fisher were dishonest, it's that it teaches us how we know what we know to be true, and how to provide the light that withers a lie.
As World War 2 continues to fade from living memory, and survives as national myth far more than as recent history, it's vital that we retain a sense of the actuality of events. There are far more dangerous, far more insidious efforts to rewrite the history books than turning the middling efforts of a music hall magician into a wartime adventure story, of course, but every tall story and misrepresentation is a chip in the edifice of truth and history, and the way we determine the truth of one story should be instructive in how we apply the same arguments just as rigorously to any other.
In an age of constant disinformation, misinformation, and unprecedented levels of bullshit, we need more John Nevil Maskelynes and fewer Jasper Maskelynes to cast their eyes over not just social media and headline news, but over our history books, and how the stories we tell about our history shape our present.
Post-Script: Alistair Maskelyne
Jasper Maskelyne’s estranged son, Alistair, was an invaluable part of Richard Stokes’ work in debunking the Jasper Maskelyne myth. Theirs was a troubled relationship, as the glitz and glamour of their famous surname already by the early 1930s provided a threadbare protection for a family in increasing financial straits. Struggling to get by - the problems exacerbated after the war by Jasper’s worsening drink habit - Jasper did what no previous member of his family had done, and agreed to attach his name to a ghost written autobiography and family history, White Magic, the precursor for Top Secret which would, along with Jasper’s diaries, form the basis of The War Magician.
During the war, Alistair and his mother were not - as depicted in The War Magician - faithfully waiting at home with bated breath, they were evacuated to New Zealand, only returning in 1943 due to Evelyn Enid Mary Maskelyne’s ill health. Alistair returned to New Zealand, finding work for a shipping company, and finding romance in the form of an affair with Esme Levant, herself a second-generation magician, married, and six years older than then-18 year old Alistair.
The younger Maskelyne returned to London, and to his father’s house, in 1946. Alistair helped his father get back on the road, working as a stage manager and helping secure bookings for music hall impresarios Lew and Leslie Grade - three years later, incidentally, Leslie’s wife would leave him for ITV wrestling commentator Kent Walton.
Unlike previous generations, however, Alistair was not apprenticed into the family business, and it was from no love of magic or of his father’s work that he was by his side - he wished to remain in London only to be nearer to his terminally ill mother. When Evelyn died, and Jasper took up with the similarly named Evelyne Mary Scotcher, their family ties were irrevocably severed.
Alistair worked in film and sound recording and, after relocating to Australia in the 1950s, never saw his father again. In Australia, he acquired his pilot’s license, and worked as a commercial pilot until 1993. He passed away in 2019.
