The Masked Marvel Unmasked! - The Story of Johannes Van Der Walt, Maybe The Worst Person In Wrestling History

I recently finished up the final draft of my long-term project, that if you're not sick of hearing about by now you likely will be once it's published, Kayfabe: A Mostly True History of Professional Wrestling, a book that began as a lockdown project and grew to occupy a considerable amount of my free time, not to mention my headspace, for coming up to three years.

I've since found myself in a strange predicament that's likely familiar to other writers and creatives - a brief sense of relief at a job finally finished has given way to an occasional emptiness, a sense of "well, now what?", and wondering what I'm supposed to do with these little pockets of free time, sat in front of a laptop screen but with nothing to tweak and revise, no research to complete, no paragraphs to tidy up. 

Worse still, as I gazed upon my ever-growing pile of "to read" books, finally freed from the need to research, looking forward to once again being able to read purely for pleasure rather than to fact-check a single sentence about New York dancehalls in the late 19th century, or to expand my knowledge of early vaudeville or Cornish tin mining, or any number of intellectual rabbit holes one doesn't expect to end up exploring when setting out to write about professional wrestling, I began to let my mind wander on to new ideas. How about another book?

Have I learned nothing? Have I forgotten how much bloody work that was? Still, maybe a little research wouldn't hurt. It's almost a treat. I've earned it.

And so, with the proverbial ink not yet dry on Book Number One, I began putting serious thought into Book Two. It's early days, and the central premise has shifted a couple of times since first occurring to me, and currently it amounts to little more than a few half-baked ideas, some scattered notes, a handful of Freedom Of Information requests and a growing trove of books to read. It's too early for me to really share the premise with you, suffice to say that I'm currently envisioning it as a work of reality-based fiction, dealing with charlatans, conmen and liars of various types, spanning the mid-20th century. It might be something, it might be nothing, only time will tell.

In truth, the idea began germinating long before I'd "finished" Kayfabe, but without any real sense of what the actual plot might entail - I was doing exactly what Stephen King, in On Writing, advises against; I had started with the themes, and was hoping that the plot would figure itself out later. I thought that maybe some wider reading would trigger some ideas, and when I saw that one of my favourite biographers, Phil Baker - whose work on Dennis Wheatley and Austin Osman Spare is nothing short of essential - had a new book out, City Of The Beast, a look at the London of arch-occultist Aleister Crowley, I thought that maybe occultism might provide the missing link that my narrative needed, while the nature of Baker's book could help anchor my story in a sense of place, with its explorations of early and mid-20th century London. It would be a start, anyway. It sat at my bedside for almost a full year before I finally got around to reading it.

I like to think of myself as a pragmatic, rational man - any interest I have in the occult and things mysterious and Fortean is from a position of detached intrigue, fascinated by why people believe strange things, and how irrational belief can spread memetically in fascinating and unpredictable ways - but I'm often taken aback by the scale of coincidences in my reading; picking up books on unrelated topics, and finding that they refer directly to other areas of interest, or that the same players and locales appear in drastically different stories. Shying away from magical thinking, I know it's a frequency illusion - "ever since I heard about the Baader-Meinhof Effect, I keep hearing about it everywhere" -  but it was still astonishing to hear that a figure I have barely begun to research, who I intend to play a substantial role in whatever Book 2 ends up being, pops up unexpectedly in a book I bought with the express intent of fleshing out the setting of Book 2, long before I ever had any interest in this person, let alone suspected that they would play a key role in my writing. Not only that, but a psychogeographical biography of Aleister Crowley is the last place I expected to provide a hint of clarification on professional wrestling history, yet there it was, as an aging Crowley in his diaries mentioned attending All-In wrestling shows in Piccadilly in 1942; over on Twitter, I explored what we could learn, and what oft-repeated points of historical inaccuracy found clarification from this throwaway comment from such an unlikely source (https://twitter.com/Patrick_W_Reed/status/1625064439215976449).

It was during that period of idle research, tracking down references to wrestling in London newspapers from 1942, that I stumbled across the topic of today's post - so finally, after the now customary lengthy preamble, we come to the topic of today's blog.

The Men Behind The Masks

"Mask Marvel Unmasked" - that was the headline in the Daily Herald on 5th February 1942. It's easy to see why that would be exciting - what is a mask if not a mystery waiting to be solved? The reveal of a masked man's secret identity is the stuff of comic book fantasy and speculation, after all.

Wrestling had been quick to recognise the potential of masks, with the first recorded hooded wrestler competing in France in the 1840s, and becoming a quick and easy solution at circuses and on the carnival circuit when necessity required a wrestler to perform twice in one evening, or any other reason that a grappler's identity might need to be concealed. It wasn't until the late 1860s, though, that wrestlers and promoters recognised that the mask itself could be an object of intrigue and fascination, rather than a means to an end, and the man largely recognised as the first true masked wrestler took to the circuses of Paris - L'Homme Masque, The Masked Man, or the Masked Wrestler; when you're the first, you don't have to be too inventive when it comes to the name.

Although popularly rumoured to be Greco-Roman pioneer and self-publicist extraordinaire Thiebaud Bauer, the likelihood is that the Masked Wrestler of the 1860s was Andre Christol, a well-travelled circus wrestler and strongman from Marseilles, who was no stranger to cons, tricks, and dual identities - he and his brother Lucien Marc Christol freely swapped names; Lucien wrestled as Andre against an "unknown" wrestler in Colorado who, after winning the match, revealed himself as the real Andre. It was an elaborate con that they played out in multiple ways all over the world - to the extent that it's still unclear if the two were even actually related - likely to manipulate betting odds.

Whoever was under the mask, Paris' Masked Wrestler was a star throughout the 1860s, so much so that there was at least two imitators popping up across the city, all claiming to be the real deal. One even made his way to the United Kingdom in 1876.

The hype around Parisian masked wrestlers seemed to die out before the end of the 19th Century, and it was in America that a masked man would once again make the headlines. In 1915, promoters held a lengthy Greco-Roman tournament in New York, at the Manhattan Opera House, hoping to claw back some of the credibility that the sport had lost thanks to a series of well-publicised faked matches and disappointing outcomes, not least of all the disastrous Gotch vs. Hackenschmidt rematch of 1911 in Chicago. Relying heavily on European imports, and hoping to make a star of the Estonian Aleksander Aberg, promoter Samuel Rachmann was in over his head, and years behind the times; Greco-Roman was old hat in the United States, eclipsed by the faster paced and freer flowing catch-as-catch-can style employed by the likes of Frank Gotch. While the Spring leg of Rachmann's tournament was a modest success, ticket sales were slow for the Autumn matches, as fans weren't interested in slow, ponderous matches between unfamiliar foreign competitors. Rachmann's dreams of restoring wrestling's credibility had to be put on hold, as now the more pressing need was to sell tickets and make a profit on an expensive tournament that was proving to be a dud. 

One of Samuel Rachmann's business partners, Mark A. Luescher, a successful theatrical and opera impresario on both sides of the Atlantic, had just the solution to their problems. He had experienced modest success in the early 1900s with an act called "La Belle Dazle, Le Domino Rouge - The Girl With The Red Mask"; a masked opera diva and dancer. Luescher and Rachmann entrusted erstwhile wrestling promoter Jack Curley with the task of finding Le Domino Rouge's wrestling counterpart, and so Curley turned to journeyman wrestler Mort Henderson, and hid his face under a black mask, christening him The Masked Marvel - a name he would come to share with the eventual topic of this post. 

The masked Henderson took a seat in the Opera House, at first silently attracting attention, before relying on an old music hall trick - challenging the wrestlers from the stands, until before long the public and the press were all desperate to see the masked man square up with the wrestlers in the tournament. Rachmann went against everything he had hoped to achieve, and booked the Marvel in worked matches, looking to insert some much-needed drama and excitement into proceedings. The Masked Marvel defeated Georg Lurich, and wrestled to a draw with other luminaries like Ed "Strangler" Lewis and Władek Zybyszko, before coming up short against Aleksander Aberg in a likely legitimate final match. The short-term boost offered by the Masked Marvel helped save Samuel Rachmann's bank account, though did little to aid in the rehabilitation of Greco-Roman wrestling's credibility, and Henderson's career never reached the same heights again, but in terms of the saleability of masked wrestlers, the genie was out of the bottle.

Masked wrestlers would again rise to the forefront in the inter-war years, as wrestling turned more and more toward gimmickry and attention-grabbing stunts. The Irish-American Cyclone MacKey can't have known the lasting impact his decision to adopt the Masked Marvel name in Mexico would have in 1933, as countless luchadores masked up and followed his lead, fundamentally transforming Lucha Libre and Mexican national iconography alike; so much so that Lucha now has its own cottage industry of myth-making, erroneously tying the masks of Lucha Libre to pre-Columbian masked traditions.

In the United Kingdom, Geoff Condliffe of Crewe masked up as Count Bartelli, and legendary catch wrestling coach Billy Riley went under the mask of "Dark Owl" in the 1930s. Then came the Red Devil, The Red Scorpion, The Zebra Kid, The Green Asp, as well as the White Owl, Grey Owl, Black Owl, Brown Owl, and a second Dark Owl, portrayed by Billy Riley's son, Ernie. One suggestion, courtesy of poster AngloItalian of the Wrestling Heritage website, to explain the preponderance of owls in the menagerie of masked wrestlers was the 1930s fame of conservationist and writer Grey Owl, a celebrated Native American author and lecturer at a time when Europe was enthralled by romanticised Native American imagery. In a very pro-wrestling twist, Grey Owl turned out to be Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, an alcoholic bigamist from Hastings, who had never set foot in America.

After all of them came the most celebrated masked man in British wrestling history, Kendo Nagasaki. Nagasaki concocted an extensive Japanese backstory, interwoven with occultism and mysticism, and went to extreme lengths to protect his real identity. Even when eventually unmasking on television, the ceremony provided more questions than answers, as in a pseudo-mystical scene more befitting a Dennis Wheatley story than ITV's World of Sport, Nagasaki was accompanied by his long-time manager "Gorgeous" George Gillette, in a ceremonial robe, and two unnamed followers with shaven heads and ponytails. As George dropped Kendo's mask into a flaming altar, the two followers committed a mock-seppuku, as Nagasaki revealed his face, with bright red contact lenses, the same shaved head/ponytail combination, and a striking pentagram tattoo adorning the top of his head. One can't help but wonder how he went about his daily business unnoticed in the 1970s sporting that particular look.

Nagasaki's secret identity was eventually revealed by a chance encounter with a plumber who, called to the property of one Peter Thornley, was met at the door by George Gillette. Realising that the tall and muscular Thornley was likely the man behind the Kendo Nagasaki mask, the plumber took out advertisements and printed flyers stating "KENDO NAGASAKI IS PETER THORNLEY" to distribute outside local wrestling events, but it did little to shake Nagasaki's appeal - the name Peter Thornley meant nothing to anyone, and all it did was reveal that the man behind the mask, as Thornley likes to style himself, wasn't really Japanese, which it's doubtful anyone really believed he was anyway. Indeed, the revelation may have only aided Thornley, as anyone digging into his past could see that he had spent time in Japan as a member of a Judo team which, combined with a fortuitous workplace injury that left him missing half a finger - reminiscent of the punishments allegedly enacted by the Yakuza - lent the suggestion of a mysterious Japanese history some credence.

In later years, Nagasaki - like several masked wrestlers before and since - simply handwaved away his brief period of wrestling unmasked, and his audience were largely happy to pretend it had never happened. Indeed, when manager Lloyd Ryan replaced the late George Gillette as Kendo's mouthpiece, he regularly spoke as if nobody had ever seen his charge's face, and routinely rattled off suggestions that beneath the mask was actually a member of the Royal Family, or even Lord Lucan, the infamous British peer who disappeared in 1974 following the murder of Sandra Rivett, the nanny of his children. Supposed sightings of Lucan were easy tabloid fodder for a slow news day, with elderly ex-pats being "identified" as Lucan as recently as last year.

Thornley and Ryan knew that the truth of any masked wrestler's identity was mundane, and that drumming up speculation was the real art to elaborating the myth and the mystery behind the mask. It's perhaps no coincidence that masked wrestlers first became commonplace in France - it was there in the 1600s that for 34 years an anonymous prisoner had his face obscured by a velvet mask; Voltaire speculated that the mystery prisoner was an illegitimate brother of Louis XIV, a theory later adopted, swapping velvet for iron, by Alexandre Dumas and repeated countless times since, along with other suggestions that "The Man In The Iron Mask" was a prominent figure whose identity had to be concealed at great cost.

It's that kind of intrigue and myth-making that Lloyd Ryan attempted to echo with his outlandish claims about Kendo Nagasaki, but a masked wrestler is just a masked wrestler, a workaday grappler in need of a gimmick - what are the odds that one could ever really turn out to be something more than that?

Mask Marvel Unmasked!

With that, we return to our so-called Mask Marvel of 1942, and his eventual unmasking.

This particular Masked Marvel came to England with Jim Londos in 1937. Londos was the biggest star of his era in America, and by some reckonings the highest drawing professional wrestler of all time, but struggled to find a footing in England, stopping off there en route to one of his intermittent tours of his native Greece.

Londos had gone into business with Henry Irslinger, a pioneering wrestler and promoter whose career started in Austria in the early 1900s, treading the familiar path of many European Greco-Roman champions - from the continent to England, and then on to America. In London, Irslinger competed against the legendary Conde Koma ("Combat Count") Mitsuyo Maeda, a no-holds barred fighter, wrestler, judoka and all-round combat sports legend who taught jiu-jitsu to a young Carlos Gracie in a Brazilian circus tent in 1917.

Unlike many of the stars of wrestling's first golden age, however, Irslinger was able to bridge the gap, returning to the forefront in the 1930s, working alongside Atholl Oakeley and sharing the wrestling baronet's dual responsibilities as both wrestler and promoter. Together they transformed British wrestling with the introduction of the American-influenced "All-In" rules, and Irslinger worked tirelessly to popularise the new style both in the ring and behind the curtain, wrestling George Modrich on the very first All-In Wrestling show in 1930, and travelling widely to introduce the rules across the Commonwealth, promoting shows in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, until his death in 1954.

It was in South Africa that Irslinger discovered his Masked Marvel, and saw him as the perfect opponent for Jim Londos. They wrestled together in front of an alleged 90,000 people in Athens - though attendance figures for Londos' Greek matches are notoriously difficult to confirm and, while falling short of Atholl Oakeley's claims of wrestling before an outdoor crowd of two million, usually stretch credulity - and together would be the centrepiece of what Irslinger was convinced would be the launching pad for Londos to replicate the stardom he enjoyed in the United States and Greece on English shores.

That wasn't to be. The show intended to launch Jim Londos into stardom on the British stage, at the Empress Stadium in London's Earl's Court - home, amongst other things, a 1938 Boxer vs. Wrestler bout between Billy Wells and Chick Knight, and a 1939 meeting of the British Communist Party that drew crowds of more than nine thousand - was a flop, an audience of six thousand people filing in to see Londos against one of his regular opponents, George Pencheff would be impressive elsewhere, but not in a venue with a capacity of closer to 20,000. Not only that, but there were changes to the card after Henry Irslinger ran into difficulties lining up some of his preferred matches when the Home Office intervened on the grounds that they wouldn't permit Irslinger to book two foreign wrestlers against each other in championship bouts.

What's more, Jim Londos had refused to compete in the All-In style, and Henry Irslinger - despite his role in popularising the style in the first place - had no choice but to follow suit, downplaying the style in the press, in favour of what he called "modernised catch-as-catch-can"; effectively the same thing with a different label, though in Londos' case, a little cleaner and classier than the wild and woolly brawling that London crowds were learning to expect. If Irslinger's ambition had been to present modern wrestling on a grander stage, he was taking one step forward and two steps back. An alternate explanation may be that Irslinger already saw the way the wind was blowing in relation to All-In, that the press were arraying against it as a violent and ungentlemanly display, and was trying to make all the right noises to suggest that he was offering more wholesome fare.

Also on the bill was our Masked Marvel, competing against Karol Nowina, a Polish wrestler often billed as Karol or Karl Zbyszko. It's unclear whether that match went ahead, given the Home Office's draconian approach to non-British fighters on Irslinger's shows, but the Marvel was also pencilled in for a match with Londos, advertised variously as under the black hood of the Marvel, and under his real name, under which he had already competed against Jim Londos on an Irslinger-promoted show in South Africa.

And that is what brings us to our 1942 article. Because the Masked Marvel's identity was an open secret - he was a Dutch South African wrestler named Johannes Van Der Walt, who began his career working under a mask, as both the Masked Marvel and Masked Wonder, to protect his earnings by disguising his identity as an amateur wrestler.

The 1942 "unmasking" was a symbolic one, not taking place in a wrestling ring, but in the South African Parliament, as Johannes Van Der Walt's true identity was laid bare.

Van Der Walt

Having failed to take off as a wrestling superstar in London, or as part of Jim Londos' touring troupe in the United States, the former Masked Marvel returned to South Africa.

Having become a sporting icon and wrestling star in his native land - so much so that in 1938 one of his wrestling matches was the second sporting event ever broadcast in Afrikaans, after a rugby match earlier that year - Van Der Walt retired from the ring in 1940, and traded in his wrestling boots for jackboots.

In 1939, Van Der Walt joined the Ossewabrandwag - an explicitly pro-German, pro-Nazi, and anti-British Afrikaans nationalist movement, who opposed South African involvement in World War 2, supported Hitler, espoused Nazi principles, antisemitism, racism and anti-Communism, and stood out as thuggish, dangerous extremists even when compared to the Afrikaan nationalist parties that dominated South African politics to the detriment of black Africans for generations. While in their initial formation the OB had claimed that their goals were chiefly around the avoidance of war, and freedom from British rule, in time their rhetoric became more unabashedly fascist and Hitlerite in both content and tone - now they spoke of, "family, blood, and native soil", of "British-Jewish" interests controlling parliament and capital, and of the need to stand up to "international Communism". Increasingly, abhorrent ideas of "racial purity" became just as central to Ossewabrandwag ideology as their stated goals of self-governance and independence.

Johannes Van Der Walt was a commandant, or self-styled General, in the most extremist wing of the OB, the Stormjaers - a quasi-military unit that engaged in sabotage against government and military installations, harassed and assaulted soldiers in uniform, dynamited railroads and telegraph lines, and committed theft, arson, and even murder. One fellow Stormjaer was John Vorster, the future president of South Africa who oversaw the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the complete disenfranchisement of all black South Africans, and further tightening of the apartheid stranglehold.

With Stormjaers like Van Der Walt as their armed muscle, the OB did all they could to undermine British and South African involvement in the war, while carrying out espionage on behalf of the Nazis, and increasingly mimicking the militaristic rituals of the Nazis they idolised. For the troops under Van Der Walt's command, training was brutal. With limited access to firearms, Van Der Walt drilled his followers with broomsticks, and issued them with knuckle-dusters and coshes. Fights were frequent, and punishment was torturous, often at Van Der Walt's own hand.

One of Johannes Van Der Walt's contemporaries was the boxer Robey Leibbrandt, who became enamored with Nazi Germany after competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and has the unpleasant accolade of being the first South African trained as a Luftwaffe paratrooper after volunteering with the Wehrmacht. On his return to Africa, Leibbrandt worked alongside 50-60 Stormjaers and plotted a coup d'etat while engaging in multiple acts of sabotage. He was eventually captured by the police in December 1942 after an anonymous tip-off, and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment for fear that his death would make him a martyr to Afrikaner Nazis. Like many Ossewabrandwag members interred during the war, his conviction was overturned by the newly elected National Party in 1948, and any connection between the Apartheid government and the Nazi Party was hushed up as much as practically possible. Leibbrandt returned to boxing in the 1940s, and remained a racist and fascist rabble-rouser for the remainder of his life.

In December 1941, Johannes Van Der Walt was arrested, charged with possessing an unlicensed firearm. A matter of days later, thanks to prison guards that were either sympathetic to his course or were actual members of the Stormjaers, he escaped from police custody, and remained on the run until the following February.

In February, D.F. Malan read a sworn affidavit alleging to be from Van Der Walt in court, and this is the unmasking that our story referred to. The once Masked Marvel confessed that the Ossewabrandwag had betrayed Robey Leibbrandt and tipped off the police, as they saw him becoming reckless, and potentially outside of their control. Van Der Walt also made claims of financial mismanagement and corruption by OB leaders, and claimed that he had personally been enlisted to assassinate prominent politicians, lawyers, and individuals accused of spreading rumours against his superiors. That triggered the beginning of the end for the OB, as the government arrested and interred as many members as they could, though few saw out the full length of their sentence, and the majority were welcomed back into public life with open arms following the war, with many gaining positions in the apartheid-era government. Nazis? What Nazis?

Johannes Van Der Walt was tracked to a farmhouse outside Krugersdorp on February 24th 1942. After a shoot-out with police, he was shot in the back, and suffered permanent damage to his spinal cord, leaving him partially paralysed. He died the following March, and his funeral was attended by more than 30,000 people. 

Psycho writer Robert Bloch said that "horror is the removal of masks". That was rarely more true than in case of South Africa's Masked Marvel, a sporting hero who took the stage in London and America, who travelled the world with one of the greatest draws in wrestling history, and whose name remains on spurious lists of the highest recorded wrestling attendances. Beneath his mask, he was a fascist, a terrorist, a violent, murderous Nazi sympathiser, and unrepentant on every count. The politics and ideology he fought on behalf of governed South Africa long after his death, and their repercussions are still very much alive today, while he remains a folk hero to some of the seedier white nationalists on the internet - his grave appears as a point of pilgrimage on sketchy "South African Road Trips" on social media, and messages alleging to be from him shortly before his death are shared among white South African racists on Facebook as "inspirational" posts, encouraging them to stand up against their imagined oppression at the hands of the ANC.

Wrestling has long played with nationalist tropes, from the jingoistic stars and stripes flag-waving of All-American babyfaces, ramped up to disturbing levels in the years immediately post-9/11, to Japan's Rikidozan standing as a symbol of strength and hope in the aftermath of devastating loss, but few have been so disturbingly tied in with the worst excesses of the racial, nationalist project of their country as Johannes Van Der Walt.

Wrestling history is replete with abhorrent, criminal, and often unforgivably awful people, but few whose actions have cast such a long and horrific shadow. 

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