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Tuesday 2 December 2008

What has sawing a lady in half to do with global warming?

At this time of year, exactly 70 years ago, I was taken to my first exhibition of professional conjuring.

From its earliest phases, professional conjuring was an overwhelmingly male-dominated trade. Even when women appeared in the act, which they did from the late 18th century, they were merely assistants. The conjuror was male, his controlling upper-class status emphasised by white tie and tails, while the woman was young, pretty, docile and dumb, wearing tights and spangles. Or she was the passive victim of the masterful magus, being made to levitate horizontally or disappear. In December 1921 P.T. Selbit, in an almost empty St George’s Hall in London, produced the most famous illusion of all. He put a lady in evening dress in an upright wooden box with ropes tied round her neck, wrists and ankles. The box was shut and padlocked, then placed horizontally on a trestle table, two feet off the stage. An enormous two-handed saw of a type used by loggers was then used by Selbit and a male assistant to cut right through the box, apparently sawing the woman in half. Sometimes blood was used, sometimes not. The trick ended with the woman sitting up in one piece. Sawing a woman in two was imitated all over the world and by virtually all conjurors with variations. Horace Goldin, for instance, used to park an ambulance outside the hall, and inside it he had white-coated doctors and nurses, plus stretchers, in attendance.

This male dominance, sometimes sado-masochistic in appearance, continues. It is true that there are now some women conjurors, and that since 1991 the Magic Circle, which for the first 86 years of its existence had been all-male, has admitted women as members. But the real reason women have not figured largely on the conjuring scene is that they became spiritualists instead. Spiritualism is usually dated from 1848 when the Fox sisters, Margaret (8) and Kate (6), directed by their older sister Leah, began to produce rappings which, it later emerged, were made by clicking their toe-joints. The movement took off in the 1850s, thanks to P.T. Barnum and other showmen. The great majority of successful mediums have always been women.

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