In September 1904 Houdini drew a huge crowd at the Glasgow Zoo. To publicise his engagement at the local Hippodrome (it seems like every big city had to have a Hippodrome back then), he arranged to be nailed into a specially built box — and was out in 15 minutes. Five years later, during Houdini’s stint at the Glasgow Coliseum, local engineers revived a 17th-century metal-cage device in which criminals were cruelly suspended until they were dead. Again, the magician swiftly regained his freedom.
But the greatest drama that Houdini encountered in Scotland was in Aberdeen harbour, where on July 1, 1909, a large crowd braved a northeaster gale to see him chained and handcuffed and thrown into the sea. This episode opens Ruth Brandon’s biography in gripping style.
Because of the storm, the police were ready to stop him, yet only after he had personally viewed the treacherous waves, into which no rescue boats would venture, could he be convinced to instead perform his stunt within the breakwater. He was duly shackled and dove from the bridge of the same tugboat that had taken him into the maw of the gale, and though the harbour was churning even behind the protective barrier, he resurfaced unscathed. His shows that week at the Palace Theatre were, needless to say, packed.
That same year Houdini leapt chained into the River Tay in Dundee and the Mersey in Liverpool, and into the sea in Plymouth and Southampton. The bridge jumps hold my imagination more than any other Houdini stunt, even though I know he made sure he was perfectly safe every time. Or at least as safe as possible. No sooner was he submerged than the shackles were off — he’d done his preparations — and he usually only had to cope with a slight current while biding his time, a few suspenseful minutes longer, before resurfacing.
But the spectacle itself is fascinating, with all eyes in the crowd focused on the lone figure at the lip of the bridge abutment, seemingly encumbered in pain. He leapt into rivers and harbours where only suicides usually leapt. This wasn’t the diving board at the YMCA. The water was murky and clotted with who knew what filth and poisons, and yet Houdini was ready to enter the vortex, to venture boldly, perhaps foolishly, behind death’s dark curtain.
Every single moment he was underwater, out of sight, tens of thousands of people were wondering what he was seeing, and, having seen what’s on the other side, could any man come back?
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EDINBURGH
Houdini is better remembered in Edinburgh than many of the cities he visited, not least for the time he gave shoes to all the poor kids. On his arrival he was struck by the number of waifs walking around barefoot in chilly weather. A long-time benefactor to orphans, he announced a special show for the Scottish youngsters and doled out 300 pairs of boots, the members of his troupe helping with the fittings. This wasn’t nearly enough footwear for the mob on hand so, according to Harold Kellock’s biography, Houdini trotted the rest en masse to the nearest cobbler shop and had more shoes made to order.
Edinburgh is also, of course, the primary setting for the 2007 movie “Death Defying Acts”, in which Guy Pearce portrays Houdini, though the script is fiction.
Harry had strings of sell-out appearances at the Empire Palace (now the Festival Theatre) and the Gaiety Theatre in Leith (pictured above) from 1905 through 1920. The Scotsman newspaper has online several of the 1905 advertisements it published for the Gaiety in July 1905, along with this photo, which it says was used to promote the Adam Currie challenge that has become one of the immortal footnotes in Harry’s career.
The account is unclear, however about whether this took place in 1910 or 1914. In 1914 Harry was in Edinburgh for his 40th birthday, though in little mood to celebrate due to the recent death of his mother. A week later, perhaps still in the city, he introduced an all-new show called “The Magical Revue”, the first proper program he’d ever done along the lines of traditional illusionist stagecraft. It enabled Bess to rejoin the act after an absence of several years from the stage, and gave Houdini a break from his most strenuous stunts.
Adam Currie was a local building contractor whose employees constructed a strongbox right onstage at the Empire while the audience watched. Houdini climbed inside, the lid was nailed in place and the box bound in ropes. The box was then placed behind a canvas screen and, as the Scotsman had it, “It was almost 12 minutes before the drapery in front of the pavilion was swept aside and Houdini appeared, showing the box apparently intact and in the same condition as before he entered it. He said jocularly, the only difference was that whereas before he was inside, now he was outside.”
The Google Earth image below shows the modern shopping centre that occupies the former site of the Gaiety Theatre, in what was called the Kirkgate, a narrow street at the Foot of Leith Walk. It was a Presbyterian Church until 1886, then a music hall that burned down, then the Princess Theatre until 1899, and finally the New Gaiety Theatre. The Gaiety carried on with both cinema and live variety until it closed in 1956.
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Across town on Nicolson Street was the even grander, 3,000-seat Empire Palace, built in 1892 by Edward Moss, the first theatre in what would become the Moss Empires chain that spanned Great Britain. Since 1830 the site had been home to Dunedin Hall, the Royal Amphitheatre, the Alhambra Music Hall, the Queen’s Theatre and Newsome’s Circus. It played host to Anna Pavlova and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Houdini and another magician celebrated for his showmanship, the Great Lafayette.
Lafayette, born Sigmund Neuberger in Munich in 1872, came from another family of Europeans emigres to America, and he too had done well in vaudeville, beginning with a bow-and-arrow act. Then Neuberger caught one of Ching Ling Foo’s “Chinese magic” shows — he breathed fire and smoke and materialised a small child from a bowl of water — and Sigmund decided to become an illusionist too.
He made his debut as the Great Lafayette in London in 1900 and was soon the highest-paid performer in the land, commanding an astounding £40,000 a year.
He cultivated an aura of mysterious eccentricity, though, never marrying but deeply devoted to the crossbreed terrier that Houdini had given him. Beauty had her own room at Lafayette’s London home, where a sign advised visitors, “You may drink my wine, you may eat my food, but you must respect my dog.” When they were on the road, the hood ornament of Lafayette’s limousine was a likeness of the dog, and Beauty had her own quarters in his private Pullman railway car, complete with a miniature bath and sofa laid out with velvet cushions.
It was in this coach that they journeyed to Edinburgh on April 30, 1911 (Beauty in a diamond-studded gold collar), before moving into the best suite at the Caledonian Hotel ahead of Lafayette’s two-week headlining stint at the Empire. Master and pet both enjoyed one of their customary five-course meals, but Beauty, as it turned out, had had too much. She died the next day, overstuffed and apoplexic, just as Lafayette was about to begin his engagement.
He first laid the dog laid out in the Caledonian suite on a silk pillow surrounded by lilies, then had her embalmed and sought permission to have her interred at Edinburgh’s Piershill Cemetery. This was granted on the understanding that he would be buried in the same plot.
Though grieving, Lafayette got on with the show. On May 9 at about 11pm he was surrounded by oriental tapestries, cushions, tents and curtains for his Arabian Nights-style finale, “The Lion’s Bride”.
The audience at his second performance of the evening had already seen him shake dozens of birds and even a goat from a sequined cloth. In the finale, an actual lion in a cage watched the fire-eaters, jugglers and contortionists who helped make Lafayette’s shows such spectacles. Then a young woman in Middle Eastern garb walked onstage and entered the cage. Just as the lion was about to pounce, its hide fell away and there stood the Great Lafayette, once again demonstrating why he was renowned as one of the best quick-change artists in the business.
He bowed to thunderous
applause, but just then a stage lamp ignited a drape and the flames quickly covered the breadth of the stage. The audience only cottoned on to what was happening when the fire curtain dropped down and the band struck up the national anthem, but all the spectators evacuated safely.
However Lafayette was killed, still with 10 years’ worth of bookings ahead of him. Some witnesses said he’d actually made it outside the theatre, but then went back in to try and rescue the black stallion that was also part of his act.
Ten others were killed backstage. Joseph Coates, just 13, and Alice Dale, 15, were midget performers from Sheffield. James Edward Baines, Walter Scott and John Whelan were members of the orchestra. The trumpeter Charles Richards was never found and it was assumed he’d been incinerated beyond trace. Alexander Ross and James Watt were stagehands. The accounts I’ve seen don’t name the other two deceased, but they seem to have been the two doubles on whom Lafayette relied for his quick-change effects.
The fire took three hours to extinguish and the search through the rubble lasted days. When the charred remains of a man in Lafayette’s costume were found near the stage, along with those of a horse and a lion, it was natually assumed that this was the magician. But, arriving from London, Lafayette’s manager Sir Samuel Lloyd and his solicitor, Albert Nisbet, pointed out that this corpse had none of the flashy rings that Lafayette always wore. This was clearly one of the doubles.
A full three days passed before Lafayette’s body was discovered, wearing the rings and still in his “Lion’s Bride” sultan’s costume.
In the meantime, says a curious account on the website of the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, which now occupies the site of the Empire, the double’s remains were buried in the grave that Lafayette had only days earlier purchased at Piershill Cemetery. This may or may not be true, something that is needless to say about the same website’s claim that some people believing Lafayette’s ghost still haunts the Festival Theatre auditorium and Scottish Power Gallery.
At any rate, on May 14 the streets were crowded with spectators watching Lafayette’s ashes carried in procession from a Morrison Street funeral parlour to the cemetery. Riding in the lead car — the magician’s own Mercedes — was another of his dogs, Mabel, a Dalmatian, wearing a black bow. Four Belgian horses drew the coach bearing Lafayette’s urn.
Jewish rites had been planned at Piershill, but the local rabbi declined because of Beauty having been interred in holy ground, so a Protestant reverend conducted the service at the grave, just inside the cemetery’s Portobello Road entrance, shown below. Beauty’s casket was opened and Lafayette’s ashes placed between her paws. The Scotsman took note of a large wreath of white flowers bearing the words “The Last Act”. This may have been the arrangement Houdini sent, described elsewhere as “a floral representation of Beauty”.
The new Empire opened in 1928 and until 1963 offered variety and opera, with stars including Charles Laughton, Fats Waller, Laurel and Hardy, Roy Rogers, Margot Fonteyn, Gracie Fields, Judy Garland and Sophie Tucker. Then, until 1991, the Empire was a bingo hall with only occasional live theatre, and finally in 1994 it was completely revamped to become the 1,900-seat Edinburgh Festival Theatre (satellite image below), home to the Scottish Opera and Ballet and the heart of the Edinburgh International Festival.
For further reading about the Great Lafayette, see Chris Hobbs’ website, which focuses on the tragic Sheffield aspect the story, and in turn borrows from the rather oddball account at TimeGun.org. William Burroughs has a memoir of his great-grandfather James Baines, one of the musicians who died in the fire.
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GLASGOW
Above, a satellite shot of Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, where the Hippodrome once stood. That was where Houdini began his second British tour, on September 5, 1904. On the 7th the famous local saddlers Leckie, Graham & Co challenged him to try and get out of the straitjacket they’d just made for private insane asylum.
The manager obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with — or knew him too well: “If you are afraid to try this in public, will you try it privately?” he asked Harry. The gauntlet was down, and swiftly picked up again. But the harness makers had done their job well, and they spent another 15 minutes lashing Houdini into the rig. It took him 55 minutes to get loose.
The Sauchiehall Hippodrome began life in 1892 as a diorama, turned into an ice-skating palace, hosted Glasgow’s first cinema show and then in 1902 was home to a circus. Fierce competition for patrons came from the new Scottish Zoo, the Glasgow Hippodrome just built in nearby Cowcaddens, and the well-established Hengler circus that was touring Britain. But the Sauchichall theatre had a vast circus ring that was converted in a minute into a tank holding 100,000 gallons of water, with the performing platform raised and lowered into the tank by hydraulics. It was a fantastic spectacle, and that was even before the show had begun.
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AIRDRIE
When Houdini played the Hippodrome on Hall Craig Street in Airdrie, Scotland, in 1913, thousands of people were unable to get tickets, so he put on an extra show for free out front. A crowd of 7,000 watched him being chained and handcuffed by the local police sergeant on the front steps of the theatre. Officials tried keeping him in “a variety of sacks and crates” too, but he kept getting loose.
Finally the Water Torture Chamber was wheeled into sight and the fire brigade filled it up. Harry had little problem escaping from that as well, naturally, but no one in the throng was complaining.
Opened in 1908, the Hippodrome occupied what had been a corn exchange and market built in 1856. The building remains in use to this day — as an amusement arcade and bingo hall.
Gilbert’s ghost, naturally, is haunting the place, occasionally popping a light bulb on the upper balcony “as a warning that something is about to go wrong”, according to one of the staff members.
