I know and quite worked out Harry did it.
He would be put into a very large milk can full of water, and the top would be secured and it would be changed put around it, and the crowd will be told, try and hold your breath and see if you can hold it for as long as your dani.
I'm Jen Kelly from the Herald Son and this is In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Welcome back to part two of the story of Harry Houdini and the final episode of the In Black and White podcast. Make sure you listen to part one first. We'll have some special thank you messages at the end of this episode. We're speaking again with Andrew McConville,
reference librarian at State Library Victoria. Now, we talked briefly earlier about the first powered flight, which was also just outside of Melbourne. Tell us about the significance of that and the preparation that Houdini had done for that.
He decided that he was going to be I mean, flight was obviously a brand new thing. So you know, the Right brothers had only just made their fights not many years before, and so he decided that he would get onto this brand new phenomenon of flying. So he had learned how to fly. I think in Germany he had someone who taught him how to fly.
He had a mechanic.
He bought a particular aeroplane of whats in aeroplane that he brought to Australia. So that would have been quite an expensive process to bring a plane. And he did that partly because he knew that at that stage there didn't appear to have been any genuine successful flights in Australia, so he wanted to be the first to do that, and he did do that at Digger's Rest on the adenth of March. There were a couple of other claimants
to that. A few days before. In fact, someone in South Australia had claimed to make a fight, although it appears as though they crashed rather than landed, and there was not really much documentation of that. One thing who doing he was very careful of was to ensure that there were a number of witnesses who would sign that
he had made that flight. And so he did do a few flights, not always successful, but he did do one fight that was about three and a half minutes and he traveled about thirty meters, so it doesn't say that big a deal nowadays, but that was in the infancy of flying, so that did become and is considered the first a controlled flight in Australia, and again another
a great amount of publicity for him. I think there's still a plaque at Digger's Rest to commemorate that, and it does stand still despite there being some disputes from other flights a little bit earlier, that this was the first recorded controlled flight and documented controlled flight, so he does hold that record, and again, you know, it's a great I guess it's partly a publicity thing, but it's
also an enormous daredevil thing to be flying. I mean, he was taught how to fly in Germany, so that was very dangerous and he flying was very dangerous, and yet he took that on.
So I think you're right about.
Him being a bit of a adrenaline junkie, because certainly that was a pretty dangerous practice back in those days.
And there are some photos of this first powered flight in the State Library collection. Can you tell us about those?
Yes, well, they're probably not quite as clear as they might be, but there's still fantastic records of his first flight. Yeah, so it's a photo of a plane actually, and as I say, it looks nothing, looks like a whole lot of boxes put together.
Actually it's a biplane.
You can see it there, just traveling barely above the trees. And there's a horse there as well too, so that kept out away for the landing. And there's about four men sort of standing staring at the flight. So he was always, as I say, very careful to make sure he had reliable witnesses there to ensure that he had it well documented. And it does look like it hasn't got all that far off the ground, which you would
expect it didn't get that far off the ground. But that is a great recording of what was the earliest considered the earliest controlled flight in Australian history.
Now what else did he get up to in Melbourne while he was here, Well, it.
Was mainly just the shows. I mean, he did those challenges where various people would challenge him to you know, their time in not stay clock him in boxes etc.
And he'd be able to get out.
Mainly, as I say, he also did the dive into the Era, which is a big publicity stunt, but mainly he was just appearing at the what was then called the Opera House in his show over quite.
A number of weeks.
I don't think he did anything else particularly remarkable in Melbourne. He was probably pretty busy actually, because he did appear, you know, on stage each night, so that would have been and his performances, even though they were fairly short, they would have been quite demanding really, I mean getting out of a straight check it would be pretty physically demanding and tiring, so he would have been pretty tired even after a fairly short show.
I think now the Melbourne Opera House. But where was that and how many seats were in that venue?
Well, I think there was a few thousand seats in the venue. I think it existed from the nineteenth century, but there was a few different opera houses because they were burned out at times, and then it became thea Tivoli Theater, so it it was a very popular place. I think it held several thousand people, so it was
a big venue. So it was a big venue that would have been filled for Hudini and the tickets for who Deani were you know anywhere from depending on where you were three shillings or two shillings or one shilling, and there was a premium if you booked your tickets beforehand, and there was general admission tickets where you could get there earlier. So yeah, so it was in Burke Street, and as I say, it was a very beautiful building, but at various times it did get rebuilt. But it
did hold quite a number of people. I think it was several thousand people could fit into the theater, so you would have had big crowds every night, okay.
And then from there he's headed straight up to Sydney.
He has He's headed up to Sydney and done very similar to what he did in Melbourne. I mean, doing that the shows, taking on the various challenges that the public put before him.
He did do a dive.
He was actually scared of the ocean. So he was never that keen in diving into the ocean.
How fascinating. He shouldn't be scared of anything. He's Houdini.
Well, the other thing was that he was a terrible sailor.
He got dreadfully seasick, and so you know, even coming to Australia would have won a great ordeal for him to come that far and in fact, once he got to Adelaide, he caught a train, so yeah, but he he was a terrible sailor and he did sort of say to the first reporter we spoke to that he wouldn't dive into the water at Framel because he was scared of sharks, and he did dive in Sydney.
He dived into the.
Domain Bars at the edge of Wormlou Bay, so didn't dive into the ocean. He dived into the into a bar's there, which I and I think the main thing was that he wanted murky water because he didn't want to see anybody. He didn't wan anybody to see what he was doing, so he certainly would have had plenty of murky water in the era. I think that Domain
Mars were likely just sort of a big dive. They weren't actually proper swimming pool as such, so he'd go down very deep and then he just appeared with his handcuffs. So he did pretty much the same thing. He did do some flights in Sydney, but he'd obviously obviously done the first fight in Australia, and he did take on
challenges from the public and he was very successful there. Again, I mean I think the other trick that he did do none of the first night in Melbourne, but that he did do in Australia, which was one of his famous ones, which was the milk called the milk can trick, which was all the milkcam mystery. But that was there was something quite a bizarre story to that in that when he arrived he complained that, according to his words, a Sydney pugilist had stolen his milk can trick. And
that turned out not just to be any boxer. It turned out to be the very famous Canadian world champion Tommy Burns, who'd been in Australia in the Seminine hundred
and eight. He'd been in one of the huge fights of the century against the African American fighter Jack Johnson, and Tommy Burns got badly beaten, but it was a huge sporting event and Tommy Burns stayed on and then had this sort of odd stage show where he would talk about his fights and his brother in law would do this milk can trick and who done was very
annoyed at that, but he did do it himself. And I mean that was again a trick that no one quite worked out how he did it, he would be put into a very large milk can full of water, and the top would be secured and there would be chains put around it, and there would just be a screen put across the front, and the crowd will be told that, you know, try and hold your breath and see if you can hold it for as long as your janey, and then who Doney when people were wondering
whether he drowned, Who Daney would appear dripping wet, and you know, I think there were some tricks to that as well. Apparently the rivets in the top of the milk can were false, and if he pushed it in a certain way he would get out. But still I think that would be many people's worst nightmare to be enclosed in a body of water like that with a lid put on, and then to be able to get out of that. So again, that was a very dramatic trick that he did for quite a few years afterwards.
But I mean one of the things he did that was quite interesting too. Because often he was so famous, people were always trying to steal his tricks. He didn't want to patent them because that would involve giving details of exactly how they were done.
You know, have to patent every part of the apparatus.
So instead of that, he would sometimes hold performances for a single person and that would be he would say, that would copyright the trick because he'd done a public the first public performance of it.
So that was one way he had of protecting his tricks.
But yes, he was very annoyed at Tommy Burns for stealing his milkcan trick and climbing it as his own.
We'll be back soon to hear what happened to hu Deini next, So stay with us, So tell us what happened after his Australian tour.
Well, he continued to greater and greater fame. He continued to tour in the United States and tour in Europe. He was very popular in Europe and he did bigger and bigger tricks. He's one of his most famous tricks was in nineteen eighteen he at the Hippodrome in New York. He had a very di soile elephant who's variously known as Jenny or Fanny, but the name possibly lost their history.
But he had a huge box on stage and the elephant was led into that and he made the elephant disappear, and I think people, I mean other people had done similar tricks. I think he purchased it from somebody, the trick from somebody who'd made a donkey disappear, but he went bigger and better. There's still discussion about how he actually did that, whether it was mirrors or some sort
of false side. That must have made a pretty big false side to hide an elephant, But anyway, he managed to do that trick once on stage and make an elephant disappear, which again created great interest in his performances. But later on in life, like by the nine and twenties, he did become very skeptical with spiritualism, and that became a bit of a campaign of his up until his death. I mean, in his early career he had tried many things, card tricks, all sorts of tricks, and for a while
he and his wife were promoting themselves as spiritualists. That was, you know, they had various tricks to do that. She was he was Professor Houdini and she was the psychometric Madam. And some of the tricks they'd used would be they might have codes so that if she took a dollar bill and was one side of the stage, and he had to guess what the serial number was. They'd have
bland words that would need numbers. So if she said something like, you know, tell me the number, tell my maan one and then it might be have you guessed at guests might man two? So he do go through his whole performance. And they did that for a short time, and they thought it was a bit of a ark.
But HERDONI was particularly attached to his mother, enormously attached to his mother, and he was absolutely distressed when she died, and after that he began to see spiritualism as a fairly mean trick, and particularly after the First World War when spiritualism became huge because so many people were trying to connect with.
Dead sons and brothers and loved ones.
And he sort of spoke about how when he was young, he didn't understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the bineful results which inevitably followed.
To me, it was a lark.
And then he talks about how he realizes that he feels quite guilty about being so frivolous about that, because it is all a trick and it does give people false hope when you shouldn't be doing that, And so he did go on to say gladly, I would embrace spiritualism if it could prove its claims, but I'm not willing to be deluded by the fraudulent impositions of so called psychics or accepted sacred reality any evidence that has
been placed before me thus far. And it was around about this time, a little bit before that, he became a great friend of Conan Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Shelock Holmes, and Conan Doyle was a great believer in spiritualism, and so that sort of placed a
little bit of a challenge to their friendship. And there was also an occasion where he went to a sort of quasi seance with Conan Doyle, and Conan Doyle's wife supposedly did automatic writings, so she was getting messages from beyond the grave, and she supposedly was right from Harry Hoo Doney's mother, and that was a very sensitive thing for Harry who Doney, and he was pretty offended by that because it was clearly false, and that really put
a great challenge to their friendship, and their friendship.
Was never as warm again, and he did.
Spend a lot of time unmasking what he considered to be Charlotte and Spiritualism and to expose their tricks. And so that was something that he wrote a book about, actually, and he assumed the spiritualists quite a bit in later in life. And part of it was, as I say, that he was I think offended by this idea that
it could connect with people who had already died. Although ironically he made an agreement with his wife that when one of them died, the other would attempt to hold a salance each year to connect and that would give of them a proof that it either didn't work or did work. And Beatrice did do that for ten years after who Doney died but didn't make connection. So after ten years decided that that would be the last annual saliance she would hold.
The other thing that you mentioned briefly before is his film career that it wasn't very successful. Tell us about that, well, it was sort of.
I think he was a natural for film companies to come to get him such a big star, such a big name. He wasn't the world's greatest actor, I don't think so. His performances were apparently very wooden, but he did do quite a number of films over about a ten or fifteen years period. The first ones were fairly successful, but as film became more sophisticated, it became a bit more obvious that with film you could pretty much do any trick you wanted to. You could make anybody do
anything just with the tricks of film. So his great escapes didn't see him as real because they weren't in person, because you know, a lot of people could perform an escape like that if you are cutting the film here there, and you didn't no one was checking the particular apparatus, etc. He did also fund some of his own films later on, and they weren't successful, so he did actually waste a fair bit of money doing that. But you can see some of his films on YouTube and they're pretty wonky
old films. And he's probably he's not a natural actor, really, and I guess that's one of the things he wasn't. He didn't have that natural acting ability that a lot of stage magicians have. He was more doing death deifying things, so he was often very serious on stage, and he wasn't sort of doing the sort of the amusing pattern or doing the type of things that you might do
if you're a capable actor. So I don't think his film career ended very well, and I think he lost quite a bit of money by pursuing it with his own money later on in the nine and twenties.
What was his personality like then? Was he quite serious?
It's interesting.
I mean, I think he obviously was a child of great poverty and missed out on a lot in childhood. He was very divided to his mother. He could hold a grudge though, I mean quite remarkably, having modeled himself on Robert Hudan and being so enamored with him. Some years later he wrote a book supposedly debunking you know, the tricks of Robert who Dan, And that was apparently because, I mean, Robert hoo Dan had died in eighteen seventy one,
so when done he was famous. He went to France and he contacted various family members because he wanted to put flowers on the grave, and they basically said, well, anybody can go and put flowers on the grave, and they didn't make a great fuss of him, so he did seem to bear a grudge against them. And that was one of the things was he did tend to bear a bit of a grudge against some other magicians.
His youngest brother, Leonard, he bore a grudge against him, to the point where some of the family photos had Lenard airbrushed out of it. He and his wife weren't party two who done his will. So he could be pretty tough like that, and perhaps a little bit temperamental. But for a performer, that's not unusual. Particularly, you know, you would be very highly strung before a dangerous performance.
Things have to work really well. But he did have a loyal crew with him, so he and his wife did never have children, but they remained married for the term of his life. Having married it, you know, she was aiding and he was only twenty and they spent a lot of time on the road, so they would have had a tough life at various times. He was an interesting character. I think, yeah, probably very much a product of his childhood.
So you mentioned earlier on that Hudini only took on tricks and challenges that he felt that he could do. Did he ever have any failures or disasters or major injuries.
I think he had injuries, and he would continue on. And that's one of the things, isn't it. I mean, you've got to continue on.
The show must go on.
So and with such a physical show as his, he would have had injuries.
I mean, I think he's getting out of straight jackets.
You know, there was I'm not sure if he was ever proven, but there was a theory that he could dislocate his shoulders. But you know, if you do those sort of things, and I think if you look at later photos of him, he understandably he looks older because he years older, but he obviously isn't the same physical specimen as he was, and obviously some of those tricks would have been much more demanding as he moved into
his forties or later. The main problem that he had with any of those challenges was this one in nineteen hundred and four when he did have a blacksmith had spent years making these impossible to escape handcuffs and who and he possibly hadn't looked at them closely enough before he accepted the challenge, and that did take him an hour and a half really to get out of those handcuffs, and when he came out, he was very he was very disturbed, and his hands were all bloody, So I
think after that he made sure that he checked the various conditions of the challenges in order to ensure that he.
Would be able to get out.
And look, it's hard to know whether perhaps he had a little bit of help behind the screen from some of his assistants, but they were fairly genuine and genuinely he was pretty good at getting out of things. But I would imagine that as time went on he would have taken on less of those challenges. They were really something that he did as a younger man when he was becoming famous, and so they really enhanced his fame.
But I'm sure he did carry various injuries through him, and of course when he died that was partly caused by the fact that he didn't get attention for what was clearly appendicitis and went on and performed and by the time they removed his appendix it was too late.
So how old was he when he was fifty two?
And I mean there was a story that he put on a show and he always used to be very proud of his physique, even as a man in his fifties, And a young student came in and said, oh, you know, can you take a punch, and he said, of course he could, and the student then punched him, you know, three or four times, really hard without who Doney been embraced for it. So there is one theory that perhaps that caused the appendicitis, although genuinely it's considered that that
wouldn't cause the appendicitis. But he did have to be pains after that, and he was diagnosed by a doctor that should go straight to a hospital, but he had a big show that night, so he didn't end up getting to the hospital for a couple of days. And by that stage the appendix a burst and while they were removed, he did die of that. So it was a fairly tragic end. And if he'd only had the treatment when he was advised to, he quite possibly would have lived on and.
Andrew, I believe that you've got a review of his first stage show here in Melbourne. Can you tell us about that?
Absolutely? Yes, see the Argust gave quite a lengthy review.
So the first start shows I think on the about the ninth of February nine hundred and ten at the Opera House, so a big you know, several thousand people there. What they did say is that he was built as a handcuff king, although not so much in Australia. In Australia he tended to be built as a great mystery arch and they talked about the most undoubtedly the greatest and most sensational act that had ever been engaged for Australia by any manager. But he had been personally known
as the handcuff king. But they do remark that there wasn't one solitary handcuff in sight. They do then go on to describe the show, and they talk about him taking eleven minutes of wrenching with the strait jacket to get out to get sufficient play, and they talk about how he had invited a gentleman from the audience to come up and time in knots, and.
He got out of those very easily.
But one of the things I do say is that the audience was warmly inclined, but seemed to think that an encore trick should have been added. Had Whodini's shown them some simple handcuff trick, they would no doubt have been satisfied. The turn is an excellent one and should
draw full houses. So that was the first show, and it might have been a little bit shorter than the later shows because later on, of course, he was asking for people to come up with tricks that might misterfin him and mystify the audience, and so that would have extended the shows. So he had tricks as a say, like being secured in a box by carpenters but secured by ropes by sailors. You know, we're using sailor knots. He did have some absurd things suggested to him that,
of course he didn't do. Somebody wrote in and suggested that he should put a gun in his mouth and fire the bullet and then somehow escape.
So quite clearly he wasn't going to do that.
But I think his shows were probably more extended as he went on with the Australian tour, as he took on some of these quite interesting challenges that were thrown at him.
As I say, later in life.
His shows went for much longer as he went back to incorporating magic tricks and card tricks. But in this show in Melbourne he had quite a few people who were supporting him. There is the Australian Datos, who I think were sort of an acrobatic trick, and the will Brothers who were apparently the most sensational acrobatic act in the world, and they had Fred Curran, the quaint comedian, who was an English comedian who was in Australia, so he.
Had a number of other performers supporting him.
So even though he was only on stage for twenty minutes or so, it would have been a performance that went for, you know, well over an hour. I would think possibly two hours, and.
I suppose just to finish it off. I guess when you consider that today's kids know the name Hudini, and he's so famous among today's children, and when you realize that the word Hudini is just used as a word, you know, as in he's done a Houdini. Yeah, we can be pretty confident that in another fifty years or one hundred years he's still going to be just as famous as he is today.
I think. So.
I think his words in his names in the dictionary now. So I think it's just you know, you could look up any paper. I mean, I did a thing on one of our databases that has papers small over the world, but there are for the last three or six months or so, and there was like fifty thousand hits for the word who DONI, and a lot of them are to do with somebody you know, might be a prisoner escaping. It might be somebody escaping from a fire or something like that. Often it's to do with a great comeback
in football. There's often sporting references to it where someone, I mean, I think the Matilda's today actually came back from three goals to kneel down to win four to three in the Olympics. And I suspect that there will be who DONI mentioned in some of the reports of that that they've done a who DONI act to escape from such a perilous situation.
Yeah, thank you so much for sharing the story of who Deni with us today and particularly who Deanie's time in Australia and those incredible, those incredible feats in Melbourne. Thanks for sharing your time with us today as well, Andrew.
Thanks very much.
Jen, it's been a lot of fun and he was certainly a really fascinating character.
Thanks for listening to the very last episode of In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly. While it's sad to say goodbye, it's been a huge privilege to host this podcast for the past five years and almost two hundred and eighty episodes. We feel immensely proud to have been able to bring to life hidden stories from Australia's past.
A few thank yous now to the podcast's producer, John ty Burton, who has guided it from day one with his loving care and endless wisdom. To my great friend and former colleague Alissa Hunt for the original idea which was only ever supposed to be a four episode mini
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