The New Demon Telegraph

Issue number 3 - October, 2024

Here’s a story that’s come down the generations in my family, one of a few no doubt yet to come in these musings.  

My great grandfather, Lewis Davenport, was performing his act at a British music hall as he did twice daily, 6 days a week. It was a Monday evening, the first house of this particular week’s run at a theatre.  

He came to perform the “Vanishing Wand” trick, which he achieved by using a servante hanging on the back of a chair. A peculiar stillness fell over the audience when he crumpled up the paper to show that the wand had “disappeared”, quite unnerving for any performer to get absolutely no reaction to a reliable applause-getter.  

Lewis had a chat to the stage manager between the houses. The SM explained that it wasn’t anything to do with Lewis, but a comic had done exactly the same trick in the previous week and he had turned the chair around to get a laugh from the exposure.  Rather than cut the trick, Lewis beavered away to come up with a completely new method for the vanishing wand in time for the second house.

He presented the trick exactly the same way, including having the chair at his side.  However, he was able to turn the chair around after the vanish and received double his normal applause, after suckering the audience. He went on to manufacture the trick, initially making batches of the trick himself during the day and sending them to his mother in London who was then able to send them out to customers.

Will Goldston, in his lovely set of 43 instruction cards, which accompanied his first locked book, "Exclusive Magical Secrets", not only included a new version of Lewis’s method for the vanishing wand but also the Davenport “Two in One” version of the mutilated sunshade.  Lewis Davenport subsequently purchased the Will Goldston company, including his remaining stock of these instruction cards. What’s interesting to me is to find that my great grandfather discarded all but one of the Goldston “Mutilated Sunshade” instruction cards but kept the small stock of “Vanishing Wand” instructions.    

I thoroughly enjoyed putting together a few sets of 35 of these "Goldston Special Instruction Cards" to offer you in my latest release, including Lewis's version of the “Vanishing Wand”, as well as a couple of sets of numbered Goldston’s “Magical Scraps” instruction sheets from 1916.

I’m interested to see if there are many of you as interested in these Goldston instruction sheets as I am.  If so, I’ll keep an eye out for any more I come across in the warehouse for future release and inevitably the trigger for another story for you!

As an additional note; I wondered if Lewis's vanishing wand was the germ for Norm Nielsen's idea for a range of vanishing bottles, so one day I asked him. He didn’t reply but just smiled at me. God bless you Norm, wherever you are now!

Roy Davenport