RETURNING NOW to more serious subjects, I was at this time struggling hard to get a place in the sun. My other public performances were given at the Old Albert Palace, under the managership of Bill Holland, where I experienced the heartbreaking work of a side-show. I learned the chief difficulty was not in giving the show, but in attracting the people to come and see it. However, Bill Holland saw me perform, and one day promoted me to the big central stage, where I made quite a success. This was my first experience on a real, large stage.

It did not last long, as I was only deputizing for a friend of mine--H. G. Clarence, a Society entertainer, to whom the side-show belonged, and he returned soon after I commenced performing on the big stage.

My next performance was in Watson's Freak Museum, which stood in Oxford Street on the site now occupied by Frascati's Restaurant. There were all sorts of freaks arranged around the hall, with a stage at one end for variety performances. Admission to all parts was 6d.

I soon got tired of this and made frantic efforts to get on the halls. I remember giving a trial show at the Paragon, Mile End Road, a huge theatre, and, as far as I could judge from the demonstration of the audience, it was absolutely successful. The manager, however, turned me down because I looked too young.

Soon after this a show came to London and opened at the Langham Hall, which was on the site of the present Queen's Hall, next to St. George's. This show was known as "The Royal American Midgets", and consisted of two miniature persons called General and Mrs. Mite. I happened to know the gentleman who was engaged as their lecturer, a musical entertainer named Ernest Walcot, and it was his duty to give a short lecture on the habits and lives of these little people, thus introducing them to the audience, who were seated round the platform, which extended down the centre of the hall.

General and Mrs. Mite, the American midgets

The Midgets were brought in in a miniature carriage and pair, and paraded up and down this platform, the lecturer following them and answering questions and protecting them from over-attention on the part of the audience. They chatted and gave recitations and waltzed and rode cycles and did a lot of everyday things thus about two hours were filled up. But the Midgets had gone out of fashion since their previous successful visit, and the performance did not draw in London. A provincial tour was therefore arranged, and, as my friend the lecturer did not wish to leave London, he kindly introduced me to the manager as a possible substitute.

At first the manager laughed at the idea of such a youth as myself lecturing on these little people. My friend eventually persuaded him at least to let me come one night and try my conjuring on the audience. I went down to Langharn Hall and gave a twenty-minutes' performance, after which I was promptly engaged at the munificent salary of £2 per week. In return for this I was to lecture and conjure for two hours, twice daily. This engagement lasted two years, and at the end of it the management owed me £13--an unlucky number for me, as I saw it no more.

The experience gained during this tour made a real performer of me; it was similar to an actor going into a stock company. During the time I was with the Midgets I learned, for instance, the great difference between audiences in different towns, and how an item that would elicit roars of laughter in London would be received in cold silence in Burnley. I learnt to judge an audience and create, as far as possible, the right atmosphere to suit each.

The music for the show was provided by a brilliant young pianist named Brakespeare-Smith, and it was he who first suggested arranging suitable music to accompany my conjuring. I soon realized the vast improvement this made and what an important factor it is in arranging magical performances. When Mr. Smith left the show three months later I had the music for all the tricks I was doing neatly arranged in a book with the numbers corresponding with the items, and proper cues set forth to enable any pianist to play my accompaniment. Ever after this I always took a pianist with me when I was engaged to attend private parties where there was no professional pianist present. In producing a new act, too, I always paid great attention to the music. "Let magic charm the eye whilst music charms the ear" was my slogan.

The Midget tour was like winter sport, all ups and downs. It opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre at Blackpool, our first performances beginning at eleven in the morning, and the next at three in the afternoon. The seats on the floor of the auditorium had to be removed so that we could set up a long platform. These stalls were replaced each evening for the presentation of a play. A conjurer named Dexter, who was running shows at Lytham, came over and engaged the Midgets to appear there. He came late to see our performance, and so missed my conjuring, and my manager did not tell him I was a magician. When later we played at Lytham he was quite surprised to find I was so young.

Our next stop, if I remember rightly, was at Worcester. This big jump from Blackpool to the Midlands was caused by hasty and bad booking; I took the hint and remembered it in after years. It is a great mistake to imagine one can get a show together and book it right away; a tour should be arranged at least six months ahead. I soon discovered, too, that it is useless trying to run a show without adequate capital; a show, after all, is a business, and out to make a profit. I began to see that the adjuncts, such as bookkeeping, advertising, and general business management, were of the utmost importance to a successful conjurer's career.

There were no programmes with our show. I was not announced as a conjurer at all--in fact I was put in the invidious position of having to apologize for my conjuring at each performance. I was forced to announce that the little people required a short rest, and I would try and fill up the interval with some magic. This surprise item was not always received too well, some people seeming to resent conjuring being forced upon them in this way. Thus at each performance I had to fight for the goodwill of the audience.

At Reynolds's Waxworks in Liverpool (now a picture-palace), I met an amusing conjurer named Professor Devono, who did several good tricks on the little stage there. One of them was producing a large cat from the utensil that conjurers know as the "dove pan". He told me that he used to produce the customary two doves, but one night the lodging-house cat devoured the doves, so he commandeered the cat and produced the cat with the doves inside it, and he had used the cat ever since.

For a time Devono and I gave shows alternately on the programme, with a mutual understanding that in the arranging of our programmes we never clashed. It was at Reynolds's Waxworks that Julian Wylie first saw me. I was then, besides my other duties, giving a humorous lecture on a small mechanical panorama called the "Il Mondo Minatura". At this theatre the show was almost continuous, and the work was very hard. However, I was making friends all along the line, many of whom I have retained to this day, and I have a great deal to thank them for.

It was at Liverpool, too, that I met Fred Scott Mitchell, now a member of the Magic Circle, and still one of my dearest friends. I was producing flags in an experiment, originated by Bautier. These flags were tiny ones, made of tissue paper with bass staves, which I showered amongst the audience. Fred Mitchell noticed this and remarked on the fact that the flags were invariably taken away by the onlookers, and he introduced himself to me by presenting me with a rubber stamp which printed the words "David Devant's Delightful Delusions" on these flags. This also gave me my first ideas of using publicity--another important factor in magic.

Kellar, the great American magician, once said to me, "You must bill magic like a big circus and give them a good show." Advertising must be done very carefully. I remember years afterwards, for a performance in Vienna, having a litho designed with my name in the centre of it, with a border depicting hundreds of little demons, similar to those on the front page of Punch. These little imps were depicted performing all sorts of impossible feats. This large bill was twenty-four sheets, and was posted all over the city. To my surprise, after the first night my business manager reported several complaints having been received from persons who expected to see the little red demons swarming over the stage!

At Huddersfield, during one tour, I met H. B. Lodge, the famous amateur conjurer who exposed Home, the fraudulent spirit medium. He always used to be ready to show pretty little pocket tricks with two dice, which he held with forefinger and thumb. The faces of the dice, instead of being spotted, were each differently coloured they seemed to twinkle between his fingers and change places at his will. Maskelyne told me years afterwards that this friend wrote a glowing report to him of my show. This was the first time Maskelyne had heard of me.

Another dear friend of mine whom I first met on this tour was Sidney Oldridge, now also a member of the Magic Circle, my lifelong friend, and I met him in this wise. The Midgets had booked a hall on the Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, but it appeared that the proprietor had overlooked a single night's booking for a private party at which Mr. Oldridge had been engaged to give a conjuring entertainment. The gentleman who had engaged him asked him to attend, as he proposed to sue the proprietor for damages for breach of agreement. Sidney Oldridge therefore had nothing to do but to sit and watch my show, at the end of which he introduced himself to me as a fellow conjurer, and thus began a delightful friendship.

In the same town I met Edwin Potter, familiarly known as "Little" Potter, and famous for his sleight-of-hand; and Mr. Broadbridge, an amateur who afterwards became well known as Dr. Byrd Page--a very fine conjurer, with a rather brusque manner, which he meant to be funny, but which was often misunderstood.

At Accrington we encountered our first serious trouble when a cheque rendered by the proprietor was dishonoured. We had been giving shows in the smaller towns round Accrington, and one fine night the pianist and myself arrived back at our lodgings about midnight, to be met by a request to pay our bill immediately. As it was Friday, we only had a few coppers between us, and upon explaining this to the landlady the door was shut in our faces and we knew for the first time what it was to be left stranded.

Fortunately for us, our baggage man had a more considerate landlady, who sheltered us for the night. There was no bed, and we had to sleep in chairs. The next day the manager obtained some money from somewhere, released our baggage, and took the Shetland ponies out of pawn, for they had been shut up in a stable for most of the week as hostages for rent due.

We had similar trouble at Bath, but this time no money turned up to save the situation. The manager thereupon departed to London, Midgets, ponies and all, leaving three of the company, including myself, without money to move. I suggested that we give an entertainment, and successfully interviewed the manager of the Assembly Rooms, Mr. Oliver, and obtained permission for us to have the use of the hall for one afternoon. We then got a printer to give us credit for 5,000 handbills, which promised schoolchildren, to whom they were distributed, a grand magical entertainment for one penny, adults 3d., including Gifts from Fairyland.

The Gifts from Fairyland consisted of the flags I have already described. We had a packed house, and as we had no expenses, having done the distribution of the bills ourselves, we made a nice profit, enough, in fact, to pay our bills and get us to town, where we found good news awaiting us.

The news was that our late manager had succeeded in booking a season at Margate at "Sanger's Hall by the Sea". He had wired to us to join him there the following Monday, promising that all would be well thereafter. The pianist and I decided to join them once more; the baggage and advance men declined, and got more lucrative jobs. So the following Monday found us at Victoria Station. I had just paid the cabman, and he had driven off, when I discovered that I had given him a two-shilling piece for a penny, which made us exactly 1s. 6d. short of the fares. The train was going in fifteen minutes. What was a magician to do? Fortunately I had a small silver watch on me, for which I obtained 5s. at a pawnshop round the corner, and returned to the station just in time to catch the train.

If I had not gone to Margate the whole course of my life would have been altered, because there I met my future wife. The Hall was panelled with large mirrors, and it was in one of the mirrors that I, like Alice, discovered a new world. I saw a girl standing behind me, and our eyes met in the mirror. She was my affinity, the dearest pal a man ever had, and in three months from that day we were married.

Mrs. David Devant, 1894

We spent our honeymoon at Eastbourne, where the Midgets had joined up with the Bohee Minstrel troupe. This enterprise belonged to the Bohee brothers, a pair of singers and banjo players who remained in England after a visit to Drury Lane Theatre of Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels. They were all genuine coloured folk, and the troupe at Eastbourne was similar-real negroes. While with this company I was asked to introduce a new rôle into my repertoire. I became interlocutor, and played verbal battledore and shuttlecock with the jokes of the end men. I was glad the season didn't last long, as I didn't care for it. I felt too much like a pigeon among crows.

Soon after my marriage, the manager decided to try his luck in London once more, this time at the Royal Aquarium and other music-halls, where the Midgets were engaged at a salary to form one of the turns. This, of course, cut out my conjuring, but gave me valuable experience of music-halls. The Aquarium was no easy place to give a lecture on midgets, or anything else that was needed to be heard.

Incidentally, one of the most difficult performances I ever gave was at the Canterbury, where a sliding roof had just been instituted. The weather was hot, but our manager insisted on having the roof closed because one of the Midgets had a cold, The audience, however, who had not colds, insisted on having it open, and when I attempted to speak I was met with raucous shouts of "Roof off" "Roof off" Another place where the audience were very noisy was the "Old Mo", or Middlesex, in Drury Lane, now the Winter Garden Theatre.

Talking of theatres reminds me of a friend, an illusionist, who was performing at a music-hall in a provincial town, I quite forget which--however, it doesn't matter; what did matter was that the Melo-drama Theatre was next door, divided only by a narrow passage at the end of which were both stage doors.

My friend was performing a trick in which his assistant disappeared from a cabinet on the stage and reappeared in the midst of the audience firing a pistol and shouting, "Here I am!"

One never-to-be forgotten night he disappeared from the cabinet in good order, got beneath the stage through a trapdoor; finally, after a perilous journey past joists and scenery, he emerged from the stage door of the music-hall, turned left when he should have turned right, and dashed into the audience of the adjoining theatre just in time for "Little Willie's death-scene", which he most indecorously disturbed by firing a pistol and shouting out, "Here I am!"

Talking of trapdoors reminds me of another little story.

When the "Vanishing Lady" was first produced there were many inexperienced performers who attempted to do the feat by means of a trapdoor. One of this class had just announced that he was going to introduce the Vanishing Lady. He walked towards the wings to fetch her, when he suddenly dropped through the flooring of the stage and "vanished" himself. The trapdoor had been left unbolted.