Barbed Wire University: Another lesson in magic

In Germany’s largest prisoner of war camp, Stalag IV-B, a captured British parachutist learns magic from a magician-POW. Their shared interest in magic distracts them from the deprivations of prison life, bonds them in friendship, and gives the ‘apprentice’ a lifelong skill.

 

Andrew Corbett Mavor (1922-2016) grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. He started his working career in the Clyde shipyards until war intervened. In 1939, aged 17, Mavor left Glasgow to join the British Army. After junior soldier infantry training with The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, he transferred to The Royal Signals, the British Army’s communications specialists.

 

Fast forward to June 1944, 2991985 Lance Corporal Mavor was a radio operator in the British 6th Airborne Division, attached to the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, part of their 3rd Parachute Brigade. 

After a year of training for airborne operations, Mavor and his 1st Canadian colleagues were about to take part in Operation Neptune, the largest amphibious invasion in military history. The Normandy landings and their associated airborne operations on D-Day began the liberation of France (and later western Europe), laying the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.

Lance Corporal Andrew Corbett Mavor (1944)

(Source: Andrew Mavor’s family, with permission)

On 5 June, the night before the D-Day, 21-year-old Mavor sat nervously with 165 other parachutists packed into C-47 Dakota transport aircraft at Down Ampney airfield in Gloucestershire. They were in one of 1,200 aircraft across the UK, about to deliver three airborne brigades into drop zones behind enemy lines, several hours before the beach landings.

 

At 2329 hours, Dakota KG.515 from 271 Squadron RAF took off from Down Ampney and headed across the English Channel. 

 

Mavor was one of the first parachute soldiers to be dropped into France. But, bad weather and poor pilot navigation meant the Dakota KG.515 strayed off course and dropped the parachute ‘stick’ 10 miles from their planned drop zone. The men landed in between Villers sur Mer and Saint Vaast en Auge, separated by the River Dives from the mutual support of the other parachute and glider-borne troops. 

 

Soon, as the local German forces realised the Allied invasion had started, they attacked and rounded up the stranded Canadians and their British attached personnel. As a radio operator, Mavor would likely have been responsible for sending updates on their situation to the 3rd Parachute Brigade. But the brigade had to achieve its planned objectives to ensure the invasion was a success, so there was little it could do to help. (In fact, it took another two months for the Allies to capture the ground where Mavor’s stick landed.)

 

Many of the Canadians who parachuted from Dakota KG.515 were killed-in-action. Others were forced to surrender. Some evaded capture, but not for long. 

 

Mavor hid from the Germans, helped by French locals, and attempted to reach the rest of the 3rd Parachute Brigade. He remained free for 5 days before being taken prisoner. 

 

Tired, hungry and scared, Mavor was first held in a school commandeered by the Germans in Pont L’Eveque. From there, the Germans moved him from camp to camp, before sending him to Stalag IV-B.

 

Entrance to Stalag IV-B

(Source: Wikipedia Commons Creative)

Stalag IV-B at Mühlberg in Brandenburg housed a multinational melting pot of POWs. It was the largest of all the German prisoner-of-war camps and became “a crowded pestiferous monster of a place within whose bleak boundaries the men of many nations were confined and in which they struggled daily to sustain morale and self-respect, or merely to keep themselves clean.”

 

As Stalag IV-B was a transit and registration camp, the Germans put most prisoners to work in labour battalions, either working from the main camp or in ‘Arbeitskommando’ [German: work command] satellite sites. The Geneva Convention meant that officers were not required to work and non-commissioned officers of Sergeant rank and above were required to work only in supervisory roles. As Lance Corporal Mavor was neither of these, the Germans may have forced him to work, typically as a labourer on local farms or forestry operations.

 

The Germans built the main camp for around 10,000 POWs; by the war’s end, it contained over 25,000.

Map of Stalag IV-B, drawn/painted by a POW

(Source: N. Uchtmann)

POW 80966 Lance Corporal A C Mavor resentfully settled into the deprivation and monotony of prison life; a life made even more difficult by the arduous labour the captors forced the POWs to do. Despite his military training, it was an immense shock to the system for Mavor to find himself in captivity.

 

Fortunately, Mavor struck up a friendship with 24-year-old Tom Angus, a fellow POW. It is not known when Angus arrived in Stalag IV-B or what his earlier wartime experiences were. Most likely, he was a soldier or non-commissioned officer in the British Army.

 

Before the war, Tom Angus was a London-based amateur (or possibly semi-professional) magician. Like Mavor, he’d joined the armed forces on the outbreak of war and now found himself incarcerated in Stalag IV-B. When the pair had downtime, Angus taught Mavor the rudiments of magic, like a master taking on an apprentice. Mavor seized the opportunity and developed a keen interest in the secretive art from that point on. Through the bond of magic, Andrew Mavor and Tom Angus found friendship and kept their minds off the ever-present threats facing POWs; depression, starvation, illness, injury, and death. 

 

Nagus (aka Tom Angus)

(Source: Andrew Mavor’s family, with permission)

One of the wooden huts in the main camp was converted into a ‘Kriegsgefangenen’ [German: prisoner of war] theatre. There, POWs put on variety revues, plays, musical recitals and other amateur dramatics. As an entertainer, it’s probable that Tom Angus performed magic or otherwise contributed to some of the productions. These shows were often the highlight of the camp week, providing a welcome, but fleeting, relief for the POWs from the tribulations of captivity.

 

Stalag IV-B’s POW theatre

(Source: Australian War Memorial)

Besides entertainment in the theatre, the POWs also set-up a programme of interest lectures delivered by ‘experts.’ Typically, lecturers would talk about their civilian jobs or interests, on topics ranging from accounting to zoology. The experts toured individual barrack blocks, delivering their talks in a space cleared out at the end of barrack block, especially for the event. Angus may have contributed to the lecture programme as an expert on magic history or famous magicians. Magician-POWs in other camps did the same, like Leslie Matthews (stage name Lincoln Lee) in Stalag Luft VI-B.

One expert was Douglas Denton, a hypnotist before the war. An army man transferred to Stalag IV-B from Italy, Denton performed feats of “autosuggestion”:

“After making some preliminary tests to determine the more susceptible among his audience, Denton would get to work with his demonstrations…”

“A chosen subject was required to lie across two stools, his shoulders on one, his feet on the other, a box under his buttocks. Autosuggestion and magic chanting done, Denton removed the box, leaving the subject stretched between the stools. He then performed the ‘impossible,’ sitting squarely on the man’s stomach. The chap remained stiff as a board.”

Another Denton feat involved convincing a subject that he was a famous Italian opera singer and inviting him to sing. The subject obliged, giving a stirring performance in what seemed perfect Italian.

Main street in Stalag IV-B prisoner-of-war camp

(Source: Wikipedia Commons Creative)

Mercifully, for those airborne troops and others captured during the Normandy Landings, their time in captivity was mostly less than a year. But, with Germany under pressure from the Allies to the east and west, life in the POW camp was much harder than earlier in the war. Overcrowding and food shortages, combined with more brutal treatment from guards, made survival increasingly difficult.

 

Mavor spent ten months as a POW; Angus probably longer. Both lost a lot of weight from the ordeal.

Soviet troops liberated the camp on 23 April 1945, as they advanced on Germany from the east.

 

At the war’s end, Mavor returned to Scotland but later moved to England. He settled in Old Windsor in Berkshire and worked in engineering in nearby Slough for several years. Later, he secured a job in the Royal Household at Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle is the largest and oldest occupied castle in the world and it’s where HM The Queen lives most of the time. Mavor worked for The Queen for 21 years. He was a civil servant instrumental in organising state visits, royal funerals, royal celebrations, and other such events.

Andrew Mavor with HM The Queen

(Source: Andrew Mavor’s family, with permission)

After his magic lessons from Angus in Stalag IV-B, Mavor kept an interest in magic. His daughter said, “My dad was a fine magician; always for fun, not professionally. I still have the ‘magic thumb’ he used for decades!” Mavor was a friend of David Cooper (Tommy Cooper’s brother) who ran Cooper’s Magic Shop in Slough. He also knew David Berglas, a famous British magician and mentalist. And in 1996, aged 74, Mavor briefly joined The Magic Circle.

Mr Andrew Mavor with members of The Parachute Regiment in 2015.

(Source: The Royal Borough Observer)

 

Outside of magic, Mavor became a keen bowler, playing for the Royal Household, serving as captain and chair before being made life vice-president. His daughter said, “He had a long life, well loved. He excelled in everything he did. He was a good golfer, high board diver, speed skater, ballroom dancer... it seemed that he tried to do everything to the utmost level.”

 

Andrew Mavor died in 2016, aged 93. 

 

Andrew Mavor (1944 and 2015)

(Source: Andrew Mavor’s family, with permission)

Tom Angus led a shorter life. After the war, he returned to London and carried on with magic, developing as a semi-professional act in the 1950s. The Magic Circle’s society magazine, The Magic Circular, recounted one of his performances in 1959:

 

“The second act was Tom Angus, who showed how four separate ropes were really one, followed by rope cutting and stretching, torn paper restoration, sympathetic silks, and coins to glass. This act finished with a neat card vanish, the card being subsequently impaled on a sword when the pack was thrown in the air. Good visual magic.”

 

Angus’ primary post-war career was in the building trade, but as he grew to prominence in the magic scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he became a professional magician. It was in the mid-1960s that he changed his stage name from Nagus to his real name. 

 

Gina, his wife, performed alongside him, later assisted by their daughter Tuppence. Aside from general magic and a dove act, Angus performed Punch and Judy and ventriloquism. 

Tom Angus and his wife Gina

(Source: New Tops, Vol. 10, 1970)

He was an active member of magic societies, including The Institute of Magicians, the Zodiac Magic Society, the Grand Order of Wizardry, the Watford Society of Magicians (in which he served as chair) and The Magic Circle. 

 

Angus toured internationally and was a regular performer on cruise ships. It was on a cruise ship that Tom Angus died of a heart attack in April 1977, aged just 57. Coincidentally, given his friend Mavor’s connection with HM The Queen, Angus died while performing on Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2 ship. He was buried at sea on the 21 April, HM The Queen’s birthday. The Magic Circular reported his death, saying, “he was a kindly and helpful man, well-liked by everyone… We shall all miss him.”

 

Tom Angus promotional shot

(Source: Magic Circular)

Afternote: When Andrew Mavor passed away, his daughter found in his papers a photo given to him by Tom Angus in 1955 (see above, labelled ‘Nagus (aka Tom Angus)’). Mavor kept the photo for over six decades as a mark of the pair’s friendship and the joy and mental escape that learning magic in captivity gave him.

 

Quotes taken from ‘Survival at Stalag IVB: Soldiers and airmen remember Germany’s largest POW camp in World War II’ by Tony Vercoe, unless otherwise stated.

If anyone would like to contribute more information to this blog, please add comments below or use the contact form.

Related article: 'Barbed Wire University: A lesson in magic'. Tells how pre-war magician turned RAF navigator, Leslie Matthew, entertains his fellow POWs with stories of magic in Stalag VI-B. Blog link.

Related article: 'The Magician of Stalag Luft III' (Parts 1-3). The story of Lieutenant Commander John Casson naval aviator, magician, prisoner-of-war in Stalag Luft III. Blog link

Related article: 'Kindertransport magic'. David Berglas, a German-Jewish refugee, later a famous British magician and mentalist, escapes Germany for a new life in England. Blog link

Research supported by The Good Magic Award 2021 from The Good Thinking Society 

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