Mark Raffles: A pickpocket at war
Mark Raffles, celebrated British magician, pioneering pickpocket entertainer and World War Two veteran, sadly passed away on 18 September 2022, aged an incredible 100 years old. In his honour, this special blog recounts Raffles’ life and wartime service.
Becoming a professional
Mark Raffles (Albert Taylor Jnr.) was born in Manchester in January 1922.* His first professional performance, aged 16, was in 1938 at the Queen's Park Hippodrome in Manchester. He adopted the stage name Ray St. Clair, much later changing this to Mark Raffles.
Because of a debilitating stammer, he performed a silent magic act.
War work in the Blitz
He was only in the second year of his performing career when Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. Initially Raffles was too young for military service, but when he turned 18 years old in early 1940, the law required him to register to be called-up.
The armed forces could have been conscripted him, if it was not for his disability:
“That
stammer was... the reason I failed my medical for the armed forces. I was
graded IIIC.”
Instead, Raffles worked as a bricklayer building air-raid shelters. He was also part of the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) rescue squad during the Manchester Blitz; a series of German air force raids on Manchester City and its surrounding areas between August and December 1940. As a rescue squad member, his role was to attend the aftermath of a bombing and attempt to recover casualties from the area, typically from burning buildings or those in danger of collapse.
In 1941, Raffles joined the Entertainments National Service Association, or ENSA for short. This was a wartime organisation established to entertain the British armed forces, at home and abroad. All forms of entertainers were grouped into touring concert parties and dispatched to perform in venues as diverse as munition factory canteens, air-raid shelters, anti-aircraft sites, supply depots, and even front-line positions.
ENSA, headed by Colonel Basil Dean, took over the Drury Lane Theatre in London for its headquarters. Different departments dealt with the many aspects of the business and shows were categorised as A, B, C companies, classics, drama and music, munitions and hospital shows or units.
Mark Raffles served with three ENSA companies. The first was an ‘A’ Company, a touring variety company. He started his military service in Richmond, Yorkshire:
“On arrival at Richmond railway station, an army vehicle whisked me to Catterick military camp. Oh joy! I had joined an ‘A’ company called Variety on Parade. It was a big production with a cast of established acts, chorus girls and musicians. My joy was short-lived. The magician I had replaced was returning to the show after his two weeks holiday. Again, I was given £2 expenses, a railway voucher and an address to report to in Glasgow…”
After his fortnight with the Variety on Parade show, ENSA assigned Raffles to Unit 537, a small concert party which toured munitions and aircraft factories. The small troupe comprised a pianist (who was also the show’s manageress), a comic, an aged chorus singer, Lillian Day, along with Ray St. Clair, the magician.
The munitions factory shows were a far cry from the music halls of Raffles’ pre-war career:
“We were collected at 2 o’clock in the morning and taken out to some god-forsaken hole in the dark... The canteen held about two hundred people. There were rows of bare wooden tables, the tops scrubbed white. Wooden benches stood on either side. Black material covered every window, and the air seemed dusty in the light from the low wattage bulbs. At the far end was a raised platform on which stood a lonely and sorrowful-looking upright piano and a chair. Grey blankets were pinned in a cord stretched across the back of the platform. We dressed behind the blankets. In top hat and tails with cigarettes primed in their holders, cards in clips and billiard balls in cut-down socks, I suddenly felt out-of-place standing behind those blankets.”
“A ship-like foghorn blasted out and two hundred booted workers burst through the doors in a Light Brigade charge to be the first at the serving counters. Large ladies dished out dinners as voices were raised high to be heard above the clattering noise from plates, mugs, knives and forks scraping and boots bashing on bare wooden floors. Then, the pianist, dressed in a black chiffon evening gown, shouted, ‘We’re on!’ and sallied forth to sit down at the piano. She bashed out a chorus of When You’re Smiling and then [we] were all on, singing the ENSA signature song. Half the audience were turned away from us, and those facing us were shovelling food into their mouths. In our half-hour show, my six-minute act was instantly forgotten! The foghorn blasted again, and like magic, the canteen emptied. We repeated the show twice more that morning to later shifts [as factories used to work non-stop during the war].”
“Accommodation was varied. It could be a commandeered hotel renamed an ENSA hostel, army barracks, industrial hotel, hut, or just the front room of a private house with a landlady.”
“Six days we worked and on Sundays we moved on to the next area [as was the norm for show people in the pre-war period]. Travel was by coach except on Sundays when it was usually by train. If our coach collected us early in the day then we knew that we were in for a long journey. With an afternoon pick-up the journey was a short one. Every day was a trip into the unknown. Perhaps to a matelots’ mess in the naval barracks of Portsmouth or Plymouth among the devastation of bombing raids, or to a quieter life in a naval training station such as HMS Scotia in Ayr [aptly a converted Butlin’s holiday camp].”
“I worked in some strange places, but we didn’t think about it. We would just go. You never knew where you were going or where you were. There were no street signs, there were no signs on railway stations. You would be told you would be collected, say, on Sunday, by a coach. Or you would be given a train time and a destination to go to and when you got there, there would be a coach to meet you… and they would drive you into the country to a camp where you would stay, or to an ENSA hostel, or even digs… but you didn’t ever know where you were going.”
When the concert party wasn’t playing munitions factories, it was given other sites to perform at. Several were in the middle of forestry blocks.
“At the end of a long coach trip on a particularly arduous journey we found ourselves in a wild wooded area of Scotland. What astounded us was to find ourselves in the middle of a Canadian lumber camp!… The unit was in Scotland to fell trees for the war effort, since of course, importation of timber had been seriously curtailed… Unfortunately, I had to leave hurriedly. During a routine on stage with a cut and restored rope, over-confidence and carelessness resulted in my almost cutting off the top of my left thumb with the scissors. Clutching the thumb, with blood oozing down on to the cuff of my evening shirt, all I could do was make excuses to the audience and exit.”
“On one occasion, we were taken into the depths of a wet, dripping forest of fir trees at Inverness. We were deposited in a clearing beside a cluster of Nissen huts. Squelching through the wet bracken, we entered the largest of the huts. There was not a soldier in sight. Our company manager told us to change and get set up for the show. Presently we heard the clumping of feet and in marched about twenty commandos. They had been on manoeuvres as a training exercise. They were wearing full combat kit, carrying large packs with rifles and Sten guns. Soaking wet and mud-splattered, beneath helmets, faces were scrawled with black and green make-up. They dumped their kit on the floor and sat down bedside it. There was no piano, so the pianist struck up on an accordion and we went into the first show. The reception we received made every minute of our effort and discomfort worthwhile.”
On his travels around the British Isles, Raffles entertained on land and at sea, and in many performing conditions:
“One night, told to drew warmly we were taken to a Glasgow dockside and together with our props, were loaded into a launch. Out at sea and in the dark, we drew alongside a vessel which towered above us. We couldn’t see the top of the ship. With ropes tied around our waists, we scaled the ship’s side on ladders, and our props were winched up on rope slings. We played three shows that night in state ballrooms to troops coming home after two years on active service. Each room was packed… The ship, in all its wartime camouflage, was the [RMS] Queen Mary.”
“Once we were ferried in a little steamboat from Glasgow down through the Kyles of Bute and the Crinan Canal bound for the Isle of Islay. Once into the open sea, our little craft was tossed around like a cork. We all sat on deck, clinging tightly to any anchored rail. Two of us sat on a long tarpaulin-covered box. Drawing into the harbour we were met by the sight of about a hundred roughly dressed men standing on the quayside. Each one wore a bowler hat! There was every shape and size of bowler hat possible. Some small bowlers on big heads, some big bowlers on small heads. Few fitted! When we had berthed and the gangplank was in place, six of the biggest bowler hats came aboard to where we were sitting. They looked even rougher close to. One of them said, ‘Excuse me, please.’ We stood up, and they peeled back the tarpaulin on the box to reveal a coffin. We had been sitting on it since Glasgow! They shouldered the coffin and walked down the gangplank where they were joined in procession by the hundred bowler hats. A crofter had come home for final rest.”
“That week on the Islay was akin to being marooned on a desert island. We slept in corrugated iron huts on folding air force camp beds. Each morning we would scour the beach for driftwood to feed the ugly black-cast-iron monster of a stove breathing fire into the centre of our hut. The more we stoked it up with driftwood, the more the condensation gathered on the inside of the metal roof and dripped everywhere. The cigarettes I used in my act were soft and squashy and refused to ignite in the gimmick on production. I think the steam from my breath made a good substitute for smoke!”
Later in the war, Mark Raffles joined one of ENSA’s ‘B’ shows called Dancing Time:
“It had a cast of twelve artists including a troupe of four girls… [who] ensured a rapturous response from the troops and sealed the success of Dancing Time… Our first performance was in the officers’ mess of a Royal Air Force base. Before the show we were all taken outside, each given a piece of chalk and taken to where buggy-loads of bombs were standing. Invited to chalk our signatures, cartoon or messages on the bombs to Hitler, we fell to it with gusto. Later that night, some members of our audience had to deliver those bombs. This though, came later: had we provided the last laughter and bit of glamour some of those airmen would ever see?”
For Dancing Time, word came down from Drury Lane (ENSA’s London headquarters) that Raffles needed a second act, so he could work two spots in the same show:
“I had been developing a pickpocket act and in desperation to try it out with an audience, I threw it on at the Garrison Theatre at Catterick Army Camp. Proving successful, I played the act for the remainder of the war years.”
Raffles
would hang around in the foyer before a show, looking like a perfect gentleman,
then later produced items on stage that he had previously stolen from the
amazed audience. While other pickpockets, such as Giovanni, inspired him,
Raffles went on to become one of the foremost pickpocket entertainers in
the world, pioneering many new moves and publishing the first detailed book on
this skill. (Read more about Giovanni here.)
Touring overseas
For the next three years, Raffles entertained tens of thousands of servicemen and women in army barracks and theatres all over the UK, including troops who took part in D-Day, the invasion of Europe from the Normandy beachhead. After the invasion in June 1944, ENSA directed Raffles to venues in Europe, performing to British, American, and Canadian troops.
When I interviewed Mark Raffles in 2020 about his wartime experiences, it was his time in war-torn Germany, which he remembered most; recalling the harrowing scenes of devastation in Hamburg. The Allies destroyed most of the city during the war, dropping more bombs on it than any other previous air bombing in the history of warfare up to that point.
Victory in Europe
Towards the end of the war, as the theatres were getting back up and running, ENSA allowed its entertainers to return to their pre-war occupations. Now an experienced performer, Raffles reconnected with his theatrical agent and booked work in the variety theatres when he wasn’t contracted for ENSA work. He appeared at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London on 8 May 1945:
“I was appearing on a variety bill... when Victory in Europe was announced. It seemed a fitting end to my wartime work that I was privileged to see the lights of London turned on and to take part in the street celebrations in the East End of the city.”
But Raffles’ war duties weren't quite over.
In June/July 1940, Hitler’s forces had captured the two Crown Dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey in the English Channel. These islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans during war. In May 1945, soon after Liberation Day (9 May), Raffles performed for troops and civilians on the Channel Island of Guernsey:
“I was a member of a variety company booked to bring brightness to the people of the island for the first time, after their four years of the German occupation, with its curfews, near starvation and other hardships.”
He observed that, “There was not a dog or cat left on the island when we arrived.”
Post-war
After the war, Mark returned to playing the music halls with his on-stage pickpocket act. He first appeared on our television screens in 1949 and continued to be seen on the small-screen during the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. He also performed on cruise ships and in the northern working men’s clubs as a speciality act.
After getting married, Mark began a new act with his wife. For many years, the couple toured as ‘Mark Raffles and Joan.’ They had three children who followed them into showbiz. Mark and Joan later took over a well-known variety act called The Wychwoods. They had twelve toy poodles, which were produced out of thin-air and from a variety of magic props. The act played during summer seasons, pantomime and television for twelve years.
He was the very first Magical Grand Prix Champion and a Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star. He also received the coveted Maskelyne Award for his services to magic from The Magic Circle and their Carlton Comedy Award.
Mark Raffles laid claim to be the longest-serving practising magician (up to his retirement in 2019, having performed professionally for 81 years) and the oldest magician in the world. He celebrated his 100th birthday in January 2022.
“I’ve had a marvellous life and I am lucky to have been able to continue for as long as I have. Magic has led me to meet all sorts of interesting people and enabled me to serve my country.”
Mark was a true gentleman in magic and
will be sorely missed by the magic community.
Comments
Post a Comment