Sydney Piddington: telepathy in a Japanese POW camp (Part 4)
During World War Two, Sydney
Piddington was a prisoner-of-war (POW) in Singapore, where he developed a two-person
telepathy act with fellow prisoner, Russell Braddon.
In the final part of this four-part article, we learn how the war ended for Piddington and how – along with his wife Lesley - he drew on his POW experiences to become one of the most famous mentalism acts of the Twentieth Century.
End of the war
In early 1945, Sydney Piddington and Russell Braddon’s telepathy demonstrations ended when Braddon – and most other prisoners in Changi – were sent out by the Japanese in groups of a hundred to various parts of Singapore to construct defences to defend the island from an Allied invasion.
Piddington, doing invaluable service on Changi Jail’s secret radio was kept – under the pretext of illness and “completely unfit for all duties” – back in the camp.
On 6 August 1945, Piddington and his two colleagues operating the secret radio, learned of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and later of Nagasaki. These acts killed over one hundred thousand people, mostly civilians.
The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August and the Allies prepared to invade Japan’s main islands.
Tensions among the prisoners rose, as they worried how their Japanese captors would react to the bombings and the impending end to the war. Repercussions were likely, and the prisoners feared for their lives more than ever.
Finally, at midnight on 15 August, the secret radio listeners heard the news that Emperor Tenno Heika of Japan had surrendered unconditionally. The war, and their captivity, had ended.
Reflection
The Japanese captured nearly 200,000 Allied military personnel in the Southeast Asia and Pacific areas. They forced the POWs to engage in the hard labour of constructing railways, roads, airfields, etc. to be used by the Japanese armed forces in the occupied areas.
By the time the war was over, 30,000 POWs had died from starvation, diseases, and mistreatment.
Sydney Piddington survived as a prisoner-of-war for three years and six months.
He was fortunate to avoid being sent ‘up country’ to work on the Thai-Burma Railway. But he experienced hard labour and brutality at the hands of the Japanese when he made to work at Bukit Timah and on the construction of the Changi airfield, both in Singapore.
Magic was key to Piddington’s survival. It led to him becoming a key member of a concert party, ordered by miliary bosses to stay behind in the POWs camps on the Changi peninsula.
Later, his poor medical condition – legitimate, but exaggerated by military doctors – kept him in Changi, where he played a vital role in operating a secret radio providing the POWs with news of the war’s progress.
Changi wasn’t a hell hole, unlike the labour camps in Thailand and Burma. But it wasn’t a nice place to be either. The conditions were better than most and this helped Piddington survive.
Magic and mentalism too helped him maintain his health. Developing a telepathy act with Braddon both kept his mind active. It broke the endless mental and physical agony of captivity. The act gave him hope and freedom. Not physical freedom, but the mental freedom of being able to perceive a life after the war.
“My mind is the key which sets me free,” said escapologist Houdini, an apt phrase for Piddington’s circumstances.
Developing the telepathy act with Piddington aided Braddon too. He later wrote about the importance of warding off mental atrophy when incarcerated as a POW; “in the mental sphere it is left to the prisoner to make himself or break himself. He may even kill himself. There is no one, other than himself, to whom he can turn for spiritual help.”
Piddington and Braddon’s performances also gave hope to thousands of their fellow POWs, boosting their morale and giving them something to think about beyond the tribulations of prison life.
After the war, Brigadier Sir Frederick Gallaghan, Commander of Australian prisoners in Malaya and Singapore, said: “I know of nothing that kept the men’s minds and their mental capacity more agile than the contribution to their welfare by Piddington.”
Post-war
NX 5822 Lance Sergeant Sydney Piddington arrived back on Australian soil on 7 October 1945 and, with the war now over, was discharged from the Australian Army a month later.
He was awarded the War Medal, 1939-1945 Star, the Pacific Star and the Australia Service Medal 1939-1945 for his wartime service.
“The Piddington who came home from the war was a rather different person from the student-accountant of peace. He was forceful, confident, knew what he wanted to do, knew how he thought he ought to do it, knew exactly the measure of his own ability.”
Not long after arriving home, Piddington met Lesley Pope, a radio and theatre actress. He spent most of his accumulated military leave with her, lazing on Bondi Beach in Sydney.
As Sydney was drawn into Lesley’s life in the theatre and on radio, so she was drawn into his interest to telepathy performances.
He taught her the tricks and techniques he’d developed with Braddon in Singapore and together they designed a two-person telepathy act.
They married on 19 July 1946.
While Piddington initially went to university to study law and work as a sales agent, a lucky break led to him and Lesley securing a deal for a series of radio broadcasts of their telepathy act.
Over 57 broadcasts, The Piddingtons grew to prominence in Australian radio broadcasts. Such was demand for them, a newsreel of their act was recorded and shown in movie theatres around the country.
In 1949, they travelled to the UK to emulate their success with British audiences.
Braddon also moved to England after suffering a mental breakdown, followed by a suicide attempt. Doctors attributed this breakdown to his POW experiences and urged him to take a year to recuperate. He decided that travelling to help out his friend Sydney would help him recover.
BBC broadcasts
Off the back of their Australian success, the BBC signed The Piddingtons to present a series of live radio broadcasts. Starting on 7 July, the show broadcast weekly over the summer of 1949 and was an enormous success. A television appearance in the middle of these broadcasts boosted their popularity.
They were included in a Christmas Day radio broadcast that same year and returned for several other broadcasts in January and June 1950.
Over 20 million listeners tuned into BBC Radio’s Light Programme to listen to The Piddington’s performance from the Tower of London on 21 July 1949. To give these viewing figures context, they represented forty per cent of the total UK population at the time. Other demonstrations in the series included ‘The Diving Bell Experiment,’ ‘The Taxi Test,’ and ‘The Stratocruiser Broadcast.’
The common theme in most was that Lesley would be taken to a location away from Sydney (such as the Tower of London), while Sydney was based in a BBC Studio in central London.
They conducted various demonstrations involving a studio audience, such as transmitting the name of a word from a book, a colour, the name of a movie star, or a selected playing card.
Despite her physical separation from Sydney and the audience, Lesley could read Sydney’s mind and correctly determine the information provided by the audience.
The impossibility of the challenges hooked the nation and the broadcasts held the country breathless.
Or, listen to their last broadcast of 1949 on YouTube here (29 min 28 secs). The programme includes an introduction from Major Osmond Daltry, the officer who prompted Sydney to put together a full telepathy act in Changi. Several former POWs from Changi are present in the audience.
The Piddington’s never used a disclaimer that their performances were real or fake. Rather, at the end of each show, Sydney always closed by simply saying: “There it is – you are the judge!”
Russell Braddon wrote the scripts for The Piddington’s performances and travelled with them on their theatre tours. He didn’t appear in the show but worked behind the scenes, no doubt handling publicity and getting up to some clever fiddles.
Fellow Far East POW and magician Fergus Anckorn also occasionally helped out during The Piddington’s early time in London.
To boost publicity for Sydney and Lesley, Braddon wrote a biography of the pair, called The Piddingtons (1950).
He achieved popular acclaim writing other books, including The Naked Island (1952), a best-selling account of the hellish environment experienced in the Japanese prison camps. Braddon was inspired to write the book after the strong public interest in the Changi camp portion of The Piddingtons.
Later life
After their last radio show for the BBC on 13 June 1952, Sydney and Lesley quit the UK to return to Australia.
They retired their act and turned to raising a family. But the intense and relentless pressures of show business had worn them down. They ultimately separated in 1954 and divorced in 1966.
Following his divorce and retirement from the stage, Sydney worked various jobs including in advertising and sales management with various firms. One of these was Reader’s Digest, publisher of the article which first got him interested in two-person telepathy while in Changi Jail.
Sydney and Lesley both married again, with different partners. Sydney’s second marriage was short lived, but soon after that marriage was dissolved in 1972, he married Robyn Greig.
In 1975, a promoter asked Sydney to take part in a charity show at the Sydney Opera House. He trained up his third wife and The (new) Piddingtons once again stunned audiences with their mentalism act. This kept them busy for several years until they retired the act and developed a boutique tourist accommodation business.
Sydney Piddington passed away from cancer in 1991. Lesley Piddington (nee Pope, later Hazlitt) died in 2016.
Despite their success, Sydney and Lesley never revealed their methods. Their secrets remained largely unexposed and unknown until 2015. In that year, journalist and author Martin T. Hart published a book based on notes written by his grandfather who’d observed the Piddington’s performances first-hand as a BBC employee.
To this day, The Piddingtons are considered to be one of the greatest two-person telepathy acts of all time.
To read the other blogs in this article on The Piddingtons, see the Magic at War blog index here.
Quoted text mainly drawn from ‘The Piddingtons’ (1950) by Russell Braddon.
A recommended resource for further information on The Piddingtons is www.thepiddingtons.com, which serves as a promotional site for Martin T. Hart's book, ‘Piddington’s Secrets: We know how they did it’ (2005).
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