Taffy's Twelve: The show that survived
The extraordinary wartime adventures of Maskar, the Welsh magician who led an ENSA concert party through a torpedoing and across North Africa.
The stage lighting came from a lifeboat. Somewhere in North Africa, towards the end of 1943, a company of Welsh entertainers was performing a scene from life in the coal mines. There were no proper theatrical lights. Instead, the performers illuminated their makeshift stage with electric torches salvaged from a torpedoed troopship. They wore battledress in place of costumes, and their equipment amounted to little more than a borrowed accordion and a pack of playing cards. Yet the show was warmly received. The company was Taffy's Twelve, and its manager was a Welsh magician known as Maskar. A few weeks earlier, the entertainers had been crossing the Mediterranean on their way to perform for British servicemen. They had survived the sinking of their ship, but almost everything they needed to put on a show had gone down with it.
Nor was Maskar confined to escapology. During the 1930s he advertised his own variety entertainments, incorporating magic alongside singing, dancing, ventriloquism and shadowgraphy, the art of producing recognisable silhouettes with the hands and fingers. His wider career encompassed hypnotism and feats of apparently extraordinary physical resistance. Such entertainment demanded more than technical skill. A performer had to recruit volunteers, manage their participation and build a convincing spectacle from what might be relatively simple materials. Maskar understood the practical business of putting on a show as well as the techniques of conjuring.
Showbusiness ran through the family. His brother Nat Evans was an accomplished weightlifter and entertainer in his own right. In 1931 he won the Welsh lightweight weightlifting championship and, later the same evening, the light-heavyweight title, despite weighing little more than ten stone. He was also a ventriloquist and strongman, although on stage he was not above becoming the target of his brother's jokes. A fellow entertainer later remembered Nat as the butt of Maskar's comic business. Between them, the Evans brothers offered conjuring, escapology, feats of strength, ventriloquism and comedy: an unusual collection of talents for the demands of wartime entertainment.[2]
When the Entertainments National Service Association, better known as ENSA, needed performers for the war effort, men with such experience had something to offer. Established in 1939, ENSA provided entertainment for Britain's armed forces and those working on the home front. Famous stars appeared under its auspices, but much of the organisation's work depended upon smaller concert parties capable of taking a variety programme to factories, military camps, hospitals and remote overseas stations. With British and Commonwealth forces deployed across several continents, entertainers had to be prepared to travel, live under military conditions and perform wherever an audience could be assembled.
In 1943, Maskar became manager of one such company, Taffy's Twelve, formed in Swansea and built around a collection of predominantly Welsh entertainers. There was Catherine Lovatt, a qualified pianist whose sister Joan was one of three dancers; a tenor from Swansea, a soprano from Blaenau Ffestiniog and a whistler from Holyhead; and an experienced accordionist and singer from London. George and Walter Smith, a father and son from Abertillery, played the bones, a traditional percussion novelty in which pairs of small wooden or bone pieces were struck together rhythmically between the fingers. The company also included performers such as Haydn Llewellyn and Mai Jones, whose names survive in contemporary newspaper reports. Alongside the Evans brothers, they provided the makings of a complete variety programme. By the summer of 1943, the company was already appearing in Wales, including an engagement at the Llanmiloe Institute near Pendine.[3]
Managing such a troupe required considerably more than presenting an individual turn. The programme had to be assembled and rehearsed, its acts arranged into a coherent entertainment, and the practical demands of travelling, accommodation and equipment dealt with. Magicians could be particularly well suited to these responsibilities. Professional magic combined theatrical presentation, technical knowledge, comedy, practical ingenuity and the management of assistants. Maskar was not alone in bringing these abilities to ENSA. Bertram Otto, the comedy magician and pickpocket who performed as Ming Chow, managed the Lucky Dip company during its travels through North Africa and Italy. His command of seven languages proved especially useful on the road. Both men were accustomed to doing considerably more than their own turns.[4]
Also, see the Magic at War article Bertram Otto: Fake Chinese magician pickpocket a hit with frontline troops for another true story of an ENSA touring company led by a magician.
For Taffy's Twelve, the opportunity to entertain troops overseas came in the autumn of 1943. Catherine Lovatt had joined ENSA earlier that year, initially touring British factories with another concert party. A capable pianist who could sight-read and improvise, she had learned to work with unfamiliar musicians, indifferent instruments and audiences whose enthusiasm often compensated for the shortcomings of their surroundings. The Welsh company rehearsed at Drury Lane in London before undertaking a short tour around the Home Counties. On 25 October, the entertainers assembled at Drury Lane and travelled by coach and train to Liverpool, a journey Catherine remembered as taking thirteen hours. The following day they embarked aboard the Dutch passenger liner Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, converted for wartime service as a troopship.[5]
Their destination was unknown to them. Alongside the military personnel were eleven other ENSA companies, including variety artists, actors and musicians, all travelling overseas to entertain the forces. For Catherine, the voyage initially offered unfamiliar comforts. The meals were better than anything she had experienced for some time, and there was a piano in the ship's main lounge. Lifeboat drills took place each day, while the performers entertained themselves with cards, music and occasional shows. Beyond the ship, however, the Mediterranean remained dangerous. The surrender of Axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943 had ended the North African campaign, and the Allies had followed their victory with the invasion of Sicily and landings on the Italian mainland. German forces still controlled much of Italy, however, and their aircraft continued to threaten the ships carrying Allied troops and supplies across the Mediterranean.
On the evening of 6 November 1943, as convoy KMF 25A approached the Algerian coast, that danger became reality. Catherine and the other women sharing her cabin were preparing for dinner when the alarms sounded. An enormous explosion followed. The ship listed violently, the lights failed and the occupants were plunged into darkness. German torpedo aircraft had attacked the convoy near Cap Bougaroun, striking the Marnix and other vessels. The American destroyer USS Beatty and another troop transport, the Santa Elena, were also lost during the attack. Emergency lighting eventually came on aboard the Marnix, but the passengers were ordered to put on their lifejackets and proceed to their lifeboat stations. Although the vessel remained afloat for many hours, it could not continue its voyage and sank the following evening.[6]
The evacuation was a prolonged and frightening business. Catherine remembered waiting about an hour before entering a lifeboat crowded with approximately eighty people, including a patient who had recently undergone an appendicitis operation. As the boat was lowered, one of its davits jammed, almost spilling the occupants into the sea. They eventually reached the water, where a heavy swell made the wait for rescue deeply uncomfortable. Several vessels they approached were already crowded with survivors. After approximately five hours, Catherine's lifeboat was taken alongside the British destroyer HMS Croome. The survivors were given blankets and tea mixed with rum. Other members of the Welsh company experienced the evacuation differently. George and Walter Smith later reported spending about three hours in a lifeboat before being rescued by an American destroyer. Remarkably, all 3,235 people aboard the Marnix survived.[7]
Catherine's party was landed at Philippeville in Algeria, where the cold and wet conditions offered little comfort. With their possessions lost, the survivors were transported in military lorries to a building where they slept on the floor beneath borrowed blankets. There was initially no food. The following morning, bread and beetroot arrived, providing a meal Catherine remembered with particular gratitude. Somewhere beneath the Mediterranean lay the company's costumes, instruments, stage properties, written music and personal belongings. The performers were safe, but the means of presenting their carefully rehearsed show had disappeared.
ENSA nevertheless had work for them. The surviving companies were expected to continue their overseas assignments, and efforts began to replace their lost possessions and theatrical equipment. Contemporary newspaper reports described the search for such essentials as ballet shoes, an accordion, a ventriloquist's figure and magicians' apparatus. As manager, Maskar faced the immediate task of getting his own company back into working order. Assistance came from military personnel and voluntary organisations, while the entertainers made the best of whatever could be found. A man who had built his reputation upon sensational escapes now had to tackle the less glamorous business of running a show without its equipment.[8]
The Welsh party was sent to Bône, where it began performing at military camps and bases despite having almost nothing with which to stage a conventional show. The members had been issued battledress in place of their costumes. A borrowed accordion supplied music, supplemented by Catherine's ability to play the company's repertoire on a piano from memory. As she later explained, this was one reason they could begin performing before being fully refitted. Even the Welsh miners' scene survived, illuminated by the lifeboat torches the entertainers had brought ashore. Writing in March 1944, Maskar described the reception of these makeshift performances as enthusiastic.[9]
As a magician accustomed to presenting escapes and illusions, the loss of his apparatus must have imposed severe limitations. A pack of playing cards was among the few items available to the company, but the surviving accounts do not identify the tricks or resistance feats Maskar performed during those first weeks ashore. Nevertheless, a versatile artist with the skills of a seasoned variety performer, he evidently could still perform an act even when the properties and tricks he'd planned for the tour had disappeared.
For approximately ten weeks, the company performed across Algeria, Spanish Morocco and Tunisia, according to Maskar's account. Its engagements took the entertainers through a succession of camps and military establishments, where the audiences were generally appreciative of the effort being made on their behalf. Catherine particularly remembered an engagement for a battery of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Maskar also reported cabaret appearances before senior British and French military personnel and representatives of the French administration in North Africa. Although the campaign on that continent had ended, the Allied forces had not simply departed. The ports, airfields, hospitals and military bases of North Africa remained essential to operations elsewhere in the Mediterranean, particularly the difficult Allied advance through Italy. Thousands of servicemen were still stationed far from home, and ENSA's work continued.
Christmas Day 1943 brought three performances, according to Catherine's recollection. Among soldiers serving thousands of miles from home, familiar songs, humour and accents could offer something more personal than an ordinary variety show.[10]
By the beginning of 1944, the company was moving eastwards. It eventually reached Cairo, where the entertainers found more comfortable accommodation and an opportunity to replace some of their lost clothing and equipment. Catherine remembered the relief of obtaining proper dresses and make-up again, as well as the hospitality they received in the Egyptian capital. She also found opportunities to perform independently, playing the piano at Shepheard's Hotel and entertaining wounded personnel at the British Embassy. But there was little opportunity to settle. Another tour awaited, this time across the Western Desert, following the route of the Allied armies through places that had become familiar names during the fighting of 1941 and 1942.
The transport arranged for the new journey was hardly conventional theatrical accommodation. According to Maskar, the troupe travelled in a converted German field kitchen, accompanied by a three-ton lorry carrying its luggage. Journeys between engagements could involve 200 or 300 miles. The performers visited places associated with the Eighth Army's campaign, including Tobruk and Benghazi, as well as more remote military establishments. The desert was no longer a battlefield, but its ports and military bases remained busy supporting the fighting in Italy. For entertainers travelling between them, the distances were still formidable. Roads were rough, accommodation unpredictable and ordinary comforts scarce. Catherine particularly remembered the battered condition of Tobruk. Yet the company continued performing, including a St David's Day celebration at Benghazi on 1 March 1944.
Maskar's account of the journey recorded a succession of difficulties that would have tested any touring manager. A sandstorm interrupted their travels. There was a collision on a mountain pass. On another occasion, a wheel came off their vehicle and had to be retrieved from a minefield. At Misurata, the company suffered the theft of much of its luggage, including the accordion upon which it had depended so heavily after the sinking. The incidents combined genuine danger with the recurring frustrations of theatrical life on the road. For a company already forced to improvise its performances, the loss of another instrument was no small inconvenience.
The losses were no longer confined to equipment. Illness and accidents were taking their toll on the performers. Barbara Hemmingway had been left at Algiers for medical treatment and subsequently joined another ENSA production, Rookery Nook. Others were unable to continue. The troupe appeared under different names, including Taffy's Troupers, as its membership changed. By late March 1944, Maskar reported that only eight performers remained. Nevertheless, they were still presenting a show lasting 115 minutes. At Marble Arch in Libya, the company encountered an open-air stage and cold conditions, another reminder that wartime entertainment rarely enjoyed the conveniences of a proper theatre. After a shipwreck, the loss of their equipment and months of difficult travel, eight performers were still delivering almost two hours of variety entertainment.[11]
The tour continued beyond the Western Desert. Catherine's recollections describe further engagements in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, although illness had by then caused changes to the company. On 6 June 1944, the entertainers reached Damascus and heard the news of the Allied landings in Normandy. More than seven months had passed since Taffy's Twelve departed Britain. Its members had survived a torpedo attack, lost their possessions and performed for military audiences across North Africa and the Middle East. During their return through Egypt, Catherine visited the military cemetery at El Alamein, where she remembered hundreds of plain white wooden crosses. It was a sobering reminder of the fighting that had taken place across the country through which they had travelled. The original company eventually dispersed, with some entertainers moving on to other ENSA engagements.[12]
Maskar returned to professional entertainment after the war. He appeared with the escapologist Murray and became familiar to audiences in Blackpool, where his demonstrations as the White Yogi invited spectators to test his apparently extraordinary strength and bodily control. In 1948, the young magician Eddie Burke watched his show on Blackpool's Golden Mile. Maskar opened with conventional conjuring, including the linking rings, a sword-cabinet illusion and a version of sawing a woman in half. During the interval he sold booklets of simple tricks before returning to present his tests of physical resistance. Audience volunteers were invited onto the stage to challenge him, examining ordinary objects before attempting to overcome his apparently impossible control. The act combined several forms of entertainment, from familiar stage illusions to the carefully managed participation of spectators.[13]
Maskar also presented Robert Harbin's Invisible Man illusion for Murray, who had acquired the apparatus and found a profitable use for it as a sideshow attraction. Harbin later praised Maskar's 'masterly showmanship', observing that his presentation convinced spectators they were witnessing something extraordinary. It was a significant compliment from one of Britain's most accomplished illusion designers. The apparatus supplied the mechanism, but the performer made the illusion convincing. In November 1955, Maskar appeared on BBC television in It's Magic, still offering audiences a mixture of mystery and spectacle.[14]
During the war, those theatrical abilities had been put to a different purpose. Maskar had helped keep a company of singers, dancers, musicians and speciality performers working through a shipwreck, the loss of its equipment and months of difficult travel. a makeshift stage while a company of Welsh entertainers performed a scene of life in the coal mines.
Sources
1. Maskar's pre-war career. Original undated handbill advertising a £50 packing-case escape challenge at the Theatre Royal, Loughborough, involving a case manufactured by George Walker of Syston. The handbill gives Friday, 30 August, but no year. See also contemporary references to Maskar's variety entertainments in The World's Fair (1936), and Philip David Treece, ‘Maskar and Mavis, Personal Photos from a Fringe Professional’, in Collecting Magic (2025), pp. 23–27.
2. The Evans brothers. Byron Davies, Halfway and Pemberton: A Chronicle (Llanelli Community Heritage, 2013), records Nat Evans's weightlifting achievements, ventriloquism and ENSA service. See also Western Mail, 12 January 1944, p. 3, ‘Taffy's Twelve in Middle East’.
3. Formation and membership of Taffy's Twelve. South Wales Evening Post, 13 December 1943, p. 4, ‘Taffies Twelve in Torpedoing’; Herald of Wales, 18 December 1943, p. 2, which reproduces substantially the same report; The Welshman, 26 November 1943, p. 3, Pendine news, ‘E.N.S.A. Players' Escape’; and The South Wales Gazette and Newport News, 14 January 1944, p. 7, ‘Comfort Corner’. George and Walter Smith are independently documented as father and son serving with the company. Their identification as the bones players rests on the correspondence with Catherine's description of a father-and-son act.
4. Bertram Otto. James Green, ‘Bertram Otto: Fake Chinese pick-pocket magician a hit with frontline troops’, Magic at War, 10 May 2020, incorporating the recollections of Joy Tudor, a member of Otto's Lucky Dip concert party. https://magicatwar.blogspot.com/2020/09/chinese-pick-pocket-magician-hit-with.html
5. The overseas voyage. Catherine Lovatt, ‘Torpedoed while Travelling with ENSA’, BBC WW2 People's War, retrospective personal account. This is the principal eyewitness source for the company's embarkation, the shipboard experience, evacuation and subsequent itinerary.
6. The attack on convoy KMF 25A. Royal Navy, War Diary, 6 November 1943, Situation Report, Mediterranean, recording the attack on convoy KMF 25A and the loss of USS Beatty, Marnix van Sint Aldegonde and Santa Elena. See also Stichting Maritiem Historische Data, vessel history of Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, which confirms that the ship was torpedoed on 6 November, sank the following day and that all 3,235 people aboard were rescued.
7. The rescue. Catherine Lovatt, ‘Torpedoed while Travelling with ENSA’; The South Wales Gazette and Newport News, 14 January 1944, p. 7, ‘Comfort Corner’, for George and Walter Smith's account of their evacuation.
8. Replacement equipment. Belfast Telegraph, 17 November 1943, p. 5, ‘E.N.S.A. Artists Escape: Ship Torpedoed — 122 Saved from Sea’. The report describes efforts to obtain replacement theatrical equipment for the surviving ENSA parties. Maskar's responsibility for refitting his own company follows from his documented position as manager.
9. Improvised performances. South Wales Evening Post, 11 April 1944, p. 3, ‘Gossip of the Day’. The article reproduces details supplied by Maskar to Lionel Rowlands of Swansea at the end of March 1944. It is the principal contemporary source for the borrowed accordion, pack of cards, battledress, lifeboat torches and Welsh miners' scene. Catherine Lovatt's later account independently describes the company's decision to continue performing without its normal equipment.
10. Christmas 1943. Catherine Lovatt, ‘Torpedoed while Travelling with ENSA’, for the three Christmas Day performances. Western Mail, 12 January 1944, p. 3, ‘Taffy's Twelve in Middle East’, for Nat Evans's encounter with Stan Williams and the Felinfoel beer.
11. The Western Desert tour. South Wales Evening Post, 11 April 1944, p. 3, ‘Gossip of the Day’. Maskar's account describes the converted German field kitchen, the journey between military establishments, sandstorm, mountain-pass accident, lost wheel, theft at Misurata and the reduction to eight performers maintaining a 115-minute programme.
12. The later ENSA itinerary. Catherine Lovatt, ‘Torpedoed while Travelling with ENSA’, for the company's movements through Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, the news of D-Day in Damascus, and her visit to the El Alamein cemetery.
13. Maskar's Blackpool performances. Eddie Burke, Resistance Secrets Explained, booklet describing Maskar's White Yogi show as witnessed at Blackpool in 1948. The account identifies his conjuring and illusion repertoire, interval sales and physical-resistance demonstrations. See also Philip David Treece, ‘Maskar and Mavis’, pp. 23–27.
14. Harbin and television. Robert Harbin, The Magic of Robert Harbin (London: C. W. Mole & Sons, 1970), section concerning The Invisible Man, quoted and discussed in Philip David Treece, ‘Maskar and Mavis’, pp. 26–27. For Maskar's television appearance, see Radio Times, 18 November 1955, listing It's Magic, presented by Richard Murdoch with Garvan and Mas-Kar.
