Magic at War

In this two-part blog, we hear – in his own words – the wartime story of Danny Varney, an amateur magician and a regular audience member at the Hackney Empire, London.    Built in 1901, during the Second Boer War, the Hackney Empire was one of the top music halls of its day. Located in London Borough of Hackney, in northeast London, it provided the people of Hackney with their mass entertainment, taking them through two World Wars, poverty, economic depression and post-war hardships.    A grand venue the Empire has more recently been described by  The Guardian  newspaper, as  “the most beautiful theatre in London.”  For over a century, the Empire has seen variety, vaudeville, plays, musicals, films, political rallies, bingo, and more on its stage.    Hackney-resident Danny Varney was a regular audience member at the Empire over the years.   Born in the late 1910s, Varney first started visiting the Hackney Empire as a babe ...

"I am informed by the Fuhrer that the big rocket bomb weighs 14 tons. This, of course, is a devastating murder weapon. I suspect that when the first projectiles plunge down into London, the English public will panic." - Josef Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister An hour before sunrise on 13 June 1944, two members of the Royal Observer Corps were on duty at their post on the top of a Martello tower on the seafront at Dymchurch in Kent, England. At that moment, they spotted the approach of a flying object spurting red flames from its rear  and with  the sound of a roaring engine. This was the  first V-1 (Fi 103) flying bomb to be released against Britain and it was rattling towards them. A week earlier, the D-Day and the Normandy landings, had signalled the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. Unkindly, just when the possibility of success and peace looked not too far away, Hitler's  Vergeltungswaffen 1 (German: Vengeance Weapon 1), known as the 'doodlebu...