Steve Canavan: Escaping my boring life with tips from the master

A book about legendary escape artist Harry Houdini has given Steve some ideas
Houdini... not the type to enjoy sitting in front of the fire, sipping a cocoa and doing a sudokuHoudini... not the type to enjoy sitting in front of the fire, sipping a cocoa and doing a sudoku
Houdini... not the type to enjoy sitting in front of the fire, sipping a cocoa and doing a sudoku

I’m reading a book at the moment - because, let’s face it, it’s pretty much the only hobby left we’re allowed to do.

If I told you the book is about a lad from Budapest called Eric Weisz, I daresay you’d shrug your shoulders, adopt a blank expression, and carry on watching Pointless.

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If I said Harry Houdini, though, the name young Eric opted for when he embarked upon a career in escapology, you’ll be more familiar with the chap.

I’ve always been fascinated by Harry, because, a bit like most people in that line of work, he was a bit of a nutter.

He emigrated to America aged four (with his mum and dad, obviously; he didn’t just wake one morning and, after a Farley’s Rusk and some warm milk, decide to head to the US on his own), started doing magic (he was a decent trapeze artist before his 10th birthday), and adopted the stage name Harry Houdini after his favourite magician (a French chap called Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, a watchmaker who, interestingly, took up magic after he ordered two books about clocks only for the company to mistakenly send two magic books instead, but I digress…)

Houdini found fame in his mid-20s, around the start of the 1900s, when his trademark trick - escaping from handcuffs - earned him a management deal with a smart promoter who saw the potential of the act. While in London on tour, his profile increased further when he left the police baffled after escaping from handcuffs at Scotland Yard – a stunt which prompted a top theatre to book him.

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It was around this time – and I love this - he sued a police officer who alleged he made his escapes via bribery and won the case when he opened the judge’s safe.

In 1904 the Daily Mirror challenged the by now quite famous Houdini to escape from special handcuffs that had taken a locksmith from Birmingham five years to make. Watched by 4,000 people at the London Hippodrome, our hero spent more than an hour trying to get out. At one point he asked if the cuffs could be removed so he could take off his coat. The Mirror representative, Frank Parker, refused, saying Houdini could gain an advantage if he saw how the cuffs were unlocked. Houdini promptly took out a pen-knife and, holding the knife in his teeth, used it to cut his coat from his body. Some 56 minutes into the escape (or not an escape considering how it was going), Houdini’s wife appeared and gave him a kiss. Ten minutes later, he freed himself – leading to speculation that in his wife’s mouth was the key to unlock the special handcuffs.

Getting increasingly daring, and realising he had to add new things to his act to keep folk interested, Houdini introduced the Milk Can Escape. Handcuffed and sealed inside an over-sized milk can filled with water, he would make his escape behind a curtain. Advertised with dramatic posters proclaiming “Failure Means A Drowning Death”, it proved to be a sensation.

In 1912, due to a vast number of imitators, he upped his game again with the Chinese Water Torture Cell. Houdini, feet locked in stocks, was lowered upside down into a tank filled with water.

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Three years later he introduced another stunt – being buried, without a casket, in a pit of earth six feet deep. He almost died the first time he tried it, becoming exhausted and panicky trying to dig his way to the surface and calling for help. When his hand finally broke the surface, he fell unconscious and had to be pulled from the grave by his assistants.

Houdini wrote in his diary “the weight of the earth is killing”. I’d have probably added, in biro, underlined and capitalised, ‘NOTE TO SELF: DON’T EVER BLOODY WELL DO THIS AGAIN’. But, of course, he did.

Obviously not the type to enjoy sitting in front of the fire, sipping a cocoa and doing a sudoku, Houdini also starred in films, learned to pilot a plane, and went in disguise to seances to prove mediums were fakes.

His death, in 1926, is the stuff of legend.

He was approached before a show in Montreal by a student called Joscelyn Gordon Whitehead, who asked if it was true Houdini could take a punch to the stomach (a long-standing Houdini boast). Barely waiting for an answer, Whitehead suddenly delivered “some very hammer-like blows below the belt”, with such venom and frequency that, according to those present, he had to be stopped and dragged away.

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Houdini was reclining on a couch at the time (he’d broken his ankle while performing several days earlier) and witnesses stated he winced at each blow and said he’d had no opportunity to prepare himself.

Houdini took to the stage that night in great pain. He couldn’t sleep afterwards (I daresay even Gaviscon wouldn’t have helped) and was in agony for the next two days.

When he finally saw a doctor, Houdini had a fever and acute appendicitis, and was advised to have immediate surgery. Now at that point I think I’d have said, ‘ok doc’, but then again I’m not an international superstar (least not yet). Houdini, adopting a the-show-must-go-on attitude, ignored the advice and took to the stage.

He was reported to have passed out during his performance, but was revived and continued. Afterwards he was taken to hospital and died a few days later, aged 52, his final words, ‘I’m tired of fighting, I do not want to fight anymore’.

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There are lots of conspiracy theorists who think his death wasn’t an accident but that the puncher - Whitehead (who vanished from the public eye completely after the investigation had ended) – was sent to do the deed by the spiritualist community, whose mediums Houdini had delighted in exposing as frauds.

Whatever the truth of it, reading this book doesn’t half make me feel my life is hopelessly boring. Must dash now, the guttering needs looking at.

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