E-Club ProThe Comedy Zone
Phone Tapping
The recent big revelations about the phone tapping allegedly used by News Of The World reporters may seem like news to most people, but to those of us involved in the murky underworld of small town magic, this is nothing new. Little Snivelington Circle Of Magicians was founded in 1939 by stage magician Hapless Hector and magic book seller Page Turner. Both could see that war was looming - but this was nothing to do with the military might of a certain German dictator, it was all to do with the Circle's feud with the Greater Snobbery Magicians' Club which met just down the road.
The Greater Snobbery's president at the time was Myles Better, who had originally been on the Council of the Snivelington Circle, but who had left in a fury after his suggestion that all new applicants for the Circle should have to undergo an initiation ceremony before being allowed to join, was thrown out by the rest of the committee. The other committee members had felt that applicants might be a touch put off when they discovered that they were to be blindfolded, stripped naked, and dumped at midnight in the middle of the countryside with nothing on them except a deck of Waddington's No.1 playing cards and a copy of the Royal Road To Card Magic.
Myles soon created the Greater Snobbery Club, and started producing a newsletter. Each copy was lovingly typed by Myles' girlfriend Daisy Wheel, and as well as announcing that the club's annual close up, stage and mentalism competitions had all been won (again) by Myles Better, the newsletters also featured editorial about the Circle. Headlines such as: "Snivelington member's invisible pass spotted", "Are Hapless Hector's doves really pigeons?", "Cheating Circle member caught doing double lift with one card", "Circle's Happy Harry reveals his Punch and Judy are getting a divorce", were commonplace, and everybody wondered how on earth Myles managed to get his information.
Well, I can now report how it was all possible. The Little Snivelington Circle of Magicians met once a month at the Cock and Bull Pub which was owned by Snobbery member Phil Emup. The Circle met in the back room of the pub whose side wall adjoined the pub's toilet. The empty beer glass sitting on the toilet window ledge may seem odd until you understand that Phil was using it to press against the toilet wall to listen in to the conversations held during the Circle meetings! Yes, it was an early form of phone tapping.
But Phil had other methods too. The window of the meeting room was the cleanest in the pub, scrubbed as it was once a month, and the bar maid, Helen Hunt (who allegedly virtually ran the place - certainly if you lost anything while there you were always told to go to Helen Hunt for it), would make multiple trips into the meeting room to take drink orders, suspicious when you know she was still doing it well past last orders. I maintain that these were the methods that Myles used to glean the information he needed and I believe that these tactics were noted by the Greater Snobbery Magicians' Club Press Officer at the time, a certain Mr. R. Murdoch.
