Jasper Maskelyne - Wartime Trickery

Wartime Trickery

Maskelyne joined the Royal Engineers when the Second World War broke out, thinking that his skills could be used in camouflage. A story runs that he convinced sceptical officers by creating the illusion of a German warship on the Thames using mirrors and a model.

Maskelyne was trained at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at Farnham Castle in 1940. He found the training boring, asserting in his book that "a lifetime of hiding things on the stage" had taught him more about camouflage "than rabbits and tigers will ever know". The camoufleur Julian Trevelyan commented that he "entertained us with his tricks in the evenings" at Farnham, but that Maskelyne was "rather unsuccessful" at actually camouflaging "concrete pill-boxes".

Maskelyne was briefly a member of Geoffrey Barkas' camouflage unit at Helwan, near Cairo, which was set up in November 1941. Peter Forbes writes that the "flamboyant" magician's contribution was

either absolutely central (if you believe his account and that of his biographer) or very marginal (if you believe the official records and more recent research).

Maskelyne created small devices intended to assist soldiers to escape if captured. These included tools hidden in cricket bats, saw blades inside combs, and small maps on objects such as playing cards. But his nature was "to perpetuate the myth of his own inventive genius, and perhaps he even believed it himself."

Maskelyne's book about his exploits, Magic: Top Secret, ghost-written, was published in 1949. Forbes describes it as lurid, with "extravagant claims of cities disappearing, armies re-locating, dummies proliferating (even submarines) - all as a result of his knowledge of the magic arts". Further, Forbes notes, the biography of Maskelyne by David Fisher was "clearly under the wizard's spell". In his book, Maskelyne claims his team produced

dummy men, dummy steel helmets, dummy guns by the ten thousand, dummy tanks, dummy shell flashes by the million, dummy aircraft...

Maskelyne was briefly head of the "Camouflage Experimental Section", a subsidiary of Barkas' unit, at Abbassia. He was then "transferred to welfare", in other words to entertaining soldiers with magic tricks, by February 1942.