Erik Weisz, better known professionally as the great escapologist, illusionist and stunt performer Harry Houdini, had many links with Ireland. He first came to public attention in vaudeville in the United States where he challenged police officers to try and keep him locked up in handcuffs, out of which he would of course swiftly escape. From there his act progressed to him being restrained in chains, held in straitjackets and being famously locked in a milk can filled with water – all of which he proved as adept at escaping from as the aforementioned handcuffs. It wasn’t long before he began to issue public challenges inviting anyone to build a container for him to escape from.
Houdini soon brought his show to Ireland and performed in Cork’s Opera House, some evidence also exists of him performing in Newry.
After a run of shows in Belfast’s Hippodrome Theatre in January 1909, one of the directors of Harland & Wolff spotted an opportunity to get some publicity for the shipyard and invited Houdini to perform in front of a sell-out audience at Donegall Quay. The directors of the shipyard had carpenters build a large box from the timber being used in the construction of their new ship, the ill-fated Titanic, and Houdini offered £50 to any person in the crowd who could prove that it was possible to “live and breathe in the construct if lowered into the water”. Houdini was placed in the box and lowered into the quay emerging unscathed two minutes later to rapturous applause.
However, he later confided to his wife Bess that the Belfast performance was the toughest of his career to date. Writing in her diary she recalled her husband’s great feat of escapology:
Early bird special — Alison Healy on a reign of aerial attacks
Escape artist — Harry Houdini in Ireland
A Game of Two Calves (and several cows): Frank McNally on Patrick Kavanagh’s imagination, mysterious street names, and a bovine legend
Detour de Force – Frank McNally on William Bulfin’s unwitting side-trip into literary history
“Of husky crew ambitious to construct packing cases to hold the escape artist there were seemingly no end. Each fresh group of challengers seemed to think that their predecessors had not exerted sufficient vigilance. The toughest of these challenges was in Belfast Ireland where employees of the Harland and Wolff shipyard held up Houdini in a chest made of the timber being used in the construction of their new ship the Titanic. Houdini slipped out in a few minutes leaving the chest intact and added Ireland to his list of conquests.”
Houdini’s links with Ireland however, predate his famous visit to Belfast.
In June 1900, as an aspiring performer he visited Scotland Yard in Whitehall in London to meet with Insp William Melville, a native of Sneem, Co Kerry, who in 1893 had become Superintendent of the Special Branch. Melville later gained fame for his work with Gustav Steinhauer of the German Secret Service to thwart an assassination attempt of the Kaiser at the state funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901 and later became the first head of the Secret Intelligence Service using the codename “M”. Houdini was said to have impressed Melville with his escape routines and taught him how to pick locks. Rumours of course have circulated since that Melville recruited Houdini into the intelligence service, a role he is speculated to have continued in amid his new found fame in the United States.
Houdini’s attention once again turned to Belfast in 1921 when he began corresponding with Irish physicist Edmund Fournier d’Albe in an effort to disprove the fake spirit medium Kathleen Goligher.
Houdini was obsessed in the latter stages of his life with challenging people he termed as “charlatans” who he believed were falsely claiming they could speak with the dead.
The Goligher family had been holding séances in their house in Belfast’s Holylands where it was claimed that Kathleen could “levitate tables and issue ectoplasm from her body”.
With Houdini’s help d’Albe soon proved in July 1921, after attending one of the “séances” that the alleged ectoplasm was simply muslin cloth and that Goligher had been holding the table up in the dark with her foot.
In a new addition to his stage performances Harry Houdini began challenging members of the audience to punch him in the stomach claiming he was “strong enough to withstand a punch from any man”. On Halloween night 1926, Harry Houdini died from acute peritonitis that had been attributed to punches he received from Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead in the Princes Theatre in Montreal the week prior, where Whitehead had caught Houdini unawares with the blows.
Was it revenge for his work against fake mediums or because of his alleged spy work with Insp Melville? The truth, it seems, is sadly lost to history.
