Peter Ross at large: Prince Rajah's still leader of the pack after all these years

Published on Saturday 7 March 2009 18:41

I'm the only magician who can catch bullets in my teeth fired from a sten gun

AS I write these words, I have on the desk a tomato given to me by an extraordinary gentleman. David Haggarty, also known as Prince Rajah, also known as Magic Hands, is a retired escapologist and magician, and though he no longer dazzles on Scotland's stages, needs no encouragement to perform, including plucking a tomato from beneath the tartan scarf of any passing journalist. "I like your scarf," he'll say, and then, suddenly, there's a tomato. Later, he gets me in an armlock. He is 78.

I meet Haggarty in a church hall in Renfrew at a meeting of the Paisley Magic Circle. The society is celebrating its 70th anniversary with an exhibition at Paisley Museum from March 20. The Magic Circle gathers twice a month. On the night I attend, they are addressed by Gary James, an Edinburgh magician who has cornered the market in corny gags. He is here to demonstrate and sell some tricks he has developed. It must be nerve-wracking, performing magic for a room full of magicians, but the atmosphere is friendly and supportive, the air thick with enjoyable conjuror's jargon; one technique is described as a "reverse Svengali", another as a "Hofzinger force".

Find a quiet corner, and everyone here has a fascinating tale, including a clown who performs at kids' parties in the west of Scotland; aware of how touchy people can be about football colours, he avoids wearing blue and green as part of his outfit.

For me, the real delight is being introduced to Haggarty, a slender man in a fisherman's cap. He reaches into his red jacket for a yellow leaflet. "Words of wisdom," he says, handing it over. Inside, there's a 1958 photo of him in top hat and tails, the full Fred Astaire, standing grinning next to a large trophy. This is the Dittia Shield, awarded for sleight of hand. Haggarty is the only Scottish magician to have won this.

The back of the leaflet lists his many other achievements, and is a small masterpiece of hubris and bathos: "Predicted the headlines of the Daily Record, 1954"; "Floated a waitress in mid-air outside the Windmill Hotel, Arbroath, 1957"; "Drove a car blindfolded with a bag tied over his head, Beith"; "Hanged by the neck, Paisley, 1963". And finally, "Member of Equity – 5,000,000 public liability," which I suppose must be essential when you go around levitating waitresses and driving through North Ayrshire with a bag on your head.

Born in 1930, Haggarty grew up in Paisley. He was a strong child, a quality noted and developed by his Uncle Jimmy, a stroke victim whose idea of physiotherapy was to get into Jujitsu, boxing and acrobatics. He taught these skills to Haggarty, then 12, who became obsessed with developing his muscles. "I used to let 20 men jump on my stomach, and I couldn't feel it," he says.

At the end of the Forties, Haggarty did his national service with the RAF and took part in the Berlin Airlift. Back home in 1950, he decided to try magic. Though he hadn't seen any magicians perform, and had no books on the subject, he taught himself to make coins and cards disappear. Then he decided to put on a show.

"I didn't have money for evening wear," he recalls, "but my mother had blackout curtains left over from the war. She made a Chinese outfit and I called myself Fu-Ling-Yu." He found he loved being on stage. "I got the applause bug. That's what I've lived for all my life."

He toured Britain as part of Pinder's circus. One night, performing on Glasgow Green, a trick with meths went wrong and his left arm burst into flames. The crowd, thinking it was part of the act, roared their approval. It was agony but Haggarty calmly patted the fire out, not letting on something was wrong. Talking about this, he actually says, "the show must go on".

Still in the early Fifties, while hanging out in Tam Shepherd's Trick Shop, Glasgow, he met a man who was to have a huge impact on his career. Comanche Jim was a gigantic American sharpshooter living in Glasgow and married to a Scottish escapologist called Astra who had once broken out of Barlinnie as a publicity stunt. "He was exceptional," says Haggarty. "He used to bend six-inch nails with his teeth, and he'd work in the fairgrounds taking on all-comers. If you lasted a round with him you won 5 but nobody could. He just pummelled them. He also taught me how to dance in my bare feet in broken glass."

Comanche Jim and Astra split when they moved from a caravan into a house and he refused to remove his cowboy boots when he came home. For a contortionist, she was surprisingly inflexible on this issue. Haggarty bought Jim's straitjacket from him and decided to become an escapologist.

"I was quicker than Houdini," he says. "I took five seconds to escape from a straitjacket, he took about two and a half minutes."

Haggarty used to travel around Scotland challenging local joiners – "You make a box, any kind of box, and I'll escape from it." He once escaped from a sealed and burning coffin in Arbroath, home of the smokie.

"I've got nerves of steel," he says. "I don't get frightened. I'm the only magician in the world who can catch bullets in my teeth fired from a sten gun." His greatest trick was removing a woman's tongue and then restoring it. Lots of men volunteered their wives as his assistant, apparently.

Other than at Paisley meetings, Haggarty no longer performs. He used more props than he could eventually carry himself, and all his assistants died, so that was that. Also, the variety theatres where he worked have closed, so there are no stages to fill with umbrellas and flags of all nations. He's still big; it's magic that got small.

He misses the audiences, but is happy with the path his life took, and pleased that he, too, did things differently.

"I've lived," he tells me, "in a wee world of my own." So I shake one of his magic hands, very glad to have visited that world for a while.