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PERSONAL PARANORMAL: Nigel Higgins explains how & why he investigates the paranormal the way he does.
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939, both Richard and his brother Dudley Vincent, volunteered for the Royal Marines and were called up for service early in 1940. Their training was done at the Royal Marine Reserve Depot at Lympstone, near Exmouth in Devon, where they were soon involved in entertainment as The Payne Brothers.
In June 1940 they participated in a Farewell Concert on the occasion of their unit’s transferring to another area. A clever display of the Payne Brothers, who in private life perform under the title of ‘White Magic’ and are members of the Magic Circle. Objects just disappeared – that’s all I can say, and if I had a gold watch when the show started, well, I haven’t got it now: but try as they would, one trick they could not perform was that of disappearing off the parade ground without being spotted by the sergeant major!
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The war ended in 1945 and Richard, after demobilization from the Royal Marines, returned to his native Hinckley, to resume his occupation as a bookbinder with Pickering and Sons. However, the call of the boards was strong, and he decided to become a full-time professional entertainer. Arthur Kimbail, a Hinckley agent, secured him his first hypnotic engagement, at the Kings Hall, Stoke-onTrent, with Ted Heath and his Band, in 1946.
In 1948, during the week of the 20th December, Richard appeared at the Chevrons Club, Dorset Square, London, during which he was filmed for Pathé Pictorial. Its subsequent screening during the next six months in some 800 cinemas throughout Britain provided some splendid publicity for his demonstration. (Interesting to note the Pathé newsreel can still be viewed)
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PATHE NEWSREEL: https:// youtu.be/T_WbX407eug
During April 1949 one of the most amusing and publicity garnering episodes in Richard’s career occurred. His local football team, Hinckley Athletic F.C., an amateur-professional club, had won only one game since January. Prior to their Easter Tuesday match with Bedworth Town in the Birmingham Combination League, Richard subjected seven of the Hinkley team to hypnosis, although they would not allow him to visit them in their dressing room. They lost 2-1, despite their supporters’ change of touchline cry from Come on the Paralytics to Just one more the hypnotics.
Tremendous national publicity ensued, including a Giles Cartoon titled “The New Factor in Sport” in the Daily Express on the 21st April. Headlines such as “No Dream Win for Soccer Team” (Daily Mail). “The Hypnotised Soccer Team Did Not Win” (Daily Mirror), and “Hypnotist Sees His ‘Fluence Team Lose” (Daily Express) were all grist for the publicity mill. The story was even picked up by a Russian sporting publication Sovietsky Sports, as according to a British United Press report in the News Chronicle on the 13th May: The crafty managers of the local club announced that the hypnotist, Richard Payne, would hypnotise the team. That day Richard arrived in the dressing room and before the game hypnotised the team and hypnotised the ball. The local team lost but it would not be wrong to assert that the hypnotism succeeded. The objective was achieved. The public was hypnotised and the organisers of the hypnotic game got their not small pile.
Questions were raised in Parliament and a Private Member’s Bill to make illegal the demonstration of hypnotic phenomena for purposes of public entertainment was presented in the Commons in December 1951. It went before Parliament in 1952 and received the Royal Assent in August of that year. This gave the local authorities discretion to implement its recommendations. Soon afterwards, the London County Council banned such shows and other authorities followed suit.
became the flamboyant landlord of the Shakespeare Hotel in Horsedge Street in Oldham in Lancashire, in August 1953. On the 26th March 1954, the Oldham Evening Chronicle noted that Richard had been developing a completely new act, escapology, and that he had designed a water torture cell similar to that used by Houdini, who rated a photograph alongside Richard’s. But he also operated a hypnotherapy clinic in Union Street, Oldham, for a couple of years addition to being mine host at the Shakespeare
The well-known and often controversial landlord of the Shakespeare Hotel left Oldham in 1963 to occupy a similar post at the Theatre and Concert Tavern in Ashtonunder-Lyne, almost opposite the Theatre Royal where he himself had topped the bill. Richard created a theatrical atmosphere by decorating the Tavern with photographs and mementoes of his theatrical days and for the next five years was a popular host while continuing to do some entertaining on the northern club circuit. Under his tutelage one of the taproom customers, Derrick Melia, a 42-year-old butcher of Dukinfield, undertook a milk-churn escape with equipment belonging to “Murray.”
Murray was at the time acting as business manager for Richard Payne’s entertainment interests, and was to remain a lifelong friend of Richard’s for many years, always visiting him at his hypnotic shows in Blackpool until his death on the 22nd January 1989 aged 87.
Eventually, the high taxes on beer and spirits and the introduction of the breathalyser test led Richard to forsake the role of landlord. This government has made things impossible for the small businessman like me, he said. “Costs keep going up, and I am fed up with being a Tax Collector – I wonder how many people realise that on every bottle of spirits I sell £2-6’s goes to the Government?”
He left for Blackpool in 1968 with the comment “I am loath to leave Ashton because I have made many friends here, but in show business I will be able to provide a decent living for my wife and kids.” So, Richard now turned his attention to magic again, doing children’s shows, while also continuing to entertain adults with his hypnotism, which proved as popular as ever. And under the name of “Zan Astaire” he presented a mentalist act, Mysticisms of the Mind.
He also set up business as a consultant psychotherapist and hypnotherapist at the salubrious resort of St Anne’s on Sea and became a Founder Member of the Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnotists.
When in his early sixties he decided to ease off on his manifold activities and in 1974 he became a security man at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. At a Christmas Party there, he did a show for the Pleasure Beach Company and the management immediately perceived a solution to their problem of Sunday night entertainment at the Horseshoe Showbar. So, it came about that in 1975, as Richard Lorde Payne, he commenced a season of Sunday night hypnotic entertainments, little realising that their popularity would carry him on relentlessly long past his projected retirement.
Indeed, at the age of 75, he completed his 14th successive season in 1988. As he moved his home to Abergele in North Wales in 1979, this necessitated travelling to Blackpool every Sunday during the long season that distinguishes this holiday resort from all others in Britain. Ideally, Richard Payne preferred about 100 to be in his audience for the hypnotic show, which comprises of two parts. For the first half of the show, Richard and his assistant Eric Strong were dressed in long robes, and from Richard’s neck hangs a medallion, Dave Kenny plays incidental music in the background.
Richard worked in a measured, gently deliberate fashion. Susceptible volunteers were seduced by means of the interlocking fingers test and then sent to sleep. Thereafter they were successfully taken to a party, the cinema, perhaps a disco or the ballet, and enact their various experiences. One male subject was allowed to be controlled by his wife or girlfriend, and much humour extracted from the sequences. Catalepsy is demonstrated and there is the opportunity for those who are smokers to be cured of their habit. They were then all put back to sleep again for the duration of the interval.
Richard and Eric then returned in dinner dress and the subjects are awakened and turned over to the audience for their requests. What hidden talents are then revealed! Cowboy, body builder, John McEnroe, Shirley Bassey, Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill were all paraded at the whims of their friends. The subjects then found themselves now seated on hot chairs and the stage then becomes hot. There were more humorous situations before all the volunteers were awakened and sent away assured that they are all healthy and with no hang-ups. As they took their seats Richard clicks his fingers and the volunteers then shout out to him Mr Payne, would you like me to get you a barley wine from the bar? (As the participants all make their way there). They argue amongst themselves until Richard says ‘Sleep‘ and they all immediately fell to the floor. Richard then says, you are now all awake, and thanks them for the drink! After this they all returned to their seats once again. Handshakes for the stage-side spectators follow, Richard takes his well-deserved, sustained applause and another evening in that incredibly long success story at Blackpool is concluded.
After 1991, Richard finally retired to his home in Abergele, North Wales, and sadly on 10th April 1996, aged 83, he passed away after a stroke, and was cremated close to his home, I was privileged to attend his funeral to say a fond farewell to one of the world’s greatest entertainers, magician and friend.
KATE CHERRELL’S CODE HARD TRUTH
“Two Minds with but a Single Thought” – Julius and Agnes Zancig
One thing I love more than grand Victorian Spiritualists, commanding rooms with a wisp of ectoplasm and messages from the great beyond, are lesser-known mentalists, delighting in their fraud.
Julius Zancig (1857-1929) and Agnes Claussen Jörgensen (c.1850s-1916) were Danish mentalists who enjoyed great fame in the late 19th and early 20th centuries thanks to their mind-reading stage act. Indeed, they were so good and ‘of so puzzling a nature that to many who had witnessed them the only explanation of the results obtained appeared to be that genuine telepathy was at play.’
Few famous spiritualists and mentalists had conventional paths to success, and the Zancigs were no different, sharing the working-class roots of so many other prominent figures. Julius Zancig was an iron smelter by trade who developed an interest in mentalism later in life. Alongside his wife Agnes, the pair became prolific writers on the occult, while also nurturing a skilled comprehension of stage magic.
The couple met early in life, being childhood sweethearts, grew apart and rekindled their love as adults after they both had emigrated to
America. They married in 1886 and began performing soon afterwards, touring internationally for three decades. The pair became particularly well known for their mindreading act, which took them to stages across the world, including India, China, Australia, Japan, South America and England. This act, and the perceived powers that emerged during these demonstrations, fooled many spiritualists into believing their psychic legitimacy. However, as with many esoteric figures of this time, they later confessed that their claims of supernatural powers were little more than well-practised trickery. The Zancig’s act of mind-reading was achieved by means of a verbal code, later known as the ‘Zancig Code’, which was an elaborate system of undetectable verbal cues, hidden within standard speech. The couple could communicate information with a few, cursory, seemingly unrelated phrases. From names to objects to ages, Julius would typically ask his wife to name the relevant data and she would respond appropriately. In the cases of objects, as recorded in I. L. Tuckett’s The Evidence for the Supernatural (1911), ‘While Mr Zancig stood among the audience and held some object handed to him by one of the audience, Mrs Zancig on the stage described it…Mrs Zancig succeeded in rightly naming the most unlikely things handed to her husband so that there are only two possibly explanations, viz., telepathy or the use of a code.’
In 1929, British magician Will Goldston explained their curious act in his chapter ‘The Truth About the Zancigs’. The book itself, ‘Sensational Tales of Mystery Men’, was a huge tome chronicling the lives and acts of famous magicians, including several others whose paths crossed with spiritualism.
‘The pair worked on a very complicated and intricate code. There was never any question of thought transference in the act. By framing his question in a certain manner, Julius was able to convey to his wife exactly what sort of object or design had been handed to him. Long and continual practice had brought their scheme as near perfection as is humanly possible. On several occasions confederates were placed in the audience, and at such times the effects seemed nothing short of miraculous. All their various tests were cunningly faked, and their methods were so thorough that detection was an absolute impossibility to the laymen.’
Harry Price, arguably the UK’s most famous ghost hunter, reportedly interacted with the Zancigs and revealed that in 1924, Julius had explained that in order to keep their act in order, they had to practice for ‘several hours’ every day.
Unsurprisingly, Arthur Conan Doyle and fellow oft-credulous psychical investigator W. T. Stead, investigated the couple and believed their psychic powers to be genuine. Both men frequently presented their latest findings in periodicals and papers of the time, and their belief in the Zancigs was no different, with both men publishing their reports on the couple’s telepathy.
Following a sitting with the Zancigs in Washington D. C., Conan Doyle wrote a letter for use by the Zancigs, stating:
Harry Houdini, ever hot on the heels of Conan Doyle spoke very highly of Julius Zancig, but as a magician, not a psychic. Writing in 1924, Houdini effused ‘I believe he is one of the greatest second-sight artists that magical history records. In my researches for the past quarter of a century I have failed to trace anyone his superior. His system seems to be supreme.
The Zancigs performances inspired countless copycat mesmerists, who attempted stage mindreading with varying successes. In ‘Telepathy, Genuine and Fraudulent’ (1919), Sir Oliver Lodge wrote of a derivative ‘thought-transference’ performance:
The Zancigs were not left to their own devices for all their 30 years of performance, but were – like so many spiritualists, psychics and mesmerists – subjected to extensive testing by British newspapers. On November 30th, 1906, The Daily Mail arranged for the couple to be tested at their offices and the successful outcomes of the experiments were promptly printed. These reports were not so warmly welcomed by other media outlets, particularly the Daily Chronicle, who began a war of words between their pages. The first reports cited ‘an exhibition of true telepathy, while those of the second paper declared the codes – visual and verbal – would account for the phenomena.’ Later investigations by W.W Baggally of the Society for
Psychical Research were overwhelmingly positive, with calls for further study into the ‘Zancig phenomena.’ In 1924, the Zancigs deliberately revealed themselves to be frauds, after years of preaching their own legitimacy from stages across the world. They finally admitted their less-than-psychic methods an article entitled ‘Our Secrets!’
Elaborating on this, the pamphlet ‘The True Secret of Mind Reading as Performed by the Zancigs’ (1912) by Laura G Fixen chronicled the minutiae of the couple’s code. Fixen had completed a course operated by the couple in ‘Palmistry and Telepathy’ and was given the couple’s blessing to transfer their curious system into print. This system of ‘tells’, called the ‘Second Sight System’ explains how the use of certain words correlated to a letter, which would then be used in sentences to spell out the name of the object held by the other. The book gives an example as follows:
I = A Go = B Can = C Look = D Please = E Will = F
For numbers, a similar code was applied with the lead word(s) of the sentence correlating to a number, i.e.
I want this number... = 1 Go on give this number = 2 Can you give this number = 3
