Odd this day
23 March 1918
It was on this day 107 years ago that Chinese magician Chung Ling Soo performed his famous bullet-catching trick at the Wood Green Empire — unfortunately for the last time, having caught it in altogether the wrong way.
According to legend, he responded to this… mishap by saying
Oh my God. Something’s happened. Lower the curtain.
Because he wasn’t Chung Ling Soo. He was William Robinson, and he was dead the following morning. He was pretending to be Chinese (and had been pretending for some years) because he’d had a very bad night at the Folies Bergère back in 1900. Wrongfooted by an audience who mistook his serious stage persona for a comedy turn, he’d done so badly, he decided he couldn’t go on the next night as himself.
His agent Ike Rose persuaded him to go on as Chinese wizard Hop Sing Loo, with an act ‘borrowed’ from a genuinely Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo (whose real name was Chee Ling Qua; do try to keep up).
So, William got rigged up and waddled on stage to make a large bowl filled with water ‘appear’ on stage (it was attached under his clothes with a harness, hence the waddling). Sadly, it seems that ill fortune was one of the salient features of Robinson’s career, and he ended the trick by tipping several cubic feet of water into the orchestra pit.
Ike was not a theatrical agent for nothing, though. According to Walter Gibson’s 1966 book, The Master Magicians, he was due to meet a man from London’s Alhambra the following day and take him to see Robinson’s original act, so he kept the appointment, and suggested that they see his new Chinese magician client instead. The man from London said no, the Alhambra only wanted one magic act — some Chinese guy who’d toured America, but not come to Europe yet… Ching Ling, or Chung Ling, or…
You must mean Chung Ling Soo.
The Alhambra man swallowed this whole. Ike duly went back to his Scottish American client and told him he was permanently Chinese now — and Robinson went along with this, presumably in the interests of being able to pay the bills. He also had an uncharacteristic streak of good luck, going down a storm in the UK, occasionally speaking in broken English, but mostly remaining inscrutably silent.
His pièce de resistance was the bullet catch, in which he was shot with a trick rifle, and caught the projectiles in a suitably Oriental-looking bowl. He wasn’t actually shot at, of course. The rifles had one barrel which was loaded with real bullets, but plugged, and another, concealed, which flashed and puffed smoke. He dropped prop bullets into the bowl through sleight of hand.
When the Boxer Rebellion in China (a movement in around 1900 to drive foreigners out) threatened to make his persona difficult for him, ‘Soo’ let it be known that he had been forced to leave because he liked foreigners, and presented the bullet trick in the form of a firing squad under the name Condemned to Death by the Boxers.
Then his luck turned again, and the real Ching Ling Foo got to London and tried to expose this impostor. William/Chung Ling (or perhaps Ike, given his track record) came up with a new story: Chung Ling Soo was, in fact, an American. Somehow (and presumably to Foo’s considerable annoyance), this made Robinson more popular than ever.
Unfortunately, over the years, Robinson hadn’t maintained his rifle. The steel plug in his barrel gradually rusted, and gunpowder residue built up. At the Wood Green Empire that night, when the fake barrel went off, it sparked the gunpowder behind the real bullet.
When British illusionist Paul Daniels performed the trick on BBC television in 1982, he got Jack Grossman, who had shot Robinson, to be part of the act to help build up tension.
He also threw in a lot of guff about how dangerous the act was, and how much he was at risk of dying on television.
And was careful with his gun.
