Jasper Maskelyne

Jasper Masklyne was born in 1902 and died in 1973. He was a male. He was a British stage magician in the 1930s and 1940s. He is most remembered, however, for his entertaining accounts of his work for British military intelligence during the Second World War, in which he claims that he created large-scale ruses, deception and camouflage. There is no information about his class, but we gess he was rich.

Masklyne joined the British Army at the beginning of World War two, and in the course of his training in the Engineering Corps he was mainly engaged in military fraud and camouflage. In 1941, Masklyne was sent to an acquaintance and placed in a special intelligence unit set up to carry out deception and counterterrorism operations. Upon arrival at the unit, Masklyne gathered around him a team of assistants, engineers, chemists, electricians, carpenters and painters, nicknamed the “magic gang”.

Masklyne and his men began to work on a different ruse to mislead the German army. They used boards and cloth sheets to make the jeeps look like tanks, or alternatively to make the tank look like an innocent transport truck, and developed a variety of ways to forge and camouflage desert vehicles.

This picture shows Jasper performing a sand magic on his stage when he was another magician.

This picture is another picture where Jasper can be seen performing magic on stage.