'Vanishing act': UK Magic Circle seeks disappearing woman

LONDON - Britain's Magic Circle has launched an appeal to track down a woman it expelled over three decades ago for posing as a man to gain admittance to the formerly male-only magicians' society.

The London-based international magic organisation now wants to apologise to Sophie Lloyd who was ejected in 1991 for "masquerading as a male".

Lloyd, who had posed as Raymond Lloyd for 18 months, unmasked herself as a woman when the organisation voted to admit women in 1991.

But members angered at her "deliberate deception", went ahead with her expulsion.

Efforts to locate Lloyd, also thought to use the name Sue, have so far drawn a blank.

"Has she vanished? Who knows what the reason is that we haven't found her but right now the vanishing act is still very much a mystery," Laura London, the first female chair of the Magic Circle, told AFP.

"The more I find about this injustice the more I'd like to right this wrong," she said.

"At the very least we'd like to apologise as a society for the way the situation was handled back then."

- 'Vanishing act' -

The deception was in fact a two-person act involving magician Jenny Winstanley who recruited Lloyd, an actress, to prove that women were just as good as men.

Winstanley died in a car accident in 2004 but London said it was possible that Lloyd was still "very much alive".

"I'd like to say 'thank you'. She pulled off an 18-month orchestrated heist so that she could prove that the girls were as good as the boys," London said.

"It was quite an extraordinary feat in itself. She pulled it off and she proved the point."

Although women have been admitted to the Magic Circle now for over 30 years, they still make up only around five percent of the society's 1,700 membership.

More female performers, however, are coming through in the 10-18-year-old age group and London said the whole atmosphere of the society had changed out of all recognition.

"Times have changed, the society is an incredibly inclusive organisation now. It's no longer that stuffy old boys game. It's full of people who look different and are different."

She said organisations everywhere were increasingly owning up to some of the things that happened in the past, which were now rightly acknowledged as discriminatory.

"We're in that time right now where we can say, 'you know what, it was a bit rubbish back then but it's OK because the world has evolved'."

And she said she would love to write a book based on the story and see it turned into a film.

"The idea of a woman infiltrating the Magic Circle is a very brilliant orchestrated deception -- it writes itself and is 100 per cent made for the screen," she added. - AFP