CORINDA

When mentalists speak of the books that shaped them, a few names always surface: Annemann, Dunninger, Fogel, and, above all, Corinda. Tony Corinda wrote Thirteen Steps to Mentalism, a work so foundational that almost every serious mentalist alive either owns it or can quote it. It is, by common consent, the essential reference in the field, bar none.

And yet, considering that reputation, remarkably little has been written about the man himself. Like the Great Alexander at the very start of this series, Corinda was a complex figure with an intriguing and somewhat private, even dark, side to his personality, a great teacher of performance who was, by his own telling, never quite a great performer.

From Mill Hill to the Egyptian Desert

He was born Thomas William Simpson in 1930 in Mill Hill, London, and his start in life was hard. Growing up through the war, with schools closing under the air raids, he left education at thirteen with no qualifications and began work at fourteen. A job at the nearby National Institute of Medical Research led to technical college and training as a microbiologist, and later to the Central Public Health Laboratories at Colindale. At eighteen he was conscripted into the Royal Army Medical Corps and posted to a research laboratory in the Egyptian desert. Near the lab stood an isolated military hospital, and it was there, entertaining patients who rarely had visitors, that his interest in magic took hold. He knew just six tricks at first, performed over and over, until a patient who happened to be a competent magician taught him more and gave him a Vampire Magic catalogue, which he is said to have slept with under his pillow. Discovering mentalism in the magic books that followed, he was, like so many before and since, ensnared by the gentle art of deception. At twenty he took the stage name Corinda, an anagram of the famous German magic author and dealer Conradi.

Finding His Path

Demobilised, he drifted between laboratory jobs until one day he hung up his white coat for good. He went to stay in Dover with a chess-playing friend, Pete Hammerton, whose mother was a spiritualist medium and who helped kindle Corinda's lifelong fascination with the occult. The pair found work at the St Mary's Bay holiday camp in roles much like Butlin's Redcoats, Pete as the resident clown, Corinda as the resident magician and mind reader, conjuring for the children and performing mentalism for the adults. Two seasons there were followed by two years travelling with a fairground, until the relentless setting-up and breaking-down wore him down. He put the experience to use at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens, the permanent showground created for the 1951 Festival of Britain, where he ran a magic stall and performed for visitors.

The Shops and David Berglas

From a tiny occult shop in Soho's Berwick Street, where it is said he also lived, Corinda first met David Berglas, beginning a friendship that would prove pivotal to his career. Berglas helped him into smarter premises in Mortimer Street and into a great deal of work, and the two collaborated on many television and radio productions over the years. Unusually for a dealer, Corinda specialised in mentalism as well as standard magic. He went on to take over The Magic Shop in Oxford Street, hold the magic concession at Hamleys, and run a second Oxford Street shop, building, through the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small West End empire of magic and joke shops that employed around forty people. He was a tireless demonstrator, too; working the Svengali deck at Gamages in the run-up to Christmas, he once reckoned he had performed the same routine more than eighteen thousand times. He also demonstrated at Dick Silverman's Cheval shop in Oxford Street, alongside Pat Page and Ali Bongo.

In business Corinda was determined and entrepreneurial, with a real gift for publicity. He kept a standing order with Goodliffe for an advertisement in Abra every week, which meant forever conjuring up an eye-catching headline for a trick. On one occasion he advertised an effect before he had so much as devised it, trusting that he could invent something worthy by the time the orders arrived in the post, a confidence that, more often than not, was rewarded.

The Thirteen Steps to Mentalism

In 1958, in his late twenties, Corinda began writing the first part of what would become his monument. There was no plan for a series at first, but having written a few he proposed to Berglas a set of perhaps ten booklets, each on a different aspect of the art; Berglas, with a fondness for the number, suggested thirteen. Each of the thirteen steps was issued as a separate course, with contributions from Berglas, Jon Tremaine and Eric Mason, the last two also providing the illustrations, and many effects from the Berglas shows found their way in. D Robbins and Co compiled the complete volume in 1964. Corinda briefly priced the bound book at an extraordinary one hundred and thirty shillings, and almost none sold; only once the price came down did it become the international success it remains, translated into many languages, later issued in hardcover, republished in 2011 within the Encyclopedia of Mentalism and Mentalists, and, decades later, adapted to video by Richard Osterlind. As the magician John Carney memorably put it, "If Corinda's Thirteen Steps to Mentalism are the tools, The Mind and Magic of David Berglas is the manual."

The Inventions

For all the book's fame, Corinda is less often remembered as a prolific inventor, yet he was one. His creations include the Khan Slate Test, the Spirit Bell, the Billet Pencil, Predicted Card-in-Balloon, the Money Box, Psychosight, the Spirit Telephone, the two-person Communicator, the Q5 Pocket Index devised with Pat Page, and Fantasy in Flame, made with Maurice Fogel, among many more; his own favourites were the Khan Envelope Test and Powers of Darkness. The famous Khan Dictionary Test was born of necessity, advertised before it existed; a hurried call to Fogel produced the idea of a full stick of chalk that snapped after writing a prediction, the act of picking up the broken piece neatly covering the secret. By Monday morning the orders were rolling in.

The Performer Question

There has long been debate over whether Corinda was truly a good performer, but he insisted he could not have been a successful dealer otherwise. The show people most remember was a spectacular fake seance he gave at The Magic Circle's Chenies Mews headquarters, aided by hidden assistants Pat Page and Mitch Devano. Asked once, in a discussion of how openly a mentalist should explain his methods, where Fogel's guiding philosophy of "if you don't have to admit anything, keep your mouth shut" had come from, Corinda replied, deadpan, "Al Capone."

Honours and Retreat

Corinda took quiet pride in two honours in particular: his Membership of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star, awarded in 1959 when he was among its youngest recipients, and his Life Membership of the Psychic Entertainers Association, both certificates always on display. In time, weary of the rat race, he retired to a reclusive life in Norfolk, distancing himself from the magic world while still keeping his hand in, writing regular articles for the Psychic Entertainers Association journal Vibrations and keeping in touch with a small circle of friends, among them Pat Page, Martin MacMillan and Chris Woodward. He died on 1 July 2010, aged eighty. At his funeral at Mintlyn Crematorium near King's Lynn, two dozen local friends and neighbours gathered to pay their respects to a quiet man they had known, never guessing that he had become, through a single book, a legend in his own lifetime. Of the magic world he had shaped so profoundly, only one magician attended.

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From The Magic Circular

This profile is adapted and expanded from Roberto Forzoni's original feature in The Magic Circular, the journal of The Magic Circle, November 2015.

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