William Henry Harrison Davenport

William Henry Harrison Davenport
Born	William Henry Harrison Davenport February 1, 1841 Buffalo, N.Y.
Died	July 1, 1877 (age 36) Sydney, Australia
Resting place	Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney, Australia

William Henry Harrison Davenport (1841-1877), along with his Ira Erastus Davenport (1839-1911), performed as the Davenport Brothers in the late 1800s.

Biography

Sons of a Buffalo, New York policeman, the brothers are famous for deceptively presenting illusions that were claimed to be of a supernatural origin.

The Davenports began performing in 1854, less than a decade after the Spiritualism movement had taken off in America. After stories of the Fox sisters began to receive public attention, the Davenports started reporting similar occurrences happening to them. Their father resigned from his police job and took up managing his sons and the group was joined by William Fay, a Buffalo resident with an interest in conjuring. Their shows were introduced by a former "Restoration Moveme7nt" minister, Dr. J. B. Ferguson, a longtime follower of Spiritualism, who falsely assured the audience that the brothers worked exclusively by spirit power rather than the deceptive trickery of commercial magicians. Ferguson was apparently sincere in his belief that the Davenports were possessed of real spiritual powers.

The Davenports' most famous effect was their box illusion. The brothers were tied up and closed inside a large box which contained a number of musical instruments. Once the box was closed, the instruments would be made to sound. Upon opening the box, the brothers were found tied in the same positions in which they had started the illusion. Those who witnessed the effect were made to believe that supernatural forces had caused the trick to work.

The Davenports toured the United States for 10 years and then traveled to England where spiritualism was beginning to become popular. In 1868 the team was joined by Harry Kellar. Kellar and Fay eventually would leave the group to pursue their own career together as a magician team.

A number of famous magicians including John Henry Anderson and Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin worked to expose the frauds of the Davenport Brothers, both by writing exposés and performing duplicate effects in their own acts. A pair of amateur magicians followed the brothers' act around Britain, tying the Davenports into their box with a knot that could not be easily removed and thus ruined and exposed the trick to angry audiences who then demanded their money back. The impresario P. T. Barnum also included an exposé of the Davenports in his 1865 book The Humbugs of the World.

The Davenports were rejoined by William Fay for a final American tour before William Henry's death in 1877. After a period if illness (Tuberculosis of the lungs) William Henry Harrison Davenport died at the age of thirty-six on July 1, 1877, at the Oxford Hotel in King Street, Sydney.

References

This page incorporated content from Davenport Brothers, a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• A Biography of the Brothers Davenport by Thomas Low Nichols (1864). (reprinted in 1976) ISBN 0-405-07969-9
• From Hours with the ghosts: or, Nineteenth century witchcraft. Illustrated investigations into the phenomena of spiritualism and theosophy By Henry Ridgely Evans Published by Laird & Lee, 1897
• Confessions Of A Closet Magician: Some Notes On William Henry Harrison Davenport
• Mahatma, Vol. 1, No. 6, August 1895, DAVENPORT BROTHERS, page 55
• The Magician Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 9, August 1911, SOME NOTES OF THE DAVENPORT BROTHERS, page 175
• M-U-M, Vol. 10. No. 2, July 1920, MAGIC AND MAGICIANS, In Australia and New Zealand by Robert Kudarz, page 11
• The Sphinx, Vol. 21, No. 3, May 1921, The Davenport Brothers, by Henry R. Evans, page 104
• The Linking Ring, Vol. 11. No. 1, March 1931, A TABLET FOR IRA DAVENPORT by HARLOWE R. HOYT, page 28
• Magic Circular, Vol. 69, No. 758, January 1975
• J. N. Maskelyne and the Davenport Brothers "Phenomena" by S. H. SHARPE, page 8
• The Perennial Mystics, Vol. 6, 1987, CONFESSIONS OF A CLOSET MAGICIAN; SOME NOTES ON WILLIAM DAVENPORT – Kent Blackmore, page 23
• The Linking Ring, Vol. 73, No. 12, December 1993, THE DAVENPORT BROTHERS and ADAH ISAACS MENKEN, by Omnus Davenport, page 64
• Genii Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 11, November 2003, AN EXCERPT FROM HIDING THE ELEPHANT BY JIM STEINMEYER, THE DAVENPORTS’ NEW TYPE, page 28
• Bio-bibliographisches Lexikon der Zauberkünstler Edition Volker Huber, April 2002, Davenport Brothers USA Zauberkünstler, page 90