The council meeting of the Magic Circle on 9 October 1991 was a historic occasion, marking the moment when the first cohort of women, including Debbie McGee and Fay Presto, were admitted to its previously male-only ranks of magicians.
But the meeting was also memorable for another, lesser known, reason. The council voted to expel a member named Raymond Lloyd, who was in fact a woman named Sophie Lloyd, who had been “masquerading as a male” in order to gain access to the society.
She had been admitted 18 months earlier after donning her disguise, and decided to reveal herself when the organisation voted to admit women in 1991. Despite the new policy, Lloyd was rapidly expelled by members angry at her “deliberate deception”, the meeting notes state.
Now the Magic Circle is trying to track Lloyd down to apologise for what happened to her and admit her back into the society. Perhaps characteristically, after tricking the world’s most famous society of magicians, she now appears to have disappeared.
“It’s almost as if they just made her vanish from thin air, tried to brush it under the carpet, but obviously now the story has come out and we’re so desperate to right this wrong,” said Laura London, the first female chair of the Magic Circle.
“I think just to even sit down with her and find out her side of the story would be wonderful for us. But more than that, we could invite her back into the society, which would be the most incredible thing.
“We’re already in talks about making a movie of her extraordinary heist.”
Archive material shows that the deception was in fact a two-woman job, concocted by the magician Jenny Winstanley, who wanted to be the first woman admitted to the Magic Circle.
Feeling she was not up to the scale of the task herself, she recruited Lloyd, an actor, and helped her to create an elaborate disguise and character that would fool even the most advanced magicians.
“We really wanted to prove that women are as good as men,” Winstanley said in a radio interview after Lloyd revealed herself.
Lloyd, dressed as Raymond, passed a 20-minute magic test in order to gain access to the society, and even spent 90 minutes drinking a pint with her examiner afterwards.
“It wasn’t just literally putting on a wig, glasses and the baggy suit and going out and doing it,” she said at the time. “I had to study the character for two years. And I think I did it very well.”
Tracking Lloyd down has proved difficult, with the Magic Circle finding no trace of her beyond some local newspaper articles in Leamington Spa and Coventry in 1997. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004.
“The trail goes cold in 1997 so we really don’t know what happened to her,” said London. “But I’d like to think that maybe we could give her some closure to this extraordinary thing that she did, let her know that it was remembered, it will go down in history.
“I think it’s really important to tell her: thank you for everything and we’re very sorry for what happened.”
Although much has changed in the last two decades, magic is still a male-dominated sector – of the Magic Circle’s 1,700 members, only 5% are women, although the figure is higher in its Young Magician’s Club for 10- to 18-year-olds.
“The fact that it’s changing now is great, but boy, it’s taken a long time,” said London.
“I’ve been one of the lucky ones but that isn’t the case for so many. I think not only was [Lloyd] pioneering, her statement was a really important one to make. That’s why we want to find her, to say thank you for doing something so extraordinary and I’m sorry that the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped for, but I tell you what, it’s so appreciated from all of us women now.”
