Davenport brothers

American magicians in the late 19th century

Ira Erastus Davenport (September 17, 1839 – July 8, 1911) and William Henry Davenport (February 1, 1841 – July 1, 1877), Their father took up managing his sons and the group was joined by William Fay, a Buffalo resident with an interest in conjuring. The Davenports caused a sensation around the world with their vaudeville act. The result of the Ghost Club's investigation was never made public. In 1868 the team was joined by Harry Kellar. Kellar and Fay eventually would leave the group to pursue their own career as a magician team. William Davenport died on 1 July 1877 at the Oxford Hotel in King street, Sydney, aged 36 years, during a tour of Australia and New Zealand. His death was attributed to "pulmonary consumption". The brothers had arrived from New Zealand three weeks previously; during the performances there William had "broke a blood vessel, and came to Sydney under the advice of his medical attendants". In 1895, Ira and Fay revived the act, but failed to attract an audience. Magicians including John Henry Anderson and Jean Eugène Robert Houdin worked to expose the Davenport Brothers, writing exposés and performing duplicate effects. Edward Dicey who attended a séance in 1864 observed that there were a host of circumstances which suggested purposely designed trickery and described the Davenports performance as a "mere conjuring trick of no very high order". He concluded that "all but the most confirmed believers will admit that, if it can be shown the Davenport Brothers can slip their hands out of the ropes, there is nothing supernatural, or even extraordinary, to explain in the exhibition." Dicey noted that the Davenport brothers employed three companions during their séances which was suspicious. Ira had begged their stage manager J. B. Ferguson to cut the knot with a knife and had received a hand wound in the process. The crowd was angry and a riot erupted with the cabinet being smashed. On 25 February 1865, Henry Irving and his fellow actors Philip Day and Frederick Maccabe who had read about the Liverpool exposure reproduced the Davenport brothers séance phenomena through trickery at the Library Hall of the Manchester Athenaeum. Irving impersonated Dr Ferguson who had introduced the real Davenports. The imitation of the Davenports séance was successful and the audience cheered. The British newspapers praised Irving's expose and admired his acting skill. Irving and his actor friends were able to reproduce all the tricks of the Davenports and they repeated the performance at the Free Trade Hall to large crowds of influential people from Manchester.</blockquote>

Some from the spiritualist community also accepted that the Davenport brothers were fraudulent. From 1864–1869, Paschal Beverly Randolph worked on a biography of the Davenport brothers known as The Davenport Brothers: The World Renowned Spiritual Mediums, which was published by the brothers anonymously. Randolph had been a friend of the brothers since the mid 1850s. However, he never published the work because he later came to the conclusion that the brothers were "deliberate impostors". Randolph became convinced of the fraud of the Davenports by the spiritualist M. B. Dyott who wrote an expose of the Davenports in the Religio Philosophical Journal in October 20, 1866. Magician Chung Ling Soo revealed the brothers trick known as the "Davenport Tie" in 1898.

According to the magician Harry Houdini, Ira had confessed to him that he and his brother had faked their "spirit" phenomena. Houdini in his book A Magician Amongst the Spirits (1924) also reproduced a letter from Ira claiming "we never in public affirmed our Belief in spiritualism." The author and spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle refused to accept the exposures of fraud, and insisted that in private Ira was a practicing spiritualist. In 1998, skeptical investigator Joe Nickell discovered the Davenports' scrapbook from the museum at the Lily Dale Spiritualist Assembly. Nickell examined newspaper clippings, personal notes and photographs from the scrapbook. He concluded that Doyle was correct about Ira endorsing spiritualism in private and Houdini was also correct about their public "spirit" phenomena being the result of trickery. According to Nickell "taken as a whole, the evidence of the scrapbook does indicate that Ira Davenport was a practicing spiritualist, or at least pretended to be, although he and his brother used trickery to accomplish the effects they attributed to spirits."