GOODNESS, they can be pretty tough on this ferry if they catch you without a ticket. No wait a minute, it’s actually the great escapologist Harry Houdini, handcuffed, and about to be locked into a wooden box before being thrown into the East River in New York in July, 1912.
He escaped, “to the delight of onlookers” as the obverse of the photograph records.
The authorities had refused to let him use one of the piers so he hired a tugboat, invited the press on board, and was nailed into the crate which was lowered into the water. He escaped in under a minute.
He also performed in Aberdeen and Edinburgh on his European tours, and had been keen to visit Aberdeen because the magician John Anderson he admired had come from the north-east.
Harry, one of the highest-paid performers in the world, would drum up publicity before performances by inviting local police forces to handcuff and jail him with him inevitably escaping within minutes - usually with the help of lockpicks hidden in his hair it was later claimed.
He died in 1926 at the age of 52 from peritonitis, not helped by a student who punched him hard in the stomach to test how hard a blow he could take.
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