Woman Who Vanished After Tricking All-Male Magic Club Is Sought

More than 30 years after a British woman pulled off the ultimate act of illusion by gaining admission to an all-male magicians’ club while disguised as a man, the historic organization says it is hoping to track her down to not only reissue her membership but offer an apology.

Sophie Lloyd was promptly thrown out of London’s historic Magic Circle organization in 1991 and largely vanished after revealing her stunning 18-month disguise to the exclusive society, which had forbidden women from joining for 86 years.

“It’s an incredibly brave thing to do, an extraordinary thing to do,” Magic Circle member Charlie Burgess, who is helping with Lloyd’s search, told HuffPost on Friday of her cunning act of trickery. “It’s not lost on us the irony to be thrown out for deception at a magicians’ club. What else do we do? We deceive all the time.”

Lloyd, who Burgess said may also go by the first name of Sue, first introduced herself to the then-segregated club as Raymond Lloyd in her application papers in October 1989 and joined as an associate member the following February. She completed an in-person exam about a year later in March 1991 and became a full-fledged member immediately after.

In a 1991 interview with CBC Radio in Canada shortly after coming clean, Lloyd recalled heavily training for her entry with the help of her female magician friend Jenny Winstanley, who, Burgess said ― like many other women ― had long sought admission to the society. She believed that Lloyd, who was an actor, would be more skilled at pulling it off, Burgess said.

“I did it for Jenny,” Lloyd told the CBC. “Well, you see, Jenny’s a magician. And she thought that it was so unfair that lady magicians couldn’t get into The Circle.”

“We kept it totally secret, the two of us, for two years,” Winstanley, who reportedly died in 2004, told the CBC. “We’ve worked very hard, in all seriousness.”

Lloyd said she presented herself to the club as a “very young-looking 18-year-old” with “a little croaky voice” and “some fluff” as a mustache.

“It wasn’t just literally putting on a wig, glasses and the baggy suit and going out and doing it. I had to study the character for two years and, you know, with Jenny. And I think I did it very well,” she said.

Her act was actually so good that she managed to get drinks with her examiner after performing her final entry exam. They got a pint, she said, and the man talked with her about how he was going to help her with her magic.

Following her admission, Lloyd said she went to a couple of classes but said she never stayed very long. She described some unease being around the men, who she noted were all much larger than her.

After more than a year of operating under Raymond’s face and name, she came clean when the organization voted to allow women as members in 1991. But instead of welcoming her, the council voided her membership at an Oct. 9 meeting, with its secretary reasoning that she carried out “a deliberate deception” of its members, according to information shared with HuffPost by Burgess.

In a backhanded twist, he said the council welcomed its first female members at that same meeting.

“I think what happened is that they were embarrassed by what had happened,” Burgess said. “Things have changed a bit, or I’d say a lot. It was still a club dominated by men.”

Though it’s not clear what happened to Lloyd, Burgess said there were reports of her in local papers giving anti-bullying magic performances to schoolchildren in the late 1990s. The trail went cold after that.

Laura London, who recently became the first female chair of The Magic Circle, said that they hope to make amends with Lloyd, who Burgess estimates is in her early 60s now.

“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,” she said in a statement shared with The Guardian.