This is a story filled with contradictions and anomalies, mysteries and missing pieces. We may never fill in all the details of Tom Selwyn’s life, nor understand his motivations, but now we have a far greater understanding of this magician, soldier and magical mentor.

Before starting on a complex story, why should we be interested in Tom Selwyn or his involvement in the world of magicians? Although he is not unknown in the annals of history, he was neither a famous performer during his life, nor one who has a prominent profile today.

The answer is that Selwyn was the mentor to Leslie Cole, ‘The Great Levante’, Australia’s foremost illusionist of the twentieth century; he may have been the person who gave Levante his stage name. As a magician undeniably skilled in sleight of hand, he was a friend and guide to other magicians, possibly including mentalist Sydney Piddington, and was held in high regard by magicians throughout Australia for his personal skills and his friendly comradeship – to such a degree that magicians contributed to the cost of erecting a headstone for his grave. Selwyn was a regular correspondent to overseas magic magazines and, it appears, had a wide circle of correspondents around the world.

A major difficulty is that most biographical information about Selwyn in the magical press has come from Selwyn himself. His friends re-tell the stories that Selwyn told them, lending credibility and directing attention away from some areas of his life; which is, no doubt, what he intended. Also, because there are periods of his life for which no documentation exists, and little way of discovering the facts, we are left with only Tom Selwyn’s tale of where he was and what he did at certain times. Though there is no doubt that he travelled extensively, in such cases we will have to say “according to Selwyn”, and hope that, over time, more detail will come to light. The fact is that, in some aspects of his life,  Selwyn was less than honest, and it has a negative effect on some of his history.

So, this is Selwyn’s biography (1) according to himself:-

- Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 22, 1878, of British parentage, and brought to England (Manchester) as a baby.

- Apprenticed as a sailor at age fourteen, travelled round the world twice but then walked off the ship in New York.

- Worked in United States at Huber’s Dime Museum, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, Dr. Bigelow’s Medicine show, Reynolds’ Waxworks Liverpool,  and circuses as a magician.

- Travelled to South America, South Africa, British provinces.

- Fought in the Boer War (Africa) then went to India, Ceylon, Burma, Malay States and Siam, across China to Korea and Japan and French Indo-China. Through the Philippines, Indonesian islands, and down to Australia & New Zealand, known as “The Globe-Trotting Magician”.

- Enlisted in the army during WW1 and was wounded at Gallipoli and gassed in France.

- Met Kellar, Herrmann, J.N. Maskelyne, Devant, Carter, Morritt, Oswald Williams, Ching Ling Foo, Chung Ling Soo, Malini, Hertz, Goldin, Leipzig, Houdini, Thurston, Bertram, Stilwell and more.
- Through ill health caused by the war, worked at the Sydney Stock Exchange before retiring. Lived in Queensland, then Tasmania before dying on January 26, 1950.

This author can claim but little credit for unravelling the untold facts of Selwyn’s military life, or locating his true name. The breakthroughs are entirely down to Jim Rouse, a military researcher based in Tasmania. My contribution to his discoveries was limited to offering some sources from magical publications. Jim was researching the history of the 40^th Infantry Battalion of the A.I.F. (Australian Imperial Force), bumped across the name of Tom Selwyn, the Battalion’s regimental sergeant major, and soon discovered that his background was rather obscured. This led Rouse to dig deeply into military records and, with some clever reverse-engineering and sleuthing, he penetrated Selwyn’s family history and uncovered a trail of military misadventures which now gives us a far greater understanding of Selwyn.

Jim Rouse’s lengthy article has been published in ‘Digger’ No.87, June 2024, Magazine of the Families and Friends of the First AIF, inc. edited by Graeme Hosken [ISSN 1834-8963] which is not widely available to the general public. This current essay rests heavily on Jim’s research and, where appropriate, will quote passages from his article, but has been re-worked for a reading audience of magicians. Those who might wish to read the finer military detail of the original article could contact Kent Blackmore via this website.

From Les Levante’s reminiscences - (2)
“Mother [Sarah Catherine Cole] died at forty years of age [December 26, 1908] (3) and I was then a little more than sixteen. I was taken down to Melbourne to attend the funeral and for the first time I saw the sea and this magnificent city and I was enthralled. After the funeral I went back to the farm to help my father and on his return to the farm, I gave him no peace, hammering away at him until he gave me permission to go to Melbourne to get a job.

Ultimately it turned out after my seventeenth birthday, he had arranged with a Mr. Frank Rout, who owned the Vine Hotel in Bridge Road, Richmond, for me to become the billiards marker. Mr. Rout had purchased from my father a number of horses which had become trotting horses and he had been successful with them. So I finally went to Melbourne [c. 1909] and became the billiards marker at the Vine Hotel where I learnt a lot about trick shots on the billiard table and, as I was a tall gangling youth, I became more or less very popular. One of the people who visited the Vine Hotel occasionally was Fred Lindrum, the elder of the brothers who in his day was one of the top billiards players in the world. Fred needed somebody to practise with him in the morning, so at seven o'clock I would go down from my bedroom and join him, and he would go 300 behind and give me 200 on, and we would play 500 up, and I never ever won a game. What I learnt about billiards and positions and that sort of thing did me a lot of good because I became a very good billiards player. Also I became more proficient at trick shots taught to me by Fred Lindrum.

Some little time after I was the billiards marker, the barman in this hotel fell ill and I was called upon to go into the bar to assist. Into the bar one day came a man named Tom Selwyn who hailed from Manchester, walking around the world with a pack of cards. Tom was about as wide as a door and about 5'6" or 5'7" in height. He was a fine athlete and a very fine exponent of sleight of hand. He was a nomadic type of fellow and his business was to go from one type of country to another, and how he ever ended up in the Vine Hotel in Bridge Road, Richmond, is something I have never fathomed. But he started to do his tricks in the bar and a lot of customers, not knowing any better, said to him, "Oh yes, young Les can do all these tricks." Young Les couldn't do them. This man was really an expert of sleight of hand. In those days pints of beer were threepence so, to keep Tom in the bar, because it was good for business, I slipped him the extra pint of beer and he, in turn, took me in hand and taught me the fundamental principles of sleight of hand with cards. He went away and came back some five or six weeks later. I had practised continually and I had become quite expert at what he had taught me. He then really went to work on me and gave me the insight into manipulating thimbles, coins and billiard balls.

Away he would go again and come back some couple of months later and would be astonished at the progress I had made. After my eighteenth year he said to me one day, "Why not take this up professionally? You have very good address. If you improve your vocabulary, I am sure you would be successful at it because you're going to be good." I gave this some consideration and finally I listened to him and then I joined the A.V.A - The Australian Vaudeville Association, and I received some small bookings.

I must tell you, in the meantime, Tom had settled in Melbourne and he was the Secretary of the A.V.A. Naturally he pushed me along and made sure I did get some reasonably good bookings, if bookings at ten and sixpence per night could be considered good. That was what I received. Some nights I would be called up to stand up in front of a cinema sheet out in an open cricket ground. How on earth some of the people there saw what I was doing I do not know. In the meantime I purchased some small tricks from a small magic shop in Melbourne owned by a man called Claude Guest, who was later to become a Chinese exponent of magic under the title of Wong Toy Sun. I did a great deal of work around the suburbs of Melbourne.

The builder of Luna Park, T.H Eslick, came to me one night and said to me, "I'm going to build a park in Sydney called the White City. How would you like to come over there and handle the Theatre of Illusions?" I said, "I think that would be delightful." So he said, "But, in the meantime, would you like to come over and be my 'tiger'?" I said to him, "Well, what do you mean by 'tiger'?" He said, "Well, I've got to have someone to run the messages and to generally make sure that the people who come to see me are on business and that sort of thing. I shall employ you at £4 per week and you can have about three months before White City opens." Of course, I agreed, and in the meantime I had to do some other work, and I was booked by Tom Selwyn to go to Broken Hill to what was then known as the Sods Opera, which was sort of a tough Music Hall which was run by a man named [Ross?] Hayward. I played there for a month and then went across to Western Australia to the then Shaftesbury Theatre, Perth, and played there. In those days, of course, there was no railway and I had to go there and back by steamer. I was then sent up to Kalgoorlie and played there and finally came back to Melbourne where I did some more work around the suburbs and then over to Sydney in [November] 1913 where I became the Tiger for T.H Eslick at the White City in Sydney, which was then being constructed.”

An anecdote regarding Levante’s adopted stage name is that following a show in Sydney, the promoter decamped, or 'levanted' with the proceeds. A more likely origin is that Tom Selwyn gave his protege the title 'Levant', a name he claimed to have had used himself (this cannot be confirmed). He told Les that the word meant not only the 'east wind of the Mediterranean', but also 'a vanisher, one who gets away with things'. The stricter definition is 'a bet made with the intention of absconding if it is lost'.

In a recorded interview given in 1975, Les recalled that the magician who had made the biggest impact on Australia up to the turn of the century was Oscar Eliason (1869-1899), billed as 'Dante the Great'. Impressed by the magician's reputation, and feeling that Dante was a classy name, Les tacked on the letter 'e' to his own stage name and became Levante. (Elsewhere it was stated that it was Jean Hugarde's name, rather than Dante's, which appealed.)

Levante and Selwyn remained fast friends for years to come, and at a later stage when Selwyn was ill, he moved to live at Levante’s holiday cottage on Cribb Island at Brisbane (since resumed for the expansion of Brisbane airport). Levante seems to have absorbed much of Selwyn’s attitude to life and performance. He was always a down-to-earth man who socialised easily with every class of person, taking business opportunities wherever they arose, unfazed by problems onstage or off, and willing to venture around the world always under his own management and direction. While Levante was not a sleight-of-hand performer, his early repertoire did include a thimble routine which may well have been Selwyn’s own.

To discover the true origins of Tom Selwyn requires a jump to the years 1895 and 1914, when he filled out his ‘attestation’ paper for enlistment in the army. The document he signed on August 28, 1914 refers to his next of kin being a Mrs. J. Law (sister) of Pendleton, Manchester, England. (4)

Jim Rouse reverse-engineered this information to discover, from Census 1901 records, that Mrs John Law was Alice Emma Noon (1867-1927) and that she had two brothers, Archibald Noon (1875-1901) and John Thomas Noon.

Their parents were Catherine Noon (nee Oliver) and John Henry Noon, a general wood turner who in 1878 was living at Howley Lane, Warrington, about 20 miles outside Manchester England.

Having identified the wider family, further confirmation of those facts became available through birth and baptismal records, census records of 1881 and 1891, and death records.

Tom Selwyn was John Thomas Noon. He was born on May 22, 1878 and baptised on June 9 at St. Elphin, Warrington. Given that he was baptised in England so soon after birth, the possibility that he was, as he usually claimed, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, or that his parents might have been in the United States at his birth, is extremely low.

The claims about his birth also extend to Selwyn’s marriage certificate of 1916, on which he falsely named his parents as John Henry and Catherine Selwyn, stated that his father was a stockbroker, and listed his birthplace as Tyngs Island in Massachusetts. Although close to Lowell Mass., Tyngs Island was the location of the Vesper Country Club, a boating club founded in 1875. Today it remains a small island with a single road leading to the existing country club; not a likely place for a child to have been born.

What little we know of John Noon’s childhood gives us no more than hints as to why he would wish to conceal his upbringing. His father’s trade as wood-turner, for instance, was not necessarily a low class position. The 1891 census records John as an errand boy aged 12.  In July 1892, the Liverpool Assizes charged a John Thomas Noon with burglary along with an accomplice, resulting in a ‘not guilty’ finding; we might reasonably assume that this was our subject.

John attested for the military on December 1, 1892, for six years’ service with the Yorkshire Light Infantry, but was later struck off the list after not attending any parades in 1893. A possible reason for this brief enlistment is given shortly.

John’s brother, Archibald, was sent to London’s ‘St. Mary the Less’ school in 1885. Archibald would then attest in 1892 and serve for nine years with the Yorkshire Light Infantry, including six months South African service during the Boer War. It might be assumed that he suffered injury or illness, since he was listed with the Royal Hospital Chelsea Pensioner Service Records, and in the 1901 UK Census he was recorded as living with his sister Alice Emma and her husband and children at 11 Booth Street, Pendleton.  Archibald died in late 1901.

John’s father, John Henry Noon, died in the first half of 1893, and his mother Catherine in 1894. So in 1893, John was in his mid-teens, without a brother in the household, and soon to lose his parents.

Selwyn would later claim (6) to have given his first magic show at the age of nine (1887) in Manchester, but all we know of his magical training comes from a photograph and pencilled note (5) stating that John had seen the magician Professor Anderton as a boy. Anderton’s real name was Albert A. Haslam, c.1851-Aug 5 1900 – a minor sleight of hand artist at English fairs until c.1890, when he left magic to become a circus worker and later a movie exhibitor. He lived at Sheffield, not a great distance from Manchester, but there is little reason to suspect that he was ever a mentor to young John.

Anderton’s magic, according to Sidney W. Clarke’s ‘Annals of Conjuring’ consisted of such tricks as the Chinese Rings, the production of bowls of water from a shawl, the Flying Bird Cage, the Rising Cards with a mechanical pack, the Aerial Treasury and the Inexhaustible Hat, DeKolta’s Vanishing Lady and the Aerial Suspension. A favourite effect of his was to apparently freeze the water in one of the bowls and show it as a solid lump of ice. In 1909, Anderton accidentally fell into the River Sid; his cries went unheard and he drowned.

Jim Rouse found an interesting connection to music hall which may have influenced young John Noon. His brother-in-law, John Law, was a hairdresser. The 1921 census showed he had an apprentice, working for and living with his family, named Rikimatsu Akimoto,who proves to have been the son of a Japanese performer/artist, Senkichi Akimoto who had a travelling troupe of Japanese artists which was in Liverpool during 1896.  ( https://ninjin.co.uk/akimoto-troupe-1896-1908/ ). If it happened that John Law had some earlier links with music hall artists, it is quite possible that John Noon had met them and learned from them.

This is as much as has been learned about John Noon’s magical education. Doubtless he had access to formative works such as Professor Hoffmann’s ‘Modern Magic’ (1876) and others, and perhaps he was fortunate enough to have found teachers and mentors whose names are lost to history. We do know that young John speedily acquired skills in performing magic, and that he showed great ability.

Here, John’s story becomes even more complex, and only by a fortuitous mention of his adopted name in magic magazines, are we able to pick up some threads of his military history.

In a discovery made following the publication of Jim Rouse’s story, we find that magicians’ magazine ‘Stanyon’s Magic’ between 1903 and 1904 ran monthly advertisements under the name “Chas. and Harry – Bros. Selwyn – Legerdemain and Second Sight Act. Now in India”. Though it seems that this was the first mention of John Noon as ‘Selwyn’, the connection is confirmed by later reference to his military career.

Magicians’ magazines ‘Mahatma’ and ‘The Sphinx’ (1904 and 1905) also refer to a Thomas Oliver (Chas. Selwyn) of H Company, K.S.L.I. Regt. Peshawar, India. (7)

The name ‘Thomas Oliver’ is a fairly clear combination of his middle name, and his mother’s maiden name; a ploy frequently used by enlistees in the military who wished to use an alias.

Who, though, was Harry Selwyn, the other half of the ‘Bros. Selwyn’? We have only the clue that a Harry Selwyn, member of the Magic Circle, is seen in London between 1906-1914, performing in concerts and acting as an Auditor for the Circle. (8) Also, a Lieutenant Harry Jasper Selwyn was involved in the Boer War with 16 company 5Bn Imperial Yeomanry.
Harry Selwyn’s identity cannot yet be confirmed, but it does raise the question as to whether John Noon decided to adopt the stage name ‘Selwyn’ to match that of his performing partner.

The significant problem with this is that he was still absent without leave from the Royal Navy! He was spinning himself a complex web of trouble for the future. Even more, within three months of joining, ‘Thomas’ went AWL for seven days, resulting in a stoppage of pay and his transfer to the 2^nd Battalion of the regiment. It appears that he spent the next year without trouble, at the Regiment’s Shrewsbury depot, or at Portland Barracks.

On October 29, 1896, John was “recovered from desertion” by the Royal Navy, and returned to the training ship Caledonia, charged with desertion and sentenced to 42 days of imprisonment and hard labour on November 13. Not only was he undergoing punishment, he was building up trouble with the K.S.L.I. from which he would have been absent without leave, unless he had contrived some means of obtaining leave.