Intriguing case of the vanishing professor

No one knows where he came from - or where he vanished to - but, in an economic depression, his well-to-do daughter, Marion, returned to Toronto to help in a soup kitchen. There she found love and stayed, living in a miner's tiny terraced house - with her housekeeper.

The story, which really should have been a Catherine Cookson novel, begins in a pub in Barnard Castle, in 1837.

William Bragger was in the Royal Dragoons, stationed nearby. He had been a sergeant, but was demoted after he took his troops out on a manoeuvre while he was drunk and they all deserted.

So he came into Barnard Castle, recruiting for his regiment, and in a pub he found 15-year-old Mary Ann.

They fell in love and eloped and, shortly before her 16th birthday, they married in Gainford.

The couple led a peripatetic Army life, but settled in 1854 in Wrexham, where William became master of the workhouse. But, at the age of 53, he suddenly dropped dead and Mary Ann was ejected from their tied home.

Early in the 1860s, she returned to Barnard Castle with her three youngest daughters and one son. She and William had about 19 children who either died or were given for adoption. But back in Barnard Castle, she had a 20th - illegitimate - child, who died in infancy.

Perhaps because of this unhappy affair, she left her home town and moved to Bishop Auckland, where she set up a boarding house in Vickers Street.

Her eldest daughter, Eliza Agnes, helped her to look after the actors, actresses and artistes who stayed there while performing at the Eden Theatre, in Newgate Street.

One of those artistes was Professor Luigi Meurice Hiodini, "the Most Astounding Prestidigitateur in the World", who was touring "in his unrivalled Prestidigitateurial Seance, entitled Wonder World".

This was the heyday of the prestidigitateur, a magician or conjuror who specialised in sleight-of-hand tricks (the professor also called himself a legerdemain, another French word which more literally translates as "light of hand").

Hiodini might have been genuinely Italian, as his name suggests, or he may have adopted the name of Robert Houdin (1805-1871), the famous pioneering French prestidigitateur.

Hiodini's show toured the North of England. We know, for instance, that on September 13, 1872, he played at the Cambridge Theatre and Music Hall, in Spennymoor, where the manager was moved to "assert that as a prestidigitateur you supersede all in the same line".

A review of his tour when it reached a music hall in Leeds reads: "The various attractive novelties at this hall are largely increased by the engagement of Prof M Luigi Hiodini, another talented manipulator in the world of magic, and he contrives by the infinite variety of his changes and the apparent impossibility to ordinary mortals of the wonders he accomplishes to hold audiences spellbound".

He also held Eliza Agnes spellbound in Bishop Auckland. She left her mother in the boarding house and took to the road with him.

In Hull, she appeared under the stage name Mademoiselle De Morenci, performing with Hiodini in "their elaborate, chaste and refined Ambidextral, Prestidigiterial Entertainment replete with the superb, ornate, elegant and mystic".

So spellbound was she that in April 1875, in Bishop Auckland, she married the professor. Three months later, on July 15, 1875, in Grainger Street, she gave birth to their daughter, Marion (her birth certificate says she was named Marian, but all her family knew her as Marion).

Eliza stayed behind bringing up Marion while the magical professor took to the road again, appearing in Hull in September 1876 with a new assistant called Pompey - "a real Darkie, in a new programme of mystery".

Hiodini then settled in London, performing conjuring and ventriloquist tricks on the fashionable dinner party circuit.

In 1884, according to advertisements in The Times newspaper, he was calling himself Dr Meurice. In 1885 he was going by the name of Colonel Meurice.

Then, as befits a world renowned prestidigitateur, he mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard of again.

Eliza took up with another professional conjurer, Dr Frank Lind, who performed under the pseudonym Henri Garenne.

Dr Lind also settled in London, where he had a factory producing one-armed bandits and "what the butler saw" peepshow machines.

His business was a success, and Eliza and young Marion went to London with him, living in some style.

But in the 1890s, Marion heard that the mining areas around Bishop Auckland had fallen foul of economic vagaries and she returned with her new-found wealth to help out. She ran a soup kitchen in Newton Cap, feeding the miners laid off by the Toronto colliery.

One of them was George Thomas Snowdon, of 7 Chapel Street, Toronto. When Marion returned to London, their courtship continued via the Royal Mail.

Her mother, Eliza, died in 1900, and Dr Lind seems to have followed soon after, leaving all his worldly goods to Marion - despite having two sons from a previous relationship living in Edinburgh.

Marion returned to Toronto, and at St Anne's Church on May 30, 1903, married George Snowdon. They set up home in Chapel Street, but Marion's inheritance allowed her to employ a maid - highly unusual, probably unique, in a colliery terrace.

Dr Lind's money lasted until the mid-1940s, and the maid must have been a great help in bringing up their three children, Jack, Maurice and Bessie.

Marion died in 1956; her George in 1957. But Bessie, approaching 90, still lives in Chapel Street.

Bessie's son, Geoffrey, lives in Bishop Auckland, and her daughter, Doris, lives in Durham City.

Between them, Geoff and Doris have three children - all great-great grandchildren of "the most astounding prestidigitateur in the world", Professor Luigi Meurice Hiodini who, appropriately for a professional magician, mysteriously disappeared into thin air over a century ago.

* With many thanks to Geoff Duncan and Margaret Taylor for their help with this article