School portraits / Schooldays at St Paul’s, recalled a long time afterwards
How to Avoid Rugby: Join the Club With No Members
The magician Guy Hollingworth got his start at St Paul’s by hiding from the rain in a society nobody attended. I read this to our eldest as a lesson in initiative.
The magician Guy Hollingworth started out at St Paul’s School in London, and it was not destiny. It was weather. The school’s magic club, the Prestige Society, was still on the list of societies, he recalls in an interview with Vanishing Inc., but “it wasn’t really about anything because there weren’t any members.” So he and a friend went along, were given a classroom, and had somewhere to hide at lunch while everybody else played rugby in the rain and the mud.
I have spent a small fortune making our eldest look interesting on paper. Guy Hollingworth’s founding principle was not wanting to get wet.
Lunch at St Paul’s is long. The school’s current curriculum policy gives pupils a 100-minute lunchtime for sports practices, society meetings and House competitions, and he remembers long lunch breaks you were meant to fill usefully. The two of them told people they were the magic club and were left alone. They borrowed books, Expert Card Technique among them, and found them hard going. They read them anyway, which is more than our eldest has done with any book I have bought him on purpose.
Then came the end-of-year open day, and the two members were asked, firmly, to put on a show. Hollingworth’s description of his own act is the finest open-day review I have ever read: “I literally just had a coin and did some false transfers.” His verdict: “It was awful!” It did not matter. Boys arriving the following year saw that the school had a magic club and came along to join it, and soon there were events to arrange and other pupils to teach. A 2008 convention biography credits the open-day show with bringing the society back to life. Nobody has ever signed up at any open-evening stand of ours, and we laminate.
I read all of this to our eldest, who is in Year 7 and has rugby on Wednesday afternoons, as an example of initiative. He took it as instructions. By half-term he had found a dead club at his own school and a classroom with a radiator, and I had found Expert Card Technique on a second-hand site for £14. It is pretty difficult stuff. I know because he gave up on page nine and I have been doing the coin ever since, at the hob, while the pasta boils.
At his school’s open evening he did one trick, badly, at a table with a sign my husband had painted. Two Year 6 boys signed up on the spot. Both, he tells me, mainly wanted to avoid rugby.
He has since gone back to rugby. He says the club is in safe hands. I am still doing the coin. It is still awful.
Sources
- Guy Hollingworth, The Insider interview with Damian Jennings, Vanishing Inc.
- Bob Hayden, 72nd British Ring Convention, Update 8
- St Paul’s School Curriculum Policy, authorised August 2026
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column