[The Piddingtons, Australian husband and wife mentalists; Changi] Biography ‘The Piddingtons’ by their manager Russell Braddon, with illustrations by Ronald Searle, signed by Braddon and Lesley and Sydney Piddington, with bookplate of Desmond Young.

238pp, 8vo, with frontispiece and illustrations. In green cloth binding, gilt. Internally good and tight, on lightly-browned paper, in good binding with slight discolouration at head and foot of spine, caused by loss to the creased and damaged dustwrapper. The three signatures are one on top of the other in the centre of the recto of the front free endpaper: ‘Leslie Piddington. / Sydney Piddington / Russell Braddon’. Facing the signatures, on the front pastedown, is the ‘Ex libris / DESMOND YOUNG / Le Beaupré Sark’, with illustration of nineteenth-century couple beneath the bowsprit of a sailing ship named ‘The Seas’, with another ship at sea behind the couple. The Piddingtons stock-in-trade as a stage act was telepathy, and their methods were never explained. The present volume, written by their manager and fellow-Australian Russell Braddon is, according to the blurb, ‘a brilliant, heart-warming story of two young people who have had greatness thrust upon them. It tells of their discovery of their ability, the struggle to gatecrash the world of theatre and radio, first in Australia and then in England. It gives the amusing facts of B.B.C. “red tape,” of the scoffers and doubters.’ Braddon and Leslie Piddington were held by the Japanese in what the blurb describes as ‘the dreaded Changi prisoner-of-war camp’. Brigadier Desmond Young, MC, was another notable Australian. He fought against Rommel in North Africa, and wrote the 1950 biography of him titled ‘The Desert Fox’ that was made into the 1951 film of the same name.