In this country everyone knows about the men who have been put away by the government without trial, without access to legal process, and who are all treated as guilty terrorists just because someone in our government said they were. Such injustice always come home to roost at some time or other. We have already seen the way in which America is regarded with distaste, contempt or hatred throughout the world because of the insane actions of our paranoid representatives.
If it’s any comfort, and it shouldn’t be, we in the States are not alone in such contrived injustices. In Britain right now a campaign for justice for Helen Duncan is being waged in the media and on the Web. She was unjustly accused of a crime in 1944 and imprisoned without the ability to defend herself by a blatantly kangaroo court in England, land of free speech and liberty, rather like the propaganda reputation of the USA. But her ‘crime’ was a spiritual one. Let’s look at it.
Helen Duncan was famous throughout the Spiritualist Church in Britain as a manifesting medium. This means that not only could she communicate with the spirits of the dead, as many in that Church do, but she caused a facsimile of the communicating spirit’s earthly body to appear and talk with the attendees at her séances.
Many such mediums have been proven to be frauds. Some magicians have made it a lifetime business to expose such people, Houdini for example. But frauds are in every profession. There are some fraudulent fire walkers and spoon benders, but they do not invalidate the others who are genuine. And Helen Duncan was investigated by several of the best magicians of her time including Will Goldston who founded the Magic Circle and was internationally famous as an illusionist.
His report of séances with Helen is available on the Web. In 1932 he attended a séance in London as an observer. As an accomplished magician he knew the theory that fraudulent mediums had the ability to swallow large amounts of cheese cloth and then regurgitate it so that in the dim light of the séance people would, by the power of their expectation, give the mass the semblance of their departed relative. He knew this, and much else.
He reported that the cabinet, in which the medium usually sat was in this case just a curtain drawn to divide her from the clients. He reported that in the space of about 90 minutes there were eight different materializations of shaped ectoplasm representing different forms, both sexes, all ages and each with a different voice. He reported talking to a small form named Violet who said she was eight years old and allowed him to feel her hand.
This was an experienced stage magician talking, who was not a member of the Church with a predisposition to believe. He also pointed out that immediately after the event he was there when Helen and he and the group moved to another room, and she drank two cups of coffee and ate a pair of cup cakes. He pointed out that this by itself would be a surprising feat if her stomach was stuffed with enough cheese cloth to manifest the eight beings.
So what did this apparently very competent medium do that got her into trouble with the authorities? She divulged secrets at her séances that officials thought to be known only to the authorities. On one occasion she told people that their son had been drowned when the Royal Navy battleship Hood was sunk by the German battlecruiser Bismarck. Trouble is she did that way before the official announcement.
On another occasion she materialized the body of a seaman wearing a cap with the name HMS Barham on it. The materialization said that he had just died on a ship of that name. The sinking of the ship was not announced for several months by the authorities because of the possible effect on public morale.
Apparently someone naïve and connected with the Church phoned the Admiralty to ask why the news hadn’t been divulged. As it was officially a secret the officials were put on red alert, rather like our officials when secrets leak out.
In 1944, just before the D-Day landings, the police raided a séance of Helen’s and arrested her. She had to be silenced apparently because she was good at what she did. The authorities did not want her to give out details of the D-Day landings through her spirit contacts, and she had proven that she was capable of receiving officially secret information from non-conventional sources. It didn’t occur to any of the paranoid officials involved to forbid her from giving séances for a few months. They did what bureaucrats always do and used a sledge hammer to kill a butterfly.
She was accused of fraud and conspiracy. Now conspiracy in wartime is a crime punishable by hanging, and even the boneheads involved thought that might be a bit of an overkill since they had no evidence anyway. So she was convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act which she had contravened by ‘pretending to raise the spirits of the dead.’ The Witchcraft Act was aimed at people who called themselves witches, and were therefore obviously frauds in the eyes of the law. She was not allowed by the prosecution to perform a séance in court because that would show that she was actually capable of doing what they accused her of pretending to do.
She was jailed for nine months to the delight of all the tabloid newspapers which treated her sentence as a ‘conviction for being a witch.’ An acute discrimination of the precision of words is not a dominant quality among tabloid readers. Her 72 year old grandchild Mary Martin still recalls the playground insults of being ‘witch’s spawn.’
The same thing didn’t happen, I notice, to the crossword puzzle constructor who had actual code names for the landing beaches as answers to the crossword puzzle in his prestigious London newspaper, just before D-Day. After questioning he was considered innocent of conspiracy or the passing of messages to enemy agents, using a public forum. But he was educated at the top schools and was a man, not a working class woman with a single unusual ability.
After Helen’s release from prison she was still harassed by the authorities, sort of what happens here if you happen to have the same name as someone on a bad guy list. Perpetual trouble though innocent.
Now, the conditions for a séance are very straightforward, and a dim light is necessary for the safety of a manifesting medium. Some other genuine mediums have experienced severe bruising when even a little light, like a small flashlight was accidentally shone in the room and the ectoplasm crashed back into the body of the medium. That this dim light is necessary is all that is needed for the skeptics to just know that the whole thing is fake. They don't expect photographs to be developed under a bright light to avoid fraud. They understand photography. But experienced investigators do at least honor this condition.
In 1956 the police raided a Helen séance without warrant, seized her while she was tranced, and took flashlight photographs to prove that she was a fraud. There was no evidence of fraud. She died six weeks later from the trauma. Yet it was the fact that she could do these things that sent her to jail. Had she been a fraud it wouldn’t have been officially necessary to stop her working.
Winston Churchill called the trial ‘tomfoolery.’ The first thing he did when re-elected as Prime Minister in 1951 was to repeal the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which gave the impetus to Gerald Gardner to revive the Wiccans as a religious group.
Winston also knew that Lord Goddard, Air Chief Marshall of the Royal Air Force, was a Spiritualist, as were other members of the House of Lords. They were all breaking the same law as sent Helen to prison whenever they held one of their religious meetings. So the Act was repealed. But Helen’s conviction was not overturned. Her family still had the slur of witch’s spawn hung on them.
Well, time has gone by. There were 300 servicemen executed during the First World War for cowardice. There was no awareness of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome then. They have since been officially exonerated, post mortem, and all stigma is lifted from their descendants.
Mary Martin petitioned the Home Secretary in 1999 for the lifting of the conviction, which was obviously an error of the paranoia of the times. Her petition was denied. We know how hard it is here for people in authority to admit, see or even conceive that they have made a mistake. The same is true elsewhere, unless there is a powerful lobbying group involved.
Helen’s case has been taken up by Baron Gordon Prestoungrange. That is a real name, and he is a real baron with rights from medieval times. A town under his jurisdiction is called Prestonpans, and the people in Prestonpans executed 81 men and women for witchcraft during the frenzy in the 16th and 17th centuries in Scotland. As the local baron he has the right to pardon those people posthumously and remove their recording guilt. He has done so publically, and has taken up Mary Martin’s case on the Web.
We too are affected because Salem in Massachusetts executed 20 people for witchcraft in 1692, and the Witchcraft Musem here has backed the Baron and his quest for justice.
There are lots of little dots here for some of you. Without the stupidity of Helen’s trial Winston Churchill would not have repealed the Witchcraft Act which kept real witches quietly in the woodwork in England. Gardner wouldn’t have been able to initiate the people who began the East Coast witches here. Their snobbish attitude wouldn’t have infuriated Kelly to found Goddess communities on the West Coast. The only Wiccans here might have been underground members of the Faerie tradition. Because of Helen all that has changed.
I was brought up in Essex, a county in England. It was here in the years 1644 to 1647 that the self-appointed witchfinder general, Matthew Hopkins, found many witches and had them arrested. So the Old Religion as people called it, kept a very low profile, and the Wise Women and Men, who were honored by the villagers for their wisdom and healing abilities were all solo witches.
My mother, who was honored as an Elder by the Hungarian gypsies in Essex, used to talk about George and his Old Religion connections. As a young boy I thought she was talking about my grandfather George and the Church of England. Much later I realized she was talking about George Pickering, one of the Wise, and the people in the New Forest, next stop on the gypsy circuit, Sybil Leek's group.
People like Helen Duncan made hundreds of people aware for sure, during the war that something lives on after the death of the body, another dot.
You may recall in my posting about pendulums how one very effective practitioner had astonished the Naval folk by pinpointing accurately the positions of Russian and American nuclear submarines on maps of the oceans. Once again an unusual method of finding out secrets without being a spy. He was denied a visa to the Middle East where a company wanted to hire him for his proven ability to find underground deposits of valuable material using only a map and a pendulum. Officialdom found him to be a security risk.
If you want to add your 10 cents to those helping Mary Martin you can find 1,600,000 sites by googling Helen Duncan. If you want to go direct to someone involved you can hit www.prestoungrange.org/helenduncan/.
If you are a European newspaper reader you can look up The Guardian files for this week or the prestoungrange site, which has a facsimile of a front page article from a prestigious newspaper for an English people getting a little fed up with the nibbling away at civil rights that is happening in their country, because an evangelical is in charge of the government, at the moment.
