On 19 January 1944 an undercover policeman at a séance in Portsmouth caught the
medium Helen Duncan with a piece of white cloth, which vanished into the
audience during the struggle that followed. Duncan and three of her sitters were
arrested anyway. By the spring she was on trial at the Old Bailey under the
Witchcraft Act of 1735, and the papers had a wonderful time with it, printing
cartoons of witches on broomsticks while the country waited for the invasion of
France.
Britain’s great spiritualist boom came after the first war, not the second,
which makes the usual question about the 1940s slightly wrong. By the late 1920s
and early 1930s there were around a quarter of a million practising
Spiritualists
and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK, plus a whole culture of
home circles and platform mediums. The second war didn’t create any of that. It
handed a movement that already had churches, touring mediums and a national
union a fresh supply of the bereaved, and the movement was ready for them.
Grief is the obvious explanation, and it’s correct as far as it goes. Duncan’s
appointments diary was rarely empty through the 1930s, and Malcolm Gaskill, who
wrote a book on her case, says demand became greater than
ever once war broke
out. Hilary Mantel, reviewing his book, made the point that belief wasn’t
confined to the uneducated; it was “widespread among dons, clergymen and
officers in the Armed Forces”, because “bereavement affected all classes”. The
Royal Navy recognised spiritualism as a religion in 1941, and sailors were
allowed to hold spiritualist services at sea.
But grief was there in 1918 as well. What seems particular to the Second World
War is secrecy. Gaskill makes the point almost in passing: the spirits offered
comfort, hope and, “due to the intense secrecy with which the authorities
conducted the war, the sort of information and news that people craved.” Late
in 1941 a dead sailor reportedly came through at one of Duncan’s sittings and
announced that his ship, HMS Barham, had gone down. It just had. The relatives
of the dead were told in confidence, but the loss was kept from everyone else,
and according to the BBC’s account of the
case
it wasn’t officially declared until months later. Nobody has ever settled how
Duncan knew. She might have heard it in a pub. Portsmouth was a naval town, and
sailors’ families talk. But if you had someone at sea and the papers were
saying nothing, a woman who seemed to know what the Admiralty wouldn’t tell you
must have been very hard to dismiss. One sinking in one naval town is thin
ground for a general theory, and I know it, but I’d push Gaskill’s point
further than he does: grief explains why people wanted the dead, and secrecy
goes a long way to explaining why they believed them.
The state saw the same thing from the other side. Mediums were normally fined
under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, a petty charge, but Gaskill says the Portsmouth
police moved in 1944 prompted by allegations that Duncan had disclosed
confidential details of the Barham’s sinking. The authorities wanted her in
prison (because of D-Day, her supporters said), so they reached for an Act from
1735, and MI5’s involvement in the investigation is, in Gaskill’s words, “beyond
question”. If the police were chasing a leaked sinking, it’s hard to blame her
sitters for thinking she knew things. The result was a trial on the front
pages, nine months in Holloway, and Churchill writing to the Home Secretary to
call the charge “obsolete tomfoolery”. Her appeal failed, and the judgement was
read out in an air-raid shelter because the law courts had been bombed.
The trial turned a medium into a martyr and gave organised spiritualism a
cause. The Spiritualists’ National Union had been campaigning for years for its
members to worship without fear of prosecution, and it had the money to pay
legal costs. After the war the pressure kept up. Thomas Brooks, a Labour MP and
a spiritualist, led the campaign while another Labour MP, Walter Monslow, put
the bill forward, and in 1951 the
Witchcraft Act was finally repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act.
From then on a prosecution needed evidence of deliberate deception for profit.
If any single moment counts as spiritualism’s post-war triumph, it’s that one:
the movement that had been dragged into the Old Bailey seven years earlier had
rewritten the law.
And then, through the 1950s, it faded. Mantel, writing in the London Review of
Books,
is blunt about it. The 1951 Act carried an exemption for “anything done solely
for the purposes of entertainment”, and in her reading it “drew its teeth. The
occult was degraded to an amusement; and television soon offered a better one.
During the 1950s, interest in spiritualism fell away.”
Television explains the empty séance rooms. It doesn’t explain why the urgency
went, and my guess is that the secrecy argument works in reverse. Peace brought
the news back. The dead stopped being a matter of rumour in a naval town, and
once you could find out what had happened to your son through ordinary
channels, you didn’t need a woman in a cabinet producing cheesecloth to tell
you. That leaves 1951 looking odd, a legal victory six years after the need had
started to drain away, but I suspect the Act measured the union’s grievance
rather than the size of the congregation. An organised body with a cause can
keep a campaign going long after the crowds have thinned. Mantel’s point about
respectability can’t have helped either. A séance that might get you arrested
has an edge to it. A séance protected by an Act of Parliament is closer to a
whist drive.
Duncan herself went back to work after Holloway, holding séances around the
country much as she had before the war, though people whispered that her powers
were going. In November 1956 police raided a sitting in Nottingham. No charges
were brought. She died at home in Edinburgh on 6 December that year, and the
BBC says her descendants are still campaigning to clear her name.
