The lion, a witch and her wardrobe

The strange case of the medium whose message upset the Admiralty at the height of World War II. Richard Ford reports.

It was one of the strangest moments of World War II. In the propaganda battles of 1944, the British lion was preparing to roar back against the Nazis in occupied Europe. At the Old Bailey, Helen Duncan went on trial under the Witchcraft Act as a possible danger to morale and security. Mrs Duncan the wife of an unemployed cabinetmaker, had given séances all over Britain in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sceptics claimed that the medium used swathes of cheesecloth to simulate the forms of spirit friends. But the incident which led to her eventual court appearance occurred in 1941 and featured the spirit of a dead sailor. This time her wardrobe of props apparently included a hatband with the words HMS Barham. The sailor is alleged to have said: “My ship has sunk.” At the time, the Admiralty suppressed the news of the ship’s destruction off Malta in order not to shake public morale.

The trial made Mrs Duncan the most well-known spiritualist of her time and even provoked an intervention by Winston Churchill over the seven-day hearing which grabbed headlines and drew crowds who packed the public gallery. Churchill sent a note to the Home Secretary demanding a report on the Witchcraft Act under which she had been prosecuted and the cost of the case, which he dismissed as “obsolete tomfoolery to the detriment of necessary work in the court”.

Mrs Duncan carried out séances which culminated in “materialisation” in which an ectoplasm would appear to come out of her mouth and take on the form of the dead. During the war, she believed that she comforted families by allowing them to speak to loved ones who had died in battle. After the Barham incident, the authorities became alarmed and feared she would reveal the beaches chosen for the D-Day landings and she was detained.

At her trial, 19 witnesses swore that she could conjure up the dead, not just in spirit but in physical form. When she was found guilty, many women sobbed and pledged unwavering loyalty to the woman they described as their “goddess”. However, she was described by the Chief Constable of Portsmouth as a “past master in the art of fraud” and “an unmitigated humbug who could only be regarded as a pest to a particular section of society”. Her supporters claimed that she was the victim of a conspiracy to keep her silent and asked, if the authorities thought she was a fraudster, why they had used an antiquated law to put her in jail, rather than charging her with obtaining money under false pretences. Churchill ensured that the antiquated law was never used again. In 1951, after his return to power, the Witchcraft Act was repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act.

After Mrs Duncan’s release from prison, she was more in demand than ever. She died in 1956, five weeks after police raided a séance she was holding in a house in Nottinghamshire. Mr James MacQuarrie, one of the leaders of the campaign to have her pardoned, said that people within spiritualism owed her a debt for the disappearance of the Witchcraft Act and the recognition by statute of the Spiritualist Church. Mrs Seaman, president of the Spiritualists National Union, said a seminar member asked if Mrs Duncan was in favour of the pardon campaign. Mrs Duncan’s answer came back: “It seems to matter a great deal more down there than it does up here.”

Ancient craft that still evokes fear

Witchcraft is still feared today, particularly in fundamental Christian groups. As in the Dark Ages, it is still held to be the use of preternatural powers and is most commonly said to be practised by women.
In Britain, as a direct result of Helen Duncan’s case the 1735 Witchcraft Act used to prosecute her was replaced in 1951 by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Prosecutions under the new act are brought directly by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Between 1980 and 1996 there were seven prosecutions under the Fraudulent Mediums Act, six of them resulting in convictions. The maximum penalties under the act are a 500 pound (NZ$1430) fine or two years in prison.

The 1735 act helped to bring an end to an era when thousands of people, mainly women, were drowned, hanged or burnt for witchcraft. Trials for witchcraft took place in England as recently as 1712. In Posen, Switzerland they took place up to 1793. The Bible is still invoked in some circles as proof of the existence of witchcraft, in particular the story of the Witch of Endor in I Samuel, along with condemnations of the practice in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Of the Church fathers, St Augustine believed in its existence, while St Hippoloytus did not. In the 13th and 14th centuries the various inquisitions tackled witchcraft but the mass burning of witches did not begin till the 15th century, when women would be put to the stake or hanged for such practices as sexual intercourse with the devil and casting spells on men and animals.

– Richard Ford, The Times

Source: The Dominion, Thursday 26 February 1998.