Enneagram Movie Board Archive
Helen Duncan
Posted by Jan den Breejen on April 25, 2001 at 14:22:30:
HELEN DUNCAN
Medium Martyr
Nov. 25 1897
to Dec. 6 1956
Case text citations (written by Michael Colmer):
Helen Duncan, a simple Scottish housewife, who was forced to serve time in London's notorious Victorian Holloway women's prison for the appalling "crime" of holding physical phenomena seances - many months which took a great toll on her health and contributed to her own premature earthly demise.
Helen was born in Callander, a small Scottish town on the 25th of November 1897 the daughter of a master cabinet maker. Her family was far from rich. Like many of her fellow Celtic lassies she struggled to earn a living even after her marriage at the age of 20. Her husband, Henry, another cabinet maker, had been injured during WW1. She had 12 pregnanies, but only six children survived. To sustain this large family and a disabled husband she worked in the local bleach factory by day and her Spiritual work and domestic duties by night.
The small amount of cash she made from her sittings, mostly token donations from friends and neighbours existing in a similar poverty to herself , would often discreetly go to their local doctor to pay for those patients who were destitute. This was in the time before Britain's national health service concept of free medicine for all had been introduced.
But her skill lay in Mediumship of a particular kind, that rare psychic gift of being a vehicle for physical phenomena whilst in trance state. A precious gift that brought comfort to thousands but one which was eventually to cost her her earthly life.
By the 1930s and 1940s she was travelling the length of wartime Britain giving regular seances in hundreds of Spiritualist churches and home circles. The evidence that flowed from these physical phenomena seances was astonishing. 'Dead' loved ones appeared in physical form , spoke to and touched their earthly relatives and and in this way brought both proof of survival and much comfort to thousands of traumatised and grieving wartime families.
One such sitting was attended by a man named Vincent Woodcock who had brought his sister in law for an evening's demonstration. Those 60 minutes changed both their lives. Vincent gave evidence in London's premier Old Bailey court room that the medium Helen Duncan slipped into trance and began producing the much scoffed 'ectoplasm'. Then his 'dead' wife materialised from this ectoplasmic matter and asked both Vincent and his sister in law to stand up. The materialised spirit then removed her wedding ring and placed it on her sister's wedding finger , adding "It is my wish that this takes place for the sake of my little girl". A year later the couple were married and returned for a further seance during which the dead woman appeared once more to give her renewed blessings to the happy couple.
But this touching human story, along with other similar unsolicited and genuine testimonials to her remarkable gifts, were ignored by the law courts for Helen Duncan was destined to 'go down' to appease an establishment terrified that she might accurately discern the date of the D-Day Normandy Landings.
During the second world war Helen was in great demand from anxious relatives, especially those who had lost close family on active war service. One of many such sittings took place in a private house in the home port of Britain's Royal Naval fleet , the southern coastal city of Portsmouth on the evening of January 19 1944. It was a dangerous place to hold any meeting - such was the German Luftwaffe's intent on reducing Portsmouth to rubble and disable Britain's fleet .
But the real danger lay not in a hail of enemy bombs but with the sceptism and fear of the establishment. For that night her seance was disrupted by a plain clothes policeman who blew his whistle to launch a raid. Police hands made a grab for the ectoplasm but the spirit world was too quick for them and it dematerialised quicker than they could catch.
Thus Helen Duncan, together with three of her innocent sitters, were taken up before Portsmouth magistrates and charged with Vagrancy. At this hearing the court was told that Lietenant R. Worth of the Royal Navy had attended this seance suspecting fraud. He had paid 25 shillings ( then worth about $5) each for two tickets and had passed the second ticket to a policeman . It was this policeman who had made the unsucessful grab for the ectoplasm , believing it to be a white sheet. But the subsequent finger tip search of the room immediately after the raid failed to discover any white sheets.
Even if she had been found guilt under this charge the maximum fine at that time would have been some five shillings ( $1) and she would have been released. But, very oddly Helen was refused bail. Instead she was sent to London and forced to spend four days in the notorious women's prison called Holloway. It was this same Victorian goal where sufragettes had been forced fed by prison warders and where the grisly gallows waited for all female murderers, spies and traitors.
Meanwhile an anxious establishment debated the best charge to lay against this dangerous war criminal Helen Duncan . One her first appearance before the Portsmouth magistrates she had been charged under the catchall act of Vagrancy. This was later amended to one of Conspiracy which, in wartime Britain , carried the ultimate sentence of death by hanging. But by the time the case had been referred to England's central criminal court - know as the Old Bailey - the charge had been changed yet again . This time to one of witchcraft and an old Act of 1735 had been dredged out of the dusty law libraries .
Under this ancient rune Helen Duncan and her innocent sitters wer accused of pretending 'to exercise or use human conjuration that through the agency of Helen Duncan spirits of deceased dead persons should appear to be present'.
But, lest this single charge may falter, the authorities scoured their dusty law precedents for further charges and they found them. One such was the Larceny Act which accused her of taking money ' by falsely pretending she was in a position to bring about the appearances of thes spirits of deceased persons'.
The prosecution were determined to prove Helen Duncan was a fraud. Her trial took place barely a few months before the famous D-Day landings and lasted for seven gruelling days. Spiritualists everywhere were up in arms that one of their most treasured and gifted demonstrators should be treated in such a tawdry manner. A defence fund was quickly raised . It was used to bring witnesses from all over the world to testify to her genuine gifts. Because of this her case rapidly became a cause celebre which attracted daily headlines in tabloid and broadsheets alike.
One telling development that this was no ordinary case was that in a rare example of cross border co-operation both the Law Societies (senior legal bar councils) of England and Scotland jointly and simultaneously declared this case to be a travesty of justice.
By the penultimate day of this ridiculous trial the defence was ready to call their star witness Alfred Dodd, an academic and much respected author of works on Shakespeare's sonnets. Alfred told the court that during 1932 and 1940 he had been a regular guest at Helen Duncan's home seances. At one of these sittings his grandfather had materialised, a tall, corpulent man with a bronzed face and smoking cap, hair dressed in his cutomary donkey-fringe. After speaking with his grandson the spirit then turned to his friend Tom and said; "Look into my face and into my eyes. Ask Alfred to show you my portrait. It is the same man".
Two equally respected journalists, James Herries and Hannen Swaffer then took their places in the Old Bailey witness box - a place where for hundreds of years many a murderer has given evidence and many a witness has pointed an accusing finger. The chain smoking Swaffer , who had already won acclaim as the acerbic uncrowned father of Fleet Street ( home of England's newspaper quarter) and co-founder of the Spiritualist weekly "Psychic News", told the court that anyone who described ectoplasm as butter muslim " would be a child. Under a red light in a seance room it would look yellow or pink whilst these spirit forms all displayed a white appearance".
James Herries, himself a Justice of the Peace, a much respected psychic investigator of some 20 years standing and the chief reporter of the prestigious and influential "Scotsman" broadsheet affirmed that he had seen Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famed author of the Sherlock Holmes books, himself to materialise at one of Helen Duncan's seances. He had especially noted the distinctive Doyle rounded features, moustache and equally unmistakeable gravelly voice.
But, wisely or otherwise, the defence had decided that the best test of Helen Duncan's genuine gifts were for her to give a demonstration of physical phenomena whilst in trance from the very witness box of England's Central Criminal Courts. This suggestion really did cause a frightened flurry in the ivory dovecots of the establishment. If she pulled it off, they debated, then instead of the censure they sought her cause would be spread throughout the land and even beyond . And this would mean that the famed British legal system adopted by so many former colonies - including America - would be held to total ridicule.
Hurried conferences with the best legal minds were held throughout the night. Their solution was to reject this offer and suggest instead that Mrs Duncan be called as a witness - thus giving the prosecution an opportunity to cross examine this ordinary Scottish housewife and , in doing so, attempt to destroy her credibility. But Helen's defence lawyers saw through this ploy. They pointed out that Mrs Duncan could not testify since she was in a trance state during these seances and could not, therefore, discuss what had transpired.
The jury only took half an hour to reach their verdict ; Helen and her co-defendants were found Guilty of conspiracy to contravene that ancient 1735 Witchcraft Act but Not Guilty on all other charges.
Portsmouth's chief of police then described this new 'criminal's' background. Mrs Duncan was married to a cabinet maker and had a family of six children ranging from 18-26 and she had been visiting Portsmouth for some five years. He then described her as " an unmitigated humbug and pest" and revealed that in 1941 she had been reported for announcing the loss of one of His Majesty's ships before the fact had been publically known .
The presiding judge announced a weekend's delay whilst he considered sentence. Helen herself left the dock weeping in her broad Scottish dialect; "I never hee'd so mony lies in a' my life".
The following monday morning the judge declared that the verdict had not been concerned with whether ' genuine manifestations of the kind are possible . . .this court has nothing whatever to do with such abstract questions'. However he interpreted the jury's findings to mean that Helen Duncan had been involved in plain dishonesty and for this reason he therefore sentenced her to nine months imprisonment.
The shocked Spiritualist movenment immediately demanded a change in the law. They felt that she had been prosecuted to stop any leakage of classified wartime information. As one of many , many, examples during 1943 and once more in that ungrateful city of Porttsmouth Helen Duncan had given a seance during which a sailor materialised reporting that he had gone down with His Majesty's Ship "Barham" whose loss was not officially announced until three months later.
But, the defence right of appeal to the House of Lords , Britain's highest court of appeal, was denied. The establishment had achieved its objective and certainly did not want one single inch of further publicity. Helen was sent back to London's Holloway prison , that Victorian monstrosity for female prisoners still being used today.
It was not only the best legal minds in the country that felt this case had been a major miscarriage of justice. So too did her prison warders. They refused to 'bang her up'. For the entire nine months of her unjust incarceration Helen Duncan's prison cell door was never once locked ! What's more she contined to apply her psychic gifts, as a constant steam of warders and inmates alike found their way to her cell for spiritual upliftment and guidance.
Churchill was no stranger to psychic phenomena. Recalling the events of the Boer War when he had been captured, had escaped and seeking sanctuary he explained in his autobiography how he he was " guided by some form of mental planchette ( a Spiritualist tool) to the only house in a 30 mile radius that was sympathetic to the British cause". Had he knocked on the back door of any other house he would have been arrested and returned to the Boer commanders to be shot as an escaping prisoner of war. Many years prior to this he had been ordained into the Grand Ancient Order of Druids. And throughout his life he experienced many times when his psychic sixth sense saved his life.
Churchill was exceeding angry indeed when the Helen Duncan case began. He penned an irate ministerial note to the Home Secretary; " Give me a report of the 1735 Witchcraft Act . What was the cost of a trial to the State in which the Recorder ( junior magistrate) was kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery to the detriment of the necessary work in the courts?" But his civil servants were over-ridden by the all -powerful intelligence community. D-Day was coming and their levels of paranoia had reached an all time high and even a Prime Minister's anger was to be set aside. Helen Duncan, mother of nine and part time bleach factory employee was considered a risk and they wanted her out of the way when the Allies struck. Her case was a transparent conspiracy to frame her ' in the interests of national security'
Meanwhile, having served her full sentence, Helen Duncan was released on 22 September 1944, vowing never to give another seance.
++++ Jan's analysis
This is an interesting historical case to analyse. Clearly the pro-Helen movement of spiritualists is predominantly Idiosyncratic style of character; believing in her ability to re-create the spirits/spooks of people who died and to predict the future. Then we have the political/military establishment, part of which feared her and turned that fear into ridiculous paranoid agression (Vigilant Style.) Finally: what about the protagonist? I've seen the Discovery Channel documentary Witch Hunt which seems to give an objective point of view. Helen was a regarded as idiosyncratic curiosity by many people. However I don't believe she was an altruistic sixth sensed helper of people in need. She clearly needed money and knew that the many dead English soldiers had caused trauma in their families. These people in fear and depression were vulnerable to frauds. Helen earned a lot of money; especially when she travelled to Porthsmouth; putting herself in a seance room with only a faint red light; putting on a cloth and role playing the spiritualist, who probably used stuff called 'cheese cloth' (she called it 'ectoplasm') to give the people the impression of creating spooks. She was Britain's leading medium until she was discredited at the country's last witchcraft trial. Winston Churchill was a supporter and, in the 42 years since her death there has been a vociferous campaign to clear her name.
Secret Home Office files show that Helen Duncan was a fraud who preyed on the relatives of servicemen who had been killed in the war. Duncan's earnings were estimated at more than £100 a week, about £2,500 in today's money, when the average wage was only £5.
Although we don't much about her character I would say that she could have been a Passive-Agressive/Leisurely Style Personality. In the Discovery documentary when she was convicted in the court she speaks a sentence - I don't know the words anymore - which correspond with the talk style of The Penguin in the Batman movie; a mix of agressive feelings/frustration and self-pity. The other option is her being Agressive Style; using the psychic mumbo jumbo to enhance her power over people. I would bet for uneducated Agressive Style.
Jan