A spiritual healing

Sometimes the dead come back. Helen Duncan, fraudulent medium or gifted psychic and spiritualist martyr, depending on your point of view, died in 1956, but she - or at least her widely reported trial in 1944, when she became the last person in Britain to be tried for witchcraft - simply won’t lie down and die.

Now Duncan’s supporters, having failed to persuade the Home Secretary to grant an appeal against the Scots medium’s conviction under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, may try to bring the case before the European Court of Human Rights, in a bid to win Duncan a posthumous pardon. It is the latest chapter in what Sherlock Holmes creator (and spiritualist) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have called "The Case of the Vanishing Cheesecloth", a tale involving wartime security breaches and police raids on seances in darkened rooms, of outraged believers and heavy-handed authority. There are cameo roles for Conan Doyle himself, for Winston Churchill - and for a former chief reporter of this newspaper who came out on the side of the spirits. On all sides the word "alleged" looms large.

At the centre of it all was Helen Duncan, born in Callander in 1897, an otherwise ordinary if severely overweight mother of six and sometime bleachworks employee, who between the wars attracted a large following as a spiritualist medium, travelling around Britain and gaining a reputation for producing physical materialisations during her seances. Among other places, she gave sittings in Portsmouth, where, in 1941, she alarmed the authorities by revealing the attacks on the British warships Hood and Barham before their losses had been made public.

Whatever her sources, unearthly or otherwise, she seems to have been considered a threat to national security. Others, of course, would have condemned her for arguably profiting from those bereaved by the conflict.

Things came to a head in January 1944, when the police raided one of her seances in Portsmouth. One constable made a grab at the "ectoplasm", the substance supposedly exuded by mediums to enable spirits to materialise, and later claimed that it looked like a piece of cheesecloth or butter muslin. However, a thorough search of the premises revealed no such material. Duncan was arrested.

Things escalated dramatically. Such a case would normally have been the business of a humble local magistrates court; instead, Duncan ended up in the Old Bailey. Normally, mediums were fined under the 1824 Vagrancy Act; for Duncan, astonishingly, the authorities unearthed the Witchcraft Act of 1735. She was charged with "conspiring to pretend to exercise or use a kind of conjugations, to wit that spirits of deceased persons should appear to be present, and that the said spirits were communicating with living persons".

She pleaded not guilty, and 44 defence witnesses testified to having witnessed her powers on numerous occasions. Among them was a widely respected former chief reporter of The Scotsman James Herries, who was also a psychic researcher, a justice of the peace and an old friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died in 1930, but who, Herries insisted, had materialised and addressed the sitters at one of Duncan’s seances in Edinburgh. A leading Fleet Street journalist, Hannan Swaffer, offered to eat a sample of cheesecloth before the court, to prove that it could not have been conveniently regurgitated by Duncan as ectoplasm, as had been suggested.

The presiding judge declined, as he also declined the offer, made by some of Duncan’s supporters, of a real live seance in court. He found Duncan guilty of pretending to conjure up the spirits of the dead. Duncan left the court weeping that she’d never heard so many lies in her life.

She spent nine months in Holloway women’s prison - where, we are told, the staff queued up for seances, while an irate Winston Churchill demanded what the cost to the state had been of this "obsolete tomfoolery". Another observer questioned the hypocrisy of paying the Archbishop of Canterbury 5,000 a year for interceding between God and man when a poor medium could be imprisoned for making a few shillings.

Helen Duncan died in 1956 - the result, claim her supporters, of police yet again disturbing one of her seances. Spiritualists believe that sudden interference can cause the ectoplasm to recoil back into the medium’s body, causing severe internal burns.

The publicity and outrage surrounding the case led to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act and its replacement 51 years ago with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which meant that prosecutions could be made only against those found guilty of practising "with intent to deceive".

For the past four years, a campaign to clear Duncan’s name has been led by psychic researchers Michael Colmer and James MacQuarrie (the latter a former policeman who grew up near the Duncan family in Edinburgh).

Initial approaches to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) proving unsuccessful, it was suggested that it might be worth the campaigners’ while checking up on Duncan’s appearance in an Edinburgh court in 1933, accused of practising as a false medium. Rather indistinct court records suggest that she was found guilty, but Duncan’s daughter Geena always insisted that the verdict was the uniquely Scottish one of "not proven".

"On this premise we re-approached the CCRC, on the basis that the 1944 trial had been heavily influenced by the statement that she had ‘a previous conviction’," says Michael Colmer. "A number of lawyers have said that it was this oft-repeated statement that heavily influenced the wartime contingency jury of seven. The CCRC - a very helpful bunch - told us that if we could prove the ‘not proven’ verdict, then they would have cause to re-examine the case."

At the same time, they are considering the time-consuming and expensive course of bringing the case before the European Court of Human Rights, although if they can secure proof of that "not proven" verdict in Edinburgh back in 1933, the Strasbourg option will be unnecessary, says Colmer.

The campaigners’ efforts were set back earlier this year when their legal adviser, the Quaker barrister Derek Willmott, died. Willmott believed that if the authorities in 1944 thought Duncan’s powers were bogus, she would have been ignored, that the frequent reference to her "previous conviction" in Edinburgh would also have influenced the jury, but that the introduction of the witchcraft charge would have made it impossible for her to establish a defence without referring to the previous conviction. The trial, Willmott believed, had been "a travesty".

Colmer has no doubt that Helen Duncan was a gifted medium, and a martyr to the spiritualist cause. Cambridge historian Malcolm Gaskill, however, believes the woman nicknamed "Hellish Nell" (not through any Satanic dabblings but because of her childhood wildness) was a fraud, if not necessarily an intentional one. The author of a book about Duncan, Hellish Nell (published by 4th Estate), Gaskill says: "She was genuine in so far as she believed in spiritualism and that she tried to help. Possibly she was also genuine in that she may have not really been aware of what she was doing in a trance - so called ‘pious fraud’."

Legally, however, he has no doubt Duncan was guilty of fraud: "But whether a jail sentence was appropriate is another matter. The sentence was certainly in keeping with the Witchcraft Act - which made it illegal to conjure up spirits - but the use of the act is questionable. Typically, mediums were fined under the Vagrancy Act and I think the use of the Witchcraft Act was designed to put her in prison because it was wartime and she was saying things about Allied shipping, supposedly through spirits, which was frowned upon to say the least. And it was just before D-Day."

Gaskill sees the crux of the case as being the legal concept known as "fairness", and whether the standards of fairness deemed acceptable in 1944 (before the Witchcraft Act was repealed) still apply. "Since then," he says, "’fairness’ has been revised, in relation to the Derek Bentley case, and this does potentially give them a chance. This may well be their leverage at the European Court, although, in all honesty, I think they’re wasting their time."

Married to a cabinetmaker who was disabled by his First World War injuries, and with only six of her 12 pregnancies surviving, Duncan had to struggle throughout her life. Gaskill sees her as "a case of arrested development: the vulnerable, attention-seeking mystical oddity who never grew up. As a child she was nicknamed Hellish Nell for her tomboyish nonconformity and that is how many people remember her in Callander. In her own mind, and in the opinion of her devotees then and now, she was neither child nor witch, but those two identities remain part of her make-up as a historical figure."

In the meantime, Colmer and his fellow spiritualists have been told it will take up to three years and a minimum of 50,000 to take Duncan’s case to Strasbourg. Regarding Willmott’s death, Colmer puts it thus: "Following the promotion of our barrister last month, we need earthly legal advice."

It is tempting, if perhaps unkind, to suggest that perhaps as a vindicating gesture, Helen Duncan, wherever she is, might be in a position to provide advice for her supporters.