Britains last witch Helen Duncan

A report today from the Daily Telegraph gives the story of Helen Duncan and the bizarre events which led to her being tried.
It is about the petition to get her pardoned.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580153/Britain's-last-'witch'-may-be-pardoned.html -

I have always thought this was such an awful thing to do to a person. They used that woman as an example and branded her as an evil person. Simply because she gave out information that was considered classified.
I think it is time she was pardoned and have signed the petition that was doing the rounds about a year ago.

Yes it seems so hard to believe that this poor woman was put in jail what the government and the powers that be should have done is got her to help with the war effort as the USSR had been using psychics and mediums for years in remote viewing exercises with good results but we have only found out about this once the Soviet Union fell etc. I can quite understand Churchill thinking it was stupid to send Helen Duncan to Jail and good for him to get that silly law overturned. She should have been pardoned years ago I signed that pettion last year as well lets hope this time they manage it.

Perhaps we will see her pardoned because they are repealing the Fraudelent Mediums Act.

Source: Wikipedia

Helen Duncan (25 November 1897 – 6 December 1956) was a Scottish medium best known as the last person to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.

Duncan was born in Callander, Stirling, northwest of the city of Stirling, in November, 1897. The daughter of a cabinet-maker, she made her name as a medium by offering seances in which she appeared to summon the spirits of recently deceased persons by emitting ectoplasm from her mouth. A mother of six and the wife of a wounded veteran, she also worked part-time in a bleach factory.

Practising medium

In 1931, Duncan's method was examined by the London Spiritual Alliance. After an initial positive review, the Alliance denounced her as a fraud. Harry Price (director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research) was also sceptical and had Helen Duncan perform a number of test seances. She was suspected of swallowing cheesecloth which was then regurgitated as 'ectoplasm'. She reacted violently at attempts to x-ray her, running from the laboratory and making a scene in the street, where her husband had to restrain her, destroying the controlled nature of the test. Her defenders claimed to have witnessed events that could not be explained by trickery.

In 1934, during a seance in Edinburgh, a sitter made a grab at one of her materialisations. The police were called, and the "spirit" was then alleged to be a stockinette undervest. Duncan was found guilty of affray and fake mediumship at Edinburgh Sheriff Court and sentenced to a £10 fine or one month in prison. Duncan's apologists have later claimed that the verdict was not "guilty" but the Scottish verdict of "not proven", based on their interpretation that the conviction was for affray alone.

HMS Barham sinking

During World War II, Duncan held a seance in Portsmouth at which she indicated knowledge that HMS Barham had been sunk. Because this fact had been kept from the public, the British Admiralty chose to attempt to discredit her. Police arrested her after another seance. She was initially arrested under section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, a minor offence tried by magistrates. However, the authorities regarded the case as more serious, and eventually discovered section 4 of the Witchcraft Act 1735, covering fraudulent "spiritual" activity, which was triable before a jury. Charged alongside her for conspiracy to contravene this Act were Ernest and Elizabeth Homer, who operated the Psychic centre in Portsmouth, and Frances Brown, who was Duncan's agent who went with her to set up séances. There were seven counts in total, two of conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act, two of obtaining money by false pretences, and three of public mischief (a common law offence).

The prosecution may be explained by the mood of near-paranoia surrounding the impending D-Day. The authorities were fearing that she could use her clairvoyant powers to reveal details of the D-Day landing plans. There were also concerns that she was exploiting the recently-bereaved.

Duncan's trial for witchcraft was a minor cause célèbre in wartime London. A number of prominent people, among them Alfred Dodd, an historian and senior freemason, testified that they were convinced that she was authentic. Duncan was however, barred by the Judge from demonstrating her alleged powers as part of her defence against being fraudulent. The jury brought in a guilty verdict on count one, and the judge then discharged the jury from giving verdicts on the other counts, as he held that they were alternative offences for which Duncan might have been convicted had the jury acquitted her on the first count. Duncan was jailed for nine months. After the verdict, Winston Churchill wrote a memo to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, complaining about the misuse of court resources on the "obsolete tomfoolery" of the charge.

Repeal of the Witchcraft Act

Duncan is often referred to as the last person to be convicted of being a witch, but this view is incorrect in two important aspects. Firstly, the Witchcraft Act 1735 under which she was convicted dealt not with witchcraft but with people who falsely claimed to be able to procure spirits. Secondly, there was a subsequent conviction under the act, of Jane Rebecca Yorke of Forest Gate in East Ham later in 1944; Yorke was bound over to keep the peace.

On her release in 1945, Duncan promised to stop conducting seances; however, she was arrested after another one in 1956. She died a short time later. Duncan's trial almost certainly contributed to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, which was contained in the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 promoted by Walter Monslow, Labour Member of Parliament for Barrow-in-Furness. The campaign to repeal the Act had largely been led by Thomas Brooks, another Labour MP, who was a spiritualist. However, her original conviction still stood, and a campaign to have her posthumously pardoned continues.

http://www.helenduncan.org.uk/

There's a book about her that I've got from the library this morning and have just started reading it's called Hellish Nell Last Of Britain's Witches by Malcom Gaskill writen in 2001. A website (link above) will give you more information on Helen Duncan.

Callander is really a small place, and I am sure that if she was fraudlent, it would have been round that town so fast.
I do think that the charge against her was a trumped up one, mainly for the reason that she showed the Government up for keeping secrets.
It wasn't known until very recently, that the very same Government could have warned the people of Coventry about the impending raid against the city but they choose to keep quiet, they did not want the Germans to know that they had managed to break the Enigma Code, and had in fact been able to read their transmitted traffic and orders between their military.

Helen Duncan informed a mother at the Seance that her son had drowned when his ship had been sunk, the mother denied this, saying her son was at sea. Duncan, insisted the son and ship had perished. This is why she was charged, in trying to give a message to a mother, she had let the cat out of the bag about a ship said to be still sailing in the convoys.

That link is a very interesting read Sarah.
In fact it shows up the trail as even more of a set up, because usually Scottish law courts and English ones act seperately and do not share information like this.

Why the verdict of 'not proven' was not mentioned for th Edinburgh trail, is very interesting.
The verdict of not proven is given down by the juries when they feel there is not enough evidence to clearly either convict of vindicate a person of the crime they are accused off.
It used to be that if you were given the verdict of not proven, then committed another crime or new evidence was forthcoming you could be tried for that crime again.

I wouldn't have been any the wiser about Helen Duncan if it hadn't been for the library online service, out of curiosity more that anything I typed into the search bar spiritualism, while going through hundreds of books by various authors I spotted the book mentioned in my post, if it hadn't have been for the word "witch" I don't think I would have bothered getting the book because I'd never heard of Helen Duncan. From the little I've read, I'm hooked as it's packed with history as the author is a historian and it's clear that he's done his home work.

Sarah, we've actually got a thread or link about Helen Duncan on here already.
I remember I signed her pardon petition, but it looks as if it is still be held up by politics.

Found it Mags, it must have been posted during one of the times I was off line, I've merged the two topics