Fortean Slips: Winston and the Witch

Winston Churchill:
journalist, statesman,
orator, warrior... and
Spiritualist mystic?

Winston and the Witch

by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com

Sir Winston Churchill was a sterling exemplar of the Renaissance Man: a journalist, a statesman, an orator, a military strategist, a historian... quite frankly, he was an all-around bad-ass. Another, lesser-known facet of the well-rounded prime minister's well-rounded character is that he pursued an interest in mysticism and the Spiritualist church.

This may sound like the sort of nonsense up with which Churchill would not put, and no one's saying he ever went as wacky on the weird stuff as a certain astrological American leader would be a few decades later. But Sir Winston was definitely into the paranormal, and new evidence suggests that he possessed a personal link with the last woman in British history ever found guilty of witchcraft.

The recipient of that disgraceful distinction was Helen Duncan, a Spiritualist medium from Edinburgh, Scotland, with a highly reputed ability to summon the dead. To help support her six children and a husband disabled in World War I, Duncan traveled across the British Isles presiding over seances. These were dramatic affairs in which ectoplasm reportedly flowed from her mouth and spirit forms manifested themselves and spoke.

Despite her dubious and frequently contested authenticity, Duncan attracted paying crowds to her ceremonies with the draw of a minor celebrity. She enjoyed a brisk business after the onset of World War II, with her services in greater demand thanks to those hoping to contact casualties of the conflict. Duncan's supernatural practices would probably have faded into obscurity had it not been for the bizarre accuracy of one of her wartime summonings.

At a seance in Portsmouth in 1941, Duncan brought forth the apparition of a dead sailor, or so the story goes. The name of the battleship H.M.S. Barham was inscribed on the ghost's hat band, and he told those gathered that his ship had been sunk. The Barham had in fact been destroyed off the coast of Malta, but the British government had kept the news of its sinking top secret, to avoid hurting public morale. There seemed to be no possible way that Duncan or anyone at the seance could have been privy to the truth.

After hearing the story of the sailor's ghost, the British authorities took careful note of Duncan as a potential risk to national security. There was fearful speculation that she would foresee other classified military information, such as the closely guarded plans surrounding D-Day.

Police raided a seance in 1944 and arrested Duncan, initially on the minor charge of vagrancy. That charge was later upgraded to the capital offense of conspiracy, and finally revised again to cite a law that had not been enforced in Britain for ages -- the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Specifically, the Spiritualist was 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."

The trial of Helen Duncan played out much like a precursor to the O. J. Simpson case: an overlong, super-sensational circus that served to distract a nation's worries from all the important bad stuff happening elsewhere. A long list of witnesses testified to the legitimacy of Duncan's powers, although the judge refused the defense's request to have her demonstrate them in the Old Bailey. Managing to restrain the rediscovered national appetite for a good old-fashioned witch hunt, the court stopped short of burning Duncan at the stake after a guilty verdict was returned, and instead sentenced her to nine months in prison.

Among the interested observers of the Duncan trial was the main man himself, Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Even embroiled in the dirty work of holding off Hitler, he took time out to express his outrage over what he considered a wasteful and shameful miscarriage of justice.

"Give me a report of the 1735 Witchcraft Act," Churchill wrote in a furious memo. "What was the cost of a trial in which the recorder [junior magistrate] was kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery?"

Churchill failed to keep Duncan from going to prison, perhaps at the insistence of superstitious intelligence officers. But Sir Winston did not forget about her. Upon his return to power in 1951, after having been voted out in 1945, one of Churchill's first actions was to repeal the Witchcraft Act. Churchill was a sworn enemy of needless laws and excessive red tape, but this move was more than just bureaucratic housekeeping. It was seemingly motivated by a personal interest in Spiritualism and his own leanings towards its beliefs.

While Churchill was never a Spiritualist himself, he was intrigued by its metaphysical tenets, and advocated the recognition of Spiritualism as an official religion. He frequently expressed his belief that a predetermined destiny had guided him throughout life, and that he possessed a sixth sense that saved his life on numerous occasions. As a young man Churchill was ordained into the mystical Grand Ancient Order of Druids. When he was lost in the wilderness as an escaped P.O.W. during the Boer War, Churchill believed that an imaginary planchette (a Spiritualist device comparable to a Ouija board pointer) mentally guided him to safety. In the years after World War II, Churchill once wrote a story in which his dead father returned and spoke with him about the fate of England.

Given this colorful background, it becomes more understandable why Churchill would be down with the Spiritualist program. But there is one further connection between him and Helen Duncan that has only recently surfaced. Michael Colmer and James MacQuarrie, members of the British Society for Paranormal Studies, claim to have found evidence that Churchill himself had "used the skills of Helen Duncan," prior to her prosecution in 1944.

They also maintain that Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of British Fighter Command, participated in seance sessions with Duncan at the same time she was being investigated by military intelligence. Being an unabashed believer in psychic abilities and the occult, Dowding was almost certainly not out to infiltrate and undermine Duncan's practices as a double-agent -- the only target he would have been interested in spying on was the supernatural beyond.

Then again, maybe it wasn't. Colmer and MacQuarrie have made no indication as to the specifics of Duncan's alleged meeting with Churchill and Dowding, and so we are left to speculate: were these British high officials acting out of personal curiosity, no different from Duncan's ordinary customers, or were they hoping to have her psychically expose the enemy's secrets before she could expose their own? Could it be that Winston Churchill attempted remote viewing for intelligence gathering in the midst of World War II, back when the CIA was just a glimmer in Harry Truman's eye?

We may never know the answer, but one thing about this tale is for certain: Helen Duncan did not have a happy ending. Following her release from prison, she promptly broke her promise never to conduct another seance, and returned to her old trade. Under the authority of the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which rose up in the place of the repealed Witchcraft Act, police raided a Duncan seance in 1956 and arrested her. In custody she was found to be covered in severe burns across the front of her body. Some accounts suggest that these injuries were caused by ectoplasm reacting violently when the police interrupted her trance, but it seems far more likely that the officers were responsible for the burns in a less metaphysical manner. Five weeks after this arrest, she died.

The British Society for Paranormal Studies is spearheading a movement to petition the British government to officially pardon Helen Duncan in reparation for the injustices she was made to suffer. Even though she was largely a con-artist who preyed upon people's ignorance and false hopes, it would be worthwhile for the U.K. to own up to the shame of prosecuting someone as a witch in the 20th century.

Sir Winston would have wanted it that way. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to a weird lady who talked to the dead.

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