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Petition to Blair could pardon a ‘witch’
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  7 March 2007
UNITED KINGDOM. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s website makes it possible for the British public to express their feelings by posting and signing petitions electronically.
The latest subject is Scottish materialisation medium Helen Duncan who was tried and found guilty under the Witchcraft Act (since repealed) – making her technically one of the country’s last “witches”. There have been unsuccessful attempts in the past to have her pardoned. Now, on the 50th anniversary of her death, the occupant of No. 10 Downing Street is giving those who share that view a chance to make their feelings known.
We recently told the story of Helen Duncan, who has already received a pardon (along with 81 other individuals from Prestonpans, near Edinburgh) from the Baron of Prestoungranage – in 2004 [see Helen Duncan remembered – but no pardon in sight].
The medium’s grand-daughter Mary Martin has been leading the campaign, pointing out that Helen was not a witch but a Spiritualist.
Electronic petitions were introduced in November 2006 and have already proved very popular – 1,000 were received in the first week. Each is given a closing date and on 20 February, when the road pricing petition closed, 1,791,942 people had registered their disapproval of that particular proposal by signing it.
The Helen Duncan petition was created by “Gordon of Downing” – which seems to be an amusing reference to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is Scottish. It reads: “I would like to see Helen Duncan, the last woman to be tried as a witch in the UK, being pardoned, as this is the 50th anniversary of her death.”
If you are a British citizen or resident and would like to give your support to this petition, click here. Incidentally, the website link contains a spelling error. It seems that someone at No. 10 believes witchcraft is spelt “withcraft”.
With the passage of time, the story of Helen Duncan and her prosecution has become riddled with errors and false assumptions, the most noteworthy of which are the claims that Sir Winston Churchill was a client and visited her in prison.
Leslie Price and Paul Gaunt, who run PsyPioneer, are doing an excellent job of correcting unsubstantiated claims wherever they occur. They recently succeeded in having the Churchill claims removed from the BBC website. Gaunt also gives some interesting insights into the medium’s legal defence, as well as the testimony of Percy Wilson and Brig. Roy Firebrace who were informed of the sinking of British battleships (HMS Hood and Barham) before their fate was confirmed, in a letter to Psychic News (24 February 2007). [See FOOTNOTE.]
 Many believe that the main reason for prosecuting Helen Duncan during the Second World War was that dead sailors were materialising at her séances and revealing that the vessels on which they served had been sunk by German torpedoes – weeks before the government was prepared to release the information. There is also a view that psychical researcher Harry Price (left), who “exposed” her, unfairly contributed to her downfall.
Richard Morris, whose book Harry Price, the Psychic Detective has just been published, tells www.ParanormalReview.com:
“People tend to think of Harry Price as a great psychic scientist and sceptic. He wasn’t. A paper I found when researching for my biography shows he truly believed in Helen Duncan.
“In 1931 he wrote a pseudo-scientific paper concerning the ectoplasm he'd collected from her during a seance. He truly believed that from this he would be able to recreate a ghost and go on to perhaps create life itself. He thought he was a whisker away from a Nobel prize.
“Then, when everything went sour with Helen, he despised her and did everything he could to make her life a misery. Although he didn’t testify at her 1944 trial he had links with the Admiralty and what he said was passed through to the Crown’s prosecution team.
“Price was such a great illusionist and magician that people believed what he reported happening was the truth. In reality the ‘psychic detective’‚ was the inventor, designer and creative brain behind some of the most remarkable phenomena ever seen in the British Isles.”
Closing date for the Helen Duncan petition is 22 April 2007.
FOOTNOTE:
The following letter was sent to the Editor of The Spectator by Leslie Price, founder of the PsyPioneer, on 2 March:
WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE BBC
A broadcast is still mainly of the moment, but a web site, like BBC History, is accessible 24 hours a day from anywhere in the world. Unlike TV or radio, it is not regulated by OFCOM. Surfers who trust the BBC brand name believe what they read there. If they sought information about the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan (jailed in 1944) from that site, the BBC until recently told them in their Scottish history pages:
During her time in jail, Helen Duncan received many visitors, including Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister was known to have spiritualist sympathies. What Churchill said on these occasions to Helen is unknown, but one of his first acts when he was re-elected to power in 1951 was to repeal the Witchcraft Act. A formal act of parliament three years later officially recognised spiritualism as a religion.
All of this is untrue. So when I noticed it in June 2006, I e-mailed the website with evidence of the errors. The web team replied: “Thank you for taking time to contact the BBC. We will investigate the possible area of error you have raised and will make any amendments as necessary.”
There was no suggestion that they would communicate the results of their investigation. In any case, nothing further happened. So on 3 July I made a written e-mail complaint to the BBC. On 9 August a response came from a named person at BBC Information which said: “The History Editor is to look into your concerns. However she is at present on leave and will not return until the end of the month. She will however review the site and make any required modifications in due course.”
Once again, no undertaking to report back. And the e-mail address at BBC Information was outgoing only. Clearly they did not want the public to respond to them further. I resorted to letter post however to send further supporting information, which was acknowledged by BBC Information.
 Then on 14 September, a named member of the BBC History Team emerged and wrote to me from an undisclosed location. “We have commissioned a researcher to look into the claims that Helen Dunmore (sic) was imprisoned for fear that she would reveal details about D-Day... [ that ] Winston Churchill (left) visited her and may have become sympathetic to her cause and was known to have spiritualist sympathies.”
I was invited to raise any further issues. So I sent more data. On 24 October, the named team member, now revealed as producer for BBC History, wrote again: “Our researcher has uncovered the following – so we’ll be amending the page accordingly. Thank you for contacting us about this interesting point.”
In fact, the researcher (who had never contacted me) had unearthed nothing to support the claims made by the BBC website. “I can find no reference to Churchill visiting Helen Duncan, expressing sympathies with her or having spiritualist sympathies,” the researcher wrote. The researcher cited the suggestion of Dr Malcolm Gaskill of Churchill College (biographer of the medium) that Mrs Duncan had been prosecuted not so much as a threat to national security but simply as another nuisance lowering morale in Portsmouth – a key point of departure for D-Day.
What lessons derive from this sorry saga so far? First, you cannot believe website claims about famous people or anything occult, especially when the two appear in the same myth. Someone who wrote the original BBC website page about Helen Duncan had forgotten this elementary caution, as did their supervising editor.
Second, there is sometimes boundless ignorance now about the basic facts of history, even among journalists and history graduates. Mediumship had been legalised in 1951 by the Labour government with the support of their Home Secretary James Chuter-Ede. No one today has heard of him, but even Americans recall Churchill, and his name has become attached to the legal change, even though he was not even in power at the time.
One can see in the BBC response a haughty spirit. Only an official complaint produced a promise of action, and then only after the holidays. Throughout, the errors remained on the website. Churchill may have been voted the greatest Briton in a BBC poll, but he is not in a position to sue.
The BBC had long forgotten the words of John Reith: “He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy.”
On the other hand, persistence could produce movement sometimes, especially if backed by chapter and verse. (The Churchill Archives and Dr Gaskill freely assisted me.) But by September, I was not the same as when I began. I had lost faith in the BBC licence fee.
I thanked the BBC editor for getting back to me and looked forward to the corrections. None happened. In January 2007 I wrote again, urging her to galvanise her colleagues, as I did not wish to make another complaint. Silence. In February, I made another official complaint. Finally, the paragraph about Churchill and Mrs Duncan was removed from the History website on 23 February and I was informed on 1 March.
No action was taken however about another matter to which I had drawn attention. The BBC History site still claimed:
In 1943 the spirit of a sailor appeared, announcing that he had just gone down on a vessel called the Barham. The Barham was not officially declared lost until several months later.
 You can check the date the Barham sank on the Net in ten seconds – it was 1941. Chronology is very important in these cases, especially when someone ended up in prison. Moreover, the bald statement – the spirit of a sailor appeared – may be acceptable in a sensational paperback. From the BBC surely an “alleged” or “was claimed” ought to be inserted somewhere? This was, after all, a tragedy in which hundreds of men died. Moreover, as psychical researchers know, the detail of the Barham case is a good deal less impressive.
In December 2006 and January 2006, false statements about both Churchill and the Barham appeared in two Spiritualist newspapers. To their credit, they proved instantly ready to publish corrections
The wide propagation of these errors is undoubtedly associated with a vociferous campaign for Mrs Duncan’s pardon. Once again the BBC proved vulnerable, even including a story on their news site: Call for pardon for last witch. The family of the last person in the UK to be prosecuted under the witchcraft act call for her pardon.
But Mrs Duncan was not the last person to be prosecuted under the Act. Her successful prosecution unleashed a wave of similar cases. Moreover, the BBC video and audio on the news site also claimed that Churchill visited her in prison, and that he later repealed the Witchcraft Act. Perhaps they got their incorrect information from the BBC History web site. The inclusion here of archive film of Churchill, and of the warship sinking, gave a spurious authenticity to the false claims.
All of these confusions do raise other disturbing questions. If the BBC is so insouciant about so well-documented a person as Churchill, or such a loss of life as the Barham sinking, how reliable is their coverage of much cloudier matters, such as the Middle East?
Yours faithfully
Leslie Price
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Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007
Category: Mediumship
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