Helen Duncan A pardon for the last witch Miscarriage of Justice                                             Born in the small Scottish town of Callender, November, 1897. Callender was known for its poor community and high unemployment. Fortunately Helen’s family, luckier than most, lived in more modest conditions due to her father being a master cabinet maker. Helen became known as Hellish Nell, not because of her psychic abilities, but her behaviour, she was said to be noisy and boisterous child. At the age of sixteen Helen went to work at Dundee. It was whilst working in Dundee that she developed TB, and was sent to a sanatorium. Helen’s, soon to be husband, Henry Duncan, also suffered ill health. He was invalided out of the Army with rheumatic fever. They married in 1916. Between the two of them they had to scratch for a living, relying on the fittest to bring home money for food. Theirs was a loving marriage, of which Helen fell pregnant twelve times, sadly only six children survived. Eventually Henry suffered a heart attack. Too sick to work he returned to his past love, reading spiritualist books. His family had encountered dealings with hauntings, and Henry was a sensitive on the subject. It was Helen’s reputation as a materialisation medium* that blossomed among the locals, and with Henry assisting her they soon wandered off around the country holding séances. The Second World War increased Helen’s popularity: mother’s wanted to know how their beloved son’s were coping on the other side. People came to Helen in droves. She brought comfort to them all. Whilst living in Portsmouth, May, 1941 (the home of the Royal Navy) in attendance sat Brigadier R.C.Firebrace. Whilst Helen was in trance she passed on the news that a British battleship had sunk. The spirit of a sailor appeared before his mother. He materialised in full uniform with an inscription on his cap, HMS Barham. He stated that his ship had been sunk in action (not unusual for a Helen Duncan’s séance; the war produced numerous dead sailors) but in this instance the sinking of HMS Barham was a state secre Firebrace later learnt that HMS Hood had sunk with a loss of 1,100 lives. He reported the facts to the Intelligence Agencies. Who immediately took an interest in Helen Duncan’s activities. Psychic News editor, Maurice Barbanel, unaware of any conspiracy from the Military Intelligence, telephoned British Admiralty requesting confirmation of the sinking. And if true, why had they not informed the mother that her son was dead at sea. This was ‘Top Secret’ information and British Military Intelligence was appalled that there had been a leak. They had held back on the announcement fearing the loss of 861 seamen, torpedoed by a German U-boat, was bad for public moral. The British government denied the vessel had gone down, and the British War Office had no official news. Months later the Barnham was indeed reported lost in an enemy attack. Suspected as being a spy Military Intelligence monitored Helen’s séances more closely. With D-Day finally approaching – 6th June 1944, they became concerned that Helen Duncan was a threat to national security. They had to silence Helen and conspired to have her arrested and incarcerated. On January 19th 1944, Helen’s séance was disrupted by a plain clothes policeman and a naval lieutenant. When Helen went into trance and started to materialize ectoplasm,* the police man jumped out of his chair blowing his whistle and launched a police raid. Expecting the ectoplasm to be a white sheet he made a grab for her which caused the spirit to dematerialize before he could get to it. They found nothing to implicate fraud. She was formally arrested with three members of the audience. A naval officer, employed by the Admiralty, was the police informer making the complaint against Helen Duncan .The original charge laid against Helen by the Portsmouth Magistrates was that of Vagrancy, which would be a five shilling fine. However, Helen was refused bail and sent to Holloway prison for four days. The alleged crime was then changed to conspiracy: a hanging offence. By the time the case came before the judge at the Old Bailey, it was once again altered. The defendants were now accused of contravening the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Helen was also charged under the Larceny Act. Bail was refused again (murderers were allowed bail not witches). In England witches were never burnt at the stake like other countries, they were hanged; this was the fate that Helen had to look forward to whilst in Holloway. The Admiralty were determined to charge her with something that carried a prison sentence. Helen Duncan supporters organised a fund to pay for expenses of the defence witnesses. The trial caused a sensation in the newspapers. Helen was prepared to demonstrate her abilities as a medium, the prosecution refused. After a seven-day trial, with forty-four, respected witnesses testifying Helen’s credibility, and three hundred ready to take stand, the judge found Helen Duncan guilty under the terms of the old Witchcraft Act of 1735. She was found innocent of all other charges. The defence’s right to appeal was withheld and the motherly medium was sentenced to nine months imprisonment at Holloway Prison. All Helen said was, ‘I never hee’d so mony lies in a’my life.’ During those months Helen’s family were evicted from their home. Whilts serving time in prison Helen’s remarkable life took another turn. She had a visit from the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.ater that year, at one of Helen’s séances, the spirit of a sailor appeared before his mother. He materialised in full uniform with an inscription on his cap, HMS Barham. He stated that his ship had been sunk in action (not unusual for a Helen Duncan’s séance; the war produced numerous dead sailors) but in this instance the sinking of HMS Barham was a state secret. Winston Churchill showed great sympathy for Helen, and was outraged by her trial and conviction. He was a great believer in the paranormal and in his anger sent a memo to his wartime Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison. “Let me have a report on why the Witchcraft Act, 1735 was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the state, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts.” " It has recently come to light by members of the British Society for Paranormal Studies, that they have found evidence that Sir Winston Churchill had himself “used the skills of Helen Duncan” prior to her prosecution in 1944". On release from Holloway on the 22nd September 1944, three months after D-Day, Helen vowed never to hold another séance. If she had stuck to her word she would not have had to endure the last days of her life being persecuted by the police. In November 1956 the police once again raided her séance in Nottingham in an attempt to prove fraud. Once again they found no evidence to prove a fraudulent practice had taken place. Helen was again taken into custody. The uproar that the raid created (she was strip searched and endless flashlight photos were taken) affected Helen’s health. A doctor was called, and discovered a very sick woman, it is alleged that there were two second-degree burns across Helen’s stomach.* Helen was returned to her native Scotland and admitted into hospital. Within five weeks, aged 59, Helen Duncan was dead. There is an active campaign to clear Helen Duncan’s name. http://helenduncan.org Winston Churchills re-election  After the war his re-election to power in 1951. One of his first actions was to repeal the Witchcraft Act 1735, to one of Fraudulent Mediums Act. In 1954 Spiritualism was recognised as a religion.     Alan Crossley talks about his experience of materialisation seances with Helen Duncan and Alex Harris.

HELEN DUNCAN LATEST  The Guardian Mary Martin was 11 years old when her father taught her to box. She would come home from school scratched and bruised, her ears ringing with abuse from the playground. Mary Martin had the unhappy distinction of being the granddaughter of Britain's last convicted witch. Mrs Martin knew her grandmother, Helen Duncan, as a comforting woman she could trust, the granny with a special gift: talking to spirits. But this was April 1944, at the height of the war with Germany. Mrs Duncan had just been branded by an Old Bailey jury as a witch and spy guilty of revealing wartime secrets. Some 50 years after Mrs Duncan's death, a fresh campaign has been launched to clear her name, with a petition calling on the home secretary, John Reid, to grant a posthumous pardon. Her conviction, said Mrs Martin, was simply "ludicrous". The appeal is winning international support from experts in perhaps the world's most infamous witch trial: the conviction and execution of 20 girls, men and women at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. "Helen Duncan was very much victimised by her times, and she too suffered," said Alison D'Amario, education director at the Salem Witch Museum. Mrs Duncan, a Scotswoman who travelled the country holding seances, was one of Britain's best-known mediums, reputedly numbering Winston Churchill and George VI among her clients, when she was arrested in January 1944 by two naval officers at a seance in Portsmouth. The military authorities, secretly preparing for the D-day landings and then in a heightened state of paranoia, were alarmed by reports that she had disclosed - allegedly via contacts with the spirit world - the sinking of two British battleships long before they became public. The most serious disclosure came when she told the parents of a missing sailor that his ship, HMS Barham, had sunk. It was true, but news of the tragedy had been suppressed to preserve morale. Desperate to silence the apparent leak of state secrets, the authorities charged Mrs Duncan with conspiracy, fraud, and with witchcraft under an act dating back to 1735 - the first such charge in over a century. At the trial, only the "black magic" allegations stuck, and she was jailed for nine months at Holloway women's prison in north London. Churchill, then prime minister, visited her in prison and denounced her conviction as "tomfoolery". In 1951, he repealed the 200-year-old act, but her conviction stood. Mrs Martin recalls that news of Mrs Duncan's conviction spread through her working-class suburb of Craigmillar in Edinburgh like a virus. "It was in all the papers, and of course the evil eye, witch-spawn - you name it, we were called it. My older sister, Helen, just wouldn't mention it. She shut it out of her mind. It was grim. I was only 11 years old, and children can be the cruellest under the sun. It taught us how to look after ourselves, I can tell you that much." She remains nonplussed that the case ever went to court. "The arrest was silly really. If they'd spoken to her she would've stopped giving seances until the war was over. Let's be honest: she'd two sons in the navy, and one in the RAF, and my father in the army. So why would she turn around and put the country at risk?" The petition has been set up by an arts festival and the holder of a medieval barony, Gordon Prestoungrange, in the coastal town of Prestonpans east of Edinburgh, a few miles from Mrs Martin's home. Two years ago, Dr Prestoungrange used his ancient powers as the local baron to pardon 81 women and men from the area executed for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. "The prosecution and conviction of Helen Duncan as a witch was clearly as much of an injustice as those of the 16th and 17th centuries," he said. "It's hardly credible that a 20th century court would be prepared to convict someone of witchcraft - within living memory of many in this present government. As well as the deprivations suffered by Helen Duncan in prison, the effect of the stigma on her family was and remains considerable." Mrs Martin and her supporters face a battle to convince the Home Office to act. But Tony Blair's apology for Britain's role in slavery, and the official pardon for more than 300 first world war servicemen convicted of cowardice, have reinvigorated the campaign. Convicted witches are being pardoned across the US. Mrs Duncan died in 1956, three months after being arrested again in a police raid on a seance in Nottingham. Paranormal investigators denounced her as a fraud who used cheesecloth, rubber gloves and egg whites to create the "ectoplasm" she claimed to produce. Mrs Martin insists her grandmother was a genuine spiritualist, "an ordinary woman with a gift. I just want her name cleared. She was never given the chance to defend herself at the trial. It was such an injustice. While all this was happening, our troops were preparing for D-day. Why did they spend 10 days trying an old lady for witchcraft?"  Witch hunts reached their peak in the UK in the 17th century, when the church viewed witches as devil-worshipping heretics. In 1604 James I issued a statute against witchcraft. Numerous trials followed, including those instigated by Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed witchfinder general, from 1644 to 1647. Hopkins travelled the south-east seeking out witches, using torture to secure confessions and using methods such as swimming - throwing the accused into a river and judging them innocent if they sank - to determine guilt. He is thought to have executed 200-400 "witches". In Manningtree, Essex, alone, he accused 36 women, 19 of whom were executed; a further nine died in prison. The accused were overwhelmingly female, often widows with no family to protect them. Some were herbalists or healers, practices opposed by church teachings, and some probably did practise dark arts, though most were innocent. The last execution for witchcraft in England was in 1684, when Alice Molland was hanged in Exeter. James I's statute was repealed in 1736 by George II. In Scotland, the church outlawed witchcraft in 1563 and 1,500 people were executed, the last, Janet Horne, in 1722. Gerald Brousseau Gardner founded the modern Wicca movement in the 1940s, 11 years before the repeal of Britain's witchcraft laws. Followers revere nature, worship a goddess and practice ritual magic. In the 2001 census, 7,000 people listed Wicca as their religion.  Katy Heslop  The witchcraft laws  January 13th 2007 The Guardian newspaper* was the latest in several British newspapers over the past few months to highlight the conviction of wartime medium Helen Duncan. Although the article said she was jailed as a witch and a spy, and was a threat to Britain at war. The article drew attention to the fact that in 1692 in Salem Massachusetts, 20 people executed for witchcraft were recently pardoned, and 2 years ago 81 women and men from the Scotland area executed for witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries were also pardoned. The pardoning of 300 shell shocked soldiers from WW 1 recently invigorated the posthumous campaign for Helen Duncan. Under the new Human rights act, for any prosecution to take place it must be based on truth, yet Helen did tell the truth, it was the government who wanted to support another wartime lie, that the ships had not been sunk. The new Home Office minister John Reid has so far said that to bring in the Human Rights law retrospectively in this case would be improper. Yet Tony Blair recently used it to apologise for Slavery Winston Churchill played a double game publicly claiming her prosecution was “ tomfoolery” while privately grouping together the leading occultists of the day. The “wartime “Black Team” was in the words of Alexander Cannon, A masterpiece in the structure of the supernatural war machine. The Church of England’s expert on the Supernatural, Archbishop Lang was complicit with Dennis Wheatley and Louis De’Whol with others, to wage a psychic war, and a suggestion from an old friend and colleague of Helens, Minnie Adamson, claimed this could have been because Helen would not be part of the black team as several other mediums were pressured to do. The prosecution rested on the fact that they claimed she could have revealed the secret coming plans for D day, yet for her to able to do this demolishes their own case that she was a fraud. Never forget Churchill himself was a 33rd degree mason, a druid and part time spiritualist and claimed psychic ability, and even dropped fake horoscopes over Germany. Soviet spy Eugene Ivanov claimed that the British osteopath and spiritual healer, Stephen Ward was murdered because he helped Churchill with his depression and alcoholism, And got him painting for therapy, and for what he knew of the Black Team. T Stokes - Lecturer in paranormal studies The rights of this article are with the owner *Guardian Unlimited Special Report Dated 13th January 2007

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