Witch? Helen Duncan, pictured in a portrait from 1931, was jailed for nine months in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735
Posted on 03/02/2008 10:55:54 AM PST by BGHater
When the battleship Barham was torpedoed by the Germans in November 1941, with the loss of over 800 lives, the Admiralty delayed announcing the news to maintain morale.
But the secrecy was ended within a few days when medium Helen Duncan told a couple during a seance that their son, a sailor on the ship, had appeared from the spirit world to tell them it had sunk.
Witch? Helen Duncan, pictured in a portrait from 1931, was jailed for nine months in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act of 1735
In one of the most bizarre acts of the Second World War, Mrs Duncan was accused of leaking military secrets - and became the last woman jailed as a witch in the UK.
Now campaigners want an official pardon for the Scots-born mother of six, who spent nine months in Holloway Prison, north London.
Helen Duncan had a vision the HMS Barham would be involved in a wartime tragedy
A group of mediums have handed a petition to the Scottish Parliament, calling on it to lobby Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
Campaigner Roberta Gordon, from Gullane, East Lothian, said: "At the time the country was paranoid about security and the evidence used against her wasn't accurate.
"It would take away the stigma from her granddaughters and the great-grandsons."
Mrs Duncan was one of Britain's best-known mediums. During her seances she produced "ectoplasm" - a stringy white substance that is supposed to give form to spirits and allow them to communicate.
Paranormal investigators denounced her as a fraud who used cheesecloth and egg whites, but her family insist she was genuine, "an ordinary woman with a gift".
Helen Duncan, here with husband Henry, after the war, was the last person in Britain to be jailed under the Witchcraft Act
Despite the controversy, Mrs Duncan reputedly numbered Winston Churchill and George VI among her clients.
Churchill denounced the case against her as "obsolete tomfoolery" and visited her in prison.
The Barham, a 29,000-ton battleship, was hit by three German torpedoes in the Mediterranean on November 25, 1941.
Stigma: Helen Duncan's granddaughter Mary Martin
The ship went down within minutes, with the loss of 861 lives. Already reeling from the Blitz, the British government decided not to make the news public, not least to keep the Germans guessing.
But Duncan, who was living in Portsmouth at the time, held a seance just days later and told how she saw a sailor with the words HMS Barham on his hatband.
He told her: "My ship is sunk". News of the revelation reached the Admiralty and she was placed under observation. But she was not arrested until January 1944.
The trial in March 1944 caused a media sensation as Mrs Duncan was accused of being a traitor.
But the prosecution struggled to back the claim and she was convicted instead under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which had declared there could be no such thing as a medium.
She was the last person in Britain jailed under the act, which was repealed in 1951. The last person convicted, East Londoner Jane Yorke, 72, escaped with a fine in October 1944 due to her age.
Mrs Duncan died in 1956, soon after being arrested again in a police raid on a seance.
Last year the Criminal Cases Review Commission rejected a petition for her to be pardoned, saying it would not be in the public interest.
It was the Daily Telegraph, not the Times.
One of them at 11 across in the Telegraph puzzle was ‘MULBERRY’, with the clue ‘This bush is the centre of nursery revolutions’.
In Times 23,805, a puzzle that appeared in December 2007, the answer to 11 across was once again ‘MULBERRY’, this time with the clue ‘Harbour children go round in the cold’. I cannot believe this is not a witty allusion to what happened in 1944.
‘Mrs Duncan died in 1956, soon after being arrested again in a police raid on a seance.’
Kinda like the War on Drugs. Raid on a Seance. Thats crazy.
Once money changes hands, a seance goes from being a silly little game to a fraudulent enterprise in many jurisdictions.
In the US the laws regarding confidence games are somewhat grayer.
Hardly, I would say seances go back to biblical times.
Besides. If it does exchange money, it’s no worse than a poker game.
How long seances have been going on is a question immaterial to the point: a seance that charges money to participants is likely a confidence game.
So the question is: should confidence games be legal?
Besides. If it does exchange money, it’s no worse than a poker game.
It's much worse than a poker game. You can win a prize of actual value at a poker game, like the pot.
A seance with a participation fee is more like a fixed poker game than a normal poker game.
Ultimately it comes down to: where does a seance cross the line from being a form of entertainment to being a confidence game?
If someone is charging all and sundry - skeptics and believers alike - a few bucks, then it is probably just entertainment.
If someone is charging a thousand a head to a select few persons who have been chosen solely because they are emotionally vulnerable and desperate, then it's likely a confidence game.
And one of the main goals of any confidence artist is to try to tweak their con to stay just plausibly enough on the right side of the law.
We should ask Harry Potter if she was guilty.
We should ask Harry Potter if she was guilty.
You seem to forget the German Navy knew they sunk the Barham. If the British were motivated to keep it a secret for morale reasons, the Germans were motivated to brag for the same reason.
Churchill was right, it was utter tomfoolery. What can one do if Churchill couldn't. In Britain, the reasoned mind is up against a society that pays royal louts a fortune, champions homosexuals, lets in the Muslims and asks it citizens to learn dhimmitude, can't fix their teeth, ... I give up.
She turned me into a newt...
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I got better...
NOW should be thanking their lucky stars we don’t have this here!
Well she does have a witches nose.
That film of the HMS Barham rolling over and exploding still gives me the willies and I've seen it off and on for 50 years!
was it water going into the stacks and into the boilers?
A fraud? Like our CO2, energy and clean air frauds? To each his own, I guess.
It sounds like this was actually a good law that was far ahead of its time.
Very famously they did not know if they sunk the Barham or not.
The U-Boat that fired the torpedoes hightailed it out of there, knowing that they had hit some ship in the flotilla but not that they had completely destroyed its crown jewel.
The German navy did not begin to suspect that the Barham had been destroyed until a few months later when they realized that U-331's November 25th sighting was the last visual the Reichsmarine actually had of that warship.
What happened to the witch of Endor?
Some rich moron here in NYC gave a psychic close to half a million to remove a curse on him. So for the feeble minded that believe this nonsense it can be a lot more then just a harmless poker game.
There were only three survivors from the HMS Hood when it was sunk by the Bismarck. They had been catapulted to the surface by an enormous gas bubble caused by the exploding boilers.
A Titanic survivor was sucked into one of the funnels as it sank and was pinned against a grate. When the incoming ice cold waters reached the boilers, the resulting explosion blasted him to the surface, where he somehow climbed onto flotsam and escaped death by exposure.
But I had never heard of the Barnham until now, nor that it was the one seen in the footage.
No wonder so many or her crew died.
After seeing that video it astounded me to read that 400 men of her 1250 man crew survived. I was expecting something terrible to the degree of HMS Hood.
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