Science and Parascience: A History of the Paranormal 1914-1939 by Inglis Brian

Author:Inglis, Brian [Inglis, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Crow Productions Ltd
Published: 2013-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

6 The SPR in Decline

‘Feda’

The reluctance of the Cambridge nucleus to become involved in the investigation of physical mediums, and the negative nature of the report on ‘Eva’s’ London series, again took the SPR out of the mainstream of psychical research in the 1920s. Significantly, the two contributions made by members at the 1923 Copenhagen international conference both dealt with the mental mediumship of Mrs Osborne Leonard. Work with her was continuing to produce positive results – about the only success which the society could claim.

Mrs Leonard’s reputation had remained unblemished, and ‘Feda’s’ ability to provide ‘communicators’ undiminished. She even won over Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion, long a leading campaigner for Socialism. ‘Throughout my thinking life I have been a convinced materialist; even a militant materialist,’ he wrote in his More Things in Heaven and Earth. ‘I believed that the personality was bound up in the structure of the brain. As I have expressed it more than once, “the brain is the man”.’ As a letter he had written shortly before he went to Mrs Leonard showed, he went sceptically. What he heard converted him: his dead wife came through, and spoke to him as she had when she was living.

Blatchford also noted what other sitters had sometimes remarked upon: ‘some curious acoustic facts’, as he described them. ‘Feda’s’ voice did not reach him as if Mrs Leonard was her mouthpiece. It sounded initially as if ‘Feda’ was speaking from above and behind Mrs Leonard. Later, it was as if she had moved in front, slightly to Mrs Leonard’s left; so that when he was speaking to ‘Feda’, he was turning away from Mrs Leonard: ‘When my wife spoke to me with the direct voice, she seemed to speak from a point between the medium and the control.’

Although ‘Feda’ expressed a preference for getting to know sitters, claiming that this helped her to obtain better results, from the society’s point of view her most impressive feats were with first-time sitters whom she could not know about in advance; as in a case history provided by Mrs Dawson-Smith, the mother of a young officer, Lieutenant Frank Dawson-Smith, who had survived the war, including Passchendaele, only to be murdered in Somalia in 1920 by supporters of the ‘Mad Mullah’. That autumn his mother went anonymously for a sitting, taking notes of what ‘Feda’ relayed from the ‘communicator’ – ‘Frank’. Mrs Dawson-Smith passed the notes on to lodge, and Mrs Salter later published extracts from them in the SPR Proceedings. At the first of Mrs Dawson-Smith’s sittings, her notes ran:

FED A:

The communicator says: ‘Have you got the snapshots?’

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