Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches: The Last of England's Witches - Hardcover

Gaskill, Malcolm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841151092 ISBN 13: 9781841151090

Verlag: Fourth Estate, 2001

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Reseña del editor

The 1735 Witchcraft Act was used for the last time in Portsmouth in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a plump Scotswoman, convicted as a fraud yet believed by hundreds to possess the power to speak to the dead. This is her extraordinary story.

Helen Duncan was born in Callander in 1898 and developed mysterious powers during the First World War, when she correctly predicted the guise of the soldier she would marry. Having refined these powers she became increasingly celebrated following her own near death from pneumonia when she was informed of her vocation by a shadowy white figure. She went on to produce spirit forms from ectoplasm that, she said, flowed through her. She was accompanied by a spirit guide named Albert and a young girl spirit named Peggy. Or was she? The Psychic community was divided in two fiercely opposing camps – followers and sceptics. The government of the day got involved (Churchill was said to be more than a little interested) when, during WW2 Helen appeared able to tell relatives of the deaths of their loved ones even before offical announcements had been made. And so in 1944, absurdly, anachronistically, she was charged with witchcraft, prosecuted and jailed for the duration of the war. Her life is an amazing glimpse into the spritiual and psychological mood of the times, a story of bathos and absurdity, of credulity and cruelty, and of England’s last witch.

Contraportada

Private seances, at which spirits are said to return from the dead, were once more of a public affair. In darkened back-rooms, cellars and halls across early twentieth-century Britain, thousands of people went to 'the spooks' hoping to see mediums manifest ghostly forms. For many, working-class Scot Helen Duncan – nicknamed 'Hellish Nell' as a child – was the best there had ever been. But fame turned to infamy early in 1944 when she was treid at the Old Bailey under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, and sentanced to nine months in prison.

It was one of the most sensational episodes in wartime Britain. Why did the trial occur just weeks before the Normandy landings? Why was Helen Duncan gaoled for summoning spirits when mediums were usually fined as petty frauds? And what actually happened at the seances to impress so many respectable people, more than forty of whom testified as defence witnesses at her trial? Was she in fact a conjurer, amystic, a con-artist or even a spy? To Spiritualists, Helen Duncan was a martyr. To the state, she became a security risk. Her life story is a broth of wartime anxieties, legal deviousness, science and pseudo-science, conspiracy, politics and sheer entertainment. But she was also the focus for one of the oldest and most difficult questions of all: what happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had lived through the slaughter and sorrow of two world wars.

Malcolm Gaskill has uncovered a fascintating and poignant story of an ordinary woman thrust onto and extraordinary public platform, on which vaudeville-style get-togethers clattered headlong into the opposing forces of church and state, determined to declare Helen Duncan a witch.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Fourth Estate
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1841151092
• ISBN 13: 9781841151090
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416