Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches [Paperback]

‘Nothing can disguise the strength of the material on display, or the sense of a great swathe of early 20th century mental life brought out into sharp but by no means unsympathetic modern light'. D.J. Taylor, SUNDAY TIMES

‘A fascinating account’ Lesley McDowell, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

‘Malcolm Gaskill has researched the whole story of Helen Duncan’s life with extreme thoroughness; his account sparkles with dry humour, but is not without sympathy too. Its main value – apart from…sheer entertainment-value – lies in the light it shines on the social phenomenon of spiritualism in early 20th-century Britain’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘Comprehensive and scholarly, and also extremely readable, being full of trenchant phrases and vivid analogies. It is balanced, fair and a salutary reminder, in our secularised society, that belief in the supernatural is still endemic.’ LITERARY REVIEW

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.

Explaining Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches
My new book Hellish Nell is a work of social cultural history. Specifically, it is an attempt to recapture something of early 20th-century attitudes and ideas through the subject of Spiritualism, and, in turn, to understand something of Spiritualism through the life and times of the infamous materialization medium, Helen Duncan. In particular, her trial under the 1735 Witchcraft Act at the Old Bailey in 1944 reveals a cross-section of opinions: legal, journalistic, religious, scientific and so on.

Although I hint at my true feelings about psychical phenomena, my main intention has been to suspend judgement in order to allow the reader to glimpse a strange world of religious fantasy. For the purpose of understanding the characters in the story, and through them to recover a taste of the past, I have tried to establish this world temporarily an an alternative reality.

The book tells a strange story, full of spectral visitations and gruesome events, and it should be read as such. But hopefully it also demonstrates that the truths upon which we rely are generated by institutions and the labels those institutions attach to people. In this case, the use of the Witchcraft Act makes it inevitable that Helen Duncan was seen as a witch, even though she was nothing of the sort in a religious or even legal sense. Such was the strange influence of Hellish Nell Duncan over British society sixty years ago. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Malcolm Gaskill teaches History at Cambridge University where he is Fellow and Director of Studies at Churchill College. He specialises in the history of witchcraft and popular beliefs, and is the author of CRIME AND MENTALITIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND.