The Background

One evening in the spring of 1919 a soldier in his uniform appeared at the front door of 115, Strathyre Avenue, Norbury, London.

Frances Sims knew who it was immediately. It was her husband – Lance Corporal Frank Herbert Sims, known as  Bert. The only problem was that Lance Corporal Sims had died at Taranto, Italy in January. 

That was the family story at least. And whether that started the long search to make contact with the dead I don’t know.

Certainly spiritualism had been a thriving and growing practice throughout much of the previous century. The huge losses of the war gave it a renewed boost as the millions of bereaved sought reassurance and relief from their grief

When the War Office telegram arrived that winter LCpl Sims was expected home on leave. His long underwear was warming on the rack above the kitchen range. The war was over. Soon he would be coming home to his wife and two little girls for good 

As the news of his death registered, Frances Sims ran upstairs and threw herself on the bed sobbing and inconsolable with grief. When her older daughter – five year old Edith – tried to comfort her, she  pushed her away. 

It was a moment that the child never forgot. She carried that sense of loss and rejection with her for the rest of her life. There was always a space where her father should have been, always a sense of loss and longing for what had been taken from her. A sense of what could have been and a deep enduring emotional absence that never went away.

I don’t know how and when Frances and Bert met but they were married in April 1911. His father was a London policeman and his parents were strict evangelical chapel-goers.

In 1911 he was an accounts clerk living in the house of an omnibus driver and paying 6 shillings a week for a furnished room in Stanley Terrace, Eccelston Square, Pimlico.

Frances was the oldest of seven, a farmer’s daughter from  Brampton, Chesterfield. Two more children had died in infancy, one of them in her five year old arms. She had won a pupil teacher scholarship at the age of seventeen and had trained at Stockwell College in south London. In 1911 she was teaching in a what was known as a slum school in Leeds.

Here they are dressed up on their wedding day. How impossibly grand, old fashioned and Edwardian they look.

Amazing to think that this is the same person I sat with in her efficiency in Santa Barbara to watch a  program about the Space Shuttle.  She was born into an age of mechanical marvels and  lived to be two months short of a century. She was in awe of the changes she had lived through and relished the excitement of space travel and new technologies. She was short, strong-willed, determined, a resilient risk-taker and a shrewd down-to-earth businesswoman with a tremendous gift for friendship. She never forgot my birthday.

I have in my hand a real genuine spirit photograph from the 1920’s. By genuine of course I mean a real fake genuine photo as there have never been any actual authenticated photographs of spirits anywhere ever. All of them have been debunked as frauds and exposed as trickery. 

It’s my grandmother.

Note the reversed image spirit image name at the top – common with such items: F. Sims. The frothy white stuff was claimed to be ectoplasm – spiritual energy made manifest by the mediumship of the photographer.

The “spirit” face has been superimposed amid the puffy cloud which conveniently allowed for the photo edges to be blurred and disguised. Those faces were known as “extras”.

I don’t know who the photographer was but there were many working in this lucrative field in the years after WW1. So many desperate and grieving people in search of some sign, in hope of some indication that the one they loved was still there in the spirit world. 

Spirit photos were big in the hey day of spiritualism which of course happened to coincide with the development of photography.

As “evidence”, as “proof” of the afterlife it was natural for hoaxers and frauds. It was a much easier and more convincing – to the gullible – than all the business of table levitation and rapping. 

Easy as they were to create so were they as easy to debunk by those who understood the tricks of double exposure and other early examples of image manipulation.

One hoaxer – Ada Emma Deane – made a practice of taking photos of the annual armistice ceremonies at the Cenotaph in London where crowds gathered every November 11th to mark the end of the war and remember the dead. This one is from 1922.

Deane was fifty-eight years old when she began her career as a photographic medium. Her Centotaph photos brought her considerable notoriety and widespread coverage in the press.

Her 1924 effort was the front page of the Daily Sketch on November 13th. It showed a number of blurry faces floating in a fuzzy cloud above the Cenotaph in Whitehall as crowds stood for the moment of silence.

Deane’s reputation took a hit but – although she took no more Armistice photos – she continued her private spirit photo business into the 1930’s. The Met Museum in NYC has a collection of them.

True believers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were undeterred. 

Before her second career as a medium Deane had been a charwoman and this in Conan Doyle’s opinion was supportive evidence that she could not possibly know of such things as ectoplasm and be clever enough to commit such an elaborate fraud.

Conan Doyle was easily deceived and he stoutly defended the indefensible long after hoaxes and frauds were exposed.

The Crewe Circle and the spirit photos of William Hope were other hoaxes exposed as fraudulent that he defended in spite of the evidence of manipulation and deception. He wrote a full account in The Case for Spirit Photography.    

The case of the Cottingley Fairies was another example of Doyle’s ready suspension of rational thought. And again he put pen to paper to defend against the skeptics. 

The photographs had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie’s home in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford, Yorkshire.

 

Ironically that book included a story by Conan Doyle himself – Bimbashi Joyce – a rather nasty little colonial story about the British Army in the Libyan desert.  He must not have looked through the whole thing. If he had it might have been hard even for him not to see the likeness between the fairies and Claude A. Shepperson’s illustrations. 

Here’s another of the illustrations:

Have no hard tasks for the children, no learning of difficult questions, aim at making the children happy, so that their Sunday may be to them the pleasantest day of the week.  – from The Lyceum Manual

There must be something more – what was on offer from traditional sources was not enough. Something more than economic injustice; something more than a faith based on hellfire and damnation. 

 

Conan Doyle was not the only prominent man to announce his belief in spiritualism. There were others including the socialist journalist Hannan Swaffer and the noted physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. Like Doyle, Lodge  had become interested in the practice in the late 19th century and both lost sons during the war. They gave lectures and platform demonstrations and their work and thinking became part of the fabric of my mother’s belief system.

Lodge was involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio and he independently identified electromagnetic radio waves.

He was also a Christian spiritualist who had in 1909 published his belief that life after death had been demonstrated by mediumship. I mention his name because he was one my mother often spouted when trying to convince her physicist son of one of the absurder aspects of spiritualism.

Lodge’s most controversial book was Raymond or Life and Death(1916) and it makes for interesting reading. His sons letters from Flanders are full of lively details about life at the front. I especially enjoyed his vignettes about food and the contents of parcels from home.

After Raymond is killed by shellfire at Hooge in September 1915 it documents the séances that Lodge his wife and other family members had attended with various mediums including Gladys Osborne Leonard who spoke through her control – an Indian woman named  Feda. In 1918 Leonard began working with the Society for Psychical Research and later with Radclyffe Hall. The results of those sessions were published in the Proceedings for the Society for Psychical Research in 1919 

Lodge was convinced that his son Raymond had communicated with him and the book is a description of his son’s experiences in the spirit world including many details of spirit world and especially of the important spirit work. Being dead on the earthly plane did not mean eternal rest.

Lodge believed that Leonard’s spirit control “Feda” had communicated with his son. However, he admitted a good deal of the information was nonsense.

Scientific work on electromagnetic radiation convinced Lodge that an ether existed and that it filled the entire universe. Lodge came to believe that the spirit world existed in the ether. 

Most interesting to me amongst all the nonsense in Raymond is the “spirit”‘s concern for the grieving of his family. He urges them not to be sad and that at the upcoming Christmas dinner he will be there. They set a place for him and refrain from mourning in the belief that Raymond is happy in the spirit world and upset when they are sad about his death.

“Mother darling, I am so happy, and so much more so because you are.”

Yes, we are; and as your father says, we can face Christmas now.

Raymond says he will be there.

We will put a chair for him.

Yes, he will come and sit in it.

He wants to strike a bargain with you. he says, “If I come there, there must be no sadness. I don’t want to be a ghost at the feast. There mustn’t be one sigh. Please, darling, keep them in order, rally them up. Don’t let them. If they do, I shall have the hump.” say.)

We will all drink his health and happiness. – from Raymond, p.117

This denial of grief and the insistence on being bright, active and cheerful reappears in Part Two of this saga when we fast forward to the 1960s.

And if we marvel at the credulity of those back then then we must also wonder at the credulity of our own times. Fake news and photoshop included.

And on that note here is an ad that appeared in the same issue of Scientific American that debunked the spirit photo fraud. It would have been hard not to believe in the magic of science and unseen marvels in 1922.