The Last Witch Convicted
Portsmouth Today reports on the efforts of local Spiritualists lead by local psychic and astrologer Pamela Ashenda to clear the name of Helen Duncan, the last woman to be convicted of witchcraft in Britain.
“During the Second World War she moved to Portsmouth to give comfort to anxious wives of Royal Naval sailors who feared their loved ones were lost at sea. On the evening of January 19, 1944, she was conducting a seance in a private house in the city when police stormed in. The following morning Helen, known as Hellish Nell, was charged under section four of the 1735 Witchcraft Act by Portsmouth magistrates. Officials had ordered her arrest amid fears she would reveal top-secret plans for the D-Day landings. They had been monitoring her since she had revealed the British battleship HMS Barham had sunk earlier in the war, with the loss of 861 lives. The government had suppressed the news to maintain morale. It took a jury 30 minutes to find her guilty and she became the last person to be convicted of witchcraft in Britain. She was sentenced to nine months in London’s Holloway Prison.”
Her conviction is notable for it helped boost the already growing sympathy for Spiritualists, mediums, astrologers, and other “cunning folk”. This changing attitude finally lead to the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, a moment long awaited by author and civil servant Gerald Gardner. Gardner had already published a fictional account of religious Witchcraft before Duncan’s conviction, and one five years after. Once the repeal went through he felt it safe to expose his adherence to the religion of Witchcraft or “Wica” (later “Wicca”) to the general public. The rest, as they say, is history.
Sadly, Duncan’s fate after her arrest in 1944 isn’t a happy one. She stopped working as a medium for many years, but was coaxed out of retirement for a seance in 1956. She was arrested (most likely under the notorious Vagrancy Act of 1824), strip-searched, and went into shock. She was hospitalized and died five weeks later. I wish her advocates luck in clearing her name.
One response so far
People fear what they either do not know, or cannot control – I hope they are able to clear her name, it would show progress on behalf of the government in matters of alternative faith and interfaith tolerance.
At the same time, I’m not so sure I would blame the government that charged her…those were desperate times and, while it’s tragic that they resorted to using a 200-year old law to control a psychic, it illustrates just how desperate a situation the British were in.