Was this back in the days of Cromwell or earlier one might ask? No it was 1944, towards the end of World War II when Helen Duncan became the last person in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft.
Born in Scotland in 1897, Helen Duncan made a part time living as a medium. She earned a reputation of sorts for summoning the spirits of the dead by emitting 'ectoplasm' from her mouth. She had been arrested a number of times for suspected fraud but her fame ( or notoriety) stemmed from one seance she gave in Portsmouth in 1941.
Just prior to the seance, the British battleship H.M.S. Barham had been sunk by German torpedoes with the loss of two thirds of the crew, nearly 900 sailors. The Admiralty realised from intercepting German radio that the enemy did not know they had sunk the ship. So they went to great and elaborate lengths to hide the news of the sinking from everyone, even going to the lengths of sending greeting cards from the dead crew to their wives and families.
Some days later, Helen Duncan gave her seance at which she announced that H.M.S. Barham had been sunk and that she was contacting the spirit of one of the dead sailors. No one knows to this day how Mrs. Duncan obtained this knowledge that the Admiralty had gone to such lengths to keep secret.
She was not arrested immediately but, though its hard to believe, some British intelligence officers believed that Helen Duncan was possessed of some extraordinary power and, when the D-Day landings were planned, British Intelligence remembered the uncanny message 'from beyond the grave' some three years before and had Helen Duncan arrested.
Any charge they could reasonably throw at her would have resulted in a fine and freedom but they were terrified that her 'power' might put the D-Day landings in jeopardy, so they dug out the British Witchcraft Act of 1735 and charged her with sorcery under that Act. Unbelievably ( though probably with connivance) she was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in prison - thus off the streets of Britain during the lead up to the invasion.
Now her relatives are petitioning Tony Blair in order to get her pardoned and this smear as a witch removed from her record. By all logic and reason it should of course succeed but who knows with this government.
I feel a little better now, knowing that our Intelligence Services were running around only 50 years ago prosecuting witches, for the ritual I always undertake when visiting my Manx homeland. Just outside Douglas, on the way to Castletown, is a little hump backed bridge and when your bus or car goes over it, you have to say 'Good Day to You, Fairies' for if you don't, the Little People will visit you in the night and do you grave harm. Do I repeat this mantra? Well of course I do! No of course I don't believe a word of it but, like the brains of British Intelligence in 1944, better safe than sorry, eh?
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