IN 1944, medium Helen Duncan became the last woman in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft after being arrested at a seance in Portsmouth. Now campaigners are fighting to clear her name.
IN 1944, medium Helen Duncan became the last woman in Britain to be convicted of witchcraft after being arrested at a seance in Portsmouth. Now campaigners are fighting to clear her name.
Among them is Portsmouth medium Pam Ashenden.
She said: 'She seemed like a woman with a natural gift who was persecuted under some antiquated law to keep her quiet.'
Mrs Ashenden has known of her own psychic powers since she was 15. Now the 60-year-old is a prominent astrologer and medium with the Joseph Carey Psychic Foundation, based at Buckland Community Centre, Buckland, Portsmouth.
She said: 'Mediums and psychics face a lot of scepticism even today, but television programmes and wider reporting are making it more acceptable.
'If Helen Duncan's name could be cleared it would be a great thing for mediums everywhere.'
Helen Duncan, nee Macfarlane (pictured), was born in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1897.
She married Henry Duncan, and the couple had five children. During the 1930s seances began to spring up across the country and Mrs Duncan, who had always appeared to have a sixth sense, became involved.
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.
She served her sentence and vowed never to hold another meeting. But in 1956 she agreed to give a seance in Nottingham, where she was arrested and subjected to a strip-search.
She was said to have never got over the shock and, after being rushed to hospital, remained there for the next five weeks and died on December 6.
Now, 50 years after her death, campaigners hope to persuade Home Secretary John Reid to overturn the original verdict, but the latest appeal has been denied.
alex.forsyth@thenews.co.uk