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Introduction
Shirley Hitchings and James Clark’s book
The Poltergeist Prince of London: The
Remarkable True Story of the Battersea Poltergeist (The History Press,
2013) begins with a sad but familiar tale.
The case, concerning alleged poltergeist activity in the 1950s of which
the teenage Shirley Hitchings had been the focus, was investigated by a
researcher named Harold Chibbett. He
died in 1978, and his wife about sixteen years later. Their relatives, with no interest in the
subject, threw away almost all of his papers.
The ones relating to the Battersea poltergeist only survived because
Chibbett had promised Hitchings that she could have them, and the relatives
contacted her to say that she should retrieve them before the rest went to the
tip:
‘Shirley and her
husband Derek raced from the south coast of England to Chibbett’s house in
north London. There they discovered an
Aladdin’s Cave of paranormal papers, the repository of Chibbett’s decades of
investigation into esoteric subjects. It
was clear, though, that the process of discarding material had already begun
and that there would be no time for a return trip. As tempting as it was simply to grab the
entire collection there was far too much to take with them, so with Derek’s
help Shirley set about looking for material relating specifically to her and
rescuing as much as she could.’
The rest, the years of painstaking
investigation (and this book is testament to the pains Harold Chibbett took),
was simply thrown away by relatives who were more interested in clearing the
house than in preserving papers. They
can’t be blamed for that, but Chibbett I think can for not making adequate
provision.*
Relatives faced with clearing out the
notes, typescripts, newspaper clippings, cassette tapes, photographs, and all
the other bits and pieces accumulated during a case, or at least accumulated
before digitisation became commonplace, will not know, because they don’t have
the expertise to judge, whether what they have is worth saving. If the records are concerned with paranormal
investigations they may consider the subject embarrassing, or distasteful. There is the possibility that confidential
notes may contain frank opinions about others which could be construed as
distressing and/or defamatory to them or their families, or the investigator
may be open to charges of credulity that would reflect badly on the
relatives. Better not to take the risk,
but to dispose quietly of the lot. A
safe strategy, but the result is the potential loss of invaluable information.
Successes and failures
I have had some first-hand experiences
of retrieving collections, and a couple of experiences of trying to track down
files only to discover that they have probably been thrown out by heirs for
whom they held no interest. These
experiences are I’m sure fairly representative and indicate some of the issues
involved. The first I was instrumental
in securing was that of Jim Jameson, who had a large number of automatic
writing scripts produced by his mediumistic wife. They lived at Wymondham, just outside
Norwich, and as I was living in Norfolk I went to see them several times to
discuss possible donation to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Dr Jameson said that he wanted to ensure that
the scripts, which held enormous personal significance for him and his wife,
were going to the best place, and he quizzed me carefully before agreeing to
consign them to me for transport to the SPR’s office. A second, much more extensive, collection was
that of the late Mostyn Gilbert. After
some correspondence I and my wife made a couple of visits to Bexhill to discuss
its acquisition, conveyed the boxes to the SPR, and then returned a few items
that were not relevant to Gilbert’s psychical research pursuits.
In both cases the individuals had
expressed a wish that their files should be preserved. In the first Jameson assigned the papers
before death, in the second Gilbert’s wishes were carried out by his
family. A third instance involved the
photographic albums of Cyril Permutt which were ‘on loan’ to the SPR, and I
negotiated their purchase with his son, the money kindly coming from the Institut
für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene at Freiburg. These were success stories, and the SPR has
acquired similar collections over the years, mainly from members who had had a
long association with the Society and left express instructions in their wills.
Less successful were experiences trying
to track down papers produced by two other researchers. While examining the role of George Albert
Smith in the early SPR, I tried to ascertain what had happened to the notes
that Trevor Hall must have made while working on his book The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Hall had died in 1991 and I could find nobody
who knew where his papers had gone, though I learned that Hall had sold some to
Stephen Gray who was writing a book on Smith’s early collaborator Douglas
Blackburn (unfortunately Gray’s book deals mainly with Blackburn’s South
African novels, not his involvement in psychical research).
Having obtained a copy of Hall’s will, I
wrote to his last address in 2007, hoping against hope that his wife or another
relative was still there. The letter was
passed on, and I made contact with one of his sons. Although we had some correspondence he did not
seem particularly interested, merely stating baldly that after his father death
the papers had been removed by ‘the beneficiary’, but not naming the
individual. Hall had married twice and
had families with both wives, and there was little contact between the
branches. I assumed that the beneficiary
was a particular name referred to in the will, who I suspected was a
step-sister. When I wrote back asking if
the son had an address for her he did not reply, and the trail was effectively
dead. Hall must have made a large number
of notes when writing his books on Edmund Gurney and William Crookes. For example, he conducted interviews with
Gurney’s daughter Helen in her old age, and with Smith’s niece Mrs Ford. Very little of these interviews made it into
his book on Gurney, and as Hall tended to include only what would support his
thesis and suppress contrary evidence, the files could have contained valuable
information he chose not to use. The
files are currently missing, presumed lost.
Also depressing is the example of the
files compiled by Fraser Nicol when fighting a libel claim launched against him
and the Parapsychology Foundation (PF) by Hall.
In these Nicol in the US and Mostyn Gilbert in England recorded numerous
inaccuracies in The Strange Case of
Edmund Gurney. As Gilbert described
it in his appreciation of Nicol’s career in the January 1990 issue of the SPR Journal, this was a formidable assemblage
of information:
‘By the summer
of 1967, if not before, Fraser had provided [his legal] Counsel with a mass of
new material to support the defence, voluminous evidence supplemental to much
of what he had already written in his review. Following a meeting in the south
of France, with Eileen Garrett [of the PF] and Fraser, I spent some months
undertaking an in depth study of the early history of the SPR, with particular
reference to the events surrounding Smith's relationship with Blackburn and the
early telepathic experiments. Forgotten material was unearthed from the SPR
archives. The Myers and Sidgwick papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, were
examined, foreign publications translated, family correspondence borrowed and
assessed for additional evidence, runs of newspapers at Brighton and Tonbridge
(where Blackburn worked as a journalist) studied and extracts copied, and
finally, perhaps the most exciting of the discoveries, meetings with
journalists who as young men had worked with Blackburn.
‘Fraser fitted
together, both in draft manuscript and reports for study by Counsel, a scholarly
study of events and experiments almost unparalleled in the literature dealing
with the early history of the SPR. However, these major and newly-discovered
footnotes to history were to be unexpectedly suppressed.’
Gilbert kept flimsies of his letters,
but he did not retain copies of documents. Nicol continued to work on the manuscript
even after the legal action was settled, but it was never published. John Beloff, when editor of the SPR’s Journal, expressed an interest in
publishing it, but for some reason that never happened. Nicol died in 1989, Gilbert in 1992, and
Nicol’s wife Betty Humphrey in 1993. In 2004 I wrote to Fraser’s daughter, who
told me that after Betty died all the files were thrown out. Nor had Beloff kept a copy, and an enquiry to
the PF yielded nothing. All that work
had simply vanished. Some of it can be
recreated, though often with difficulty, but some cannot because the sources no
longer exist.
This problem is not confined to
psychical research, but affects it more than archives in other fields because
of its marginal nature and a possible feeling by those not in the field that
the data are not worth the paper they are written on. It therefore behoves researchers to ensure
that the fruits of their labours are properly organised and the preferred destination
specified, because they cannot rely on those arranging for the disposal of
their effects to do it for them if they themselves fail to make clear
provision. That means that their wishes
are included when they are writing their wills, the executors are clear about
it, and preferably the eventual recipients as well.
Current options
So what are the options for ensuring a
safe destination for papers and libraries?
The SPR has a still-growing archive, though people might assume that
since it went to Cambridge (it is looked after by the University Library, but is
still the property of the SPR) it is closed to new acquisitions. This is not so, but donations have to be
negotiated with the archivists there. That
sets the threshold for inclusion higher than it need be if the archives were
housed in independent premises because the university has its own space
concerns. Still largely on the drawing
board, the Charles Fort Institute (CFI) is an ambitious initiative set up by Bob
Rickard, Fortean Times’s Editor
Emeritus, which it is hoped will raise money for a study centre that will
attract donations.** However, progress
has been slow. The motivation for the
formation of the CFI was the destruction of a collection by uninterested
relatives, that of Arthur Constance.
Much further advanced is the Swedish
Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), which has been very active. Among the numerous material that has been
donated, much with a ufological slant, it holds the extensive library of Hilary
Evans, who had been a Council member of the SPR. More recently AFU received Rickard’s
collection for which he had to find a new home because it was housed in a damp
cellar. As AFU’s website indicates, the
organisation has an international reach and it is likely that more loads of
books and papers will go there; in October this year its blog stated that ‘Between
September 23 and October 5, AFU’s heroic gang has been touring the southern
parts of Britain (and Denmark) for new pickups of excellent archives and libraries
to be preserved by AFU,’ and these forays are made on a regular basis.
Sending things to Sweden has to be
better than throwing them out, but it seems a shame that we are unable to
preserve them in England. I am told by
CFI member Gordon Rutter that Rickard’s material is effectively on loan and can
be returned on request when suitable facilities are available; in the meantime
it is being scanned. It is highly likely
though that much that is shipped off will not return, and there is no reason
why organisations here should not be able to organise a similar operation to
AFU’s. A living, growing archive is
essential for a subject to thrive.
Without access to previous research and thinking the field is the
poorer.
Future possibilities
The obvious organisation to oversee such
an operation in this country, because it has the necessary structure already,
is the SPR. The Society has a narrower
remit than an organisation like AFU or the CFI, and over the years the SPR has
actually given items considered outside its core activities to other
organisations: its UFO books went to the Association for the Scientific Study
of Anomalous Phenomena, for example. But
there is no reason in principle why it should not, space and other resources
permitting, enlarge its already substantial holdings to cover the entire range
of fortean phenomena, fulfilling in essence, if not in name, Bob Rickard’s
vision. That would however entail a
radical alteration to the Society’s current arrangements.
One could become somewhat utopian and
speculate on the possibility of the SPR purchasing premises large enough to
contain the archives and rare books currently housed in Cambridge. These could be combined with its London
administration and library, currently in cramped rented premises in Kensington,
plus facilities for conducting research.
It would be a bold step and it would require money, not least to fund a
full-time archivist. The last is imperative
because it was due to the lack of security for the rare ‘Z’ books that these
and the archives were transferred to Cambridge.
So where would the money come from? Buying larger premises, not necessarily in
Kensington, would require extra funds, but a start could be made by utilising
the windfall of the Buckmaster bequest.
Nigel Buckmaster left the SPR more than £600,000 (a figure stated by the
Hon. Treasurer Dr David Rousseau in his statement of the Society’s financial position
in the SPR’s 2011-12 Accounts). The
provisions of the will fall into three parts.
The first two relate to publications, but the third states:
‘If there is a
balance of funds available my preference would be to contribute to the purchase
of a freehold headquarters building for the Society where a more extensive
library could be housed.’
That would seem to be a sound proposal,
using the bulk of the money to help pay for bigger accommodation. With such a start, and using some of its
invested assets, additional funds could be raised by appeal, allowing the SPR
to become an even more important centre for researchers than it is at present,
and acting as a beacon for donations.
One may have reservations about the methods of Harold Chibbett when
investigating the Battersea poltergeist, but without the files that Shirley Hitchings
and her husband salvaged it would not have been possible to write The Poltergeist Prince of London. What other fascinating cases were lost when Mr
Chibbett’s relatives threw out the rest of his files after his wife’s death?
Digitisation – will it solve the space
problem?
Perhaps in future there will be fewer
such scenarios with piles of lever arch files and manila folders, full of
yellowing sheets held together by rusty staples, taken to the municipal
recycling centre. It is a fair
assumption that such collections will be far less prevalent because much
material never sees paper these days. Inputting records on computer that would once
have been typed has its own advantages and disadvantages. While storage is less of a problem it is even
easier to delete electronic files, not to mention email exchanges, than it is
to dump the contents of a filing cabinet, and their value is more easily
overlooked. It is imperative that
researchers ensure that such files are flagged so that they can be transferred
to new owners when the time comes.
Evolving formats is an issue (my
personal example being all those WordStar files that are unreadable by the word
processing packages I currently own). Eventually
it would be beneficial to see all paper-based archives digitised where possible
for ease of access and preservation, but not at the expense of disposing of the
originals – not only because digital reproduction standards continually improve
but because the history resides in the object as a whole, not just the text on
it. So while digitisation can improve
access, if properly managed, it should not be a solution to the space problem,
even if readers are relieved of the effort of travelling to the place where the
originals are stored. These, and not digital
copies, are the subject’s heritage, and we should ensure that they are
maintained, and added to, for the benefit of future generations.
*Update, 26 May 2014:
I heard a rumour earlier this month that
more of Harold Chibbett’s papers had survived, and this has now been
confirmed. Fortean Times, issue 315, June 2014, p.71, carries a letter by
James Clark which has a surprising, but extremely welcome, announcement about
their fate. Chibbett, it turns out, did make provision for the safekeeping
of his papers, so my original assessment of him was somewhat harsh.
Last month Clark received an email from
a Mr John Edens who told him that Chibbett had issued instructions for certain
of his papers to be destroyed, which presumably was what Shirley Hitchings saw
in progress when she arrived to retrieve those relating to her own case. However, the remaining papers were not thrown
out but passed to Mr Edens, who still possesses them.
Why he was made the beneficiary is not
clear, though Clark says that Edens told him that his family was involved in
the case of ‘Charlie the Basingstoke Poltergeist’, which was also investigated
by Chibbett. It is not clear either what
criteria were used for preservation, how much Edens holds, or its condition. Despite these uncertainties this is
marvellous news, and one can only hope that Edens in turn has made adequate
provision for the safekeeping of the files.
It would be useful if Clark could elicit further details from him. Presumably this information only came to
light after Edens read The Poltergeist
Prince of London. But for that,
Chibbett’s papers would still be in the ‘lost’ category.
Ironically, if I myself had not read the
erroneous description in The Poltergeist
Prince of London I might not have written this post, but the points in it
are still valid, and such success stories are rare. We need to ensure that provision is made for
the preservation of archives, and access ensured for scholars. When I thought that the papers were lost
forever I asked: ‘What other fascinating cases were lost when Mr Chibbett’s
relatives threw out the rest of his files after his wife’s death?’ Now we may have the opportunity to find out.
Unfortunately it is clear that my
‘utopian speculation’ that the Society for Psychical Research might utilise the
money left it by Mr Nigel Buckmaster to purchase a property that would allow it
to accommodate a research centre and be a magnet for future donations cannot
now come to pass. The Buckmaster funds
stood at £729,000 in September 2013 (SPR Annual Report 2012-13, p.12), but they
have now been allocated elsewhere and
my utopian dream will have to remain – for now – just that.
**Update, 25 July 2015
The August 2015 issue of Fortean Times, issue 330, August 2015, pp.46-49,
carries an article by Bob Rickard, ‘Saving Private Forteana’. He begins with a familiar story, the loss of
archives after a death. In this example the
files of Flying Saucer Review’s early
years were disposed of by the widow of its first editor, Waveney Girvan. Rickard rightly says that ‘Too many unique
collections have been sold off or otherwise dissipated on a researcher’s death,
either because they’d had no one to leave them to or had left no instructions
or provisions in a will.’
The issue was important for Rickard
because as one of the late Steve Moore’s executors he carried the
responsibility for locating an appropriate home for Moore’s ‘huge and unique
library’. They had discussed what should
happen to such collections generally, not just Moore’s. Their conclusion echoes my own feelings
precisely:
‘We dreamed of a
physical repository where books, periodicals, recording media, ephemera and
objects can be safely stored, properly catalogued and even digitised, with
space enough for future expansion as we gathered more or received bequests.’
Rickard’s efforts had been channelled
through the Charles Fort Institute (CFI), comprising items gathered by FT’ over the years plus other
acquisitions and donations. That nucleus
acted as an attractor, crucially with promises written into wills rather than
being just vaguely expressed intentions.
The plan was that such an institute would not only offer a home to
individuals’ collections but also to holdings from large institutions whose acquisition
policies changed, plus small organisations without a permanent base whose archives
often move between members’ garages.
Unfortunately Rickard had come to the reluctant
conclusion that it is unlikely a CFI research centre in the UK would be
economically feasible, and he was housing a vast quantity of material in his
damp basement. That is where the
Archives for the Unexplained (AFU) at Norrköping, Sweden, came in and in 2013 members
travelled over to collect several hundred boxes from Rickard’s house. AFU is well established, and over the past 35
years it has accumulated enough material to make it a key player
internationally. In addition to
Rickard’s collection, AFU has hoovered up a number of others across Europe.
To give an idea of its achievement, the
roll-call of donors from this country is astonishing: Hilary Evans, Gordon
Creighton, Lionel Beer, Peter Rogerson, Mike Hutchinson, Janet and Colin Bord,
Jenny Randles, John Rimmer, Timothy Good, and many others. Steve Moore’s library will follow shortly. AFU’s reference collection already contains
30,000 titles, it has 50,000 periodicals and over half a million news clippings
on 2.2 km (over one and a third miles) of shelving. The organisation was originally called
Archives for Ufology, hence the current UFO slant in the donors, though as it
has expanded the scope to more general fortean subjects that bias will become
less prominent. Funding comes mainly
from grants and donations.
Despite the export of a large part of
our heritage, Rickard still dreams of a centre that would combine a library,
archive, museum, digitisation, publishing, a lecture programme, educational
outreach, in short a one-stop shop for scholarly research and
dissemination. How that could happen
with so much having been sent abroad is unclear, and in the meantime CFI, which
would have fulfilled this vision, is on hold, perhaps to be resurrected
eventually ‘as a fortean “think-tank” under the aegis of AFU’, in Rickard’s
words.
Gordon Rutter had told me that sending
material to AFU was effectively a loan, but the way Rickard writes, and judging
by what the AFU website says, it sounds as though it is a gift, though neither provides
details of the legal agreement donors presumably sign to transfer custody. Richard’s article states that AFU have a
service whereby, if a donor needs to consult something they had sent, the text
will be scanned as priority, with no mention of the item itself being returned
on request. In any case, given his
enthusiasm for AFU, it doesn’t sound as though Rickard will be asking for his
boxes back any time soon.
He is very upbeat about AFU, exhorting
forteans to show support either with their collections or financially, and
concludes with this plea: ‘Don’t let our fortean treasures slip away through
neglect or leaving it too late.’ My view
is that by sending it to Norrköping we are already letting slip away a good
chunk of Britain’s heritage in this field.
I understand why Rickard wanted a safe home for his and Moore’s
collections, but it strikes me as scandalous that we have reached the position
of being happy to send the history of British forteana abroad because there is
no viable alternative here.
[Update, and minor revisions throughout,
25 July 2015]
