Visions of Bowmen and Angels: Mons 1914 - A review

Visions of Bowmen and Angels: Mons 1914, by Kevin McClure. A Wild Places Special, 32pp. Self published: St Austell, Cornwall, n.d. [1994].

I have no idea for whom I wrote this, and can find no record of it having been published.


Kevin McClure has compiled and self-published a useful booklet describing visions, mostly but not exclusively of angels and mediaeval bowmen, allegedly seen by soldiers in France during the early stages of the First World War. He mainly confines his efforts to contemporary sources, providing a path through the confusing chronology and variations in the stories.

The striking thing about the original accounts is the paucity of eyewitnesses to the events being described. These are urban legends, told by friends of friends, with a tendency to evaporate upon closer inspection. The SPR launched an investigation, and decided that as they had received no first-hand, but only weak second-hand, testimony which did not support a paranormal interpretation, they were in effect obliged to declare the visions 'not proven'.

McClure concludes that "a combination of tiredness, discomfort and fear, prolonged over an excessive period, can effectively create an ASC [altered state of consciousness] of one type or another." This does beg the question why such visions were seen so early in the war, and not later, when exhaustion, stress, disease, malnutrition and general misery were even more prevalent.

To be in such a situation in 1914 was novel, and perhaps the visions were one way of helping the combatants make sense of their predicament, but as the war dragged on familiarity blunted the emotions and sheer survival became more important than a mystical sense of Englishness. The bigger surprise is not that such entities as St George, King Arthur, Agincourt bowmen, Jesus (aka The Comrade in White) and angels appeared to the weary soldiers, but that they were not followed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Hereafter – A review

Hereafter – A review

Clint Eastwood does not seem the sort who would spend a lot of time bothering with metaphysical speculation, and it is to his credit that he has made a film which, if it does not always perform satisfactorily and often lacks subtlety, does have a heart and will give the attentive viewer something to think about. Hereafter has three separate strands, each featuring an individual who has to face issues of life after death. Marie (Cécile De France) is a Parisian intellectual author and television presenter caught by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 who has a near-death experience which causes her to question what is important in life.

George (Matt Damon) has given up the life of a well-paid psychic, considering his gift a curse, and works at the San Francisco docks, resisting pressure from his mercenary brother to return to his old trade. Marcus is a twin in London whose brother Jason is killed (the pair played by Frankie and George McLaren). All three thus have a connection with the afterlife of one kind or another, but the difference is that whereas Marie and Marcus are searching for answers, George is running away from them because the grief he experiences through others weighs too heavily on him.

Despite the title, this film is not about the hereafter, but about the ways in which we deal with death and loss. There is no clear depiction of life after death, only a shadowy sense that those who have died have passed over (the little girl who was swept away with Marie can be glimpsed briefly, indicating that she did not survive). Even George, with his long experience of talking to those on the other side, has to confess that he has no idea what it is really like.

To get out of the way the things that annoyed me about this film, which were many. You would not be allowed to wander around a hospice unescorted and see people dying in rooms with the doors open. A book entitled Hereafter: A Conspiracy of Silence implies that nobody is discussing near-death experiences and it requires a courageous mainstream author and personality to bring them to the attention of the public, whereas the NDE is an extremely popular subject at present, with numerous books devoted to it. A publisher would not give an unknown telephone caller the name of the hotel where one of its authors was staying.

There’s more. No crematorium would allow a funeral to take place with the party for the next service standing at the open door waiting to come in (and I doubt if even the most harassed clergyman would be quite as insensitive as this one, especially as the funeral is for a child). You would not be given the ashes directly after a funeral; it takes time to burn a body and put the remains through a cremulator. You would probably not be given an urn without a box to hold it. Even with £200 in his pocket, it is implausible that a primary-aged schoolboy would be able to visit a platform medium, have a private reading with another psychic, and visit a bizarre Electronic Voice Phenomenon researcher in a day (a montage designed to show us that they are all either deluded or outright frauds - the platform medium in particular is a crude caricature who would not last five minutes in front of the most obtuse audience with such blatant fishing).

There’s still more. Given how many people are involved in taking a film from script to screen, you would have thought that someone would have noticed that having a Dickens expert say that his last novel was Edward Drood was ridiculous. The intersection of the three strands of the story at an Alexandra Palace book fair feels contrived. Anyway, this London is not like the city I know (though Eastwood is not alone in making screen London feel like it exists in a parallel universe to that occupied by the real one). Clint’s music is bland. And the excessive amount of product placement in the film meant it had probably largely paid for itself before a foot was screened.

It could be argued that these are superficial elements which do not affect the deep meaning of the film, but they are distractions which weaken its impact. The sloppy writing is surprising given that the script was penned by Peter Morgan, who has plenty of experience, though on more down-to-earth themes. Eastwood apparently likes a certain unpolished spontaneity in his scripts, but this one is positively ragged and would surely have benefited from rewrites to iron out some of the implausibilities.

Those niggles aside, there is much to like. The tsunami which opens the film is gripping and stomach-churningly realistic. The pace of the rest of the film, while slow, allows us to get to know the characters. Performances generally are first-rate, especially Cecile De France as the TV interviewer whose professional and personal lives unravel after her near-death experience. Matt Damon appears convincingly lonely and buttoned-down, and the scenes in which George listens to audio books utterly sad (his Dickens enthusiasm is endearing, if unlikely). The adult evening class where he learns Italian cooking and gets on with a fellow student are nicely observed, their blindfolded tasting sessions have a gently erotic quality. Only Marcus fails to demonstrate the required degree of emotion, and in the key scene in George’s hotel room whichever brother it is cannot convey the grief required to make the scene as powerful as it could have been if, say, the Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense had been sitting in the chair.

When he is persuaded to give readings, George at first appears to be supplying fairly general statements, allowing the sitter to read meaning into a description. But the one he gives Marcus is clearly specific and accurate, which indicates that George does posses psychic abilities of some kind. And when he accidentally touches Marie, he has a vision of her under water as she was when enveloped by the wave. The film though does not explore the possibility that the information George receives which purports to come from the deceased might instead come from the minds of the living, even though in those readings we see him give, he never supplies more information than he could have gleaned from the client‘s mind, added to inferences he could have made himself. The default position is that George has a link to the dead, even if it works better at some times than it does at others. There is also a sense with Marcus that George is partly ad-libbing purely to comfort the distressed boy.

For all its weaknesses, Eastwood has given us a thoughtful analysis of our relationship with life after death. Despite the vision that Marie experiences, the film seems to be saying that it is relationships in this life that are paramount. The dead Jason tells Marcus through George that he cannot expect Jason to look after him anymore, and our final view of Marcus is in the arms of the one significant person left in his life, and facing an optimistic future. The general feel of the film is one of compassion for people in difficult circumstances who do not always make the right decisions. It seemed entirely fitting that the scene featuring the platform medium was filmed at Conway Hall, the home of the South Place Ethical Society, which is a leading force for humanism.

The ending in particular is beautifully done. Touching another person for George had always entailed accessing the person’s grief, and was therefore a barrier to close emotional involvement. Now he realises that he can finally connect to another person because she has come to terms with her experience and found an inner peace. We sense that he too will find happiness in this life, which one suspects is what counts for Eastwood, whatever happens to us afterwards.

Hereafter, directed Clint Eastwood, 2010

This Record is not to be Broadcast – A review

It is a fair bet that most casual listeners to this three CD set from Acrobat Music, subtitled “75 records banned by the BBC 1931 – 57”, will be surprised to learn that some of the tracks were ever banned, and for what will often seem now to be ridiculous reasons. The one that surprised me most was the sickly Deck of Cards, banned because the BBC thought it mocked religion. In my youth it formed the basis of a sketch, using large cards thrown onto a sheet in silhouette, which was performed at more than one show put on by my local Boys’ Brigade company, an organisation not noted for deriding religious belief.

Fortunately for those baffled by what there might be to object to in some of these songs, there is an accompanying booklet which contextualises the reasons for the bans (from which we learn that several included actually were not banned after all, and one song is dated 1958, despite the subtitle). Compiler Spencer Leigh has combed the BBC Written Archives Centre’s files to track the pronouncements of the Dance Music Policy Committee and other decision makers who determined what the ears of the British listening public could and could not be exposed to, such as the Head of Light Entertainment and that noted musicologist, the Head of Religious Broadcasting.

Unsurprisingly the BBC does not emerge with credit because though one can see a justification for some of the decisions made by the self-appointed arbiters of taste, others are extraordinarily trivial or eccentric. The old-fashioned paternalism towards the lower orders, which is what lies beneath many of the bans, indicates that moral standards are far from rigid, and the sorts of issues that exercise the censors of one day will almost certainly appear quaint to the consumers of the next, and those who took their task so seriously become objects of ridicule.

Sex and drugs were unsurprisingly part of the checklist of the unacceptable, along with product names and morbid references to death. But in our post-modern world where ‘borrowings’ are generally seen as unexceptional, it seems odd to find tunes banned merely for souping up motifs from the classics. The decisions concerning religious issues also seem strange to a modern audience, revolving around such issues as bogus sentiment or unsound doctrinal interpretation. The detection of these theological subtleties must have required a finely-tuned sense of the spiritual, yet such arcane issues seem to have caused as much fuss at the BBC as if the proffered disc had described the burning of nuns.

So how successful is this as a compilation? Well, like all anthologies inclusion is dictated as much by access to rights as it is by the wish to present the best, or the most representative, examples, which gives it an arbitrary feel (no Max Miller!). There is a lot that is readily accessible elsewhere, hence cheap to use, and some dull stuff that is obscure for reasons other than for having been refused airplay by the Beeb a few decades ago.

If near the knuckle period material is what you want, rather than a batch of tunes that happened to find themselves persona non grata on the turntables at Broadcasting House for what are now considered trifling reasons, I would recommend Living Era’s ‘Listen to the Banned: 20 Risqué Songs of the 20s and 30s’. This covers a period relatively neglected by ‘This Record is not to be Broadcast’, which contains few tracks from the 1930s. In fact, well over half date from the 1950s, which not only reflects the larger market for music post-war, but also an increasingly forceful pushing at the envelope of acceptability. ‘This Record’ is a pleasant enough compilation and it always good to see archive recordings made available to a modern audience. Rather sadly though, not many of the tracks would make your maiden aunt colour even slightly.


3 boxed audio CDs, released August 2008 by Acrobat Music, ASIN: B001BP4ZF4

From Magic Lantern to Movies: The Optical Magic Lantern Journal 1889 – 1903 – A review

Digitisation of old newspapers and journals is making a wealth of hitherto difficult-to-access material available to researchers. At one time you might have to travel long distances to a specialist library which carried increasingly fragile (having generally been considered ephemeral when first produced) periodicals you wished to examine. The situation was improved by microfiche, though even if a title was available this still entailed a trip to use expensive, cumbersome and often fiddly equipment, and searching was difficult (and off-puttingly noisy). Since then digitisation is increasing apace, though many very worthy projects are only available online via academic institutions, and therefore not generally accessible.

Sometimes material appears on CD and DVD, making it easy to search large quantities of text at home. Instead of having to devote several feet of shelving to yellowing publications, or travel to see them, one can obtain the lot in a convenient form. One such venture is this DVD, published by PhotoResearch. Its genesis lies in the purchase by a pair of collectors of 139 issues of the Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic Enlarger on eBay, and these have been supplemented with copies from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to complete the set.

The OMLJ was published from 1889 to 1903 as a trade paper for lanternists, though it did stray into general photographic matters (the editor for all but its last year was J Hay Taylor, son of J Traill Taylor, editor of the British Journal of Photography). One hundred and sixty issues were produced, totalling nearly 5,000 pages. The complete run is presented here as PDFs in two versions – a high definition copy of each issue, and a lower resolution one that is searchable. The issues are arranged by volume, all thirteen of them, so if a particular issue is required, it is simple to access.

To make navigation easier, the issues are indexed with a couple of thousand content items, with links to the issues. These are arranged in several ways: by title, listed alphabetically; by contributor; by type of item – editorials, articles, letters, obituaries and so forth; by people mentioned, including contributors, with biographical information where available; and by advertiser. Fortunately all the advertising, often discarded when journals are bound, is included, providing important information on the trade.

Despite the journal’s title there much here to interest early film enthusiasts. It allows the reader to track the magic lantern as it gives way as an entertainment medium to films (or rather, “animated photographs”), which move from a novelty in the mid-1890s to an increasingly significant medium in the early twentieth century (hence the disc’s title). Thus the April 1896 issue could imply that they were a passing fad with “The present boom, as regards the lantern, appears to be in the direction of ‘animated projection.’ Some time ago we had Friese Greene's apparatus, but latterly quite a host have arisen.” A mere seven years later, J Page Croft was surely swimming against the tide when he wrote an article which appeared in the last issue, entitled ‘How to Become a Lantern Lecturer’. A lesson that the Journal teaches is that cinema did not spring ex nihilo, but came from a well-established culture of projection.

It could be argued that using a disc instead of leafing through the pages removes something from the experience of research, and it is true that a connection is formed when handling paper that is missing from a computer screen. But the advantages of being able to scan large quantities of information quickly, along with the conservation aspects, and the sheer convenience of being able to do it at one’s desk, means that ventures such as this are to be applauded. One day such individual initiatives will be integrated into a Grand Unified Database, with sophisticated search facilities that can range widely over vast tracts of newsprint. In the meantime this will do nicely.


From Magic Lanterns to Movies, published by PhotoResearch, October 2010, ISBN 978-0-9523011-1-0, £60 including UK and international airmail postage. Contact: Mike Smith, South Park, Galphay Road, Kirkby Malzeard, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 3RX, UK or email: lmh.smith@magiclanternsocy.demon.co.uk.

Hiding the Elephant - A review

Hiding the Elephant, by Jim Steinmeyer

Jim Steinmeyer has provided a very entertaining look at the history of stage magic from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s. This was one of the art’s golden ages – we are arguably living through another, though after reading Hiding the Elephant one might be forgiven for thinking it is in large part derivative of past achievements – and he gives us a lovingly crafted (and crafty) look at the personalities and some of their tricks.

His structuring device is Harry Houdini making an elephant vanish on the stage of New York's Hippodrome Theatre in 1918. It’s one of the most famous acts in the history of magic, but was received with general indifference by those who saw him perform it; the only people who could appreciate it were those sitting directly in front, which was a tiny proportion of the audience. Nevertheless it has intrigued magicians ever since. The author has investigated and puts forward his theory of how Houdini did it at the end of the book, along with a description of his own effort at doing the same with a rather more compact donkey.

While we are waiting for that, we are treated to a history of magicians and their cunning. Steinmeyer is as much interested in the personalities of the magicians who turned magic into an art form as he is in the technology, and gives a flavour of the intrigues behind the development of some of the greatest tricks, the schemes and professional jealousies, friendships and rivalries, the thefts of ideas and sometimes equipment, and despite all that a sense of camaraderie among fellow professionals.

The book’s scope is ambitious, and an extensive cast of larger-than-life characters parades through it. The dramatis personae are listed at the front, with pen portraits, and this is the first indication that this is going to be a complicated story, with names such as Goldin, Goldston and Thurston, Hermann and Kellar, to keep straight.

He covers well-known figures such as the Maskelyne dynasty and David Devant at Egyptian Hall, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, mainly remembered because Houdini borrowed his name, and Georges Méliès, known today as a film pioneer, and who makes a very brief walk-on appearance (it has to be said that the book’s focus is mostly Anglo-American). Others are undeservedly obscure, such as Charles Morritt and P T Selbit, and Steinmeyer provides a valuable service in bringing the achievements of a range of lesser-known performers to a wider audience.

To add to the complexity, Steinmeyer generally analyses the technical aspects of the tricks with just enough information to convey a sense of the mechanics, but descriptions can get quite complicated, even with the aid of line drawings. The chapters are choppy, with individuals, perhaps appropriately but not always elegantly, appearing and disappearing from the narrative, which never spends too much time on any one before going on to the next, and then back again often over several chapters. While written in a clear style for the general reader, it does help to have some background knowledge of the subject already. Yet despite the stylistic infelicities Steinmeyer has a good sense of momentum, keeping the reader wanting to know the secret of whatever he happens to be discussing.

Not least we get a sense of the stresses involved in having constantly to find the next big thing, while at the same time Steinmeyer shows how themes could be endlessly recycled, a vivid demonstration that still-drinkable old wine could be put in shiny new bottles. The emphasis is not so much on the mechanics but the presentation and showmanship of the performer, that is, it’s not about the idea of the trick as much as what you do with it. And some tricks were amazing, whether small or large scale: sawing a woman in half or levitating her for example.

A motif running through the book is the versatility of glass. In the nineteenth century, competing magicians combined advances in optics with mirrors that permitted people to disappear, or "ghosts" to appear, combining the art and science of reflected images to create attractions such as Pepper's Ghost, Proteus, the Oracle of Delphi and the Sphinx. As the cliché indicates, they really did do it with mirrors, though sometimes wires came in handy. One marvels at the ingenuity and leaps of imagination which some of these devices required for their conceptualisation and development.

The methods were often cruder though. The Davenport Brothers took advantage of the popularity of Spiritualism, touring with a ‘séance’ cabinet, and their strength was the ambiguity of their act. Steinmeyer looks at their career in terms of magic rather than the physical phenomena of Spiritualism, and finds that actually they weren’t that good because they did too much: by showing themselves untied they undermined their own illusion. It is ironic that Houdini, scourge of mediums, should seek out the aged Ira Davenport, and in his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits exclude the Davenports from his general blasts against the purveyors of the paranormal, even though Ira and brother William had capitalised on it.

It is sad that so many of the artists so lovingly describes have been eclipsed by the myth created by Houdini‘s tireless self-promotion. In their own time Howard Thurston was as famous, but is largely forgotten today outside specialist circles. Houdini was a remarkable personality, but in terms of magical ingenuity and presentation he was not in the first rank – he was a great escape artist but a poor stage magician, and this is not a flattering portrait of him. Steinmeyer, though, clearly has a huge affection for most of those he covers, for all their personal frailties.

As one of the world's leading designers of stage illusions, Steinmeyer writes from a fund of practical experience, which gives his account not only the evocative warmth of a fellow professional, but also a practical appreciation that would be lost if the book had been written by an armchair theoretician. He too has confronted logistical problems and overcome them, and so has an insider’s understanding.

He also provides a little of the philosophy of magic, describing what distinguishes a good trick from a bad one. The result is an engaging and accessible (as far as possible given that some of the tricks are pretty mind-bending) guide showing “How magicians invented the impossible” – or at least gave the impression they had, which is truly magic.


Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible, by Jim Steinmeyer, London: William Heinnemann, 2003.