The Time Machine, Adapted and performed by Robert Lloyd Parry

H G Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) was the first science fiction novel I read, at the age of 11.  I can date this precisely because I was in hospital for an operation.  Far from the association with surgery putting me off it, I have always had a soft spot for the book, with its vivid descriptions of the Time Traveller’s journey to a far-future world inhabited by the passive Eloi and the predatory Morlocks.  I have also been a fan of Robert Lloyd Parry for some time, having seen him perform stories by M R James in the intimate surroundings of the Corpus Christi Playroom in Cambridge.  So it was with great anticipation that I visited Anglia Ruskin University’s Mumford theatre to see Lloyd Parry’s one-man performance as Wells’s much put-upon chrononaut.

There were two performances at the Mumford, on 23 and 24 May.  Each had an Initial talk, and that on the second night was by Professor Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck College.  Luckhurst is currently editing an edition of The Time Machine for Oxford World’s Classics to coincide with Wells’s books coming out of copyright in 2016, and his talk, ‘Forward to the Past! Some contexts for 1890s time travel’, was presumably a dry run for the introduction.  Addressing the audience flatteringly as ‘hard-core Wellsians’, he took us on a tour of the novel’s themes and historical background.  Starting with an overview of Wells’s life, Luckhurst outlined his immense reputation while alive, yet its rapid decline after death.  The lively popular early scientific romances gave way to increasingly turgid didacticism, his distrust of democracy and conviction that a rational technocratic world government populated by the intellectual elite would create a better future sounding increasingly naive.

Luckhurst situated The Time Machine within both science fiction and the fin de siècle Imperial Gothic and saw it as futurology, projecting current trends forward.  It was in dialogue with other books, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) and the futuro-mediaeval socialism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).  Before his journey the Time Traveller thinks that the future will continue on a smooth progression, whereas when he arrives in it he sees only decay and an end to evolution.  There were concerns in the 1890s over such issues as the decadence of society and degeneration which the novel tapped into (Max Nordau in his influential 1892 book, Entartung, published in 1895 as Degeneration, talked about ‘the unchaining of the beast in man’, and what is the beast if not a Morlock?).  Humanity in Wells’s novel has bifurcated into two species, heirs of present-day social classes for whom social distinctions have become biologised.  The feeble Eloi, living in the ruins of a vanished civilisation, are a mockery of the Victorian decadents that Wells despised, the subterranean Morlocks represent a retreat back down the evolutionary chain.  The Time Traveller is appalled at what we have become while acknowledging our kinship with these creatures.  When he escapes into the even further future he finds the world exhausted, its death surely not far off as it succumbs to entropy.

Luckhurst argued that Wells’s best work had been done by 1901, with much rubbish produced after that date by the prolific author, to the extent that writers as diverse as Henry James and the literary modernists defined themselves against him.  However, Luckhurst stressed that there was a great deal of snobbery in this because of Wells’s lower-middle class background, even though he was unusual as a novelist during the period in actually having had a science education.  E M Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) was a humanist attack on Wells’s technocratic ‘utopia’, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) was an even more influential satirical riposte.  Yet The Time Machine is an ambiguous text, balancing optimism and pessimism; the future inhabited by Eloi and Morlocks can be changed, if we have the will to do it.

After this entertaining and illuminating introduction, it was off to see what Lloyd Parry had made of the role of the Time Traveller.  The set comprised the titular machine, a garden chair and a bird bath, the last filled so that from time to time he could plunge his face into it for a refreshing draught before continuing his story.  The time machine itself was a beautiful construction.  The designer had avoided the temptation to go steampunk and have whirring gears and flashing lights.  When seen initially on its side it looked like small tapered mahogany missile but when upright it was in the form of a huge metronome, with time increments displayed on the pendulum which handily could be pressed into service as a weapon later in the action.  The machine was a versatile bit of kit because it doubled up as aspects of the far-future scenery, an effect facilitated by staples up one side that the Traveller could climb.  It could be a hill enabling him to survey his surroundings, and even masquerade as a well by the process of hinging back the tip and staring down into it.  The script was complemented by effective sound effects and lighting, insistently chiming clocks particularly helpful in ratcheting up the tension.

The setting at the start is the garden outside his house (hence the bird bath and garden chair) and the beginning bore a similarity to that of the Corpus Christi James performance I witnessed, in that he was on stage but hidden in the machine before the audience entered.  The Time Machine started with him falling out of it exhausted and writhing about until he regained his composure.  Whether intentional or not, it was reminiscent of the beginning of Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre production of Frankenstein, when the creature (alternately Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch) emerged from a womb-like structure and fell about helplessly while learning to control its limbs.

The wildly bearded Traveller – as in the book we never learn his name – presented a contrast to Lloyd Parry’s clean-shaven bespectacled M R James.   It was curious too to see the actor so mobile after his seated performances as James.  The Traveller was cast in the mould of the Victorian gentleman explorer, perhaps the John Hanning Speke of time travel, though Lloyd Parry seemed to be channeling Professor Challenger in his vigorous physicality.  He spent the evening wearing extremely disreputable-looking long-johns, signifying what a tough time he has had/will have (oh these time paradoxes) in 802,701.  (The publicity leaflet is misleading in showing the Time Traveller properly attired and sporting a neat moustache.)  A thought did occur that if he has only the one pair, and wears them for every performance, by the end of the run it won’t be a one-person show because they will be able to participate independently.  A change from the novel is that one actor cannot easily replicate the circle of friends who listen to his story, and instead the theatre audience stands in for them.  At the same time, the audience plays the part of a jury weighing evidence; we are explicitly given the option of taking the story as untruth, and have to assess its plausibility.

As the action continued, Lloyd Parry was able to generate a real sense of tenderness when talking of Weena, an Eloi who had become devoted to him, and of menace when recounting his trip into the underground lair of the Morlocks in search of his purloined time machine.  Overall the Traveller did not come across as a particularly likeable character: he showed that he could be petulant under stress, and mean to Weena when she became irritating.  He was put out by the failure of the Eloi to be suitably impressed by his achievement in visiting them, and not unreasonably disappointed to find that intellectual and social development had not made a smooth progression from the 1890s to some higher plane.  Whether or not our descendants have such a future to look forward to – and who knows what the Traveller would have found had he ventured out of the Thames Valley – Wells’s novel is a rich text, and Lloyd Parry’s interpretation was enjoyable and thought-provoking.  You do worry though about the foolhardiness of travelling to unknown places with only a box of matches but without a firearm or a change of underwear.  It all seemed most unlike the correct behaviour of a Victorian gentleman.

A symposium on Gef, the Talking Mongoose

On 10 April 2014, the University of London’s Senate House Library hosted a meeting organised by Christopher Josiffe and Richard Espley, ‘“If you knew what I know, you’d know a hell of a lot!”: A symposium on Gef the Talking Mongoose’, to examine the Isle of Man’s weirdest personality.  A good-sized crowd gathered to hear a range of speakers explore the phenomena surrounding Gef, and to discuss how we might make sense of the bizarre story 80 years on.  The symposium was supported by displays of items connected to the case drawn from the library’s collection.

The first speaker was Christopher Josiffe, who has researched ‘the Dalby Spook’, to give Gef one of his alternative names, and published a well-received article in Fortean Times (January 2011).  He started by saying that he had thought the matter would be easy to resolve, but after a number of years finds that the case is still enigmatic.  He ran through the events at Doarlish Cashen (Manx for Cashen’s Gap), outside the village of Dalby.  These started in Autumn 1931, the family involved comprising James Irving, his wife Margaret and their 12-year old daughter Voirrey (the local variant of Mary).  Their house was isolated, a couple of miles away from the nearest neighbour, with no electricity, radio or telephone.  The family were incomers from England, and were not making a go of life in the harsh terrain, Mr Irving having previously been a commercial traveller, not a farmer.  They were in straightened circumstances and not popular in the insular community.  Against this background, the chatty Gef – a mere 12” long, six of which were occupied by his tail – must have come as a bit of welcome relief to the family, for all his annoying habits

 

Voirrey and her father at Doarlish Cashen

The following speaker, Robin Klarzynski, discussed connections between Gef and William Burroughs in a talk that was really more about Burroughs than Gef.  Klarzynski did bring in the concept of the trickster, which seems highly relevant here, and was keen to reject a simplistic real/hoax, either/or, binary.  Burrough’s interest in animals, particularly cats, as psychic familiar spirits certainly chimed with Gef.  The notion of the ‘Third Mind’, which results from the meeting of two minds, suggests that an emergent property could have been produced in the febrile atmosphere at Doarlish Cashen, but it is a stretch to consider Gef as a dream reality made manifest, the creature brought into existence by thought.  The exercise in cutting up Gef’s statements á la Burroughs, and putting them through google translate multiple times, did not seem particularly illuminating of the Gef mystery.

Next up was Alan Murdie, chair of the Society for Psychical Research’s Spontaneous Cases Committee, who looked at the case in the context of poltergeists, particularly the role that sex has been shown to play in them.  His starting point was that poltergeists exist as ‘social facts’, the SPR receiving large numbers of such reports from around the world.  Many of these involve animals, or entities that resemble animals, so in that light Gef is not unique.  Murdie also pointed out that while about three-quarters of all poltergeist cases last for under a year, about a quarter (more place- than person-centred) go on longer, sometimes considerably so.  Gef-as-poltergeist should not therefore be ruled out on the grounds that it lasted too long.

Murdie drew on the work of psychical researcher and psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, who linked sex and poltergeists.  He spent a week on the island investigating Gef, but unfortunately went off the rails somewhat by reaching the conclusion that Gef really was an animal that could talk.  Murdie, taking a more plausible line, speculated that there was an element of incest between Mr Irving and his daughter.  Voirrey later blamed Gef for her failure to marry, but perhaps she was really blaming her father.  Incest does seem to be a possible factor in a considerable proportion of poltergeist cases.  In this scenario Gef might have been Voirrey’s way of gaining a limited measure of control: his rudeness and bad language to Mr Irving giving her licence to be offensive to her father while blaming Gef, a small measure of release.

Harry Price visited the farm in 1935 and wrote a book about what he dryly referred to as the ‘Manx prodigy’ with R. S. Lambert (editor of The Listener), published the following year.  This was The Haunting of Cashen's Gap: A Modern ‘Miracle’ Investigated, a pair of inverted commas that speak volumes.  When Price suggested that he take Voirrey for a ride in his car, Irving became angry and said that Price should look for a girl elsewhere.  In his interpretation of this incident, Fodor thought that as well as protecting Voirrey, Irving probably feared that he would lose his position centre-stage in the drama.  Despite Fodor’s Freudian leanings, Murdie suggested that he had missed the more sinister possibility that Irving feared his daughter might spill the beans if Price was allowed to interrogate her unsupervised.  Fodor concludes in the 1953 book he co-wrote with Hereward Carrington, The Story of the Poltergeist Down the Centuries, in the chapter on Gef just before that of ‘The Poltergeist Psychoanalysed’, that Gef ‘was the missing link between the animal and human intellect…’  Gef was not a poltergeist, Fodor thought, but he had included the case in the book as it exhibited many characteristics associated with poltergeists.

James sitting firmly between Voirrey and Lambert

Mark Russell Bell’s paper was read in his absence by Richard Espley.  Bell compared the Gef phenomena with those of the 1817 Bell Witch case in Tennessee.  Fodor actually has a chapter on the Bell Witch immediately before that of Gef in The Story of the Poltergeist, in which he suggests that Betsy Bell hated her father John because he ‘had taken sexual liberties’ with her.  Perhaps he felt on safer ground making such suggestions once the individuals concerned were all safely dead.  Mark Bell, presumably no relation, finds parallels between Gef and ‘Kate’ in Tennessee, with strange animals featuring in the latter, a disembodied voice, trickery and clairvoyance.  (In addition to speech, Gef developed clairvoyant abilities, picking up gossip from around the island, though despite considering himself ‘just a little extra, extra clever mongoose’, his information and observations tended to be mundane.)  However, Kate was supposed to be the spirit of a human, not an animal, and Kate displayed physical violence that was alien to Gef, though he did have a verbal temper and was supposed to exhibit bad language, though when this was raised as a question nobody could say precisely how bad it had been.

Richard Espley then presented his own paper.  He looked at instances of books being referred to in The Haunting of Cashen's Gap, and noted tensions whenever this happened.  Despite claims of Gef’s literacy, it was apparent that he didn’t actually like books (the Bell Witch on the other hand was knowledgeable about the Bible), on one occasion insisting that a book on ghosts be destroyed.  When a book is mentioned it tends to be along the lines of ‘it was brought into the house’, as if to disavow responsibility.  It was not the sort of household that welcomes books.  Nor was Gef happy to see Mr Irving reading a newspaper.  Espley suggested that this was a preference for orality, Irving both the teller of the tale and its servant and Gef living through ritualised oral retellings of his story.  Gef’s ability to read may have been overstated, and the only evidence of writing that he produced was the letter ‘N’, which Fodor said was an attempt to write his first name.  It is fairly obvious that ‘Gef’ had a problem with spelling.  Price and Lambert on the other side represented a textual culture.  Reading between the lines, Espley thinks that Price and Lambert thought Irving a bore, and Espley sees their book as documenting the uncomprehending encounters of the various participants in the saga.

The final speaker was Craig Wallace, a post-graduate at Queen's University Belfast.  He analysed possible influences of Gef’s story on Nigel Kneale, who lived in Douglas from 1928, when he was 6.  Kneale’s work is full of the supernatural and the idea of digging through layers of the past.  Similarly, Gef was possibly a manifestation of something older, and Wallace mentioned a slab covering a funerary urn being found at Doarlish Cashen.  He focused on the Baby and Special Offer segments of Kneale’s 1976 series Beasts, the former revolving around Something uncategorisable found behind the wall of a cottage, the latter featuring a cartoon creature called ‘Briteway Billy’ used as a marketing device in a shoddy supermarket.  With their interspecies aspects they both have echoes of Gef.  As with Kneale’s The Stone Tape we have with Gef, as Wallace put it, data awaiting interpretation, ‘disturbances in the grid.’  During the discussion, Mark Pilkington from the audience said that he had once attended a BFI interview with Kneale and Kneale had vehemently dismissed the reality of paranormal phenomena, almost too strongly Pilkington thought.  Kneale did not refer to Gef in the conversation.

The Irvings spend a pleasant evening at home

The final event of the afternoon was a screening of Vanished! A Video Seance (1999), a gallery film made by Brian Catling and Tony Grisoni that was based on the case (‘Vanished’ was Gef’s word for goodbye).  The film consisted entirely of close-ups of three actors playing the Irvings talking about Gef. Some artistic licence was taken with the evidence in the monologues, but it did convey the claustrophobia, eccentricity and emotional poverty of life in that isolated cottage.  Catling and Grisoni had gone to the site of the house – demolished sometime in the 1980s we learned – to record the wind, and the film began with it, before we even saw the actors.  We could hear just how exposed it was there, and the viewer had to wonder how living in that place might affect a person’s mental stability.

So did the afternoon shed any new light on the Gef enigma?  Was Gef a poltergeist, some kind of cryptid, a hoax, or a combination of these?  If a hoax, was it by Voirrey alone, a cry for help; with her mother, the two women attempting to force Mr Irving to move to somewhere more congenial; or was he involved as well?  Clearly there was some hoaxing, as evidenced by the dubious casts of paw prints (of which it seems only the photographs now exist) and the hair samples.  Voirrey could have been engaging in ventriloquism, possibly aided by the house’s acoustics, given the gap between the outer walls and the wooden panelling that provided some measure of insulation.  Money does not seem to have been a motive for hoaxing, but the psychology of the family may have provided one.

 The symposium showed how Gef has had a cultural influence and remains a popular Fortean oddity, but we got no closer to working out what was going on in that house.  Whatever it was, Gef petered out along with the 1930s and was gone by 1939, by which time the world had most definitely moved on.  Despite a previous reluctance, Walter McGraw managed to interview Voirrey for Fate magazine in 1970.  She wasn’t terribly forthcoming but affirmed Gef’s reality: ‘Yes, there was a little animal who talked and did all those other things.’  She still did not admit to it being a hoax, which would have helped to dampen interest, and provide the peace she wanted.

I wonder if the story would have been anything more than a curiosity if it had not been for the involvement of Harry Price.  Was it really worth a book-length treatment, one wonders.  There are other strange cases in the annals of psychical research which have faded into obscurity, and there is no particular reason why this one should have become so well known.  But Price has retained a high profile because of his symbiotic relationship with Borley, and his profile has lent itself, along with Christopher Josiffe’s efforts in more recent years, to the maintenance of interest in Gef.  One of the speakers said words to the effect that it was useful to scrutinise the mystery from a variety of angles and that the symposium showed that a multi-disciplinary approach would yield fresh insights.  But the day seemed rather to indicate that Gef is a limited, if entertaining, mystery that does not lend itself to deep analysis or wide extrapolation.  The talks suggested ways of looking at Gef that go beyond Price and Lambert’s narrative, but while the resulting suppositions and insights might be correct, what we are left with is a fantastic story that is not amenable to a solution.  Still, while we may not have come to any conclusions, it was nice to gather in the congenial atmosphere of Senate House Library to discuss that clever little beastie.

There was one question which did not come up during the afternoon: Gef called himself ‘the eighth wonder of the world.’  Was he aware that King Kong had been given that title in the 1933 film?  Was it a coincidence?  Perhaps Gef did read the newspapers and saw a reference.  If so, his humour went over the Irvings’ heads, comparing his tiny body to that of the mighty Kong.  There’s hubris for you.

A possible theory of what Gef was appeared in the pages of a 1976 issue of Look and Learn.  It noted that prior to the First World War a farmer had released a number of mongooses on the island to keep down rabbits.  This is true, and according to Josiffe there are alleged sightings of these animals today.  Look and Learn speculates that if a mongoose had mated with a weasel, ‘its descendants would almost certainly have looked like, well, Gef.’  But would they have had his vocabulary?

Memories of seeing The Exorcist, 1974

I’ve been enjoying Leo Ruickbie’s article in the latest Fortean Times celebrating the 40th anniversary of The Exorcist, which opened in the UK in March 1974 (‘What Possessed Us?, FT April 2014, pp.30-35).  Forty years, how time flies.  I particularly remember the film because I saw it that summer in Edinburgh, on a school trip to Scotland. We had spent the bulk of our time near Aviemore (featuring a visit to Loch Ness, as well as the first and last time I ate haggis) and had stopped at Edinburgh for a final couple of days before travelling back to London.  The film, as the FT article indicates, had received a huge amount of publicity and debate, and some friends and I decided that as we had the opportunity we ought to see what the fuss was about.

This was far from being the first horror film I’d seen.  I used to go with my mother to the cinema occasionally, and she was happy for us to see X films as long as they weren’t sexual in content.  The first of these was The Travelling Executioner in 1970, which was the support feature on a double bill with House of Dark Shadows, the film I was there to see.  Later I remember going with school friends to see A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs, other controversial films and not ones to see with my mother.  Being underage was never a problem, and I don’t recall ever being turned away from a film because I looked too young.

Fortean Times, April 2014

That night in Edinburgh we were primed to expect a terrifying experience by being handed a copy of a leaflet as we walked in.  ‘The Exorcist shows the reality of evil power’ it shouted; that was a promising start.  ‘It portrays this power in a way which is likely to affect you adversely’ it continued.  By the time we read ‘The viewing of this film may lead to unusual fears, depression or mental stress and it is possible that physical, mental and spiritual breakdown may result’, we knew we were in for a great night.  The choice between paying attention to earnest Christians handing out leaflets on the pavement or witnessing the power of Satan in action didn’t seem much of a contest.

I kept it, but didn't need it

The lurid newspaper reports of cinema-goers experiencing adverse reactions had raised expectations that we were in for an intense experience.  A lot of the hysteria whipped up by the film’s publicists related to people being sick in the cinema.  We happily thought we might be physically ill at the horrid sights on screen, so we all sat in the back row just in case, because then we could vomit in the gangway behind us and not over our neighbours.  We were that keen to be revolted.

Helping to whip up the frenzy

In the event not only did we not see anyone be sick, I don’t think anyone in the audience even fainted.  Certainly nobody fled screaming, though perhaps for some the mental and spiritual breakdown threatened by the leaflet came later.  We sturdy South London school students all enjoyed the film, but felt a little short-changed it had not had the promised physiological effects that would have represented extremely good value for money.  Yet despite falling short of the hype I think we agreed that it was scary enough, and nicely wrapped up a very pleasant trip.

Nowadays when such material is easily available there is no sense of achievement in seeing a particular title.  You can watch Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom uncut at home, whereas when I first saw it at the Brixton Ritzy it was in a cut form and the audience had to join a ‘cinema club’ for the night.  As a result it felt a big deal.  I would not want to go back to the times of a censorious BBFC (when the C pre-1984 stood for Censors rather than Classification), a time when the phrase ‘Festival of Light’ made you think of Mary Whitehouse rather than Diwali.  But convenience does come with a price.

That easy availability has made us blasé.  The heightened feeling of anticipation experienced by those audiences for The Exorcist in 1974, so strong that in some cases they resulted in severe psychosomatic effects (if reports are to be believed), could not be replicated in 2014.  Something, an intensity of engagement, is lost when on the whole we can see what we want when we want.  Is the flipside of accessibility a greater sense of disposability?

‘SPR announces Buckmaster Legacy’

I didn’t think I would be returning to the matter of the Buckmaster money left to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), quite so soon.  The SPR circulated its 2012-13 Annual Report and Accounts last week, with information on the Buckmaster legacy, and it has just announced, now that the ‘controversial’ CaseBase proposal championed by Dr David Rousseau has been withdrawn, what it plans to do with the money instead.  An email was sent to SPR members on 24 March, and the text repeated on its website.

After a brief run-down of the contents of Mr Buckmaster’s will, and how much his legacy is worth, the message rightly points out that the final total is far beyond what Mr Buckmaster envisaged bequeathing to the SPR.  The sheer amount has created a bit of a problem in finding ways to spend it in keeping with the will’s spirit, which essentially was to provide information on psychical research in various ways, the rest going into a property fund.  Since the will was written there have been significant technical advances, particularly in information delivery and digital reading formats.  Bearing these issues in mind, the email goes on to outline how the SPR’s Council has decided to utilise the funds.

Some £350,000 (yes, that’s not a typo) will be spent on a programme of information dissemination, both hard copy and online.  There will be a major book and ebook containing case studies with a commentary bearing on survival issues; a free online encyclopaedia; a series of short popular books (plus ebook versions) on key aspects of psychical research; and an expanded SPR website with a stream of articles and commentaries.  There are a couple of subsidiary awards.  One is £10,000 for an upgrade to the Lexscien online library run by David and Julie Rousseau.  The online library is generally acknowledged to be somewhat creaky these days, and the content needs to be brought up to date (it currently stops at 2008).  The same amount will be spent on an online repository into which researchers can load their experimental data.  That just leaves a rather curious item which is worth quoting in full:

‘Council considers that the need to convince the scientific establishment of the relevance of psychical research is as important as educating the public. Accordingly, it has made a grant of £78,000 towards the creation and publication of a systematic methodology for anomalies research. It is intended that this methodology can be applied to other scientific disciplines besides psychical research, and help draw our field into the mainstream.’  I’ll come back to this.

The balance, which currently amounts to some £270,000 according to the announcement, is to be invested with a view to the future purchase of a freehold property.  The total amount of the Buckmaster funds is given vaguely as ‘in excess of £700,000’ but the total Buckmaster fund at the end of September 2013, according to Dr Rousseau’s Treasurer’s Report in the Annual Accounts, was £729,000, and six months later will be more, bearing in mind that none of it has been spent yet.  It should be ‘in excess’ of three-quarters of a million pounds by now.  What about research, a word enshrined in the SPR’s name? It’s in there somewhere: the announcement tells us that while the will doesn’t specifically provide for research, ‘it is intended that interest earned from the funds prior to disbursement will be used to increase the amounts available for research grants.’  We are promised further information on the Buckmaster projects in a future issue of the Journal and/or Paranormal Review.

These are promising developments, but there are some reservations (these comments are based entirely on information in the public domain, and not any privileged discussions).  It is impossible at this stage to determine whether the overall project, and its subsidiary components, will represent good value for money.  Will these initiatives be of benefit to the subject or will they fall on stony ground?  The encyclopaedia is most welcome given Wikipedia’s deficiencies, but there are already moves to produce alternatives, notably Citizendium and the World Institute for Scientific Exploration’s online Worldwide Resource Center, both of which seek to fulfil the same function.  It will be hard for the SPR to carve out a distinctive niche, but its name will help in providing an authoritative cachet to its product.

The books should be popular and there are a couple of possible routes here.  The volumes in the SPR’s Centenary series, published in 1982, are still discussed.  Or, if the ‘Very short introduction’ format is chosen, that will go down well in our attention-deficit age.  An expanded website with fresh content has to be useful.  These are all worthy efforts, but it is hard to see how they are going to cost more than the third of a million pounds that has been budgeted.  If the book programme is done right it should be making money, not costing it!

That leaves the £78,000, the reference to which feels a bit coy.   We are not told in the announcement who has trousered this extremely large sum, nor how the figure was arrived at.  In terms of the normal amounts of grants given by the SPR’s Research Grants Committee (RGC) this is far beyond what a researcher might expect to receive.  To put the figure in context, in the 2012-13 Annual Report the chair of the RGC reports that the SPR awarded five grants in the reporting year, ranging from £1,700 to £3,275, totalling £13,270.  If this is thought to be atypical, bear in mind that during 2011-12 the RGC also awarded five research grants, totalling £12,670.  These are miniscule figures compared to the £78,000.  You could make a lot of small grants with that money and stimulate the field in the process, so expectations must be extremely high that £78,000 will deliver an output commensurate with the investment.  So what will the recipient do with this sum?

It’s all dressed up to make it sound impressive and justify the amount.  It isn’t for hoi polloi, it is for the scientific establishment that will be immune to the other strands of the Buckmaster project which are merely for the purpose of ‘educating the public’.  Special measures, tailored to said scientists, are required in these exceptional circumstances.  This will take the form of ‘the creation and publication of a systematic methodology for anomalies research’.  Isn’t that what parapsychologists do anyway, one is tempted to ask.  What is the secret ingredient that can do what others have failed so signally to do in the past?  The description sounds a bit like Dr Rousseau’s ‘controversial’ CaseBase proposal, minus the data collection, and isn’t a million miles away from Dr Rousseau’s SPR Journal paper ‘Challenging the Paradigm Systematically: A New and Generic Approach to Classifying Anomalous Phenomena.’  Admittedly this is on a far smaller scale than CaseBase, but perhaps that was required to make it seem uncontroversial.  From this bland description it comes across sounding a bit like Mini-Me to CaseBase’s Dr Evil.

Perhaps the huge amount being spent on it will be worthwhile, if it works.  For the money we will get a ‘methodology [that] can be applied to other scientific disciplines besides psychical research, and help draw our field into the mainstream.’  In other words, it is, in the words of Dr Rousseau’s JSPR paper, a ‘generic approach to classifying anomalous phenomena.’  In theory that sounds good, and would be £78,000 well spent.  But what if it fails to convince that hard-to-satisfy scientific establishment, and psychical research finds itself still outside the mainstream?  It will be exactly where it is now, just £78,000 poorer.

Given the risk, one has to ask, ‘Nice in theory, but couldn’t it be done cheaper?’  Are this and the publications strand so expensive simply because of the amount of cash washing round?  It would be great to hear precisely what will be delivered, and by whom, for that generous £78,000, and how sufficient confidence has been generated to justify investing so much for what appears to be an extremely speculative outcome.  At the very least an assurance that this ‘grant’ application was peer-reviewed should be provided, in order to prevent charges of cronyism – whoever the recipient is – being bandied about.

In addition to the general outline of how the money will be spent, the SPR announcement also included an advertisement for the post of commissioning editor for the publishing strand.  Claiming to be ‘modestly remunerated’, it pays about £15,000 a year for three to four years.  There are also freelance opportunities to work on publications and the website.  I’m sure these will prove very popular.

It has taken a while to get to this point, and there is a long way still to go before we have a firm idea whether the Buckmaster money will be spent wisely on these schemes.  One hopes it is, for three reasons.  Firstly, such largesse comes along very rarely, so it is necessary to make sure that when it does it is not wasted.  Secondly, large bequests will probably get even rarer thanks to changing economic circumstances.  Money that might have been given to the SPR could in future be eaten up by care home fees and other requirements of a population that is living longer than in the past.

Thirdly, should money be available, and a potential donor is wondering whether the SPR is a worthy recipient, if Buckmaster proves to be poor value they might think, ‘hang on, I’d love to see my money spent exploring psi and attempting to engineer a paradigm shift, but didn’t they get £750,000 from that Buckmaster chap, and mostly squander it?  I’ll give my money to help eradicate malaria, or fund research on Alzheimer’s instead.’  I know where my money would go.  There are greater dangers here than merely wasting the Buckmaster cash on unfulfilled potential, or on what might turn out to be vanity projects.

Members will soon get a chance to enquire into these matters.  The SPR’s Annual General Meeting is coming up on Saturday 26 April, and there will be an opportunity to ask about the disbursement of the Buckmaster legacy.  One hopes that more specific information will be forthcoming then, as well as later in the SPR’s publications.  I’ll be coming back to this issue as the Buckmaster programmes roll out and we can better judge progress, and value, against expenditure.

A Goodly Company: Ethel Le Rossignol at The Horse Hospital

‘Ye say ful sooth,’ quod she, ‘that is no nay;

I see coming a goodly company.’

Chaucer

From 22 February to 22 March 2014 The Horse Hospital in London, situated a hoof beat from Russell Square tube, showed a number of paintings by the medium Ethel Le Rossignol.  Possessing mediumistic abilities, she created forty-four paintings between 1920 and 1933 which depicted her interpretation of the world of Spirit.  Twenty-one of these painting belong to the College of Psychic Studies (CPS) and were loaned for the exhibition, which was mounted in association with Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor.

The exhibition was called A Goodly Company: Ethel Le Rossignol, and the accompanying leaflet was subtitled ‘A series of psychic drawings given through her hand as an assurance of survival after death.’  The words were taken from her book the full, very full, title of which is A Goodly Company: A Series of Psychic Drawings Given through the Hand of Ethel Le Rossignol as an Assurance of Survival After Death this Sequence of Designs is Shown to Open the Eyes of All Men to the Glorious World of Spiritual Power Which Lies About Them.  A Goodly Company was published in 1933 by The Chiswick Press, and a copy was on display at the exhibition. (1)

Le Rossignol does not seem to have had much of a profile while she was alive; details of her life are sketchy, and those here are lifted from the exhibition leaflet.  She was born in Argentina in 1873, her father hailing from the Channel Islands (Rossignol is French for ‘nightingale’) but her family had moved to Kensington by 1891.  She studied art and married Arthur Beresford Riley in 1930, somewhat late in life.  A number of of her artworks and copies of her book were donated to the CPS in 1968, with the request that the paintings be displayed in the College’s premises.  She died in 1970, aged 96.

Her pictures were designed to represent a ‘story’ of spiritual evolution, as indicated in the book’s conclusion:

To those who have followed the story of these pictures to this final page it can only be repeated that they were given as a joyful reassurance of the spiritual spheres, showing the archangels, the angels and the different creations – lower and higher – as man has slowly evolved through animal to man, from man to spirit, from spirit to angel and from angel to participator in the unveiled purpose of God.

The pictures certainly are joyful, and while access to their meaning might be restricted to adepts of some kind, even those among us who are unenlightened can obtain a great deal of pleasure from these remarkable images.  They are gaudy in the extreme, hypnotically so, vibrant, exuberant, intense, eye-popping, a kind of pop art before pop art, a celestial circus.  Rainbow-coloured shapes are prominent in them.  Psychedelic in their boldness, they are a harbinger of the New Age movement that she predated by a third of a century.  The pictures represent a mystical admixture of spiritual traditions, with a significant Eastern component.  They are filled with acrobatic nudes flying against a blue background, and some figures are caught making synchronised movements, like a Busby Berkeley film still.  Many wear weird headdresses, have distorted and multiple body parts.  While some of the paintings are square or rectangular, a good proportion are circular, which adds to the strangeness as they seem to have no beginning and no end, no anchoring point for the eye.

Perhaps that is part of the point Le Rossignol is making.  The difficulty with the ineffable is that by definition even the attempt to depict it is bound to fall short as the artist tries to evoke that which cannot be translated into terms we can comprehend.  That is why, while strangely timeless in one sense, in another they are very much of the period of their creation, the faces having a lipsticked 1920s look about them.  According to Le Rossignol a spirit referred to as ‘JPF’ was the actual artist while ‘JPF’ claimed in turn to be acting as intermediary for another discarnate group which wished to convey spiritual truths.  Le Rossignol as medium forms a continuum with the mediumistic communications of the spirits and the medium of the painting.  No wonder meanings struggle to emerge, with multiple layers of transmission.

The book is rather more restrained visually, with black and white reproductions of the paintings.  Le Rossignol was an automatist and the book is partly written in the form of a diary, the first entry dated 20 February 1920, only just over a year after the end of the Great War.  She is clearly impatient at the beginning because a spirit reproves her by saying: ‘you are still far from being a perfect secretary.  You are like a restive horse – always trying to start off without knowing where you are going’, which makes the Horse Hospital as a venue even more appropriate.  She got the hang of it though, and the messages, from a friend who had passed over, came through with a high degree of fluency.

These initially offer a standard view of a Christian-oriented Summerland, a place of beauty, one where ‘we see our friends in their new bodies – everyone much younger and happier.’  Living in a place intertwined with the ‘earth sphere’, but under a ‘higher rule’, there are opportunities to study and develop as an individual.  Objects are created by thought, including clothing, though judging by the paintings most choose not to bother.  The communications are clear that there is a limit to what can be conveyed to those still in the earth sphere, and that the higher spheres represent a qualitative change of existence.  As the scripts move into the 1930s, Eastern influences appear, they become more opaque and symbolic, and include an emphasis on breathing exercises in order to increase mediumistic receptivity, talk of masters, initiation and spiritual enlightenment as humanity follows a path of gradual evolution towards ‘the unveiled purpose of God.’

Le Rossignol's work does not fit neatly into any artistic currents, though echoes of Art Nouveau's sinuous lines and lively use of colour can be detected.  The artist she most puts one in mind of is the later Marc Chagall, who also painted colourful flying figures.  While Chagall is clearly not a direct influence, there are similarities stemming from their spiritual preoccupations.  The publisher Leon Amiel produced a book on Chagall in 1975, with text by Marie-Thérèse Souverbie.  She concludes her brief examination of Chagall's career by stating that he existed outside the main currents of modern art, an artist 'for whom time and space are not important'.  Most tellingly, the jacket blurb cuts even closer to their similarity:

... he followed his own path and, in the last analysis, he was faithful only to himself and his own vision.  The figures in his paintings seem to be telling us that truth lies elsewhere, beyond the world of appearances, of convictions and ordinary certitudes.  That is why they are not held down by gravity; their weightlessness lifts them above the sphere of our values.

Exactly the same could be said of Le Rossignol.  This is not to say that she is an artist on the same level as Chagall, merely that she deserves to be taken seriously.

The exhibition at The Horse Hospital was the first occasion these paintings had been displayed outside the College.  Let’s hope it is not the last.  The Horse Hospital’s strapline is ‘providing space for underground and avantgarde (sic) media since 1993.’  How Le Rossignol’s work fits into that mission statement is still to be decided, and it is to be hoped that the exhibition will stimulate interest in her life and work, and discussions of her place in the history of Spiritualist and esoteric thought.  If you missed the paintings this time round, try to seek them out at the CPS.  They possess a strange luminous beauty, even if the technique and subject matter seem limited to the uninitiated.  Whatever one’s opinion of their contents, there is purity in the intention behind them; if Le Rossignol was a nightingale, she sang high, and sweet, and strong.

(1) According to the British Library catalogue, Eyre & Spottiswoode republished A Goodly Company in 1958, but I have not examined their copy.

Updated 17 April 2015:

Ethel Le Rossignol’s paintings do not come onto the market often so it was interesting to see one for sale on eBay this month, with a starting price of $8,500 plus $240 shipping.  The seller is in Sterling, Colorado, USA, and one wonders how the painting came to be there.  It dates from September 1951 (the date can be seen in a diamond shape near the bottom right-hand corner) and according to the seller’s description is number five of a series of eleven made during the period 1947-1953.  The medium is watercolour and gouache on Bristol paper board, and it measures approximately 7 1/2" x 11 5/8", including a lower margin of about 3/8".

The seller has helpfully included a photograph of the text on the back of the painting:

Sep. 1951

The astral sphere above the city has many presences who have striven for the welfare of the remainder of their fellows.  They are shown, shedding their light upon the world.  They, as spirits emancipated from their earthly bodies, have realised the pursuit of the Way followed by all those who seek.  The man holds the flaming torch of fulfilled aspiration in the embodiment and loving participation of Power, and the woman shows the flower & seed of the golden fruit gathered from the conception and perception of harmony which arrays her, and every individual aspirant who faithfully essays to find the goal of perfect ideal love.

There are no surprises in terms of style and it is immediately identifiable as coming from the hand of Le Rossignol, though the seller notes that the colours have faded, which means it does not compare well with the luminous paintings that were on show at The Horse Hospital.  What is certainly noteworthy is the late date compared to the pictures owned by the CPS, and research needs to be done to determine the length of her working life as a painter.

I don’t know how the price was arrived at, but it seems rather a lot for a small watercolour by a fairly obscure artist, however infrequently the opportunities to buy her work arise.  That this was not my opinion alone is evident by its failure to sell when the auction closed on 15 April.  Le Rossignol is becoming better known, but she clearly has some way to go before she can command that kind of figure.

Updated 31 March 2020:

Ethel Le Rossignol's photograph at the CPS

In August 2019 I attended the College of Psychic Studies’ summer exhibition, Art and Spirit: Visions of Wonder and learned a little more about Le Rossignol from a card accompanying her photograph.  Her married name was Constance Beresford Ryley, not Riley.  When she became an art student on her return from Argentina she shared a studio with three others, including the Arts and Crafts jewellery designer Sarah Martineau (incidentally, Sarah Madeleine Martineau (1872-1972) was distantly related to Harriet Martineau, whose Letters on Mesmerism (1845) created a stir).  The caption writer plausibly thought Sarah’s influence could be felt in Le Rossignol’s use of gold and the intricacy of her designs.  Le Rossignol served as a nurse during the First World War and turned to Spiritualism, as many did, because of her experiences, becoming a medium in 1920.

A quick genealogical search threw up further information.  Le Rossignol was born on 7 April 1873 at Buenos Aires and her first appearance in the UK Census was in 1891.  Her father was Alfred Le Rossignol and Ethel was her second name.  She was awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal for her war service.  Husband Arthur died in November 1934, so it was a short marriage lasting only four years.  She died at Falmouth on 25 February 1970, leaving a modest estate of £39,656, but having bequeathed some remarkable paintings to the CPS for future generations to enjoy.

Not enjoyed by everybody though.  A Goodly Company was reviewed unfavourably in Psychic News by ‘J.P.’ (21 June 1958, p. 4).  The book was priced at £8.10s in a print run of 500, and J.P. marvels at the luxury of the production but ridicules the contents.  He refers to the book as ‘most certainly powerful proof of survival – of the printer’s and bookbinder’s art’ and lacking subtlety, almost overwhelming the reader with its sheer bulk.  The pictures are brutally dismissed as ‘grotesque’ and technically deficient, though conceding there is a ‘(William) Blake-like quality about some of them’, but Blake at his ‘mystical maddest.’  While boring in style, they possess ‘a spiritual quality … that partly compensates the lack of artistic prowess.’  On the whole, however, the reviewer does not feel the several thousand pounds it must have cost to produce A Goodly Company money well spent.