The Ninth Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film, November 2016

Once again the film festival organised by Rory Finin, director of Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, has brought Ukraine to the Winstanley lecture theatre at Trinity College in Cambridge for two evenings, 11-12 November.  The past couple of festivals unsurprisingly had a major focus on Maidan and the political turmoil which has racked Ukraine, with the emphasis on documentaries exploring filmmakers’ responses to the crisis.  The ninth festival returned to the more traditional format of mixing documentaries portraying broader perspectives on the lives of contemporary Ukrainians with classic fiction.  The festival was run in collaboration with the Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival and the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.

The first film on Friday evening was a short, Has-Beens (Olena Moskalchuk and Dmytro Burko, 2015), about the Petrivka book market next to the railway line in Kyiv/Kiev.  Opening with the sounds of the trains as the camera tracks along a passageway lined with books, we are introduced to a world the twenty-first century seems to have forgotten: a market crammed with decaying books, piled high and scattered around, but few customers for them.  One seller sadly notes people don’t read these days, while a smartly dressed man hunts only for books not available as digital versions.

Many of the units are shuttered and it must be a long time since this forlorn space saw any kind of bustle.  One wonders how the market keeps going, with customers haggling over books that are relics from another era, as the one containing pictures of a young and old Lenin amply demonstrates.  Yet the sellers and their customers are in good humour, boasting and telling jokes.  There is even an effort to repair books that might have to wait a long time to find a loving owner.  It is heartening to see the occasional young person browsing, but on this showing the second-hand book trade is not in good health.  A rather sad film for bibliophiles, but more context to allow the viewer to gauge Petrivka’s position in the world of Ukrainian bookselling generally would have been useful.

The second documentary of the evening was feature-length, and also dealt with a vanishing world: Hollywood on the Dnipro: Dreams from Atlantis (Oleh Chornyi, 2014), Rory pointing out that the title is a nod to the Odessa Film Studio’s nickname of ‘Hollywood on the Black Sea’.  Hollywood on the Dnipro charts the rise and decline of the village of Buchak, about 150 km from Kiev, as a destination for filmmaking during the Soviet era.  Alexander Dovzhenko, who proclaimed the area ‘Ukraine’s Switzerland’, planned to shoot his final film, Poem of the Sea, here.  After his death in 1956 his widow Yuliya Solntseva undertook the project, and the association gave Buchak a boost that attracted other projects throughout the 1960s and into the 70s.

Over the years a significant number of directors arrived, taking full advantage of the picturesque rural setting.  Andrei Tarkovsky, who used it to great effect in his debut feature Ivan’s Childhood, may have been the most notable, but there was a roll-call of directors in what seems to have been a renaissance in Ukrainian cinema paralleling New Wave movements elsewhere in Europe.  An enthusiasm hinting at boundless possibilities is on display in these films.  As dyed cows in one suggests, the area somehow lent itself to play, a poetic approach bordering on surrealism.  It could be that the feeling of remoteness from government strictures encouraged a sense of escape, though there could not be total freedom from state censorship.

The filmmakers talked to those who worked on the films, both sides of the camera, as well as locals who remembered the productions and often acted in them as extras.  Tarkovsky’s Ivan himself, Nikolai Burlyayev, discusses the film and its director while Larisa Kadochnikova, who spent a year filming Ivana Kupala Night here in the 1960s, is given a tour as she tries to pick out landmarks half a century later.

The second part of the film’s title comes from the fact that today the village has largely disappeared under water.  In the early 1970s, against fierce local opposition, the Soviet government authorised the Kaniv hydropower plant which entailed building a reservoir.  Some residents moved to abandoned dwellings above the water line but most were relocated to other villages where they had to build their own houses with no government assistance.  As a result Buchak has been left almost completely deserted, its famous windmill which appeared in many films fallen into decay, though it remains home to a handful of bohemians who value the solitude.  Towards the end there is a shift from celebrating Buchak’s cinematic heritage to highlight the fragile ecosystem and the environmental degradation, with activists fighting to prevent further flooding and preserve the natural beauty along with sites of archaeological significance.

The film’s writer Stanislav Tsalyk, who also appeared in the film, was present to introduce it, and do a Q&A afterwards, though the latter turned out to be a single question from Rory and an extremely lengthy answer that covered most of the questions the audience might have asked.  Tsalyk pointed out some of the problems making the film, notably that many of those who had been involved during the village’s golden age had died or moved away, reducing the number of people they could interview.  Memories were fallible because those who had acted in the films only actually saw them once DVDs became available because there were no cinemas close by, and no electricity.  He added that the films discussed are only a slice of those which used Buchak as a location.

This was an important oral history of the Dnieper’s very own dream factory, bringing to light a significant aspect of Ukrainian cinema.  There was undoubtedly an atmosphere of nostalgia and loss hanging over Hollywood on the Dnipro, but it was too an indicator that such excitement and experimentation can once again energise the country’s film making, and reinforce national identity in the process.

Saturday’s screenings, Two Days (Heorhii Stabovyi, 1927) and The Night Coachman (Heorhii Tasin, 1928), were a complete change of pace, two gripping hour-long dramas that were a fascinating alternative to the didacticism of Sergei Eisenstein’s films in the same period (though a shot of a sleeping stone lion in Two Days may have been intended to echo the first of the famous trio of lions in Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin).  Where Eisenstein’s primary concern was the movement of the masses, subordinating the individual and assuming a common motivation based on class, these two films examined the human cost, particularly intergenerational frictions, as a new world was born, leaving those who were stuck firmly in the old in confusion and despondency.  There were commonalities between the two: both show the brutal execution of a child who has joined the Communists – a son in Two Days, a daughter in The Night Coachman – at the hands of the Whites, and the revenge of the aged father, culminating in death or despair.  In each case the father (a widower) is out of sympathy with his offspring’s views, but aghast at the way the Whites, with whom he naturally feels an affinity, behave.  However, in neither case is the retributive act carried out from class consciousness, but from a more visceral hatred of cold-blooded murderers.

The evening began with Two Days.  A wealthy bourgeois family flees before the advancing Reds, leaving their elderly retainer to look after the house.  During the loading of the car a puppy is accidentally killed, a seemingly minor act in the scheme of things but the beginning of a chain of events which drives the tragedy.  The Reds arrive and the old servant is astonished to find his son with them, someone he had thought dead in the war but who is now a commissar.  The young man though makes it clear his loyalty is to the Revolution.  His father is hiding the young son of the family in his attic room, at considerable risk to himself, as the youngster had been left behind in the confusion.  Unfortunately the puppy’s body is dug up by its mother and this leads to the Reds finding a chest with the family’s valuables, buried for safekeeping.  They remove the chest but the boy in hiding mistakenly thinks the old man had told the revolutionaries of its whereabouts, and when the Reds retreat and the Whites come back, he denounces his erstwhile protector.  The commissar had been ordered to remain undercover but the boy betrays his hiding place, the Whites find him and promptly hang him from the tree under which chest and puppy had been buried.  The old man in his agony burns the house, killing everybody in it, including the boy, before himself expiring on the road.

In depicting the conflict Stabovyi does not create the simplistic dichotomy of noble Reds and dastardly Whites one might expect in the 1920s.  The former are a boorish lot with bad manners, whereas the Whites are cultivated and at least know how to play the piano (and don’t put lit cigarettes on it).  But the Whites are ruthless when it comes to dealing with the captured commissar.  The old man’s political sympathies are entirely with them but he still has personal loyalties, and cannot reconcile the two.  Not seeing where his true interest lies is his tragedy.  Thus he experiences false consciousness by allying himself to the bourgeoisie, sheltering an ungrateful youth who symbolically takes his bed while he has to sleep on the floor.  At one point the old man sits in his room and fondles his old Imperial Army cap.  He sighs that those days are long gone, and indeed they are.  Alone, with nothing left to live for, his time is over as a new society rises from the ashes of the old.

The Night Coachman is a story about an elderly coach driver who has worked nights for 30 years, living comfortably with his daughter who is employed, so he thinks, at a printing works.  In fact she is a Communist, secretly producing revolutionary literature.  Her father discovers that she is no longer at the works and is associating with, in his eyes, bad company, a fellow radical.  The pair have stashed printing equipment in the loft above the stable, and thinking to save her, the father brings in a ruthless counterintelligence officer when he believes the young man will be in the loft alone.  Unfortunately the daughter is there instead, with incriminating evidence.  In a chilling scene the officer forces the old man to drive them to the mortuary.  After telling the custodian there is a body for him while the camera shows the daughter sitting passively, the officer shoots her (in practice one would have expected him to interrogate her to find out as much as possible about her network, but the scene is superbly dramatic).

The following day the old man is in a daze, out in his carriage in daylight for the first time in decades. He sees at a street corner the officer interrogating the very person with whom his daughter had associated, and when the man is detained the officer orders the father to drive them to – the mortuary.  The father whips up the horse, tells the young man to jump, and crashes the carriage on some steps.  His impulsive act kills the officer and the horse, and leaves him dazed and injured as the film ends with him reaching for the scarf he had earlier given his daughter as a gift.

Technically the film is a marvel, with a great deal of night shooting done on location in Odessa.  Early on there is a sequence where the old man is driving the officer and the latter sees a pretty woman in another carriage.  He orders the old man to speed up and drive alongside, then he hops into the other vehicle to exercise his charms on the lady.  It is similar to a sequence in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) in which the camera in a car drives next to another car, filming its occupants; perhaps this is where Vertov got the idea.

As is the case in Two Days, an old man furthers the revolutionary cause, but not from radical motives: here it is to atone for causing the death of his daughter.  Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother has a mother and son pitted against each other initially; however, she comes to understand the system’s injustice after seeing the harsh way it treats him, and she adopts his revolutionary outlook.  Both Stabovyi and Tasin by contrast demonstrate that the way individuals respond to reality is not always so neat.  Ultimately, if one cannot change one’s views in accord with the forces of history, the forces of history will roll over you.  The old, as symbolised by the father, will give way to the new, albeit at the cost of great sacrifice on both sides.

Rory Finin is doing a fine job organising the festival and bringing us gems.  As well as familiar faces it consistently attracts those new to Ukrainian film, and the number of students willing to give up the more usual pleasures of weekend nights (or even Radio 4’s Any Questions?, which was being recorded at the Cambridge Union at the same time on Friday evening) is testament to its attractions.  Watching the clips in Hollywood on the Dnipro made me realise just how many films Rory could potentially programme for future festivals.  Next year (coincidentally the centenary of the Russian Revolution) will mark the tenth.  There is no shortage of potential material so there is scope, budgets willing, for an expanded festival, perhaps occupying all day on the Saturday.  The festival has always been free, but I am sure that a charge to help defray the extra costs would not deter attendants.  I hope Rory will consider pushing the човен out and making the tenth festival of Ukrainian film even more enjoyable than the preceding nine.

The Society for Psychical Research in the exhibition of Curious Objects

Cambridge University Library (CUL) is currently the venue for an exhibition of curious objects called, appropriately, Curious Objects.  On show are some of the unusual items held by the Library in this second public presentation to mark the institution’s 600^th anniversary, the purpose to stress that there is a lot more to the collections for which it has responsibility than books and manuscripts.  Many of the items were accumulated by individuals or picked up as curiosities and came into the library’s possession by chance.  Others were seen as expanding the idea of the library as a repository for the written word to include supplementary material which aided study.  Occasionally the Library has acquired an institutional archive intact, artefacts arriving as a by-product of records.  Sometimes books obtained under the Copyright Act have extra bits bundled in.  Over the years many pieces have been transferred to other repositories within the university, but there is still a lot in the vaults with which to compose a wonderfully eclectic miscellany.

Among the ancient Egyptian pots, facial hair sent to Charles Darwin, Soviet ephemera, footwear and so on is a case devoted to items drawn from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research which, though in the care of CUL, are still the property of the SPR and shown with its permission.  The most eye-catching, and frequently mentioned in publicity, is undoubtedly the ‘ectoplasm’ retrieved from medium Helen Duncan after a séance in Portsmouth.  The soft lighting displays the fabric beautifully even as it undermines any claim to paranormality.  Alongside it is a page from an SPR report of a 1931 séance with Mrs Duncan.

At the other end of the case is a cardboard ‘luminous trumpet’ and its box, as sold by the Two Worlds Publishing Co., Manchester, in the 1920s – British made, 5/- post free.  These were used in séances to amplify spirit voices.  An 1884 slate bears a fine example of spirit writing obtained through the mediumship of William Eglinton, and a photograph by William Crawford has Belfast medium Kathleen Goligher sitting with an ectoplasmic ‘psychic rod’ between her feet.  Next door a photograph of Mina Crandon, the medium ‘Margery’, her face covered by ectoplasm, is accompanied by three wax impressions of thumb prints taken during a séance at the SPR’s premises in London in 1929 that were supposedly from her control, her deceased brother Walter Stinson.

The paper parts of the Society’s holdings are justly famous for their quality, but its other possessions are less well known, and this makes their appearance here noteworthy.  A handsome free booklet has been produced to accompany Curious Objects with 20 high-quality photographs of some of the choicest; it is gratifying to see that two are devoted to the SPR’s contribution, the spirit trumpet and a fine smoky rendition of the Duncan ectoplasm.

It was one of the conditions in the agreement signed by the SPR’s president and the Chairman of the Library Syndicate in 1989 to transfer the SPR’s rare books and archives (other than its audio-visual collection) to Cambridge that CUL would ‘endeavour during the continuance of this agreement to exhibit Society materials whenever possible and to arrange special exhibitions of Society materials as possible.’  This hasn’t happened much in the decades since so CUL are to be congratulated on making the SPR such an important element in their anniversary celebration.  But don’t just visit Curious Objects (open until 21 March 2017) to see the SPR’s treasures – there is much here to enjoy.  Entry is free and if you find yourself in Cambridge it is a fine way to spend an hour, browsing among the stranger things librarians deal with at work.

NB The web pages set up for the exhibition by the university include two items not mentioned above.  These are a cast of the left hand of medium D. D. Home, which has been cleverly rendered in 3D so the viewer can see all round the object; and examples of Harry Price’s ‘Telepatha’ cards with score sheet, his improvement on J. B. Rhine’s Zener cards designed for use in ESP experiments.  These are not in fact among the artefacts in the display but are illustrated on a panel attached to the wall next to it.  Sadly there was not enough room in the case to include the objects themselves.  The panel, headed ‘Spirits, psychics and artefacts’, also gives details of the SPR’s origins and its archives and notes that the Society is still in existence.

Tony Cornell and the SPIDERs from Cambridge

Tony Cornell 'chasing spectres with a Spectrum'

Psychical researchers these days can utilise a wide range of sophisticated instruments when studying spontaneous cases (possible ghosts, poltergeists and the like), even if the theoretical basis for their application is often dubious.  But while the power of the equipment at their disposal has increased enormously over the last decade, attempts to record evidence of paranormal phenomena have long been an important aspect of the field.  A significant figure in applying technology to the detection and documenting of spontaneous cases was Tony Cornell (1924-2010), a Cambridge-based researcher with extensive practical experience.  In his 2002 book Investigating the Paranormal he discusses the use of instrumentation and in particular an innovative method for collecting information.  This was a piece of kit called the ‘Spontaneous Psychophysical Incident Data Electronic Recorder’, or SPIDER, which he largely developed with Howard Wilkinson of Nottingham University, and with input from Alan Gauld, who was also at Nottingham, in trialling it.

There have actually been two separate versions of SPIDER.  The prototype was put together by Cornell with help from a technician and a computer programmer in 1982 and was initially housed in a cardboard box.  Modifications were made, then Cornell and Wilkinson unveiled the Mark II, christened SPIDER, in 1984, though Wilkinson continued to improve it.  It is essentially a large black-painted box, accompanied by a smaller brown chest labelled ‘C.U.S.P.R. (Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research, a group Cornell ran for many years), containing an array of devices to monitor an environment.  Controlled originally by a 16K ZX Spectrum computer with DCP Interspec, relay box and Sinclair printer, it could record motion, temperature changes, sound and electromagnetic activity, and included floodlights, an audio recorder, a cine camera (later a camcorder), infrafred video and still 35mm cameras.  These operated for set periods, as selected, or when initiated by the sensors.  Readings were logged automatically so the equipment could be left to operate without any supervision for several days.

The editor of mass-circulation magazine Your Computer deemed the project of sufficient interest to send excitable journalist Meirion Jones to interview Cornell in his basement HQ in Victoria Street, Cambridge, putting Cornell on the cover of the May 1983 issue and devoting three pages to ‘Captain Spectre and his Spectrum-powered spook hunt’, though the interview covered more than SPIDER (not yet known by that name).  There was a sober status update, co-written by Cornell, in the subsection ‘Notes on the instrumentation of spontaneous cases’ of the ‘Research Report of the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR)’, which appeared in the (national) Society for Psychical Research’s June 1984 Journal.  The total cost to date was put at about £850, from which it is clear that over the years Cornell sank a considerable amount of his own money into SPIDER.

Cornell used SPIDER on at least a dozen occasions between 1982 and 1996, amounting to about 1,200 hours, and several of these are described in his book.  The Mark I was first employed over a six-week period in 1982-3 in an antique shop storeroom in Cambridge which appeared to be experiencing poltergeist phenomena.  SPIDER was then taken to such diverse locations as Chingle Hall, a Leicestershire stately home, Abbey House in Cambridge, Stirling Castle, Berry Pomeroy, Chillingham Castle, and others.  In 1988 the television network NBC invited Cornell and Wilkinson  to investigate stories of disturbances on RMS Queen Mary, permanently moored as a tourist attraction in Long Beach, California, USA, for its series Unsolved Mysteries (one dreads to think how much the excess baggage charge was).  With poltergeist researcher William Roll, who brought several mediums with him, they made an extensive 10-day examination of the ship (in addition to Cornell’s chapter on the trip Roll refers to it in his Journal of Parapsychology review of Investigating the Paranormal, though with greater interest in his own participation than in that of his English colleagues).

Cornell and Wilkinson, along with a production company making a television programme, visited the Bell Inn at Thetford with SPIDER in September 1991 to continue an investigation into a haunted bedroom, and Cornell spent further time there the following year.  In 1994 he returned to the Bell with members of a group I was in, Norfolk-based ESPRI, for a programme in Inca Productions’ series Ghosthunters.  Cornell brought SPIDER with him, but it was not operational as that would have taken about 90 minutes to organise and the room was already crowded (and overheated) with people and equipment.  Instead only the video cameras and monitors were set up to simulate how it would look (described by Andy Waters in his 1994 report for the ESPRI newsletter).  With Inca’s cameras rolling Cornell explained the case, I explained how SPIDER worked, and the group pretended to conduct a vigil.  The programme aired in June 1996 but the ESPRI contributions, including mine, were left out, as was the entire visit from Cornell’s book.

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference had SPIDER been operating because little of significance was noted during the hundreds of hours of SPIDER’s deployment. There were electrical failures with no apparent cause which rectified themselves, some object movements which could not be accounted for, and occasional temperature drops which may have had normal causes, but that was it.  However, Wilkinson gave a talk at an SPR combined study day and training event in 1994 which was reported by Peter Flew for the SPR’s magazine The Psi Researcher (forerunner of the current The Paranormal Review).  Wilkinson’s talk, ‘Recording the evidence’, covered SPIDER, later technical elaborations, and the problems involved in using electronic equipment on location.  Alluding to a lack of results, he argued that a police speed camera might be trained on a traffic black spot for many hours before capturing an accident, and paranormal activity is a lot rarer than traffic accidents.

Investigating the Paranormal contains several pictures of SPIDER: on p. 6; p. 117 (at the Bell); and p. 197 (the Mark I in the antique shop).  The Your Computer article also contains photographs.  The boxes are certainly clunky, but as the above account indicates, SPIDER’s importance in the evolution of psychical research as a scientific enterprise cannot be underestimated.  Even though superseded by more complex, and much smaller, gadgets, it is still of historical significance.  So what of SPIDER now?  The two boxes are currently sitting in a corner of the meeting room in the SPR’s new headquarters at Vernon Mews in London.  That is not a long-term solution because the space they occupy is required for the installation of AV equipment.  If a home is not found for SPIDER the chances are it will go into a storage unit where it may deteriorate.  It deserves to be where it will be cherished, and preferably displayed to the public.  A tall order certainly, but if anyone has any thoughts on what can be done to preserve SPIDER and make sure it is remembered for the pioneering undertaking it was, I would be interested to hear them.

SPIDER at Vernon Mews, October 2016

References

Cornell, Tony. Investigating the Paranormal, Helix Press, New York, 2002.

Flew, Peter. ‘Investigating Spontaneous Cases’, The Psi Researcher, No. 15, Winter 1994, pp.16-23.

Jones, Meirion. ‘Where Micros Fear to Tread’, Your Computer, vol. 3, no. 5, May 1983, pp. 50-1, 53.

McLaren, I. P. L., Loosemore, R. P. W, and Cornell, A. D. ‘Research Report of the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR)’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 52, June 1984, pp. 307-11.

Roll, William. Review of Investigating the Paranormal, Journal of Parapsychology, vol. 67, Spring 2003, pp. 187-203.

Waters, Andy. ‘A Night to Remember’, ESPRI Newsletter, Winter 1994, n.p.

 

Update 10 November 2016

There has been a surprising development in the SPIDER saga.  It transpires that the equipment does not actually belong to the SPR!  Through a misunderstanding it was thought that the SPR was to be the ultimate destination.  However, as I have now learned, ownership in fact passed from Tony Cornell to his longtime colleague Alan Gauld and was finally vested in Dr Melvyn Willin, the SPR’s Archives Liaison Officer.

As a result of this misapprehension the Society thought it had responsibility and was wondering what to do with the big boxes sitting in its Vernon Mews HQ, but now it can rest easy.  Melvyn tells me he is going to collect SPIDER at some point and take it home where it can be conserved and stored in optimal conditions.

So for the foreseeable future it is in safe hands, looked after properly and preserved for future historians as the groundbreaking initiative it was.  I think Tony would have been pleased with this positive outcome.

 

Update 23 May 2022

Alan Murdie’s ‘Ghostwatch’ column in the June 2022 Fortean Times briefly discusses SPIDER, and one of my photographs taken at Vernon Mews in 2016 accompanies the article (p. 19).  The cover of Your Computer featuring Tony is also used, but gives an incorrect date of 1987; the correct date is May 1983.  Alan expresses scepticism about the value of instrumentation: noting that despite SPIDER’s extensive deployment, ‘the results were negligible,’ he refers to it as a ‘relic’, and doubts whether its ‘or any other heavily technical approach’ is superior to more basic investigative methods at capturing evidence of the paranormal.

The Paranormal Review referred to above is now The Magazine of the Society for Psychical Research.

Reference

Murdie, Alan. ‘A Vigil in Westwood Lodge’, Fortean Times, issue 419, June 2022, pp. 16-19.

Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948

The National Portrait Gallery is currently showing a small exhibition, Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862-1948, the end date marking the Windrush’s arrival.  The black, and Asian, presence in Britain is underrepresented in the early photographic record and the studio portraits shown here indicate the diversity of the black experience, and the significant contributions black and Asian men and women made to British culture, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Cartes‐de‐visite and cabinet cards have been drawn from the NPG’s own collections, supplemented by large modern bromide prints taken from glass plates in the Hulton Archive.  They show people active in numerous walks of life.  There are actors, dancers (Les Ballet Nègres, the first black ballet troupe), composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (‘The African Mahler’), musicians, boxer Peter Jackson (‘The Black Prince’), a missionary, soldiers, and diplomats.  Ram Gopal, an early exponent of Indian dance in England, has a case to himself.

A significant portion is dedicated to portraits of members of the African Choir, a 16-strong group which toured Britain in 1891-3, including a performance before Queen Victoria at Osborne House.  They were photographed by the (original) London Stereoscopic Company, and it would have been even more interesting to have seen these as originally intended – perhaps stereoscopy aficionado Sir Brian May will take note for a future publication in his series devoted to bringing vintage stereograms to a modern audience.  The African Choir negatives were only rediscovered in the Hulton Archive in 2014, which suggests they were not considered to have much commercial potential in the past.

An album contains a number of photographs of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a Yoruba captured, aged 5, by King Gezo of Dahomy (curiously black and Arab slavers tend to be omitted from the historical narrative in favour of an emphasis on the European-African-American triangle) but a British naval officer, Captain Forbes, persuaded the king to offer the girl to Queen Victoria as a gift: her surname was derived from the name of Forbes’s ship.  She became a society figure in England after the Queen paid for her education and became her godmother. At the other end of the social scale, Ndugu M’Hali, known as Kalulu, was servant to Henry Morton Stanley on his expeditions and the inspiration for his 1873 book My Kalulu, Prince, King and Slave: A Story of Central Africa.  He was given to Stanley by an Arab merchant, and Stanley paid for his education.

A series by Benjamin Stone records visitors to the House of Commons: a sergeant and three privates of the King’s African Rifles, a delegation of Basuto chiefs, South Nigerian Regiment ‘gun carriers’.  Various individuals connected with the Raj are depicted, from Duleep Singh, Maharaja of Lahore, the last Sikh ruler of the Punjab who was exiled to England, to Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian Westminster Member of Parliament.  Demonstrating Africa’s exoticism in British eyes, in 1905 half a dozen pygmies were brought to England and performed to large audiences for two years.  They were photographed by Stone during a visit to the Commons.

There is much to think about in the exhibition, even though it is a small slice of what could have been shown.  Mounted by the NPG in collaboration with Autograph ABP, an arts charity, it constitutes part of a three-year archival research programme, The Missing Chapter, supported financially by the Heritage Lottery Fund.  The Missing Chapter’s goal is to ‘to augment the photographic narratives of migration and cultural diversity in relation to Britain’s past, and disseminate a visual heritage that is fragmented and dislocated.’  This is a laudable aim, if inelegantly put, and Black Chronicles fulfils it well.  My only criticism is that spreading the content over several rooms dissipates its impact.  The main section, in its own space, has a powerful effect, with large prints imposingly presented on black-painted walls; but the other elements are just a couple of cases sited in general galleries, and are fiddly to find.  It feels like a loss of confidence by the gallery’s management.

Black Chronicles runs 18 May - 11 December 2016.  A conference accompanies it, The Missing Chapter: Cultural Identities and The Photographic Archive, at the NPG on 21 October 2016, marking the culmination of The Missing Chapter project.

The Society for Psychical Research’s new Psi Encyclopedia

As I know from my own experience, it is unwise to rely on Wikipedia for anything psi-related, driven as it is by pseudo-sceptics determined to cast the subject in as negative a light as possible.  This is extremely detrimental because of Wikipedia’s status as the default online knowledge resource.  Craig Weiler’s book Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet addressed the unsavoury business of those antagonistic to psychical research distorting content associated with it.   He eloquently showed how a core group, ‘Guerrilla Skeptics', aided by a number of independent editors sharing its general outlook, had between them rendered Wikipedia’s psychical research and parapsychology pages untrustworthy.

That is why the SPR’s new Psi Encyclopedia, which has just been launched in tandem with its new website, is to be welcomed.  Unlike Wikipedia the undertaking is not crowd-sourced, a method that is fine in theory but unfortunately gives the upper hand to those who have most stamina pressing the delete key, to the detriment of balance.  Rather it takes the form of invited articles, often lengthy and detailed, written by experts who, unlike many Wikipedia contributors, are named.  They have endeavoured to present a rounded picture, acknowledging fraud and error where demonstrated, but minus the reflexively negative agenda so damaging to Wikipedia’s coverage.

The encyclopaedia’s ‘about’ page lists four different types of entries: there are broad overviews; articles breaking those overviews down into smaller themes to be examined in greater depth; case studies; and lists.  These categories combine to provide information to suit a wide range of needs.  Apparently at launch the site’s total word count was half a million words, with a lot more to come.  A very useful section is ‘New to Psi Research?’, describing major areas and linking to specific articles.  As someone who regularly handles students’ enquiries I anticipate that the encyclopaedia is going to make my job a lot easier.

One may not agree with everything in it – psychical research is a lively affair after all – and those who are hostile will naturally moan about a lack of ‘balance’ (as they see it, i.e. not conforming to their particular view); but one can be confident that at least the information has been carefully compiled to be as accurate as possible and is designed to inform rather than mislead.  The editor has provided a contact form and will be glad to receive feedback, suggestions for additional topics, and offers from suitably qualified writers to contribute.  This is a work in progress but early comments have been overwhelmingly positive, and in the years to come it will undoubtedly prove to be the standard source for reliable online information on psychical research.  Project funding came from the late Mr Nigel Buckmaster, and the entire field owes him a huge debt for enabling the Psi Encyclopedia to become a reality.