Arthur Balfour's Ghosts , livre ebook

Arthur Balfour’s Ghosts
An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic Writings
Trevor Hamilton
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Copyright © Trevor Hamilton, 2017
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For Anne, Dan and Ralph



Preface and Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following institutions for access to their records and the ability to make use of them: the Society for Psychical Research archive at Cambridge University Library, the Society for Psychical Research online library of their Proceedings , Journal , and online Encylopaedia, Trinity College, Cambridge (the Wren Library), and the Houghton Library Harvard, and the American Society for Psychical Research, New York. The online records of the Balfour family archive in Edinburgh were searched but no material has been taken from them.
Short quotations and extracts from other sources are within the accepted guidelines for the purpose of criticism and discussion and are fully attributed. Any errors in accuracy or non or incorrect attribution are apologised for and will be corrected in any future edition. Illustrations and images are largely from the SPR’s own records, or out of copyright, or untraceable, though every effort has been made to do so. Any omissions will be corrected as stated above. Thanks to the National Portrait Gallery, the Keep/Special Collections Sussex University, Mary Evans Picture Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Colin Salter (Tall Tales from the Trees website) for their permissions. I would particularly like to thank Tricia Robertson for advice, permission, and help with some of the illustrations, and for her sturdy encouragement in this most difficult of fields. I also owe a debt of gratitude to her close friend, the late Archie Roy, author of The Eager Dead , for his courageous and enthusiastic pioneering work in this field. I would also like to thank Adrian Parker for his general interest in and support for this work.
I wish to acknowledge, with gratitude, financial assistance for the research on which this book is based, from the Perrott-Warrick trust.
I owe a profound and specific obligation to Alan Gauld for his support and advice and for allowing me to take away and scan thirty-one volumes of printed scripts and the commentaries on them, in order to photocopy each individual page and then scan them (over many long months) into a manageable and searchable format. The book would not have been possible without this act of generous trust.
A special note of thanks must also go to Carlos Alvarado for his invaluable work in disseminating, in useful and perceptive articles, the historical resources of the Parapsychology Foundation, and for his efforts to encourage a less Anglo Saxon perspective in this field.
My brother David gave, to a complete neophyte, invaluable advice on the technology of scanning.
I would also like to thank Ralph Crane for access to the letters between Trix Fleming and Maud Diver; Barbara Fisher for extracts from her intended biography of Trix Fleming; Mark Coombe-Tennant for permission to access the Houghton archive and for his interest and encouragement; Peter Lord for his excellent edition of Winifred Coombe-Tennant’s diaries and for general information. Robin Darwall-Smith, the archivist at Magdalen College, Oxford, was very helpful on the academic background of John George Smith (as Piddington was called then). Lis Warwood and Marc Demarest were hugely resourceful in tracking down his business and personal records and those of Rosalie Thompson.
Finally, I have to thank my wife Anne, and my son Daniel, for their unfailing love and encouragement, despite my involvement in a project which must at times have seemed to them both puzzling and something of a pain in the neck.
The subject matter of this book is so complex in range, variety, and volume that there are bound to be many errors, despite my best efforts, still undetected in the text. Such mistakes will be fully acknowledged and corrected in any future edition.



Important Note on the Selection, Presentation and Assessment of Material
Quotations around words like ‘discarnate’ and terms like ‘ostensibly’, ‘allegedly’, and so forth, are, as far as possible, not deployed in the text. This is to reduce the density of an inevitably highly complicated document. There is no attempt by this to either endorse or reject the paranormal elements in the narrative. For reasons of space and expense only a sample of parts of significant cases and scripts can be presented in some detail but it is hoped that there is enough depth in the documentation provided to enable the reader to get a more than superficial sense of the issues involved in making a judgement on this highly intricate and daunting body of material. There is no substitute, in the final analysis, for an examination of the individual scripts themselves, or at the least, a study of the detailed extracts printed in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Selections from scripts are generally indented to make them stand out in the text. Those parts of the scripts which were originally in Greek and Latin have been translated. The translations are those of the first investigators. Words enclosed in square brackets are summaries of script material, bridging statements, or descriptions of drawings. Words enclosed in conventional brackets are explanatory and contextual comments. The script extracts are not consistent in layout, spelling, and punctuation and have been condensed because of limited space. But they remain faithful to the overall meaning. For the same reason, only essential references are provided in the text. For more detail on this consult the online Society for Psychical Research abstracts catalogue.
It should be noted that, though careless phrasing might accidently imply this, the Society for Psychical Research, past or present, holds no collective view on the cross-correspondences or any other phenomena that it may study.



Introduction
Why Arthur Balfour’s ghosts and why link his name with the cross-correspondence automatic writings? He is known in the twenty-first century, if at all, as an aristocratic politician of a century ago, and some people may well link him with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which promised a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Yet, during his long political career, the intimate involvement of his family in the interpretation and construction of the cross-correspondences has not yet been fully explored from the full range of original sources, and has profound implications for the proper assessment of the huge body of data generated by automatists and investigators alike. The bizarre messages that emerged from the scripts focused largely on him, his lost love, May Lyttelton, and his brother Gerald’s child by Winifred Coombe-Tennant, one of the participating mediums. It is important to analyse and weigh these personal elements since many reputable scholars (who were not aware of this personal equation) have stated that the cross-correspondence automatic writings provided some of the best, if not the best, evidence for the postmortem survival of individual consciousness and personality.
The evidence began to build up shortly after the death of Frederic William Henry Myers on 17 January 1901 in Rome at the Hotel Primavera (Skrupskelis 1994: 156). He had a reputation in his earlier years as a classical scholar, poet, and man of letters, but in later life he was known for his energetic and wide-ranging work on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research. His conclusions and much though not all of the evidence to support them were published in his posthumous masterpiece Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death . He had come to believe that the survival of bodily death did in fact take place. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that his former colleagues in the SPR should have looked eagerly for any indications of his continuing existence and that one, Margaret Verrall, offered him the opportunity to make contact through automatic writing. She could not have realised at the time that this would lead to the generation of well over three thousand scripts from a number of automatists between 1901 and 1936 which told an incredible tale that went far beyond the post-mortem survival of one individual. This narrative, which was constructed by the first investigators, all of whom had been Myers’ personal friends and collaborators, strongly requires an up to date and, within the obvious human limitations, an independent appraisal.
There are several reasons for this. First, the claims made for the scripts. Alan Gauld (1983: 77) has written that they are ‘undoubtedly the most extensive, the most complex and the most puzzling of all ostensible attempts by deceased persons to manifest purpose, and in so doing to fulfil their overriding purpose of proving their survival’. They have, in addition, the advantage of being a permanent paranormal object: that is, the original spontaneous event by its very nature was creating a record that could be examined again and again. Second, the complete body of material has rarely been studied in detail by later researchers because of its inaccessibility and convoluted nature. Therefore, there is always the suspicion that the original interpreters selected those items from the scripts that confirmed their prior belief in survival and, conversely, that critics of the cross-correspon