Falling a prey to the mediums
First published in Tribune, 24 November 1944
Everyone has a list of books which he is ‘always meaning to read’, and now and again one gets round to reading one of them. One that I recently crossed off my list was George Bourne’s Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer.1 I was slightly disappointed with it, because, though it is a true story, Bettesworth, the man it is about, was not quite an ordinary labourer. He had been a farm worker, but had become a jobbing gardener, and his relation with George Bourne was that of servant and master. Nevertheless there is some remarkable detail in it, and it gives a true picture of the cruel, sordid end with which a lifetime of heavy work on the land is often rewarded. The book was written more than thirty years ago, but things have not changed fundamentally. Immediately before the war, in my own village in Hertfordshire, two old men were ending their days in much the same bare misery as George Bourne describes.
Another book I recently read, or rather re-read, was The Follies and Frauds of Spiritualism, issued about twenty years ago by the Rationalist Press Association.2 This is probably not an easy book to get hold of, but I can equally recommend Mr Bechhofer-Roberts’s book on the same subject. An interesting fact that these and similar books bring out is the number of scientists who have been taken in by spiritualism. The list includes Sir William Crookes, Wallace the biologist, Lombroso, Flammarion the astronomer (he afterwards changed his mind, however), Sir Oliver Lodge, and a whole string of German and Italian professors. These people are not, perhaps, the top-notchers of the scientific world, but you do not find, for instance, poets in comparable numbers falling a prey to the mediums.3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning is supposed to have been taken in by the famous medium Home, but Browning himself saw through him at a glance and wrote a scarifying poem about him (‘Sludge the Medium’). Significantly, the people who are never converted to spiritualism are conjurors.
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“George Bourne” was a pseudonym of the English writer George Sturt (1863-1927). His books dealt with country life in and around Farnham.
The Rationalist Press Association, now known as the Rationalist Association, was originally established in 1885. It continues to publish a monthly magazine, the New Humanist.