Helen Duncan and HMS Hood: A Coincidence? March 23, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Introducing HMS Hood
This blog dealt yesterday (it feels longer ago) with Helen Duncan, medium extraordinaire, claiming, in Portsmouth in 1941, that HMS Barham had sunk before the British government had announced that ship’s demise. In that post I acknowledged that there was another case where Helen Duncan had learnt that a ship had sunk before it was generally known, and this was the Hood. HMS Hood was, as many readers will know, perhaps the best loved of all the Royal Navy’s ships. As her greatest biographer writes:
There is a special quality about the battlecruiser Hood which resists any single definition. It has to do with her beauty and her destructive power, with her gilded years of peace and then her annihilation in war, of sinuous strength and desperate fragility (Taylor).
She met her end early morning Saturday 24 May 1941 at the hands of the Bismarck: much of Britain’s subsequent hunt for the Bismarck was excited by the need to revenge Hood, something that was amply achieved, 27 May. HMS Hood did not sink. She exploded when a shell entered her magazine and only three of her crew of 1418 survived. News of her demise was given to a shocked nation on Saturday 24 May at 9 pm. Many remember it as one of the worst moments of the war.
Helen Duncan and a Battleship
This account comes from Roy C. Firebrace and was given in a discussion following a talk by Percy Wilson in 1958 on Helen Duncan, ‘Evidence for Survival’ at the College of Psychic Science at Brighton. Firebrace was… Well, perhaps it is best if he introduce himself.
During the war I was head of Intelligence in Scotland and I had the opportunity of attending a seance with Mrs. Duncan in Edinburgh. There appeared during the seance the form of a control, Albert, and he suddenly said ‘a great British battleship has just been sunk’. Well, I had no knowledge of this. After the seance I returned to my headquarters and as soon as I got back, about two hours after the sitting, I heard on the private line from the Admiralty in Scotland the news that the Hood had been sunk. And I was then able to check up that at the time of the seance the Admiralty had no knowledge whatever of the sinking of the ship. That was an instance of a materialised form, whatever you like to call it, which did give, I think at the correct time, the fact about the sinking of the battleship. So you understand from the point of view of the authorities, Mrs. Duncan was a somewhat dangerous person. It is a fact that the police from Scotland Yard did come to the International Institute while these stories were current, and consulted Mrs. Duncan there, and myself, as to how Mrs. Duncan could be prevented from giving this information out, because the authorities admitted that the information was authentic.
This evidence is much more interesting than the evidence for HMS Barham, where there is a relatively straightforward explanation at hand. All the signs are that Firebrace is a good witness. There is certainly no reason for doubting his honesty. Is there any other explanation, though, for this remarkable ‘coincidence’?
Memory Problems?
Let’s start on some minor but telling problems with Firebrace’s account. First, the Hood was blown up at 0559 or 0600 hours GMT; its destruction was so rapid that by 0603 nothing but bodies were on the surface of the water, the mighty hulk had vanished into the depths. We can assume then that Albert was not relaying information broadcast simultaneously from the North Atlantic as might be suggested by Firebrace’s words: ‘he suddenly said ‘a great British battleship has just been sunk’; and something there in his ‘I think at the correct time’.
Second, Firebrace states that, when he was with Duncan, the Admiralty did not yet know that Hood had been sunk. I’m assuming that the séance could not have started earlier than 9.00 am and that Firebrace would not have been back in his office before midday; let’s say that the séance lasted an hour. The Admiralty certainly knew long before 1200 on 24 May! The Hood had blown up at or just before 0600, remember. Hood fought alongside HMS Prince of Wales and the crew of the PoW watched horrified as Hood went up: she was less than a kilometer away when her magazine exploded. The PoW communicated the information immediately, not least because the PoW was not necessarily going to survive the duel with Bismarck; in fact, she almost did not. HMS King George V also communicated, at 0615, the news that was picked up by many horrified British ships in the Atlantic. As noted above there is absolutely no reason for doubting Firebrace’s honesty, but his memory was demonstrably at fault on these two important points.
Explanations?
No one – I hope! – would suggest that Helen Duncan had contacts within the Admiralty leaking her information. The most economical explanation, not involving psychic phenomenon, would be the following. Albert announced not ‘a great British battleship has just been sunk’, but ‘a British warship has just been sunk’. In WW2 the chances of that happening, particularly in 1941 proved to be, unfortunately, relatively high: Malcolm Gaskill makes this case in his Hellish Nell. As Bismarck was drowning members of the Home Fleet in the Atlantic the Germans were raining death on Crete and many British ships would be lost in subsequent operations to evacuate British and Dominion troops there: this Mediterranean disaster in the making had been trailed in the previous days newspapers that Duncan might have read. My guess would be that Firebrace returned to work to learn that the Hood had been sunk and that a chance sentence of Albert’s ‘evolved’ in his mind from ship to ‘battleship’.
Having said this there is no question that the evidence for Duncan’s gifts are much better for HMS Hood than they are for the HMS Barham later that same year. Any other thoughts: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
Sources
Bruce Taylor, The Battlecruiser Hood
Joe writes, 29 Mar 2018: ‘It is of course possible that such a thing could occur, as the Holy League defeated the Ottomans at Lepanto, the pope in Rome turned to those in the room with him and said, “We are victorious!” In a materialist age where such events are dismissed out of hand, no such events can be acknowledged. This doesn’t mean they don’t occur, just that they can’t by tautological imperative.’
Beach replies: ‘In total sympathy with this, just in my experience the evidence doesn’t add up… More’s the shame!’
