Britain's Last Witch
On the 60th anniversary of the sinking of HMS Hood, Malcolm Gaskill looks at the prosecution of medium Helen Duncan for witchcraft in 1944.
Sixty years ago this month, the battleship HMS Hood was sunk off Greenland killing all but three of its 1,418 crew. Before the news had spread, even within official circles, at a seance in Scotland a medium’s spirit-guide described the disaster, an announcement which soon reached the ears of the security services. In wartime, any leakage of information, however trivial or improbable, was liable to be investigated, and so from this time the work of the medium, Helen Duncan, was monitored until January 1944 when she was arrested during a raid on a seance. Towards the end of March, Mrs Duncan was prosecuted at London’s Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, not for a breach of security, or even for fraud, but for conspiracy to contravene the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
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