Helen Duncan - the last witch gaoled in Britain (1944)?

Witch hunts reached their peak in Britain (and other Protestant countries) in the 17th century, when the church viewed witches as women who worked in conjunction with the devil in order to harm decent Christian neighbours. In 1604 King James I proclaimed war against witchcraft, becoming witches' greatest enemy. Many trials foll­owed, including those instigated by witch hunter Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s. Hopkins travelled the country, using torture to secure confessions and to determine guilt. He executed hundreds of women and many others of his victims died in prison. The accused were largely female, often widows with no family to protect them. Many were healthcare workers, for example herbalists, healers or midwives. 

I knew from lectures that the last English execution for witchcraft was in 1684. James I's statute was repealed in 1736 by George II. In Scotland, the church outlawed witchcraft in 1563; by the time of the last execution in 1722, 1,500 Scottish witches had been put to death.

Parliament passed the 1736 Witchcraft Act repealing the old laws against witchcraft, but imposing fines or gaol on people who claimed to use magical powers to predict or alter the future. Prison yes, but thank goodness Britons were intelligent enough to end witchcraft tortures and executions.

So who was Helen Duncan (1897-1956) and why was she a witch? She was born in Scotland and was already displaying an interest in the spiritual at school. In 1916 she married Henry Duncan, cabinet maker and WW1 soldier, and had 6 babies. When she was not working in her factory job, she was offering séances in which she summoned the spirits of the dead. The London Spiritualist Alliance did not approve of Duncan's spiritualism and neither did the police; Duncan was prosecuted a number of times and fined or gaoled.

Helen Duncan and her husband Henry

By April 1941, at the height of the war with Germany, Helen Duncan had two sons in the navy, one in the RAF and one in the army. She had given more to her country's war effort than most families in Britain.

In November 1941, right in the middle of WW2, Duncan held a séance in Portsmouth at which she claimed the spirit of a dead sailor told her the HMS Barham had been sunk. This was true…. The HMS Barham had indeed sunk, torpedoed off the coast of Egypt in that same month, November 1941.

The Navy hoped to keep the tragedy quiet for a while, so official death notices were sent out to parents and wives of the 861 sailors, asking them to keep the secret until the official announce­ment came out in late Jan 1942. I suppose it was not a very careful guarded secret - The Times news­paper carried news of the disaster very quickly. Duncan simply picked up the gossip and did what any commercial spiritualist does – she incorporated it into her séance.

In wartime, any leakage of information, however trivial or improbable, was treated as if it might have been part of a spy ring. Duncan was investigated from the time of the Portsmouth seance (Nov 1941) until Jan 1944 when she was arrested. She was initially arrested, by two naval officers, on some minor charge. But the authorities clearly regarded this case as threatening the war effort. Eventually there were seven charges, two of conspiracy to contravene the Witch­craft Act, two of obtaining money by false pretences, and three of public mischief.

Witchcraft??? Of course in war the entire population was terrified. But did the prosecution really believe this middle aged, chunky Scottish factory worker had classified war intelligence which she could possibly reveal in the future? Perhaps the timing of the January 1944 arrest was critical; that was when the military was secretly preparing for the D-day land­ings. Everyone was on war footing, of course, but paranoid as well. Perhaps it was the fact that Portsmouth was exactly where the Royal Navy was based.

The jury brought in a guilty verdict on count one, and the judge then discharged them from giving verdicts on the other counts, as he held that they were alternative offences for which Duncan might have been convicted, had the jury acquitted her on the first count. Amazingly Helen Duncan had been formally identified by the Old Bailey jury as a witch. She was gaoled for nine months at Holloway women's prison in north London.

HMS Barham

Prime minister Winston Churchill rightly denounced her conviction as rid­ic­ulous and repealed the 1735 Act in 1951, but her conviction was never overturned. Nor did the Home Secretary ever explain why Duncan was charged under the Witch­craft Act, rather than on a spying charge or a breach of the State Secrets Act. She was released in 1945 and died in 1956.