HELEN WOOLLGAR DE GAUDRION VERRALL (1883-1959) AND THE EVIDENCE FOR TELEPATHY

Helen Verrall, my great aunt, was, like her mother Margaret, a psychic medium, active in the Society for Psychic Research. The Society was formed in 1882 with the intention of applying scientific methods to the study of that great Victorian fascination, the paranormal.

Helen Verrall and Willy Salter on their wedding day, 
28^th September 1915

After her marriage in 1915 she introduced her husband William Henry Salter to the work of the Society, which he joined in 1916 and served at various times as Treasurer, Secretary and – in 1947-48 – as President. He was a historian at Cambridge; but as far as I can tell, all his published work after his marriage was concerned with psychic phenomena, including Ghosts and Apparitions and Zoar, his review of the evidence of psychical research concerning survival after death, dedicated to Helen “and all who are working to complete Man’s knowledge of his Nature.”

As Mrs W.H. Salter, Helen also wrote, and gave talks. Among her publications is the Frederic Myers Memorial Lecture which she gave in 1945, Psychic Research: Where Do We Stand?; and Evidence for Telepathy: The Response to a Broadcast Request for Cases, which followed a talk she gave on the BBC on 16th February 1934 with a round-up of some of the four hundred letters she subsequently received. “A few of these,” she notes in her introduction, “were from persons not entirely sane.”

Evidence for Telepathy, by Mrs WH Salter (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934)

The book examines fifty eight of the more credible ones, and she concludes, “These are the kind of things that happen from time to time to ordinary people, leading ordinary lives.” There’s a lovely matter-of-factness about that remark that I like.

Many of her correspondents describe telepathic intimations of the death or illness of a loved one which were later confirmed by more conventional communication. It is shiver-up-the-spine stuff, and I wonder idly where Willy was when Helen died, and whether he sensed her parting.

Here are two of the cases she reports. The first

… was sent by Mr JR Johnstone, who wrote as follows:

My Battalion was stationed at Ballykinlar Camp, County Down, Ireland, in April 1917. On 5^th April I was “Captain of the Day.” Part of my “duties” was the turning out of the various Guards, once after 10pm and once after midnight. Between these times I was sitting alone on a deck-chair in my cubicle reading a book.

In the middle of a chapter, I stood up and exclaimed aloud, “Arthur is killed.”

On April 7 Mr Johnstone received an official telegram informing him of his brother Arthur’s death in action on April 5^th, and subsequently he learnt in a letter from a brother-officer that Lieutenant Johnstone had been killed at about 11pm.

The death of 2^nd Lieutenant Arthur James Johnstone, 6/7 Bn The Royal Scots Fusiliers, is officially recorded [notes Aunt Helen] as having occurred on April 5, 1917.

Ballykinlar Camp became an internment centre during the Irish War of Independence in 1920-21

For the second, her informant

… was Mrs Bradburn, who wrote thus:

In the year 1893 my husband’s brother was out in South Africa at the time of the rising of the Matabele War, and all had to take part in it to protect their farms. One night my husband woke me up, and was terribly upset. He dreamt he saw his brother in the midst of fighting, and all at once he saw a lot of smoke and his brother fall into it, at the same time calling my husband by name.

That was on December 3, and we got a letter from him on January 1, saying they were going to fight Lobengula, the King of the Matabeles. The letter was dated on the eve of the battle and it coincided with my husband’s dream. My brother-in-law was one of the twenty-four brave men in Major Wilson’s last stand.

Major Wilson’s Last Stand was a celebrated act of British Imperial heroism. The entire party (actually thirty-four men) were cut off and massacred by 3000 warriors in the British equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand. A Sgt Bradburn is known to have been a member of Major Wilson’s party.

Major Wilson’s Last Stand, as depicted on a cigarette card

THOMAS WOOLLGAR (1761-1821) AND THE LEWES LIBRARY SOCIETY

Thomas Woollgar was my great aunt Helen Verrall’s great great grandfather and a man after my own heart, so fascinated by so many things that he found it hard to settle on any one thing. His was a constantly enquiring mind. A draper to trade, he taught himself medicine and natural history in his time off and was a compulsive student of the past and present of his town, Lewes in Sussex.

 

Lewes, Sussex, painted by JWM Turner in c1796

He wrote everything down. His observations of local botany, his transcriptions of monumental inscriptions and ancient records, even the names and trades of everyone living in Lewes – the surviving notes in his neat handwriting, bound in huge leather-bound volumes, are now in the care of Sussex Archaeological Society. The books, known as Specilegia Lewensis (a Lewes Miscellany), form a priceless snapshot of the place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Only a generation after the pioneering naturalist Gilbert White, Woollgar's botanical collections were the earliest studies of the area’s ecology and fossil-rich geology. A year after his death his friend and fellow naturalist Gideon Mantell named a locally occurring ammonite, Collignoniceras woollgari, in his honour.

Collignoniceras woollgari, discovered in lower chalk deposits around Lewes by Gideon Mantell in 1822

Thomas was a founder member of the Lewes Library Society, one of the thirteen people who on 1^st January 1786 chipped in half a crown each (12.5 pence) and a monthly subscription of a shilling (5p) to set up nothing less than a temple to the arts and sciences built of printed words. Members could nominate books for the library to purchase with their subscription fees, and by 1824 the collection contained some 3400 volumes for a membership which now numbered 92. Gideon Mantell signed up in 1789.

From the start it had lofty aims. No type of publication was expressly excluded, but as Gideon noted in 1824,

A taste for light reading seems rather to have gained ground among the members, which is perhaps mainly to be attributed to the excessive popularity of the works of “the author of Waverley.” [The first of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels appeared in 1814.] It is to be hoped that the leading members of the establishment, will always exert themselves to prevent the character and importance of the collection from being lessened by too great an influx of works of mere imagination. That this institution should ever become assimilated to a common circulating library, would be a matter of sincere regret.

1839 Fisher edition of the Magnum Opus, the collected Waverley novels: pulp fiction to Gideon Mantell, but they did look good on the shelves

Thomas Woollgar served as the library’s second president from the early 1800s until his death in 1821. By then the joining fee had risen to six guineas (£6.30), and the monthly subscription to five crowns (£1.25). Thomas’s tenure was marred by unproven accusations of his financial impropriety. He was succeeded by a Lewes upholsterer, William Verrall, another founder member of the society and another ancestor of my great aunt Helen.

And lest you think that it was all dry-as-dust high literature and learned non-fiction for those early readers, I can tell you that romance blossomed among the shelves of their first-floor library in Lewes High Street. It was announced in 1794 that two founder members were to wed – Thomas Woollgar and Anne Webb, “a woman of most amiable character” according to Gideon. Thomas was made a partner by his employer as a wedding gift, but four years later resigned to pursue knowledge fulltime. Anne died in 1815, and "her removal [wrote Gideon] caused a blank in Thomas’s enjoyments that even time could not supply." They were reunited by Thomas’s death only six years later. The Society continued until 1897 when its books were donated to Lewes's new public library.

ARTHUR WOOLLGAR VERRALL (1851-1912) AND THE PROPER BOOK

I’ve been writing about books recently, those handed down from generation to generation in my family, and the inscriptions inside them. One that came up was Essays on Two Moderns by my great uncle, the historian William Henry Salter (1880-1969). It’s a 1911 collection of four essays: three about Euripides, the ancient Greek tragedian, and one on Samuel Butler, author of the 1872 Utopian novel Erewhon. My copy belonged to my father, and he got it from his father, my grandfather Frederick Gurney Salter, to whom it was given by his brother the author. It’s inscribed

“F.G.S. from W.H.S.

With thanks for much valuable assistance

6 Feb. 1911”

My father produced it for me as an example of a “proper book” (by which I think he meant one with serious ideas and no pictures) when I tried one last time to impress him with one of mine (a frivolous and illustrated approach to kick-starting your artistic genius, since you ask) in 2008.

Arthur Woollgar Verrall (1851-1912)

In his preface, Uncle Willy pays lavish tribute to the leading Euripidean scholar and translator of the day, Arthur Woollgar Verrall. Both men attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Verrall was a tutor there from 1889 to 1899, the year Salter went up to Cambridge, and Willy (who graduated with a 1^st Class degree in 1901) mentions having attended one of Dr Verrall’s lectures on Euripides in around 1908. Their views on Euripides chimed, and Willy was at pains in the preface to stress that he had reached his long before hearing Dr Verrall’s thoughts or reading Verrall’s latest books on the subject.

Verrall’s views were, in his day, unorthodox. He was one of the first classicists to consider ancient Greek drama on its theatrical merits and not just as dead poetry. He used examples from modern literature to illuminate the text, a radical departure from traditional self-contained classics practice. Verrall sometimes overthought challenges of interpretation, choosing over-complicated explanations for difficult passages instead of the more obvious ones generally accepted by other scholars. Supporters described him as ingenious, detractors as convoluted.

Euripides (or is it Dr Verrall?)

His translations reflected his idiosyncratic approach, to the extent that Uncle Willy remarked in his preface, “Euripides (or is it Dr Verrall?) is the most notable dramatist of the modern school.” Verrall’s very modern approach made him an excellent choice when the university appointed its first ever professor of English literature in 1911. Before then he had already given popular lectures on Walter Scott and on Victorian poets, and in the new chair he delivered a course on Dryden. But by 1911 he had become so disabled by arthritis that he had to be carried to and from the lectern, and he died the following year.

The two men, Verrall and Salter, certainly knew and respected each other through their academic work at Trinity College. I would like to think that they were friends too, not least because four years later Willy married Arthur’s daughter Helen, my great aunt.

William Henry Salter and Helen Verrall on their wedding day, 28^th September 1915

Helen, like her mother Margaret, was amongst other things a psychic medium, active in the Society for Psychic Research and particularly involved in receiving the so-called Cross-Correspondences from beyond the grave. One of her correspondents after 1912 was, it was claimed, her father.

Helen, named I feel sure after Euripides’ romantic comedy of the same name, introduced her new husband to the work of the Society, which he joined in 1916 and served at various times as Treasurer, Secretary and – in 1947-48 – as President. As far as I can tell, all his published work after his marriage was concerned with psychic phenomena. Probably not what my father would call “proper books.”

FREDERIC MERRIFIELD (1831-1924), LEPIDOPTERA AND GLOBAL WARMING

Everybody needs a hobby. Frederic Merrifield was my great aunt’s grandfather and a successful barrister on the south coast of England; but life isn’t just about work. Frederic’s hobby was butterflies and moths, and living on the edge of the Sussex Downs he could not have been better placed – next to one of the richest Lepidoptera habitats in Britain.

Pieris napi, the Green-veined White butterfly

Like many enthusiastic amateur gentlemen of the nineteenth century, Frederic took his hobby seriously. It was an age of scientific enquiry, spurred by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 which effectively launched the theory of evolutionary biology. So Frederic applied himself to the methodical study of moths and butterflies. By the end of the century the Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London had included several papers by him, and he served as the society’s president in 1905-1906.

Vanessa atalanta, the Red Admiral butterfly

Merrifield’s special interest was the effect of changes of temperature on the various stages of the Lepidoptera lifestyle, particularly the colours and markings of the insects. Amongst his papers were Systematic temperature experiments on some Lepidoptera in all their stages, Conspicuous Effects on the markings and colouring of Lepidoptera caused by exposure of the pupœ to different temperature conditions, and The effects of temperature in the pupal stage on the colouring of Pieris napi, Vanessa atalanta, Chrysophanus philœas, and Ephyra punctaria.

Chrysophanus philœas, the Small Copper butterfly

I’m not qualified to comment on the science, but Frederic Merrifield cannot have imagined how relevant his investigations would be 120 years after he wrote about them. Small temperature changes have dramatic effects on species – even I know how they affect the proportion of the genders in reptile births, for example. As the world heats up, I wonder how many biologists are revisiting Frederic’s studies, looking for clues to the effects of global warming.

Ephyra punctaria, the Maiden’s Blush moth

Frederic's daughter Margaret De Gaudrion Merrifield married Arthur Verrall, whose cousin George Henry Verrall also served as president of the Entymological Society, in 1899-1900. It's a small world, and not just for moths.