Family campaigns for 'witch' pardon
Updated on 19 March 2007
The family of Helen Duncan, the last woman to convicted under the witchcraft act, have started a campaign for her posthumous pardon.
It sounds more like the seventeenth century, but it happened just a few decades ago. Now the family of the last British woman to be convicted under the witchcraft act are stepping up their campaign for a pardon.
Helen Duncan was jailed in 1944, in the paranoid days of the second world war.
Previous attempts to get a pardon have failed but now her supporters have started an online petition to the prime minister.
When the Barham sank, the government kept the news quiet, even forging Christmas cards from the dead to their families. But they reckoned without Helen Duncan.
A Scottish medium with a huge following, she held a seance in Portsmouth days after the attack and told the family of a dead sailor he'd appeared to say his ship had sunk.
Three years on, with huge secrecy surrounding plans for D-Day, the authorities wanted Helen Duncan silenced. She was arrested for conspiracy and fraud, but convicted in just 30 minutes under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
She'd even offered to hold a seance at the Old Bailey but the judge declined. She became the last ever witch to be jailed in this country.
Churchill wrote a memo denouncing her conviction as 'obsolete tomfoolery'.
The then prime minister, Winston Churchill, is said to have visited Mrs Duncan in prison. There's even a rumour he went to one or two of her séances. He certainly wrote a memo denouncing her conviction as "obsolete tomfoolery", and went on to repeal the witchcraft act in 1951.
Mrs Duncan's family and fellow spiritualists want the present prime minister to conjure up a posthumous pardon. 50 years after her death, they've set up a petition on the Downing Street website.
Helen Duncan's methods may look bizarre - there is even a photo of her producing ectoplasm from her. Fraud or genuine psychic, whatever Helen Duncan's powers, her followers hope their petition will work its own magic.
