Witchcraft during Wartime: the trial of Helen Duncan

Published in Criminal Law & Justice Weekly, (2011) Vol 175, No. 03, p 27. 

In earlier columns I have written about wartime cases to reflect on present-day problems. Such cases are often the most instructive, because it is during wartime that a legal system is under the greatest strain, and how it reacts to that strain says a great deal about the system. Previously I have considered cases where the law reached the right conclusion. This month, however, I am concerned with a case which should never have been brought at all: that of Helen Duncan, often (incorrectly) said to be the last person in Britain to be tried for witchcraft.


Duncan held herself out to be a spiritual medium. She received minor convictions for fraudulent activities relating to her "trade" before the Second World War, but acquired lasting fame during the conflict by telling one anguished person during a séance that her son’s ship, HMS Barham, had been sunk.

News of this revelation caused alarm in Whitehall. The Barham had indeed been lost, but the Navy had suppressed the information. The reason was that intelligence had revealed that the Germans did not know about the sinking, since the U-Boat commander responsible had been unsure. Several other capital ships had been lost around the same time, and news of the Barham’s loss would have been a severe blow to morale as well as a German propaganda victory. Fearing that Duncan had access to its secrets, therefore, the state decided to put her out of business.

After some impressive pre-internet legal research by the prosecution, Duncan was charged under s 4 of the Witchcraft Act 1735, concerning “fraudulent spiritual activity” (rather than witchcraft per se). The trial that followed veered towards farce, with a number of apparently respectable people prepared to testify that her powers were genuine, but with the judge prohibiting Duncan herself from “proving” her abilities in court. She was eventually convicted by a jury and imprisoned for nine months.

After the trial Churchill lambasted the case as “tomfoolery”, and it is hard to disagree. It seems absurd that the authorities thought Duncan either a genuine medium or privy to state secrets: the fact that she guessed that a ship during wartime had been sunk hardly constitutes proof of anything.

If Duncan had indeed improperly obtained state secrets, she should have been charged on those grounds accordingly. If that was the true reason for the trial, however, but the prosecution chose instead to prosecute her under the Witchcraft Act for its own convenience, then that looks like a misuse of the legal system.

The most persuasive ground for the law’s intervention was that Duncan was exploiting the vulnerable, and that argument of course applies to all others in her vocation. There is clearly some justification for the state prosecuting charlatans. Then again, if people derive comfort from falsity, why should others object? In a free society, if competent adults wish to pay for such “services” they should have the right to do so, both as an exercise of the right to freedom of contract and the right to freedom of religion.

On the other hand, trading standards usually require that vendors do not offer for sale something they know to be false, particularly when the prospective purchaser is likely to be vulnerable.

In the absence of blatant trickery, however, the question of proof in either direction is an interesting one; after all, a good many intelligent people seem to want to believe in the Loch Ness monster, and it is not as if the veracity of mainstream religion is any more open to scientific proof. In all seriousness, the state is generally best leaving such things to the marketplace of ideas.

At most, spiritual mediums and similar types should be the concern of trading standards rather than the criminal law. There may come a point where coercion or deception merits criminal proceedings, but existing laws against intimidation or fraud should suffice in those cases. Otherwise, commercial regulation rather than specific criminal offences should be the extent of the law’s intervention, the aim being to restrict misleading advertising or otherwise protect the vulnerable rather than shut down the business altogether.

The justification is that the state should adhere strictly to the separation of church and state. On the one hand, the state should not seek to outlaw peddlers of religion and spiritualism. On the other hand no funding or official sanction should be given for spiritual or religious activities, “mainstream” or otherwise. Rather, the state should concentrate on education, surely the consumers’ best weapon against snake oil salesmen of any kind.

Coda: Recently, supporters of Duncan campaigned to have her pardoned. They were unsuccessful, though their website seeks to assure everyone that Duncan's powers were genuine. Readers can judge that one for themselves.