Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches

Private seances, at which spirits are said still to return, were once more of a public affair. In darkened back-rooms, cellars and halls across Britain, thousands of people went to 'the spooks' hoping to see mediums manifest ghostly forms. For many, working-class Scot Helen Duncan - nicknamed Hellish Nell' - was the best there had ever been, providing solace to the bereaved and proof of life after death. But fame turned to infamy early in 1944 when she was tried at the Old Bailey under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, and sentenced to nine months in prison.

It was one of the most sensational episodes in wartine Britain. Why did the trial occur just weeks before the Normandy landings? Why was Helen Duncan gaoled for summoning spirits when mediums were usually fined as petty frauds? And what actually happened at the seances to impress so many respectable people, more than forty of whom testified as defence witnesses at her trial? Was she in fact a mystic, a con-artist or even a spy? To Spiritualists, Helen Duncan was a martyr. But she was also exploited financially, objectified for research, pursued as a public nuisance, and packaged as sensational news. Most intriguingly, to the state she became a security risk.

Her fascinating and poignant story was a broth of wartime anxieties, legal deviousness, science and pseudo-science, conspiracy, politics and sheer entertainment. Beyond that, it touches on deeper, more universal themes: faith and knowledge, class and reputation, institutions and individuals, love and remembrance, truth and justice. It also forces consideration of the oldest and most difficult question of all: what happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had lived through the slaughter and sorrow of two world wars.

'Fascinating and highly intelligent . . . Malcolm Gaskill has researched the whole story of Helen Duncan's life with exemplary thoroughness: his account sparkles with dry humour, but is not without sympathy too. Its main value - apart from the sheer entertainment value of a story poised somewhere between Svengali and Mr Pooter - lies in the light it shines on the social phenomenon of Spiritualism in early twentieth-century Britain.'
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

'Hugely revealing of many aspects of early twentieth-century British life . . . capable of switching from highbrow to lowbrow in consecutive sentences, and supplying paragraphs of historical detail packed as tight as his subject's ectoplasmic underwear.'
D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times

'Fascinating and meticulous . . . Gaskill's dispassionate and thorough study does not seek to martyr her [Helen Duncan]. But it does illuminate aspects of British society and its attitudes which are not so far removed from our own, and which should cause us shame.'
Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday



'This lively book . . . is comprehensive and scholarly, and also extremely readable, being full of trenchant phrases and vivid analogies. It is balanced, fair and a salutary reminder, in our secularised society, that belief in the supernatural is still endemic.'
Jessica Mann, Literary Review

'Full of quirky detours into Spiritualism's uniquely odd hall of fame (all its friends and enemies are here, from Arthur Conan Doyle to Harry Houdini). But its chief fascination, I think, lies in the way it shows how the Spiritualist movement, for a certain group of women, proved to be more liberating than winning the vote.'
Rachel Cooke, New Statesman

'Malcolm Gaskill has undertaken to tell the life-story of Helen Duncan, placing her in the context of her time and class. The book is also in a wider sense an enquiry into "how we know the things we know" and how what we can know or choose to know is circumscribed by our culture . . . A great strength of Gaskill's book is that it provides, by the way, a piece of working-class history: he makes Spiritualism comprehensible in the context of the utter bleakness of the lives he describes.'
Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books

'Fascinating.'
Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail

'Malcolm Gaskill's book is long, full, admirably researched, and so cranky in parts that it reads as if it had been dictated from the other world.'
Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

'Hellish Nell is as much a biography of Spiritualism as of Helen Duncan. Gaskill is not concerned with whether Spiritualism is 'true' or not, but with how its adherents viewed its beliefs and practices - which included the manifestation of ectoplasm.'
David V. Barrett, Independent

'This is a tremendous story, which Malcolm Gaskill tells with all the gusto of a historian on holiday . . . His research is admirably thorough . . . his voice, sympathetic yet unflinchingly analytical permeates the book . . . The human relationship with magic is one in which tragedy and farce are constantly intermixed, and Malcolm Gaskill shows how vividly this was true in early twentieth-century Britain.'
Ronald Hutton, Times Literary Supplement

'Gaskill tells the story of this woman with an academic rigour . . . scrupulously logging evidence for an against the central claim that she was a fraud who made a good living out of bunkum.'
Walter Ellis, The Times

'A fascinating and poignant tale . . . Malcolm Gaskill . . . has no axe to grind and adopts an inquiring rather than inquisitorial stance throughout.'
Steve Craggs, Darlington Northern Echo

'A boiling cauldron of intrigue . . . a fascinating and poignant story.'
Chester Evening Leader

'[An] extraordinary story.'
Venue

'Supernatural stirrings, sexual voyeurism and courtroom drama, this book has all the ingredients of prize-winning fiction. The fact that it's true makes it all the more gripping.'
Zoe Willows, Focus

'Book of the week.'
The Week

'Who would give credence to a week-long witchcraft trial at the Old Bailey under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in 1944! Well, it happened, and poor Helen Duncan, nicknamed 'Hellish Nell', overweight and an angina sufferer, got nine months in Holloway . . . Interesting.'
Brian Case, Time Out

'Hellish Nell can tell us more about our past than she ever could about the future.'
Jennifer Cunningham, Glasgow Herald

'A well-researched biography . . . Dr Gaskill is concerned with the cultural relativity of belief systems and avoids offering a verdict on the objective reality of the phenomena attributed to Helen Duncan, either as a child clairvoyant or an adult materialization medium. Nevertheless, some of the observations he records leave little doubt that she produced effects by horribly mundane methods of deception.'
Donald West, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research

'Using [Helen] Duncan to understand Spiritualism and Spiritualism to understand society, the fruits of Gaskill's labours are as persuasive as they are fascinating . . . This is a book about the lingering presence of the past in beliefs and ideas, but it is also a book about modernity. Helen Duncan's life, it seems, has little to do with the witch-cult, and everything to do with the cult of celebrity.'
William Gordon, Archives

'Skilfully blends the events of her [Helen Duncan's] curious and, to be honest, quite sad life into a detailed but highly readable history that takes in Spiritualism, witchcraft and all manner of mystical jiggery-pokery. It reveals that Dunkirk was not the only spirit to be invoked during the dark moments of the Second World War.'
Travis Elborough, Waterstone's Online

'In telling Helen Duncan's story, historian Malcolm Gaskill takes us on a fascinating tour of Spiritualism and the social and religious factors behind it . . . With witchcraft and spirituality currently undergoing a renaissance, Hellish Nell offers up interesting food for thought on Spiritualism and psychic ability and shows that, even in the twenty-first century, we still don't have all the answers.'
Jo Green, Norwich Eastern Daily Press

'An amazing glimpse into the spiritual and psychological mood of the times, a story of bathos and absurdity, of credulity and cruelty, and of England's last witch.'
Amazon Books

'The fact that the book is written as though the highly questionable occurrences are solid fact that makes it so compelling . . . An absorbing and informative read.'
Fliss Evans, Cambridge Adhoc

'Fascinating.'
Anna Carey, Dublin Sunday Tribune

'Gaskill's style draws one into an extraordinary world of emotion, longing, fraud, bathos, credulity, banality and the dowright bizarre . . . a great read.'
New Directions

'Hellish Nell is an entertaining blend of vaudeville humour and legal jigsaw set against the bleak backdrop of war . . . the story is made all the more riveting because it is true.'
Abigail Hughes, Abergele Visitor

'The true story of Helen Duncan . . . cannot fail to fascinate.'
Big Issue

'Malcolm Gaskill uncovers the story of the woman who many were convinced had amazing powers, yet others tried to discredit . . . fascinating.'
Helen Mead, Bradford Telegraph & Argus

'Well-researched, occasionally hilarious . . . It is an odd characteristic of the human mind that, try as it might to conceive of things spiritual, it continually returns to matter, wanting to believe on the one hand, but needing to see and touch on the other.'
John Burnside, The Scotsman

'Gaskill's intelligent study glimpses beyond mere biography and uses the story as a measure of wartime anxieties, of legal deviousness, science, pseudo-science, conspiracy and folklore. It's one big melting pot of paranoia, and, well, stupidity might be a better word. Poor old Hellish Nell. Not a witch. Not really. Thank God for investigative historians like Gaskill and books like this that can finally lay her particular ghost to rest.'
Mick Middles, Manchester Evening News

'This fascinating book makes you long to know how mediums achieved their spectacular effects - floating trumpets, ectoplasm, disembodied voices, flowers from nowhere and translucent spirits. Suggestions that Helen Duncan hid sixteen yards of muslin in her mouth (or other orifices) and made it flow out in a spooky miasma don't convince me . . . I do wish I'd seen her in action.'
Mavis Campion, The Veteran

'Helen [Duncan] may be dead but she's far from forgotten and Mr Gaskill's book will give the old Spiritualist a new lease of life.'
Alan Cleaver, Hampshire Chronicle

'As Malcolm Gaskill's detailed and illuminating reconstruction makes clear, Helen Duncan's misfortune was to be a soothsayer at a time of national security paranoia . . . Hellish Nell perhaps did nothing wrong, but rather offered solace and meaning in the midst of pain and the absurdity of what Freud called "the accumulation of death".'
James Ferguson, The Tablet

'The extraordinary life of Helen Duncan . . . Gaskill takes in her career as a medium and, although treating his subject unsensationally, he reveals some astonishing facts - such as the tricks that were revealed when frauds purported to manifest ghostly forms of the dead.'
Books Magazine

'Hellish Nell is obviously the main character in the book, but this is a history as well as a biography, set in the Spiritualist boom years of the two world wars with their tragic loss of life. So we meet the old practitioners like Florence Cook, D. D. Home and Eusapia Palladino, as well as the credulous scientists Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge in England and Dr Charles Richet in France. Not to mention the ambivalent Harry Price.'
Colin McCall, New Humanist

'Opinion is divided as to whether Duncan was spy, a mystic, or quite simply a con merchant. The whole event was a quite extraordinary affair, but in Gaskill's hands it becomes an intriguing insight into a little-known facet of wartime Britain.'
Robert Colbeck, Yorkshire Evening Post

'Intellectually polished and eminently readable if occasionally annoying.'
Lyn Guest de Swarte, Psychic News