Gerald Balfour is remembered today mostly for being the brother and political confidant of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister and statesman who later issued the famous declaration that the British government would ‘view with favour’ the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Gerald had spent a few years in the 1870s teaching classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a few more trying to write philosophy in Florence, but in 1885 he joined the family business and entered Parliament for the Conservatives. He made little mark there until a decade later, when Lord Salisbury appointed him, in what the papers called a ‘family arrangement’, to the same post his brother had held in the late 1880s, Chief Secretary for Ireland. Administratively talented but never politically adept, Gerald ended his time in Ireland resented by nationalists for his superior manner and loathed by landlords for his surprisingly progressive land and local government reforms. Alongside his brother and another 200 Conservative MPs, Gerald lost his seat in the 1906 Liberal landslide.

Gerald Balfour left politics without regret. He did some of the things well-connected outgoing politicians do, joining company boards and serving on Royal Commissions, but he spent much of his time until his death almost forty years later in his study, sometimes with collaborators but often alone, trying to discern patterns and meanings in a great heap of automatic writings – or ‘scripts’ – produced by a psychically attuned woman who walked into his life in 1911 and knocked him sideways.

For in 1906, at a loose end and at the urging of his sister (and Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge), Eleanor (Nora) Sidgwick, Gerald Balfour accepted the presidency of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Founded in 1882 by a tight-knit group of friends mostly associated with Trinity College, Cambridge (including Gerald and Arthur, who served in 1893 as its president), the Society spoke to a wide late-Victorian interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. Its most active members – especially Nora’s husband Henry Sidgwick, Professor of Moral Philosophy – insisted spiritualist claims must be investigated ‘scientifically’. For two decades, the Society researched mediumship and telepathy, debunked claims and exposed frauds, but in the early twentieth century it moved in a new direction.¹ Gerald, in a public lecture in 1909, encouraged the Society to devise a means to assess evidence for ‘spirit-return’ after death.² The prominent physicist Oliver Lodge and a Cambridge coterie were already working along these lines, collecting scripts – automatic writings produced by mediums in a trance state and ostensibly working in isolation from one another – and searching them for common phrases or motifs that might indicate telepathy or the presence of intelligences seeking to communicate from beyond the grave.

One of those recruited ‘automatists’ proved particularly prolific and talented, transmitting messages purportedly from the SPR’s most prominent dead founder-members (and the current leadership’s closest friends) themselves: Henry Sidgwick (who died in 1900), the poet Frederic W.H. Myers (who died in 1901), and especially the experimental psychologist Edmund Gurney (who died, possibly by his own hand, in 1888). This was one ‘Mrs Willett’, the nom-de-medium of a wealthy Welsh matron named Winifred Coombe Tennant, whose psychic activities would remain, through her life, a closely-guarded secret. ‘Mrs Willett’s’ scripts urged the production of children, exceptional children, and especially of one child – ‘a genius . . . of a high order’, a world-leader to be conceived by the automatist herself. ³ In her not-strictly-private diary and in conversations with Lodge, Winifred expressed her amazement about that otherworldly request: she was not having sex with her husband anymore, and they had no plans for further children. ‘If I do bear yet another,’ she wrote, ‘it will only be as a direct result of Edmund Gurney’s repeated requests and my love for him.’⁴ She did bear another child. Augustus Henry Coombe Tennant, named to inaugurate a new Augustan age, was born on 9 April 1913.

What was known to only a few at the time, and was kept secret from the child Henry (as he was known) until his mid-forties, was that he was Gerald Balfour’s son, conceived in a hotel on Langland Bay on the Welsh coast in early July 1912. Born to fulfill a prophecy, he was scrutinized through the first half of his life by Balfour, his mother, and a few in-the-know members of the Society for Psychical Research for signs of that world-transforming genius they confidently awaited. Through those decades, the automatists (all women) kept the scripts coming, and the interpreters – especially Gerald and his close friend and research partner J.G. Piddington – kept hard at work too, documenting those common motifs and patterns that, they thought, could not be explained by chance alone. This was the project of the ‘cross-correspondences’, the Society’s protracted effort to ‘prove’ the survival of human consciousness.⁵ It was also, surely, one of the most elaborate justifications for an extramarital liaison ever devised.

Not that Winifred and Gerald’s script practice was just a hoax. Winifred Coombe Tennant didn’t fabricate psychic communications simply to draw this attractive older man into her bed (though she clearly wanted him there); Gerald didn’t cast himself as the servant of higher powers to excuse a folie à deux that would give his wife much pain. All parties in this story – Winifred and Gerald, automatists and script interpreters – genuinely believed themselves to be receiving messages from the other side. They were world-making as well as lovemaking, and if the rules of their practice seem only too familiar, urging a union of spiritual women and rational men, they acted in a period of such gender codes under pressure – pressure that turned our medium unreliable and changed the plot. ‘Mrs Willett’ would foretell, and then produce, a messianic child – a child, so the psychical researchers thought, who would be someone just like them: a man, educated at Eton and Trinity, launched into public life. So, Gerald Balfour shut himself up in a Surrey country house for three decades, poring over scripts, as the woman who produced those scripts became a suffragist and internationalist, a Liberal candidate for parliament and a delegate to the League of Nations.

 

Winifred Coombe Tennant was born in 1874 into a Cambridgeshire gentry family and raised mostly in Switzerland, Italy and France. A romantic girl, at twenty-one, in ‘a sort of “bold pirate” mood’, she married Charles Coombe Tennant, a wealthy barrister twenty-two years her elder with a landed estate, Cadoxton, in South Wales. She later deplored this ‘hopeless irrevocable mistake’, for Charles proved fussy and uninteresting, but the marriage had compensations: her mother-in-law had been Flaubert’s mistress; one sister-in-law was married to Henry Morton Stanley, another to the poet and founder-member of the SPR, F.W.H. Myers.⁶ Winifred had a first child, Christopher, in 1897. A second, Daphne, was born in January 1907 and died at eighteen months – at which point Winifred’s diary explodes in paroxysms of grief and anguish.

How does one bear a loved child’s death? Like so many bereft parents, Winifred was desperate to feel her daughter near her. F.W.H. Myers was dead by then, but his widow assured her sister-in-law that, in the spirit world, Daphne lived on, ‘fuller of Life now than ever could be here.’⁷ As she read up on spiritualism and psychical research, Winifred began an intense correspondence with the Newnham classicist, SPR member, and automatist Margaret Verrall, who had also lost an infant daughter. Coached by Verrall, Winifred practiced sitting with a blank pad of paper before her, emptying her mind of conscious thought, and writing whatever came. This is how automatists usually work, but in early 1909 Winifred also began having what she called ‘D.I.s’ – ‘Daylight Impressions’ – where she heard ‘Myers’, ‘Sidgwick’ or ‘Gurney’ speaking, and wrote down what they said. To her joy, those communicators regularly brought Daphne with them, the little girl appearing first as a lisping toddler, and then as a mischievous child, her appearance and character changing as – in the spirit world – she grew. Slowly, Winifred began to detect a Plan: Daphne’s death had been necessary, its purpose to draw  Winifred into that world. Now in regular contact with (and persistently dreaming of ) Oliver Lodge, Winifred produced script after script.⁸

Winifred was thirty-seven in 1911; Gerald Balfour was fifty-eight. Very intelligent and always rather remote, Gerald was the second youngest and the most beautiful of the Balfour boys. Tall, slim, judged delicate in health, his longish hair thick even in extreme old age, Gerald turned heads his whole life. His Eton tutor Oscar Browning fell in love with him, bearing the teenage Gerald off to Sicily on holiday; so too his sister-in-law Lady Frances Balfour, wife of his architect brother Eustace, who worked hard to arouse Gerald’s interest in politics and bring him back to England from Florence. Through the late 1880s and 1890s, Frances and Eustace, and Gerald and his intelligent and musical wife Lady Betty Lytton, lived with their growing families in adjacent villas in Kensington, as Gerald rose in politics and Frances became the women’s movement’s most effective parliamentary lobbyist. But that ménage à quâtre soured, and in 1901 Gerald and Betty moved their family to Fishers Hill, a lovely Arts and Crafts house in Surrey built for them by Betty’s architect brother-in-law Edwin Lutyens. It was to that house that Gerald invited this whispered-about medium in February, 1911.

It was a coup de foudre. Winifred thought Gerald extremely beautiful – ‘like a Greek head or an old ivory’.⁹ Gerald felt honored by the presence of a great adept. Oliver Lodge, Nora Sidgwick, and J.G. Piddington were there too; the group talked about its research plans. In June 1911, Winifred visited again, and – at ‘Edmund Gurney’s’ urging – she and Gerald began to work together, adapting solitary script-making into a game for two. Secluded in Gerald’s study, ‘Mrs Willett’ declaimed while Gerald transcribed – although, from the evidence of the scripts, it is clear that the two sometimes wrote in tandem, as if co-authoring a play, ‘Mrs Willett’ acting the role of ‘Sidgwick’ or ‘Gurney’, and Gerald as himself.¹⁰ Betty approved the friendship, for she was (Gerald wrote) a ‘wonderful woman’, someone who knew that ‘the affection given to one is not taken away from the other’.¹¹

But the spirits were restless, ‘Gurney’s’ instructions growing more explicit by the day. On 6 August 1911, Winifred, alone, transcribed a long message thick with agricultural and sexual imagery. ‘Write the word seed,’ ‘Gurney’ instructed. ‘Write again the word Plan.’ And tell Gerald he is wrong to think his life’s work lies in the past: ‘It lies – quite distinctly – in the future.’¹² Gerald and Betty visited Winifred and Charles a few days later that August while on a motoring holiday, and Winifred ‘had a little talk with Lady Betty and wept in her arms’.¹³ A week later, in a hotel with her mother, Winifred had a ‘very sacred & beautiful experience’ which persuaded her that she and Gerald were bound together, ‘soul & very soul’. Winifred then packaged up her seeds-and-plan script and this account, and sent them off to Gerald.¹⁴ (As he and Betty were still traveling, he would receive that packet on 27 August; the timing will matter.) Certain now that their relationship was ‘too sacred a thing to be exposed to the microscope of any group’, Gerald instructed Winifred henceforth to send him two editions of each script, one for him and one for the Society, ‘with any too tell-tale or illuminating passages expunged!’¹⁵ They felt on the brink of something tremendous, the spirits massed behind to give them a shove.

When Winifred next visited Fishers Hill in early October 1911, ‘Gurney’ got down to brass tacks. Winifred’s early automatic writing is almost illegible, the script running unbroken without the pencil leaving the page. But here, working à deux, the words are crystal clear, as ‘Mrs Willett’ transmits ‘Gurney’s’ instructions and deals with Gerald’s troubled, penciled-in-the-margins interjections. ‘S[idgwick] is most anxious that you should realize your freedom to act or to abstain – freedom yet under the Peak of Destiny’, states ‘Gurney’. Faintly, Gerald demurs: ‘Henry you say that in agreeing I shall be following at once my own destiny and the purposes of God. This may be clear to you, but it cannot be so clear to me . . . It may end up in the breaking up of two families.’ But his role is ‘foreordained’, ‘Gurney’ interjects – and besides, Winifred’s ‘present marriage’ might not last. Gerald is shocked: ‘But there is the consideration of my family’, he writes. ‘You know how close the bond is.’ ‘Yes. I do’, replies ‘Gurney’ – ‘but we want the CHILD.’ ‘She is practically alone for this month’, ‘Gurney’ continued. Surely, the two of them could arrange a few trysts? That much, Gerald concedes, he could do.¹⁶

The next day, Gerald and Winifred exchanged rings and vows in the lovely art nouveau chapel, all angels and flowers, that the ceramicist Mary Watts constructed at Compton after her painter husband’s death; along with a cairn Winifred built to remember Daphne, and a garden Gerald laid out at Fishers Hill incorporating symbols of their union, it would become one of their many sacred places. Then, having dispatched Winifred’s husband Charles off to France, these two chauffeured and servanted people somehow found a place to get down to it. Gerald’s study? The nearby lodgings that Winifred had taken with her mother? Winifred underlined 11, 12, and 13 October in her 1911 diary, her usual code for sexual relations with Gerald.¹⁷ She also prudently rented a house near Fishers Hill from the end of November.

There was tumult to come. That November, Gerald told  Winifred that Betty was expecting, hardly the first time a woman fell pregnant because her husband was aflame for someone else. Betty was surprised but happy. She was in her late forties; Ral, her youngest and only son, was almost nine; she had thought her childbearing days over. But Winifred was incandescent with rage, writing to Gerald that he’d betrayed her, crucified her, left her begging for death. A little out of line, perhaps: after all, she was married too, and Gerald had done nothing worse than sleep with his own wife, before taking those vows with Winifred. But that’s not all that was going on – for Winifred had been doing something exclusive and intimate with Gerald, something suffused with eroticism, something that made her vulnerable and left her exhausted: she was producing scripts.

 

When Winifred had her first ‘Daylight Impression’ with Gerald in the ‘White Study’ at Fishers Hill in June 1911, she wrote of being ‘frightened and dazed’ in her diary. But when she regained full consciousness he was ‘divinely kind’ and told her the script had come; she then went and slept for a few hours. At Cadoxton that July they had two more, after which she slept most of two days.¹⁸ For Gerald, those script sessions were the high point of his visits: he was, Winifred teased, a ‘bad boy’ who needed scripts but couldn’t produce them himself. Scratching an itch to discern patterns and meaning that had driven his philosophical speculations decades earlier, he admitted that he was dependent on her ‘mysterious powers’, her ability to be ‘my bridge between God & man’.¹⁹ Soon they were experienced partners. Left alone together, they could quickly make scripts come.

The script of script production rather followed the script of sex: it was intimate, exciting, boundary-crossing, and left the participants changed. The two practices bled together. While in Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) Myers had described trance-mediumship as a kind of ‘unselfing’, an out-of-body ‘ecstasy’ in which the medium was opened to the spirit world, according to Gerald (who would know), ‘Mrs Willett’ never lost awareness of her physical self: for her, ‘extasy’ (as she spelled it) was less a trance state than a state of physical arousal, both she and Gerald using the word to describe moments – nursing, intercourse – of intense physical pleasure.²⁰ The erotics of touch are everywhere in Winifred’s prose, surely part of the reason she, unlike most mediums, never performed for a group.

The practice also provoked jealousy. When Gerald left Cadoxton after one visit, Winifred’s husband Charles – we’re suddenly reminded he’s there too – insisted on watching her have a script come and, rather in the spirit of a certain kind of compensatory marital sex, Winifred complied, writing in her diary, ‘I thought it best to get it over the next time I had any.’²¹ Gerald was jealous too, not of Charles but of Oliver Lodge, berating Winifred in March 1912 for giving Lodge three sittings in two days, and without telling him: much too much; she’d be exhausted; she must never do that again.²² But he needn’t have worried, for working with Lodge really just showed Winifred that she only wanted to do it with Gerald: ‘Thankful when I came to and saw him [Lodge] sitting there’, she noted, ‘for I had feared that without Gerald I might not “get off”.’²³ She was glad to see Lodge leave, and for the next two years kept him at arm’s length.

She and Gerald were ‘one’, a true ‘union’. But was ‘union’ a physical or psychic act? In September 1911, before they first had sex, Winifred was ‘devouring’ George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, an 1891 novel (and gift from Gerald) about two lovers who, separated physically, learn how to meet and experience connection psychically.²⁴ The story spoke to Winifred, reminding her of her ‘soul & very soul’ experience of ‘union’ with Gerald that August, when he was motoring with Betty. This is why, too, Winifred felt so betrayed by Betty’s pregnancy. For if Gerald dated ‘union’ with Winifred from October 1911, when they first had intercourse, Winifred dated it from that experience. When, Winifred obsessively wondered, had Gerald impregnated his wife? If it was after 27 August, when he had received those crucial scripts, he had committed ‘the supreme wrong a man can do a woman’ – that is, having sex with another woman (Betty) when already bound to Winifred, his true ‘wife’. He had betrayed ‘one who has given up all, who has laid up on Love’s altar her one heart & seen it burnt to ashes’.²⁵

Remarkably, Winifred forced Gerald to adopt her view. Years later, Betty recalled Gerald’s horrified response to the news of her pregnancy; to her bewilderment and unhappiness, he moved immediately from her bed to a cot in his dressing room. (He would sleep in such monastic cells for the next six years; Winifred gave him a terracotta Madonna to guard his chastity.)²⁶ No longer ‘my Darling’ in his letters, Winifred became ‘Madonna mia’, ‘Madonna mia carissima’, or – more simply – ‘Mummie’. The Daphne story ‘was but a preparation for our story, Madonna mia, and above all for the issue to which “they”’– the ‘discarnate intelligences’ on the ‘other side’ – ‘believe our story is predestined to lead’. He now believed that his and Winifred’s project of conception was the center around which all the scripts turned – although the SPR inner circle couldn’t know that, as the lovers freely excised what they called private materials from those texts.²⁷ In January 1912 the two managed a week at Nora Sidgwick’s Cambridge house, the one place they could pass the whole night together without detection. Winifred’s diary for that week is a host of underlined days.

 

Confident she had conceived, in early February Winifred sent the SPR a record of a vision where an angel appeared to her, pre-Raphaelite lilies in hand, along with Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney and Daphne, announcing her beatification.²⁸ When her period came, she was devastated – but the scripts again rescued her. ‘With a piece of mechanism as delicate & complex as she is in the mind & body’, conception would likely not succeed on the first try. ‘Made thee of Fire and Dew’, the script intoned. ‘That is a good description of her . . .’²⁹ Through the spring of 1912, as Betty endured her sixth pregnancy, Gerald and Winifred honed the rituals that bolstered their resolve, kneeling at Daphne’s grave, ‘meeting in spirit’ each morning, and sprinkling their correspondence with symbols and tokens – pressed flowers, sprigs of yew, ribbons from Winifred’s undergarments – of their love. ‘No obstacles’, Gerald wrote in March 1912, ‘are going to prevent the accomplishment of the Great Task that is laid upon us. The Great Gift is to be ours [here, as always, he circled the word ‘ours’] in God’s good time.’³⁰

Winifred couldn’t bear even to be in the same country when Betty’s child was born and went to Switzerland in May 1912 – with Charles, though his presence is never mentioned – and released another torrent of agonized recrimination. She was ‘in darkness . . . such depths of spiritual torture . . . a hell of misery’, humiliated utterly by ‘what is passing in my home’ – she meant Fishers Hill – ‘under my husband’s’ – she meant Gerald’s – ‘roof’.³¹ By having this child, one begotten (she again charged) ‘after we had met & loved’, Gerald had pushed aside the rights of ‘Ours’, their own desperately-desired child: ‘oh Gerald the sound of its retreating little steps has been echoing like a death knell in my heart.’³²

Gerald still insisted he had not had sex with Betty after 27 August 1911 – the date when he received those critical scripts revealing his and Winifred’s ‘union’. Betty’s baby was just late; his son Ral had been two weeks late too.³³ When Betty finally went into labor on 4 June 1912, now so unhappy that she genuinely wished she’d just die,³⁴ Gerald wrote Winifred that he would be with her in spirit, holding her hand – Winifred’s hand, not Betty’s hand – ‘firmly, tenderly, lovingly’ through the whole ordeal. During that long and difficult labor, Gerald went off to London and posted this letter.³⁵ When a girl, Kathleen, was born (he and Winifred both assumed their child would be a boy), Gerald wrote: ‘Thank God you are saved the last drop of bitterness.’³⁶ But Winifred would not be consoled. Gerald must not feel his ‘present self to be the Father of that other child.’³⁷ ‘Pray for me that I may die before I see that child.’³⁸

Gerald went to Wales so they could try again. Their script of 6 July 1912, written in a hotel on the Welsh coast right after Kathleen’s birth, includes a passage in which Gerald says, ‘The loyal knight wishes her to know that he understands.’ ‘She keeps crying, I want – I want,’ says ‘Mrs Willett’. ‘Him to come himself, is that it?’ asks Gerald. ‘It’s been such a long way,’ sighs ‘Mrs Willett’.³⁹ The next day, 7 July 1912, Winifred fell pregnant. Augustus was ‘descending from heaven and becoming incarnate’, Winifred wrote in her diary on 31 July; ‘be it unto me as according to thy word’.⁴⁰

She went to ground in Wales immediately. She had a full domestic staff, a resident husband and toddler, and a teenage boy at school, but she felt herself mostly under the dead ‘Gurney’s’ care. She produced a number of ecstatic scripts, Gerald visited her, and she wrote to him constantly – sometimes harping on the hardness of her lot compared to Betty’s, but occasionally with the kind of intensity that gives one some sense of just why Gerald was willing to risk so much for her. ‘I want all always,’ she wrote that October. ‘I want to be ever with you night & day & day & night . . . I want to know you love me from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot – even as I love – I want the touch which quickens delight to Bliss. I want to be one with your mind, one with your heart, one with your body’ – a destiny ‘for which sole purpose God made me’.⁴¹ After a long, hard labor, on 9 April 1913 – Gerald’s own sixtieth birthday – Augustus Henry Coombe Tennant was born.

Gerald, officially the child’s godfather, was over the moon. The inner circle of the SPR, who knew of the Plan but probably not of Gerald’s paternity, simply assuming Henry was Charles’s son, was excited too. Over the next years, that group – Oliver Lodge, Margaret Verrall, J.G. Piddington, Nora Sidgwick – would keep an eye on little Henry, waiting for him to reveal his godlike gifts. Gerald doted on the child and visited Cadoxton regularly. Winifred and Henry were duly absorbed into the wider Balfour clan. Gerald had told Betty in September 1912 that Winifred’s coming child was his, and Betty – in Gerald’s words, ‘a truly noble type of womanhood’⁴² – told Gerald she would love the child too. Betty would welcome Winifred and Henry to Fishers Hill – where Betty’s children, who cordially detested Mrs Tennant, gleefully led immaculately turned-out little Henry down the muddiest paths.⁴³

 

Almost thirty years ago, in The Darkened Room, the feminist historian Alex Owen argued that Victorian and Edwardian elites embraced spiritualist practices in part to play with gender roles, acting out behaviors in shadow that could never be allowed in daylight.⁴⁴ Transgression – unsanctioned desire, forbidden touch – was allowable because it was enacted while entranced: mediums were the vehicles for knowledge they could never own; unseemly emotions – rage, lust – were always the spirits’ work. In just this vein, Winifred always insisted that Gerald’s dead friends were speaking, not her, and Gerald heartily agreed: ‘Do not doubt that in all these communications the same intelligence is at work, and that intelligence is not you.’⁴⁵ Gerald did believe Winifred had a special gift, but that it resided in her psychic sensitivity, not her intellect; indeed, it was important to him that she was not an intellectual but a ‘wild glad frolicsome being’,⁴⁶ ‘sweet and wild’.⁴⁷ Gender complementarity runs riot in their letters: Winifred accesses ‘spirit’ and Gerald interprets text; Winifred births the Messiah, so that a male Balfour can save the world.

But by 1911 this astonishingly conservative vision was everywhere under pressure. Other heterodox movements springing up, after all, did not require such strict gender codes. Theosophists welcomed women not only as adepts but as teachers and found their own Messiah in a teenaged Indian boy.⁴⁸ The ‘Panacea’ movement, founded by a vicar’s widow named Mabel Barltrop, honored a ‘Divine Mother’ as well as God the Father and treated the automatic writing Barltrop produced as direct communications from God.⁴⁹ Gerald and his collaborators thought such women credulous and weak-minded, but the trends of the time were against them, for the women’s revolt was spreading, its tentacles reaching even into the Balfour home. Betty’s sister Emily embraced theosophy, while her sister Constance became a famous suffragette: when Christabel Pankhurst went into hiding in March 1912, as the militant movement turned to property damage, to Gerald’s mortification the police came to search Fishers Hill.⁵⁰ Frances and Betty Balfour were both constitutionalist (not militant) suffragists and sought-after speakers, and marital unhappiness made Betty throw herself still more into that work.

Surrounded by suffragists, small wonder Gerald was happy that Winifred wanted sex from him, not the vote. ‘My (one) is a woman from head to foot,’ he wrote her on Christmas 1912. ‘She is not “unhappy or rebellious”, she is only a woman, and not for anything would I have her otherwise.’⁵¹ But, in a comeuppance for Gerald, by 1912 Winifred too felt the suffrage movement ‘very near my heart’.⁵² In January 1914, with Henry weaned, she accepted the presidency of her local Neath suffrage society. Gerald felt rather mixed about her new feminist convictions. When he had said the two of them were ‘like in difference’, he meant they were complementary and made one other whole, but Winifred, he began to realize, thought they just disagreed – on labor militancy, the Irish question, and much more.⁵³ Gerald found their disagreement painful and suggested they not discuss it. He was ‘hungering for her’, but Winifred was not a woman to fly to a man who had told her to be quiet.⁵⁴

The war deepened that rift. Winifred became desperately worried for her firstborn, Christopher, who was in the Officer Training Corps at Winchester at the war’s outbreak and then a cadet at Sandhurst. In August 1917 he was sent to France, a boy in charge of 150 men. For two weeks he wrote faithfully to his parents, disclosing his location in a code he and Winifred had devised that easily eluded the censors.⁵⁵ He was killed on 2 September 1917, his first day in battle.

Winifred had always luxuriated in feeling; now, a grief Gerald could not share consumed her. ‘You must be prepared to find me a changed woman,’ she wrote, her only comfort to ‘work for the destruction of the social order’ that had killed her son.⁵⁶ She asked him to write a memoir of Christopher, but then found his production inadequate. Christopher had become a transcendent genius in her eyes, not the nice but quite ordinary boy Gerald remembered. On impulse she wrote to Oliver Lodge, who had in 1916 published a famous book giving claims for his dead soldier son Raymond’s communications.⁵⁷ Lodge, eager to get his star medium back, happily replaced Gerald as her collaborator for the memoir.⁵⁸

Gerald, sidelined, grew frantic, and stupidly told Winifred he couldn’t detect the references to Christopher she discerned in one SPR script. Why, Winifred retorted, must he ‘throw lumps of ice at me as I stand bleeding from every pore’?⁵⁹ Gerald protested: wouldn’t he have been ‘almost more than human’ if he could calmly accept that the woman to whom he felt himself ‘solemnly wedded in the sight of Heaven’, loves him no longer?⁶⁰ No, Winifred replied, if he truly loved her he would have thought ‘solely of her’: ask Betty to explain it to you, she added spitefully.⁶¹ Told to take his case to his wronged wife – ‘the latchet of whose shoe neither you nor I are worthy to unloose’ – was more than even Gerald could bear. He fell ill, and two months passed before he wrote Winifred again. ‘You have destroyed my faith, so that I rock on a sea of doubt, questioning even those things of which I once felt most sure,’ he told her. ‘Tell that to E.G. [Edmund Gurney] if you ever see him.’⁶²

If  Winifred could simply throw him over, then the foundation for Gerald’s six years of faithfulness – the conviction that their love and its fruit would engender a reconstructed world – was undermined as well. Gerald had little to cling to, for Winifred was fed up with the Society for Psychical Research and the whole scripts project. Nor was she alone: other automatists had also had as much as they could take of its male leaders and resented (and often flouted) their rules. ‘I will not be pot-bound by SPR mania about “evidence”,’ Winifred wrote in her diary, ‘which has kept us all – Margaret Verrall, Helen Verrall, Mrs Lyttelton and myself – living in water tight compartments.’ It was time to try ‘other and more human methods . . . now, when broken hearts are all over the world’.⁶³

Winifred would go on to try those human methods, out in the world and leaving Gerald behind. A fervent Liberal, she grew close to Lloyd George: by 1920, she would be explaining to her tolerant husband that she had to stay overnight at Downing Street, so that the Prime Minister could talk with her in confidence about the political situation in Wales.⁶⁴ She stood (unsuccessfully) as a Liberal candidate in the 1922 election, and Lloyd George appointed her Britain’s first woman delegate to a League of Nations assembly. In later years she became a prominent Welsh cultural nationalist and a patron and collector of  Welsh art. She would still bring Henry to Fishers Hill to see his adoring ‘godfather’, but her tumultuous liaison with Gerald Balfour was over.

 

Decades later, Gerald’s daughter-in-law Jean would place the whole project of script production and Henry’s conception within the febrile atmosphere of that pre-war era, with its spiritualist strivings and psychological naiveté. She recalled that Winifred had been a narcissistic and intensely ambitious mother; of course her scripts were about her exceptional children and their world-historical destinies.⁶⁵ Through the twenties and thirties, however, the SPR ‘interpreters’ still assumed that the scripts revealed plans and patterns beyond the automatist’s ken. J.G. Piddington would claim in 1923 that the scripts indicated A.J. Balfour would reemerge as a world leader. When those hopes went unfulfilled, Gerald extracted evidence that Henry nevertheless was, in psychic terms, really his brother Arthur’s son, destined for greatness.⁶⁶ But Jean, noting the plentiful Dido references in the scripts, concluded that Betty had been in a sense ‘the leader of their enterprise’, the success of the messianic project quite impossible without her sacrifice.⁶⁷ Gerald and Piddington published their conclusions in limited editions marked ‘secret’; some survive in Trinity College’s Wren Library, their pages still uncut.⁶⁸ Jean’s feminist re-reading remained in the SPR records, where it moldered as our principals died. Nora Sidgwick died in 1936, Oliver Lodge in 1940, and Betty in 1942 – after which Gerald moved to Scotland, to be cared for by Jean and Ral, the son he never had much time for. Jean read all the scripts through to him in his last months, for Gerald was still waiting on Henry.

Henry was sent to Eton (of course), and then to Trinity (of course), where he got a first in moral sciences (of course), and then into the Welsh Guards (of course), just in time for the Second World War. Although Winifred, now in her sixties, went nearly crazy with anxiety, Henry had a good war. He was captured but made a famous escape out of wartime Germany; after the war, he went into the intelligence service. He was a dutiful son and never married, confiding his anxieties about his attraction to men to Ral;⁶⁹ he was polite but the SPR devotees found him curiously flat. ‘If Henry is really going to inaugurate a new Golden Age’, the SPR secretary wrote crossly in 1956, when Winifred died, ‘the sooner he gets going the better’.⁷⁰

It was left to Jean to tell Henry the story of his mother’s mediumship and his own parentage. Henry was enormously upset. Through the whole of his childhood, he told Jean, he had felt as if ‘certain things mysterious to him . . . had always been expected of him’. He never knew what they were, and it had ‘puzzled and disquieted him’.⁷¹ He was very bitter, and after ‘considerable inner upheaval’ became a Benedictine monk.⁷² Conceived to be a new Messiah and kept in ignorance of that plan for more than forty years, he sought shelter, and quite possibly absolution, in a more established faith. Augustus Henry Coombe Tennant, now Dom Joseph, died at Downside Abbey in Somerset in 1989.

 

All images courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Eng 1825).

 

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¹  The standard history of the SPR remains Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), but see also Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). For the SPR’s shifting turn-of-the-century leadership and practice, see especially, George Morris, ‘The Trance Phenomena of Mrs Thompson: Mediumship, Evidence and Intimacy in early twentieth-century Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 32: 4 (2021), 608–29.

²  The Rt. Hon. Gerald Balfour, ‘Psychical Research and Current Doctrines of Mind and Body’, Hibbert Journal, April 1910, 543–61.

³  Cambridge University Library, Society for Psychical Research papers, SPR.MS, 88/16, A1, ‘Statement by Oliver Lodge’, 1 December 1910.

⁴  WCT diary (National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth), 23 October and 12 November 1910. The historian of Welsh art, Peter Lord, has produced a beautiful, copiously illustrated edition of Winifred’s diary, Between Two Worlds: The Diary of Winifred Coombe Tennant, 1909-1924 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2011), but as he did not note her code for sexual intercourse, I have relied on the original diary at the National Library of Wales for chronology and quotations.

⁵  Accounts of the ‘cross-correspondences’ project written within the SPR’s frame include Archie E. Roy, The Eager Dead: A Study in Haunting (Sussex: Book Guild Publishing, 2008) and Trevor Hamilton, Arthur Balfour’s Ghosts: An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic Writings (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017); W.H. Salter, who married the Verralls’ daughter Helen (also an automatist) and acceded to the presidency of the SPR, tried to sum up the project and its methods in An Introduction to the Study of Scripts (Private and Confidential, Passed for Press, 6 May 1948); copy in Trinity College Library, Salter Papers, B8. John Gray offers a skeptical, racy, but undisciplined account in The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (London: Penguin, 2001), 7–103.

⁶  Winifred Coombe Tennant Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 16 September 1911.

⁷  Tennant Papers (Swansea), D/D T3475, Eveleen Myers to WCT, postmark 4 September 1908.

⁸  WCT Diary, 17 and 31 January and 3, 4, 10, 12, 14 February 1909.

⁹  WCT Diary, 4 February 1911.

¹⁰  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 2 June 1911.

¹¹  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 2 August 1911.

¹²  Houghton, Box 1, Script of 6 August 1911.

¹³  WCT Diary, 9 August 1911.

¹⁴  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 14 August 1911, and copy of script of 15 August 1911.

¹⁵  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 27 August 1911.

¹⁶  Houghton, Box 1, Script of 7 October 1911, original.

¹⁷  WCT Diary, 11–13 October; in a letter the following year Gerald recalls that he and Winifred were first ‘united’ in October 1911: Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 30 September 1912.

¹⁸  WCT Diary, 4 June 1911, 14–18 July 1911.

¹⁹  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 14 September 1911.

²⁰  Gerald William, Earl of Balfour, ‘A Study of the Psychological Aspects of Mrs Willett’s Mediumship, and of the Statements of the Communicators concerning process’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 43 (1935), especially 45, 53–61, 133, 150–1, 172.

²¹  WCT Diary, 24 December 1911.

²²  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 16 and 30 March 1912.

²³  WCT Diary, 13 March 1912.

²⁴  George Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson (1891); for Winifred’s comments on the book, Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 21 and 25 September 1911.

²⁵  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GRB, 24 November 1911.

²⁶  SPR.MS 88/44, Jean Balfour, ‘Letter to Henry’, second part (16 December 1930), p. 4.

²⁷  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 27 December 1911.

²⁸  Winifred prudently had her mother annotate her account of her vision and send it to the SPR on 3 February 1912, where it was kept sealed and locked; that copy is now in SPR.MS 88/24.

²⁹  Houghton, Box 1 File 3, ‘Sc. Before D.I. of Mar. 5/12’.

³⁰  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 6 March 1912.

³¹  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 29 May 1912, from Adelboden.

³²  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 1 June 1912.

³³  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 1 June 1912.

³⁴  SPR.MS 88/44, Jean Balfour, ‘Letter to Henry’, second part (16 December 1930), pp. 4, 6.

³⁵  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 1–4 June 1912.

³⁶  Ibid., ‘Tues. ev.’ [4 June 1912].

³⁷  Ibid., WCT to GWB, 6 June 1912.

³⁸  Houghton, Box 2, 20 June 1912.

³⁹  Mrs. Willett’s Automatic Phenomena, No. 299, 6 July 1912, pp. 182–5.

⁴⁰  WCT Diary, 31 July 1912.

⁴¹  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, 13 October 1912.

⁴²  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 28 September 1912 and 1 and 5 October 1912. Also, SPR.MS 88/44, Jean Balfour, ‘Letter to Henry’, second part (16 December 1930), pp. 7–9, and SPR.MS 88/57, ‘The Vindication of Dido’, part 3, p. 12.

⁴³  CUL, SPR.MS 88/147, Jean Balfour, ‘Thoughts on Augustus Henry’ (1966), p. 2.

⁴⁴  Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

⁴⁵  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 19 September 1911.

⁴⁶  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 22 September 1911.

⁴⁷  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 12 December 1911.

⁴⁸  Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and on Krishnamurti, Star in the East: Krishnamurti, the Invention of a Messiah (London: Constable, 2000), and Mary Lutyens, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (London: John Murray, 1990).

⁴⁹  Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (London: Jonathan Cape, 2011).

⁵⁰  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, 7 March 1912.

⁵¹  Houghton, Box 2, GWB to WCT, Christmas Day, 1912. As always, the word ‘one’ is enclosed in a circle.

⁵²  Houghton, Box 2, WCT to GWB, n.d. [March 1912].

⁵³  Houghton, Box 3, WCT to GWB, 21 October 1913.

⁵⁴  Houghton, Box 3, GWB to WCT, 29 March 1914.

⁵⁵  Those are in Tennant Papers (Swansea), D/D T 4579.

⁵⁶  Houghton, Box 4, WCT to GWB, 26 September 1917.

⁵⁷  WCT Diary, 10 October 1917; Oliver J. Lodge, Raymond: Or, Life after Death (London: Methuen, 1916).

⁵⁸  Lodge’s Christopher: A Study in Human Personality (London: Cassell, 1918), includes not only a warm appreciation of the character and intelligence of Christopher but also Winifred’s own biography of Daphne, who – though she died at a year and a half – is said to have given the impression of ‘nothing less than genius’.

⁵⁹  For that admittedly brusque letter on various script interpretations, see Houghton, Box 4, GWB to WCT, 26 October 1917, and WCT to GWB, 28 October 1917.

⁶⁰  Houghton, Box 4, GWB to WCT, 29 October 1917.

⁶¹  Houghton, Box 4, WCT to GWB, 1 November 1917.

⁶²  Houghton, Box 4, GWB to WCT, 8 January 1918.

⁶³  WCT Diary, 14 October, 10 November and 16 November 1917.

⁶⁴  Tennant Papers (Swansea), D/D T 4116, WCT to CCT, 4 December 1920, and D/D T 4117, WCT to CCT, 9 December 1920.

⁶⁵  SPR.MS 88/147, Jean Balfour, ‘Memories of the Interpreters’ (1973), 19–20, and especially SPR.MS 88/146, Jean Balfour, ‘Thoughts on ‘Mrs Willett’.

⁶⁶  SPR.MS 88/38, Statement by Piddington for Mrs Sidgwick, 20 February 1923; Notes and Excursuses, vol. 2, introduction.

⁶⁷  SPR.MS 88/57, Jean Traprain [Balfour], ‘The Vindication of Dido’, part 2, p. 38.

⁶⁸  This is the case, for example, for the last 200 or so pages in Salter’s copy of vol. 2 of Notes and Excursuses, ed. Gerald W. Balfour (privately printed, 1927), a mad compendium of passages relating to ‘Rainbow, Octave, the Numbers Seven and Eight, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, Music and the Power of Music, and Analogies of Colour and Sound’, Salter Papers, B7.

⁶⁹  SPR.MS 88/47, ‘Note by Jean’, April 1931; and SPR.MS 88/108, Note by Ral, 22 July 1945.

⁷⁰  Salter D1/13, W.H. Salter to Jean Balfour, 5 September 1956.

⁷¹  SPR. MS 88/147, Jean Balfour, ‘Thoughts on Augustus Henry’ (1966).

⁷²  SPR.MS 88/138, Henry to Jean, 16 June 1960. A popular historian has written a biography of Henry: Bernard Lewis, Wales’ Unknown Hero: Soldier, Spy, Monk: The Life of Henry Coombe-Tennant, MC, of Neath (Y Lolfa, 2021).