A review by mafiabadgers
Hellish Nell: Last of Britain's Witches by Malcolm Gaskill

1.0

First read 03/2025 for Farnham book club

No matter what the Storygraph tags say, this is not a challenging book, except insofar as it rattles off a lot of names and acronyms and doesn't provide a good way of keeping track of them all. It's fairly easy to separate them into the for and against camps based on context, though, and within those categories they're fairly interchangeable. It is very much a popular history book, not an academic one.

Albert was one of the few spirits to admit that war was inevitable, and further predicted the coming of a great British leader, the failure of a German invasion, the alliance with Soviet Russia and the survival of the Empire - although memories of this last prophecy were to fade. [p. 154]

This quote neatly encapsulates the ambiguity that pervades the book. The Notes section at the back doesn't clarify what that last clause means, and no explanation is given in the chapter itself. Whose memories faded? How could Gaskill's research have drawn on a faded memory? It's a baffling line.

The first six chapters (out of ten) seem oddly credulous of these accounts of ectoplasm and materialisation, and when the unreliability of the sources is raised, it is glossed over. Page 21 mentions a memoir but casts doubt on its authenticity in the same breath; nonetheless, a good deal of Gaskill's material is drawn from it, as well as other sources similarly close to Duncan. Chapter Three opens with the story of Duncan's grandchildren, left alone in the house, seeing an apparition of her, reported just as factually as the events of her trial. I initially assumed that Gaskill had fallen in love with his material and was loathe to strip away the supernatural air, but in his acknowledgements, he said that he wholeheartedly endorsed "Collingwood's dictum that history should aim to be 'the re-enactment of past experience'". Apparently, that only stretches as far as the experience of the mistaken, the deluded, and the conned. (Notably absent from the book are the much-discussed photographs; here's one, and it looks ridiculous.)

Only in the epilogue are we told that "The research materials for this book lend themselves more to fiction than would be usual in a historical biography, which is why I have limited how far the narrative steps outside the world those materials purport to describe." (p. 378) I think I would have had much more patience for the liberties this book takes if it had said this up front, but even then, some sections are still going too far: the assertion that "Between three and four in the morning, with Albert and the legions of the beloved dead beckoning in her dreams, Helen pushed softly through the veil" really hacked me off—how could he possibly know what she was dreaming about as she died? I suspect Gaskill felt the primary audience for a book about Duncan would inevitably be present-day Spiritualists, and was reluctant to take too combative a stance.

Before it was issued in a revised edition, the subtitle was "Last of Britain's Witches", which seems far more appropriate for a book that is more a biography than it is a deep dive into her 1944 trial. The first six chapters tell her life story up to her post-trial imprisonment, beginning with a wearyingly long aside on the tenuous supernatural connections of Callander, the town she was born in. Aside from the lack of critique, it's interesting enough. Chapter Six was particularly good, specifically the sections discussing wartime secrecy and paranoia and their intersection with Spiritualism. The book began to give me what I wanted after that, with Chapter Seven covering contemporary conjuring tricks; it was the first chapter to take a critical stance, and to address the psychological reasons why people believe in these things, from both sides of the curtain. Chapter Eight tackled Spiritualism as perceived by The Powers That Be, reframing it as a potent presence in contemporary politics, rather than just a balm for the grieving. It reverts to the wishful thinking of the early chapters to close out its account of Duncan's life. The book's working with some interesting material, but I wish it had been handled better. For an example of a book dealing much more deftly with very similar topics, see Judith Brown's Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.