No. 5 Chancery Lane — a discreet alley between Cathedral Square and Gloucester Street. Hidden, yet in the very centre of the city. Some notices and letters call it no. 3; the society's own scrapbook is inscribed 27 Chancery Lane. The address shifted, or was misremembered, or there was more than one room. The confusion is itself fitting: this was spiritualism in New Zealand, kept just below the surface of public life.
One Friday night in 1937, at eight o'clock, a rapt audience sat in the dark under a red light. The room was entirely black, cloth over the walls and ceiling, because spirits were notoriously shy. In the northwest corner stood the medium's "cabinet": a wicker chair behind safety-pinned curtains. Into that chair the medium, Mrs Lily Hope, was sewn, lengths of ribbon holding her arms and legs to the wood. The Psychic News had called her "a woman of the highest integrity, unassuming and earnest in her sacred work." Robert Ellwood, who later studied the movement, called her "a remarkable new materialization medium."
They began with two or three verses of Abide with Me and the Lord's Prayer. The society treated the séance as a science, yet complained that verifying the apparitions empirically made them feeble; the night opened with "a prayer through Christ for protection and guidance…if it is his will." It was a faith caught between science and religion, not entirely at ease with either.
When disembodied voices asked that the safety pins be undone, Mrs Eddles, the medium's assistant, stalled. She asked to feel the medium's hands, felt head and face, slid down arms to the fingers. The medium was warm, but her hands were cold. The wrists were strapped in.
Two personalities appeared. Sister Monica, a nun with "a beautiful, cultured voice" and a sweet, plump, slightly pouting face under her black veil, was willing to show her feet: all toes intact, a point, because Mrs Hope had part of a toe amputated. Sunrise, a Native American girl, preferred flowers to flesh: from a "luminous slate" held high, two carnations fell from the ceiling. A woman at a Wellington séance had explained them: "Don't put flowers on my grave. I'm not there."
Even the society's own dead came. A nameless woman wrote to her sister on the slate; a husband was greeted by his late father. "Bliss" awaited the dead, and the promise of meeting again. In the long shadow of the First World War, that was comfort enough.
The man who held it all together was Edgar McLeod Lovell-Smith, an artist trained at the Canterbury College School of Art, a lithographic draughtsman, "the family historian and entertainer." He came from a famous Methodist family of feminists, Fabian socialists and philanthropists. Around 1935 he left the Anglican Church for the Christian Spiritualist Church, "his role virtually that of a pastor," though he had a vehement distaste for hierarchy. He filled notebooks with séance transcripts, Ouija messages and spirit writing, and kept a list of biblical verses that supposedly supported the modern psychic science, ammunition for the fight with the churches.
And there was a fight to win. Spiritualism in New Zealand was bigger than it ever looked from the street: a secular colony with no established church, it fostered higher levels of occultism than any other English-speaking country. Arthur Conan Doyle's 1920 visit boosted an already growing movement. In 1948 nine hundred people packed the Civic Theatre for a spiritualist service; the society's lectures in Timaru drew three hundred curious onlookers. But it was fought over in public too. As early as 1873 The Press had reported spirit rapping; in 1920 Catholic Bishop Brodie called spiritualism "a blasphemy conceived in fraud." In 1949 the letter columns of The Press ran a war: "PERTINENS" called it "fluffy-mindedness" that blended Old Testament miracles with scientific pretence; supporters answered under pseudonyms, because "you took your chances by supporting Spiritualism under your own name. Anonymity allowed more freedom." When critics said the spiritualists should give their money to the poor, Lovell-Smith answered that "stones and mortar" mattered less than the ongoing work of healing.
Lovell-Smith died in 1950 and the scrapbook ends, mid-page. The movement was largely swept away in the 1960s. The lane outlived it, the Chancery Arcade, the tavern, the fire of 1985, until the earthquakes and then the demolition of 2015, when the lane was cleared for Te Pae, the convention centre that now stands over the spot. The séance room is gone, the red light out. All that survives is a scrapbook in a university library, and a voice that spoke from the dark: "Don't put flowers on my grave. I'm not there."
Source
Canterbury