5.1 Geraldine Cummins
Striking an Unhappy Medium
King’s literary executors might have hoped to carry out their work with minimal fuss. Get the biography started, sort out what to do with King’s papers, and watch as the government took over control of King’s former homes. This is how government was supposed to work in 1950s Canada – efficient administration carried out by experts. Yet being a literary executor of Mackenzie King brought surprises. There was the odd case of someone calling herself Mary Mackenzie King. The manager of Eaton’s had rung to check her story. She had ordered an exorbitantly expensive $1,450 scarf and asked it to be billed to King’s estate. She claimed to be the widow of the man everyone knew to be a bachelor prime minister. The Eaton’s manager thought the shipping address was for an insane asylum in southern Ontario. Mrs Mackenzie King persisted. Over the next few years, she ordered expensive jewellery and a fur coat, always insisting that the shop owners bill the Mackenzie King estate. Wasn’t she, after all, King’s widow? Her letters hectored King’s executors, demanding they recognize their obligation to her. She even eventually created her own official letterhead scribbled out in messy slanted pencil writing, elevating herself to the aristocracy as the Duchess of Innisclare.1
More worrisome was the case of Geraldine Cummins. When Edouard Handy brought them the letter from Geraldine Cummins, King’s literary executors were only just learning the extent of the kinds of secrets the former prime minister had once kept. Handy explained who she was, what she was. King had twice met with Geraldine Cummins and her assistant on his visits to London in 1947 and again in 1948. Now it seemed that Geraldine Cummins, the medium who claimed to speak for the spirit world, was not finished with Mackenzie King.
Cummins asked politely after the fate of her own papers in King’s records. King had apparently promised to return copies of what had transpired between them – transcripts of his conversation with ghosts. She had read in The Times that his papers were to be destroyed but she thought that this couldn’t be right. Cummins radiated sweetness and sympathy, yet she said something that worried the literary executors. “He told us,” she wrote, “that he had every intention of publishing in his MEMOIRS, his interest in the matter about which he saw us, and of similar investigations he had made.”2 This meant King’s psychical research. What were they to do?
King did seem to have taken the documents Cummins now wanted returned. They searched through his correspondence and saw that he had promised to send copies back to her once he had the time to have a secretary make copies for himself. Yet King himself had stressed the need for privacy. He had only one secretary to whom he could entrust the job and this was Handy. Death intervened and King never returned the documents. Even though the executors couldn’t agree on how much they would let the official biographer use for his task, they were certain that some documents, exactly the ones Cummins requested, were the kinds of things the public should not see.
Geraldine Cummins had other plans. She professed not to care if others believed in her psychical research. She claimed that she was no missionary for the spiritualist cause. Yet in fact she published book after book on the subject, detailing what she thought of as her research. The modern world needed what she called a new Magna Carta for freedom of thought. In a more blessed age, Queen Victoria had held sittings with mediums. Two British prime ministers, Gladstone and Arthur Balfour, joined the Society for Psychical Research, an organization that, even if it did debunk phony mediums, also took seriously and openly the possibility of communicating beyond the shadow of death. The modern world of the 1950s had turned its back on this freedom. Was this any different, she wondered, from Soviet totalitarianism? “When will the western nations learn in their struggle for peace and freedom that psychical research and ‘Spiritualism’ are not things of shame to be hidden and suppressed?” she asked. “Tolerance, gentlemen, tolerance, please.”3
King had been impressed. He had sat beside her as she picked up a pen, foolscap paper on the table in front of her, while she descended into a trance and her hand began to write. “Most remarkable” is how King described the results. It had to be true, remarked David Gray, the wartime American ambassador to Ireland. The words poured onto the page, with a speed “beyond normal powers of composition.” It seemed to Gray “to constitute a supernormal phenomenon of first importance.”4 Perhaps he needed to meet more writers with a tight deadline, but clearly her mediumship impressed some.
In her memoirs Cummins recalled some of the different occupations she had taken up over her life: novelist, short-story writer, playwright, agricultural labourer, and even athlete. She omitted to mention spy, yet the Irish classical scholar E.R. Dodds recalled how Cummins told him that she had been a spy during the Second World War. With Ireland neutral in the war, she put herself at the service of the British government, reporting on pro-German elements in Ireland. “I believe[d] her,” he said, “the courage, the deviousness, and the necessary skill in ‘fishing’ were all of them in character.”5
Her psychical research perhaps helped with this too. At the outset of the war, with the United States still neutral, Cummins met for a session with David Gray. Gray wasn’t only ambassador to Ireland. He was also related to Eleanor Roosevelt, the president’s wife, and hence in a potentially useful position to influence American policy. It was quite the coincidence that, in a seance with Cummins, the spirit of Roosevelt’s dead mother chose to come through Cummins to send a message to the American president. What message did she have? Did she miss her son? Perhaps. But the spirit message that Cummins passed on had more to do with current affairs. It urged the American president to “throw down the gauntlet” in the present war.6 It was certainly the message the British government would have wanted delivered to the American president.
If Cummins professed that the spirits spoke through her, she did not entirely diminish her own role. The question of who wrote the words that came from Cummins’s pen was never more clearly tested than in a court case in 1926. In the mid-1920s Cummins transcribed the scripts of a series of seances featuring a ghost purporting to be from the time of Jesus. She published these as The Scripts of Cleophas. But a very unchristian feeling came over one of her sitters, an architect named Bligh Bond. He thought that he owned the scripts. As he saw it, he had been the sitter and the scripts were addressed to him. Moreover, although Cummins wrote out the scripts in long form, he typed them and corrected the grammar. If anyone should profit from the sale of the book, Bond thought that it should be him.
The conflict travelled to the courts, where a judge had to decide whether spirits enjoyed copyright protection. He sidestepped the issue, which would have set a unique legal precedent. Instead, his judgment ordered that if “these writings were the composition of a spirit the brain of Miss Cummins was used to ‘interpret and write’ the composition. So it belonged to Miss Cummins.” Cummins kept the scripts and the copyright, and British law escaped from a tight scrape with the paranormal.7
This meant, though, that Geraldine Cummins was well aware of her rights when she wrote to King’s literary executors. She knew whose papers these scripts really belonged to. Still, she kept up her cordial correspondence with King’s literary executors for the time being.
The Psychic News story gave Geraldine Cummins an idea. She wrote to Fred McGregor to say how much she agreed with him that the Psychic News story had been in bad taste. “Too much care and discretion cannot be exercised in making such matters publicly and widely known,” she wrote.8 But this did not mean hushing up the story of King’s psychical research. It only meant that someone should tell the whole story properly.
As luck would have it, Cummins was just then completing her memoirs. “In view of the publicity that Mr. King’s connection with mediumship has now received,” she wrote, she had decided to add King’s story as an appendix to her book. McGregor needn’t worry, she wrote. Her account would “put the facts in their true perspective, free from all sensationalism.”9
King had told her that he did not consult mediums about affairs of state. Even if he had, she knew him to be a rigorous investigator who “analysed everything in the critical spirit proper to psychical research.” She assured McGregor that her books reached “a good class of people all over the world and are not of the vulgar, sensational kind.” In case he was interested, she enclosed a leaflet for an earlier book, festooned with dignified commentary from reputable aristocrats and pseudo-scientists. The leaflet announced, no doubt in an attempt at reassurance, “No cheap edition of this book will be issued.”10
It was left to King’s former secretary Edouard Handy to reply. He was the one contact that the Irish medium had actually met. He tentatively asked to review the part of the memoir dealing with King ahead of publication. “It might be,” he offered, “that I could make some suggestions that might prevent the kind of comment that both you and I would like to avoid.” 11
The appendix arrived at Laurier House in January 1951. The little furor over the Psychic News story from the autumn had finally subsided. When McGregor read Cummins’s appendix he recoiled in horror. Here was a document that threatened to bring it all back up again, but in a far more sensationalistic fashion. For Cummins presented the actual words of one of King’s mediums, showing how convinced he had been by the truth of his experience with her. In this book, vague stories became eyewitness testimony.
By chance, two men closely connected with the literary executors were to be in London in a matter of days. Duncan MacTavish, King’s lawyer and an executor of his estate, was leaving by ship directly. Leonard Brockington, a former King speechwriter and another executor of the estate, was already in London. They went directly to meet with Cummins, appealing for discretion. Ideally, she would agree to delete the appendix altogether. McGregor scribbled some notes of instruction for the two men. Remember to emphasize, he wrote, that King had “kept everything so secret – nobody knew – [not] even his family.” Then there was the matter of his Roman Catholic friends, to whom spiritualism was anathema. To speak of these things publicly would diminish his stature in Canada, McGregor noted. In time, the men were to say, his literary executors would deal with everything. It could even be dealt with in his official biography, but later, and in the way King would have wanted.12
They offended Cummins almost at once. She lived in London with someone she referred to as her investigator, Beatrice Gibbes. The two unmarried women had lived together for decades, Gibbes handling the practicalities of life for the medium. She researched the significance of Cummins’s findings and kept the public at bay, arranging all of Cummins’s meetings with her sitters. King’s men came to their Chelsea home to be greeted by Gibbes and led in to an audience with Cummins.
Gibbes was not impressed. “I have never been so insulted in my own drawing-room,” she said later. “We were treated as though we were criminals in the dock.” It seems that King’s representatives were a little heated in their appeals to the women. None of the literary executors were spiritualistic sympathizers themselves. McGregor urged the men who were negotiating with Cummins not to get “contaminated!” “We have to live with you for a while yet,” he wrote. One of the men later said about his meeting with Cummins and Gibbes that “never in his life had he had a greater desire to strike a happy medium.” 13
Some of this must have been evident when they implored Cummins to delete the appendix. Wasn’t the relationship between a medium and her sitter, they asked, like that “between solicitor and client or between priest and parishioner or between doctor and patient”? Gibbes asked the men to leave.14
They didn’t give up. Over the next several days, telegrams went back and forth across the Atlantic as the executors tried to fix the problem. The women suggested that the most they could do would be to make the appendix anonymous, leaving out King’s name. At first, the executors thought this would be worse. It would only heighten the mystery. People would wonder about the real identity of the mysterious Commonwealth statesman. They would quickly see through the ruse. There was also the delicate matter of payment. The book had been sent to the printers and it cost money to interrupt a printing and reset the type. On this the executors offered to help, but when they received an exorbitant bill from the printer, they recoiled. Telegrams again went back and forth across the Atlantic, haggling over how much of Cummins’s printing costs Mackenzie King’s estate would pay.15
Eventually, McGregor and the executors accommodated Cummins’s proposal of making the references to Mackenzie King anonymous. McGregor tried to smooth relations with Cummins. He wrote to apologize for any offence given to her, and to tell her a bit about the sterling character of the men who had managed to upset her. He hoped that all would be forgiven between those who, they all agreed, had King’s best interests at heart.
Maclean’s magazine gave Canadians an early Christmas present in December 1951. Blair Fraser’s article “The Secret Life of Mackenzie King, Spiritualist” was an in-depth account of the former prime minister’s spiritualistic activities. For anyone who had doubted the rumours about King’s dalliances with the occult, this article showed them to be true. Mackenzie King really had been a spiritualist. Blair Fraser, the trusted, middle-of-the-road, and, some would have said, Liberal journalist, confirmed it.
In each issue of Maclean’s Blair Fraser took Canadians on an inside tour of national politics.16 His column was the most popular feature of the magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. Maclean’s was meant to be different from a daily newspaper and Fraser was part of that difference. The magazine came out fortnightly. The distance from the daily bustle and hurly burly was supposed to matter. There was time for reflection, gentle analysis, and consideration.
Fraser knew all the politicians. He felt particularly close to the civil-service mandarins, the Ottawa Men, the kind of people King had chosen to be his literary executors. Fraser and the Ottawa Men shared a view of what Canada and the national government could do, should do. They wore the same suits and went to the same clubs and parties. They lunched and fished and canoed together. Martinis in hand, they cultivated a North American version of Oxbridge style, a “wry wit, relaxed nature and subtle manner,” and they frowned on enthusiasm.17
Fraser’s crowd distrusted partisans and doctrinaire thinking. Pragmatism served them better. They had ideals and, in a way, this distrust of ideological rhetoric was its own ideal. They were generally progressive liberals, committed to freedom and liberty and in sympathy with the little guy. Fraser had a social conscience, pushing for a broader view of English-French relations in Canada and penning sympathetic accounts of labour strikes. As the economic boom of the 1950s spread over the country, why couldn’t these sympathies coexist with a realization that the country was at least moving in the right direction?
If Fraser was part of the Ottawa establishment, he also refused to firm up his allegiances and considered himself an “independent” liberal. He had friendships, networks of contacts, informants who could trust him. He might criticize the government but he mostly wanted to give constructive criticism. Why push when a gentle nudge would do?
Some stories, though, were just too good to overlook. Someone tipped him off, but it isn’t clear who. In the summer of 1951 Fraser got hold of a copy of Geraldine Cummins’s new memoir, Unseen Adventures: An Autobiography Covering Thirty-Four Years of Work in Psychical Research. In the fall he flew to London and was knocking on the door of the book’s author. He claimed that he already knew that the book’s anonymous Commonwealth statesman, “Mr. S,” was really Mackenzie King. To the women in London, with their recent memory of unpleasant Canadian visitors, Fraser must have seemed a pleasant guest. Good journalists know how to listen. Cummins and Gibbes invited him in and told him their story.
It was only a starting point for Fraser. He spoke to the editor of the Psychic News and tracked down another of King’s mediums in Scotland, Helen Hughes. Back in Ottawa, Fraser showed up at Laurier House with a draft version of his article: Did the people crafting the official version of King’s life care to comment? Backed into this corner, Fred McGregor agreed to talk, as did King’s closest friend, Joan Patteson, feeling it was better to control misinformation than to say nothing at all.18
Anyone who had taken much of an interest in the career of Mackenzie King would have known that King made no secret of his special fondness for his mother. She was, in a way, the woman in his life. A bachelor, and certainly one who seemed not to be a ladies’ man, was almost expected to be especially devoted to his mother, and to her memory, as King had been. Early biographies of King extolled him as a dutiful son. Even the trenchant critic John Stevenson, who had tried and failed to publish a scathing biography of King, had said it was to the young King’s “credit” that he had spent so much time with his mother when she was alive.19
Yet sometimes as you peek around a corner, the glimpse you catch is partial in a particularly misleading way. Look longer, take in just a few more details, and the meaning of everything shifts. A chaste kiss becomes the prelude to a longer embrace. A smile turns to a sneer. So it was with Mackenzie King and his mother, and the rest of King’s private life.
Fraser’s article began with a full-page picture of King and his mother – or rather, King in devotion before a portrait of his mother. The picture had been seen before. From this point on, it would begin to take on a new meaning and become one of the most reproduced images of King. The soft light from a lamp glows on her portrait. The dutiful son gazes lovingly at her image. He is now almost as old as she had been when the portrait was made. “In Laurier House King kept a light burning before this portrait of his mother,” Maclean’s announced. “In England he ‘talked’ with her through mediums.” The article promised to reveal these and other details of King’s belief in spiritualism: “the best-kept secret of Mr. King’s amazing career.”20
Blair Fraser exposed King’s dealings with British mediums, how he turned to them to talk to the ghosts of his mother and other close relatives, to his deceased friends like Franklin Roosevelt and Wilfrid Laurier. He even conducted seances in the third-floor library of Laurier House. Only a small group of intimates knew of King’s psychical research, and they had kept it a secret until now.
For those who might not know anything about mediums and seances, Fraser explained the different kinds of mediums King had consulted. There were automatic writers like Geraldine Cummins, who went into a trance and whose hand began to pen messages from the spirits. Helen Hughes was a “clairaudience” medium, someone to whom the spirits spoke, sometimes when she was in a trance, and who then reported back what was said. Most remarkable perhaps was Mrs Etta Wriedt, a “direct voice” medium. Wriedt used a silver trumpet which would roll up to a sitter and through which a spirit could speak. A friend of King’s recalled: “I remember the thing rolling up to me and giving me quite a rap on the shin … The voice that came out did sound very like a person I knew who had died. However, I was a bit shaken when she got hold of somebody who was supposed to be French. That trumpet spoke very bad French.”
Fraser didn’t shy away from these more ludicrous aspects of spiritualism, though he usually let the sources do the speaking. Perhaps the revelation that later damaged King’s reputation more than any other was that he had communicated with the spirit of his beloved dog Pat. Even for those sympathetic to King, this seemed a step too far.
Despite the shocking revelations of the article, Fraser remained remarkably respectful. He went along with the testimony of the mediums and King’s friends that King had never sought advice in matters of state. Fraser repeated again and again the words of those who said King hadn’t wanted “advice about public affairs.” King had been a lonely man. His mother and father and then two siblings had died, leaving the bachelor King very much alone. In the spirit world, King sought solace and comfort. Fraser emphasized the secrecy and caution of King and those around him. His English visits were coordinated by Miss Mercy Phillimore of the London Spiritualist Alliance, one of the oldest such institutions and “regarded in spiritualist circles as a pretty careful investigator of mediums’ claims.”
What is striking in retrospect is that the commentary was so restrained. The safest thing for a 1950s journalist or editor to do was to just report the facts, reporting what King was said to have done or believed without editorializing. There were hints that, in private, many told jokes at King’s expense. Over the next few years references to King and the spirits showed up in papers and even in the House of Commons in a sly fashion, rarely directly. What people said privately differed from what made it into print or was said on the air.21
Other journalists took it on faith that King did not govern the country at the behest of the spirit world. Denys Paré in La Patrie wrote soberly of King as “A great reader. And his research in the field of spiritism was equally serious.” He remained content to say that “spiritism was perhaps more than a hobby, but it concerned only his private life and in all likelihood had nothing to do with matters of state.” The editor of the Windsor Star seemed to be confessing personal knowledge of King’s beliefs when that paper said that, of course, King had “occasionally consulted mediums,” and with more frequency over the years. But it insisted that King was simply a “mystic” and explained his beliefs within the range of acceptable Christian ideas of belief in life after death. Even the Tory Ottawa Journal came to King’s defence, repeating the line about King not consulting the spirits about affairs of state. The Journal reported that King’s “friends were indignant at the suggestion Mr. King had made contact with the spirit of his dog, the Irish terrier Pat. They said Mr. King, much as he loved this venerable animal, would not have it claimed it had a soul like mankind.” 22
The letters Maclean’s received about the Fraser article give a sense of the fine line that journalists trod in discussing the odd private life of this very public man. Some writers clearly thought that Mackenzie King was bonkers. Ada Hayner wrote from Mindemoya, Ontario, to complain that “there is little wonder we are faced with such chaotic conditions as exist today” if “those who have been entrusted with the highest position that the Dominion has to offer should resort to the ravings of a medium.” An Alberta man exclaimed: “No wonder Canada is debt-ridden when men of King’s position are allowed to spend the taxpayers’ money to gallop all over the world to talk to dead dogs.”23
Still, if King’s bizarre behaviour angered some readers, others found the whole exposé itself to be “in very bad taste.” “Surely a new journalistic low,” wrote one man from St Catharines. “You might at least have left out his mother.” Another wanted the magazine to know “that at least one of its readers did not approve of this effort to cast dubious reflections on the private life of Canada’s greatest Canadian.” Some of this talk no doubt came from Liberal supporters. Overlaying it, though, was the idea that public men reflected the nation. If you criticized someone like King, you criticized Canada.
Back in 1926 Mackenzie King’s Quebec lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, had faced scandal when a Conservative MP claimed that Lapointe had gone on a binge cruise of women, drink, and music aboard the government ship The Margaret. The story made headlines in the midst of the election, but the political class had largely closed ranks around Lapointe and he was vindicated in a hastily arranged and closed-to-the-public inquiry. Simply by raising such an unseemly topic, the Tories seemed to have sullied themselves. If the allegation were true, Lapointe’s behaviour would have been “contrary to the dignity of public men” yet the allegation itself was also seen as improper and undignified.24
Twenty-five years later, Fraser still trod on dangerous territory. If public men had secrets, the common sense of the early 1950s left doubts as to whether these could or should be talked about openly. Did it matter now that King had done these things, especially after he had died? Different Canadians came up with different and opposing answers. Journalists moved carefully in the murky area of contemporary public speech.
For Geraldine Cummins, the story did not end with Blair Fraser’s outing of Mackenzie King. A short time after her meeting with the Maclean’s journalist, Cummins had a rather special Canadian visitor. It was the spirit of Mackenzie King himself. According to the transcript that Cummins kept of this ghostly prime ministerial conference, King wanted to reassure Cummins that she had done right in telling his story. In fact, he confessed to feeling “remorse” for leaving the decision about his papers and his psychical research up to his literary executors. They were “good but ill-advised friends.” 25
King had one further message. This was for the person who had tipped off Blair Fraser and sent the journalist her way. Cummins doesn’t record who this was, only referring to the person as “X.” She does record King as saying that this individual had given “devoted service” to him in his life. The person had “in the journalistic phrase ‘given my story away.’” For this he was grateful: “I have obtained my freedom and my peace through his action.” It is impossible to know for certain who this “X” was, yet the most likely candidate would have to be J. Edouard Handy. He had been King’s devoted assistant in the latter years of his life. It was Handy who transcribed King’s diary entries each day. No one else knew more about King’s dealings in the occult.
How did Fred McGregor and the literary executors react to Blair Fraser’s exposé? Day by day, McGregor continued to pore over King’s diary, transcribing this important private document into a form that the official biographer could use. He worked toward making the proper respectful monument for King the statesman.
McGregor remained guarded. “Fraser has his facts right as far as they go,” he wrote to a close friend of King’s, “but even he has not realized the extent and intensity of Mr. King’s interest in establishing direct communication with the spirits of the departed.”26 King had a great many more secrets. And in the early 1950s it still seemed possible that these could either be kept secret or handled discreetly in such a way as to preserve the old chief’s dignity.
