As the twentieth century went on and as the original members of the Society grew elderly and died, a succession of water-takers moved to Bedford to take over managing the healing and the Society more broadly. The last head of the healing, and the last Panacean to live at the Society’s campus in Bedford, was Mrs. Ruth Klein, a retired nurse, who had become a water-taker in the early 1970s and moved to Bedford in 1996 to take over the oversight of the Society’s teachings and rituals from the previous two or three elderly members. In 2001, the Society appointed an administrator who was not a believer in the Society’s doctrines to oversee the financial and legal side of the Society’s charitable work, and with Ruth Klein’s death in 2012, the healing and the religious function of the Society effectively ceased. The Society continues as a charitable institution at its original headquarters in Bedford.1
Ruth Klein had continued the long-standing system of recording and managing water-takers’ information on index cards stored in tidy drawers in a room adjacent to the kitchen in the Society’s main administrative office at 16 Albany Road. The index cards she used indicate that, in the ten years before she died, 283 individuals made contact with the Society, either to apply or to report on their progress. Of those, 130 had identification codes used by the Society for those applying from the West Indies and most wrote from addresses in Jamaica—though some wrote from London or other places in England, and a few from the United States. Fifty-three of the correspondents had codes indicating they had originally applied for the healing from Africa, and they principally wrote from addresses in Ghana and Nigeria. American water-takers remained an important constituency, and 48 people made contact with the Society’s healing with U.S. codes, most writing from the U.S. mainland, though some had Jamaican addresses. Aside from four Canadians; one person each from Finland, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand; and one with no address; the remaining 43 correspondents in that final decade had British numbers. It is remarkable to note that nine of those had in fact first applied in the interwar period—including some who had originally applied when they lived in Khargapur in India, Kingston in Jamaica, County Cork in Ireland, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere. The longest-serving water-taker in evidence among these was a woman (86904) in England. In 1924, when she was four years old, her mother had applied for healing on her behalf, and she wrote 376 letters before she stopped writing in the final years of the healing.
In 2003, a documentary broadcast on British television, called Maidens of the Lost Ark, caused a considerable increase in the volume of applications—and the Society’s lay administrator was even called on to assist with their processing. While many of these applicants quickly stopped writing, a small number became relatively committed and continued to maintain contact with Bedford. The Society’s administrator, who worked closely with Ruth Klein, recalled the decision to take part in the documentary as part of Klein’s final attempt to renew and invigorate the membership—though he also noted her sense that the healing was in long-term decline and that this was perhaps a final opportunity to tell the story of the Society. The last water-takers who wrote to the Healing Department were ultimately sent a letter informing them of its closure and given a few pieces of linen—though many thousands of these remain in storage in Bedford.2