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A Remarkable Legacy
Douglas Lawrence MBE has left a unique and remarkable legacy of over two hundred audio recordings giving glimpses of practically all aspects of Spiritualism from 1957 to 1980 featuring the teachings, philosophy and phenomena of modern Spiritualism. His authoritative plain-speaking lectures are likely to be of interest to spiritualists, psychical researchers and parapsychologists alike. Lawrence’s knowledge and experience of physical mediumship of his era was exceptional{1}.
He did not shrink from exposing fraudulent mediumship and understood the thorny problems of mixed mediumship, especially unconscious fraud [2].
His verbal descriptions from Helen Duncan séances are amongst the most vivid and credible accounts one is likely to hear regarding physical séances. Apart from perhaps, reports from the earlier years of Spiritualism where the perceived authenticity of all such accounts now tend to be challenged, fairly or otherwise[3].
On this website
Acknowledgements
To the curator of the Arthur Findlay College Museum, Paul Gaunt, who first brought to my attention the significance of the Lawrence recordings. Until then I had no knowledge of the extend of the collection. I had only heard one recording by Doug Lawrence which described his amazing experiences at a Helen Duncan séance. It was a serendipitous moment when on offering to use my state of the art software to digitise and clean up a very crackly 78 record of Sir Oliver Lodge that Paul also mentioned the reels of tape he had found at the college. Also, thanks again to Paul, who is also AFC Librarian, for information he provided confirming Douglas Lawrence’s extensive administrative work for the SNU over several decades.
To Barry Lawrence who inherited his father’s 100 or so reels of recordings and allowed them to be digitised before the fragile tapes deteriorated and became unplayable. Thus, these mainly unique recordings will be available to future generations who may not have the chance to hear or see the phenomena that I and others of my generation have witnessed over the last 60 plus years. Barry has also been a great help in providing first-hand information on his father’s involvements with Spiritualism. Barry Lawrence was also able to identity sitters or mediums featured in the recordings from the York Lodge Reading church, Berkshire, where many of the recordings were made.
Many thanks also to Karl Jackson-Barnes who has generously spent many hours adding extra content details to many of the recordings. Karl, a trustee of the Leslie Flint Education Trust, was also able to fill in additional information on sitters and communicators at Flint seances whose voices were unknown to me.
Lew Sutton
