Writer, Medium, Suffragette, Spy? The Unseen Adventures of Geraldine Cummins more

THE PARANORMAL REVIEW WRITER, MEDIUM, SUFFRAGETTE, SPY? THE UNSEEN ADVENTURES OF GERALDINE CUMMINS (1890-1969) WENDY E. COUSINS PIONEERING MEDIUM, Geraldine Dorothy Cummins was born on 24 January, 1890, at 17 St Patrick’s Place, Cork City, Ireland. She was the fifth of the eleven children of Dr Ashley Cummins, an eminent physician, appointed Professor of Medicine at University College Cork at the early age of 40, and his obviously equally busy wife, Jane Constable. The Cummins family was Anglo-Irish Protestant with strong medical and military connections, bright blue eyes and an “insatiable curiosity” for the unknown (Cummins, 1951, p. 12). In her youth Geraldine was active in the campaign for votes for women and made a number of public speeches in favour of the suffragette cause; although, at one point this resulted in her being stoned through the streets of Cork by an unsisterly mob of female factory workers (ibid, p. 18). Along with her activities in support of women’s suffrage, Geraldine Cummins [Mary Evans Picture Library / SPR] she pursued a literary career Geraldine Cummins’s principal interest, even though her own estimation of her literary however, was in psychic phenomena. In June talents was low, and she went so far as to 1914 she visited Paris where she met the Irish describe herself as ‘slow of speech’, and as a medium Hester Dowden and joined in a ‘dull uninformed conversationalist’. Yet, despite fascinating Ouija board session which appeared these self-confessed short-comings, she to predict the outbreak of the First World War. managed to co-write two plays for the famous Mrs Dowden, the daughter of a famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and went on to publish Shakespearean Scholar, was a favourite in Irish two novels, The Land they Loved (1919) and literary circles, a charismatic hostess and a Fires of Beltane (1936), both of which displayed friend of luminaries such as Bram Stoker, her continuing concern with feminist issues. In George William Russell, Ellen Terry and 1952 she published the first biography of her William Butler Yeats. In fact, it is believed that friend and fellow-writer Edith Somerville (coshe served as the inspiration for the psychic in author of The Irish R. M. books, which were Yeats’s spiritualism play Words on a successfully dramatised by UK television in the Windowpane. Much impressed with her well1980s). THE PARANORMAL REVIEW connected acquaintance, Geraldine left her hometown of Cork for the City of Dublin, where she took a job at the National Library of Ireland and became a paying guest in Mrs Dowden’s house. It was there that she began her training in mediumship and as a result became less active in the cause of women’s suffrage. In her autobiography Unseen Adventures (1951) she wrote that she “abandoned the idea of becoming a politician, it has not seemed to my mind at any time since, as humanly constructive an occupation as that of medium” (p. 18). Considering the restless and violent political climate in Ireland at the time, this was quite possibly a more hard-headed decision than might at first be supposed. Her mediumistic career progressed rapidly, and as fate would have it, the poet W. B. Yeats, was to be the participant in one of her first professional sittings at Hester Dowden’s house. Some years later, in 1923, Geraldine met the psychic investigator Edith Beatrice Gibbes, who became her patron, and soon went to live with her in Chelsea. She still returned to Cork each summer to visit her mother and call on her friend and fellow writer Edith Somerville, who also maintained a keen interest in all matters spiritualistic. After her arrival in London she began to produce a series of scripts through automatic writing, which were later published. One series, apparently from the time of Jesus, was dictated by an early Christian called Cleophas. In another set of writings she was the channel for probably the most famous ‘otherside’ communication in history, The Road to Immortality1, in which F. W. H. Myers apparently laid out ‘the progression of the human spirit through eternity’, stage by stage. The years when Geraldine and Miss Gibbes collaborated gave rise to an enormous volume of material, but there were also periods in which not much was written. Unfortunately, at the end of 1931 Geraldine became extremely ill with cancer and recovered with difficulty, yet despite this, in the early summer of 1939 she had a sitting with former Chief Secretary of Ireland (and SPR President) Gerald Balfour. By her own account this was highly successful and appears to be a significant moment in her 1 eventful life. Ten days later she returned home to Ireland, noting in her autobiography that this was due to “the outbreak of war in September ruthlessly driving all our minds and energies in a different direction” (p. 84). Interestingly, Geraldine’s biographer, Charles Fryer, records that between 1940 and 1944 she was “doing some work of an investigative nature, which involved her in a certain amount of danger and was undertaken from patriotic motives” (Fryer, 1990: p22). Apparently, although further details were among the papers Geraldine left when she died, they were (at least in 1990) in the hands of a government department and for reasons of security could not be released. However, never a man for vagaries, another former SPR President, the Northern Irish classical scholar, E. R. Dodds (nicknamed the Universal Question Mark) was more forthright in his assessment: The last time I saw her, shortly before her death, she confided to me that in the war period she had from a sense of duty undertaken the dangerous work of a British agent in Ireland, exploiting her ‘innocent’ status as a ‘non-political’ medium to worm out the intentions of a pro-German I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) faction. I believed her: the courage, the deviousness, and the necessary skill in ‘fishing’ were all of them in character. (Dodds, 1977, p. 108). In Unseen Adventures Geraldine Cummins notes that an unfortunate misprint in publicity material for one speaking engagement in Brighton led to a particularly packed audience expecting to hear a rather more salaciously titled talk on “The Road to Immorality − with fifteen years experience”! The wider historical background is of relevance at this point. The newly independent Southern Irish state was officially neutral during World War II, although the actual extent of that neutrality in practice was a subject of bitter dispute. The Irish leader, Eamon Devalera signed a book of condolences on the death of Hitler, yet many thousands of Irish people fought with Allied forces. This topic still remains divisive and emotive. However, to view the situation in strictly military terms, a key point is that by remaining neutral during World War II, Ireland ensured that Britain did not have naval access to the Irish deep water ports that would have provided exceptional control of the North Atlantic and a distinct strategic advantage. The United States was also somewhat ambivalent to the idea of joining the war, but the American envoy to Ireland, David Gray, was outspoken in his condemnation of the Axis forces and was publicly sympathetic to the idea of British naval access to the disputed Ports. David Gray was married to the aunt of Eleanor Roosevelt and his relationship with THE PARANORMAL REVIEW President Franklin D. Roosevelt was more than usually close, but his relations with Devalera were extremely strained, to the extent that the Irish leader reported that he would have had Gray declared persona non grata, if it were not for his family connection to the President (Dwyer, 1988). Geraldine Cummins had first met David Gray in County Cork as fellow guests of Edith Somerville, Gray having spent some years living in Ireland back in the 1930s. Their next meeting was to occur in less convivial social circumstances. On 7th November, 1941, at the American Legation in Phoenix Park, Dublin2, a most unusual reunion took place. Only Cummins and Gray were present and at that meeting, via automatic writing, Geraldine transmitted messages purporting to come from President Roosevelt’s late mother, who had died a few months earlier, from former President Theodore Roosevelt and also from Arthur Balfour, former British Prime Minister and yet another SPR past President. The Balfour message wrote of I.R.A. activity and named several Irish political leaders as potential quislings for Hitler, adding the caveat “I am no prophet, I can merely see into the minds of certain leaders”. Ominously, the message introduced by the name of the President’s deceased mother sent a warning, “My boy will have to make an important decision in the next few months, I want him to throw down the gauntlet”. This was a little over a month before the U.S.A. entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbour. Further meetings were to follow. The messages thus transcribed were not always accurate, but they do make sensational reading (Dwyer, 1988). This is an extraordinary situation and one that is either passed over by historians or noted with some embarrassment. The whole affair may be dismissed as merely a peculiarity of an impressionable American official with an interest in spiritualism (Dwyer, 1988), but nevertheless, the messages were duly passed on to a wartime President and it should be noted that, as befits his diplomatic position, David Gray was a man usually guarded in his communications. The facts of this case may well bear further examination, however, it should be noted that Geraldine Cummins’s 2 Previously the residence of both Arthur and Gerald Balfour as former Chief Secretaries of Ireland. Gray was aware of the connection and appears to have prior acquaintance with the Balfours. profession as a medium does appear to have endowed her with the most enviable item in the espionage armoury − the cloak of invisibility. As occult travellers, charged with privy messages, sent from one world to the next, there may be some similarities between mediumship and espionage, however there are other metaphors in use. Noting the many analogies between mediumistic communication and the traditional concept of literary inspiration, Cottom (1991) points out that “this parallel could be extended to encompass all the ills to which texts are heir, from stupidity to cupidinous irresponsibility to the ghostly abyss of false personation, which literary language would term plagiarism” (p. 108). Geraldine Cummins was well aware that using her psychic skills professionally might lead to litigation (Cummins, 1952: p. 95); however, in a perfect example of Cottom’s extended analogy, she ran into some difficulty, not with the Witchcraft Act, but with copyright law. This legal dispute arose through an architect, a Mr Bligh Bond, who having been present at the sittings for the Cleophas writing argued that as the writings were the composition of a spirit, and that as these communications were addressed to him, and had been typed by him, he should be entitled to the copyright of the production. Cummins’s counsel was quick to retort that following this line of reasoning “that it might just as well be said that the copyright in Keats Ode to a Nightingale was vested in the Nightingale”. After a two day hearing the court made a somewhat tongue in cheek ruling that, since it had no jurisdiction in the afterlife, Cummins was the sole author because it was she who had held the pen. The curious case of Cummins v. Bond [1927] 1 Ch. 167, may have established an important precedent in British law for if Geraldine Cummins had lost her case any author’s typist could claim, and might successfully establish, that he was the exclusive owner of the book he was employed to type (Cummins, 1951, p. 112). It is also an interesting incident of a mental medium strenuously asserting her moral rights over those potentially held by her spirit messenger! Geraldine’s health began to fail again in the mid 1960s and she returned again to her birthplace in County Cork where one of her cousins nursed her. It was at this point, on the advice of a respected advisor, that she gave up her psychic practices on the grounds that her weakened physical state would leave her THE PARANORMAL REVIEW susceptible to undesirable influences (Fryer, 1990). She died in August 1969 at the age of 79 and was buried in St Lappan’s Churchyard on Little Island. The stone is difficult to find and merely bears her name and the dates of her birth and death, giving no clue to the many and remarkable ‘unseen adventures’ of this highly individual woman. References Cottom, D. (1991). Abyss of reason: Cultural movements, revolutions and betrayals. New York: Oxford University Press. Cummins, G. (1951). Unseen adventures. Essex: The Amber Press. Cummins, G. (1952). Dr E. O. E. Somerville: A Biography. London: Andrew Dakers Limited. Dodds, E. R. (1977). Missing persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, T. R. (1988). Strained relations: Ireland at peace and the USA at war, 1941-45. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Fryer, C. (1990). Geraldine Cummins: An Appreciation. Cambridge: Pellegrin Trust. WENDY COUSINS is a Northern Irish university Lecturer, currently researching the paranormal experiences and experiments of the writers, artists and mediums of the Irish literary revival (with a particular reference to the practice of automatic writing). She would be especially interested in hearing from anyone who may have a personal memory of Geraldine Cummins. Her email is Dalriada3@gmail.com. CITATION: COUSINS, W.E. (2008) Writer, Medium, Suffragette, Spy? The Unseen Adventures of Geraldine Cummins, Paranormal Review, 45, 3-7.