The Bedford Prophetess

 

Today, I learn, is Bedfordshire Day. Who knew there was such a thing? Radio 3 was making the most of it this morning, with various Bedfordshire-linked musicians and, of course, settings of Bedford's own John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I've visited Bedford several times over the years, on one occasion to visit what is surely one of the strangest museums in England – or at least one telling the strangest story. I recently discovered, 'among my papers', something I wrote about that museum for a magazine, who in the end didn't want it. So here it is...

[The Panacea Museum is at 9 Newnham Road, Bedford – very near the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, with its Edward Bawden graphics and William Burges furniture.]

'War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box.' Some of us – most of us, I guess – are old enough to remember when announcements to this effect appeared regularly in the national press. (Actually, you don’t need to be that old; the campaign to ‘open Joanna Southcott’s box’ lasted into the 1990s.) But what was it all about? Who was Joanna Southcott, what was in that box of hers, and who wanted it opened?
 The story begins in the years of war and revolution around the turn of the 19th century, and leads all the way to… well, to Bedford, of all places, at the time of the First World War. England in the 1790s was experiencing a spate of self-proclaimed prophets claiming to have urgent news from God about an imminent millennium and what must be done to save mankind. Joanna Southcott was one of these, but she began as a follower of another, Richard Brothers, a retired seaman who liked to be known as ‘God Almighty’s Nephew’ (or, by way of variety, ‘Revealed Prince of the Hebrews’ or ‘Slain Lamb of Revelations’). Brothers’ prophecies caused a sensation in the early 1790s, but he set the date for the millennium too early. It came and went, and so did Brothers (ultimately into a lunatic asylum) – but Joanna Southcott, who was receiving her own messages from God, continued what he had started.
 One of Brothers’ claims was that he was the ‘Shiloh’ mentioned in Genesis, the new messiah who would gather the people of Israel – who, for Brothers, included the lost tribe known as the English – at the millennium, lead them to Jerusalem and set up a new world order. Joanna Southcott didn’t go quite that far; her ultimate mission, she believed, was to give birth to this messiah, Shiloh. Southcott was a Devon woman, a former domestic servant, who in her portrait looks more like a jolly farmer’s wife than a prophetess, but her barely comprehensible prophetic writings won her a devoted following of thousands, high and low, in London and beyond.
The Southcott cult reached a pitch of frenzy when Joanna declared that she was the ‘Bride of Revelations’, the ‘woman clothed with the sun’, and that she – although a virgin in her sixties – was now pregnant with Shiloh. While the satirical cartoonists of the time had a field day, six eminent doctors who examined her declared that she was indeed pregnant (so much for medical expertise), and her followers set her up in a grand London house and prepared for the great day. But alas, Joanna Southcott, far from giving birth, died of some kind of dropsy, and was discovered – surprise – never to have been pregnant at all.
  However, she left what was to prove a strangely enduring legacy – a trunk-sized, sealed box of prophecies, which, if opened in the presence of 24 bishops of the Church of England, would, she declared, initiate an era of eternal peace, love and harmony under the new messiah. Southcott also left behind a core of believers, but Joanna and her box faded into the background as other prophets emerged, in England and America, with their own ideas about the always imminent millennium.
  Then, a century after Southcott’s death, something extraordinary happened. In Bedford. Mabel Barltrop, a clergyman’s widow, began receiving visions and messages from (as she believed) God, who communicated with her through automatic writing. She became fascinated by Joanna Southcott’s prophecies, and found a sympathetic audience among Southcott’s rump of followers, who were happy to accept the ‘revelation’ that Mrs Barltrop was in fact the expected messiah, Shiloh, in person. They also believed her to be the eighth and last prophet of ‘the Visitation’, the prophetic tradition that had begun with Richard Brothers. Mrs B therefore styled herself ‘Octavia’.
  The community of followers, mostly women, that ‘Octavia’ formed around her in Bedford took the name of the Panacea Society, and it soon proved remarkably successful. As well as 70 members living in and around a ‘campus’ of large Victorian houses centred on Albany Road, there were up to two thousand in other parts of the English-speaking world as the Society grew and its influence spread through the 1920s and 1930s. The Bedford community lived quietly and drew little attention to themselves, but they pursued their two aims vigorously and in a thoroughly businesslike manner. These were to sell their cure-all ‘panaceas’ – little squares of linen dipped in water on which the prophetess Octavia had breathed (130,000 sold worldwide, many cures claimed) – and, yes, to campaign relentlessly, though leaflets, advertisements and petitions, to get those 24 bishops to open Joanna Southcott’s box. Adverts appeared everywhere – not only in the press but on billboards, hoardings and the sides of buses – and many thousands signed petitions calling for the opening of the box.
  The society continued to thrive even after Octavia’s death in 1934, but it gradually faded away over the post-war decades, finally being dissolved in 2012. However, that was not the end of the story: the society’s considerable assets were used to found a charitable trust – and to turn the Society’s ‘campus’ into a most fascinating museum, which tells the story of the Visitation tradition and the Panacea Society lucidly and objectively. There are informative displays on such unlikely phenomena as the House of David baseball team, formed of extravagantly bearded members of the Michigan-based Israelite House of David (which also had a successful basketball team, an orchestra and even a big band). The museum is a quite extraordinary place, with many rooms preserved as they were, everything in readiness for the visit of the 24 bishops and the opening of the box. There are some extraordinary artefacts, including the very fancy cradle made for Joanna Southcott’s divine child, and even the baby clothes that he was to wear. The buildings are ranged around a pleasant, peaceful garden (the Panaceans believed Bedford was the site of the Garden of Eden – a wonderful flight of fancy). In the garden are the chapel where the Panaceans worshipped, the Wireless Room where they relaxed and listened to the radio, a weeping ash tree that they believed to be ‘Yggdrasil’, the tree at the centre of the world – and, stuffed and mounted in a cage, Octavia’s pet jackdaw, Sir Jack Daw.
  As for Joanna Southcott’s box, that stands in the panelled room prepared for its ceremonial opening – but it’s not the real box, only a facsimile. There seem always to have been a number of replica boxes in circulation, just to confuse the sceptics (the psychic researcher Harry Price X-rayed one of them in the 1920s and found it contained only a horse pistol, a dice box, a purse and various odds and ends). Where is the real box? No one knows – or at least that’s the official answer. Wherever it is, there is no clamour now for it to be opened. The handful of remaining Southcottians in England are mostly in their nineties. It seems the curious prophetic tradition that led to the Bedford prophetess and the Panacea Society is finally at an end. However, it has a fine memorial in the Panacea Society Museum. And of course it’s never too late to open that box.