It is unknown exactly what events spurred the founding of the Society for Psychical Research of Christchurch Inc. It is known that the society was originally founded in 1940 in imitation of its counterpart in Wellington, in which many of its members were involved. It was also closely linked to the Spiritualist Church of New Zealand, founded in 1924. Arthur Conan Doyle’s visit to New Zealand in 1920 helped to boost an already growing Spiritualism, and may have caught Lovell-Smith’s interest. Family stories of an outlawed baronet ancestor also piqued his interest, filling several séances notebooks, Ouija-board messages and spirit writing. The stories of the other members tell of the quest for the sublime which occupied Alternative Spirituality in Christchurch.
Edgar McLeod Lovell-Smith
The main figure of the Psychic Research Society, Edgar was the eldest son of Jennie and Will Lovell-smith, a Christchurch family of feminists, Fabian socialists and philanthropists. Their story is amply chronicled in Plain Living, High Thinking, the family biography written Margaret Lovell-Smith. Their staunch Methodism inculcated a highly practical worldview given to philanthropy and social reform. From the end of his primary-school years, he worked as a lithographic draughtsman at Smith and Antony Press. He was, in Margaret’s words, ‘the family historian and entertainer’. Having been a member of the Anglican Church, he left it in the mid-1930s for the Christian Spiritualist Church, ‘his role virtually that of a pastor’. Lovell-Smith’s library includes Emmanuel Swedenborg, a clairvoyant Swedish minister who rejected the Trinity and believed in multiple spiritual spheres of residence for the departed. A drift from Christian orthodoxy to a less rigorous framework was therefore quite easy, a path repeatedly trod even before the Lovell-Smiths. Edgar died in March 1950.
Outside the orbit of Lovell-Smith, the other members of the Psychic Research Society appear something of an enigma. A series of names continually recur in minutes; Violet Barker, the Sumner resident, who was a regular at the Chancery Lane Séances, as well as participant in her Affair of the Blue Brooch. Lily Hope, the medium; the photographer, Mr. Edlin, and his wife, who both created Spirit Photographs and subsequently posed for them, Mr. O’Brien, who organised a visit to Timaru to spread the Spiritualist ideas, all bear testament to a circuit of the committed, the helpful, and the possibly fraudulent. But all of these figures have a shadowy presence, arguably even less visible to us than the spirits they searched for. Edgar, the Spiritualist Minister, despite his vehement distaste for hierarchy, appears to have taken a strong hand in the compilation of research. The focus on the spiritual phenomena, rather than the living personalities behind it, makes the personalities behind it far more elusive.
