According to the SPR reviewer, King devotes a section of his book to Cadoxton Lodge and to Winifred Coombe Tennant, although "one of the most interesting sections from the perspective of the SPR probably does not actually feature anything paranormal at all". King treated as an unproven rumour a scheme to produce a "spirit child" who would help bring about world peace. The reviewer points out that this was more than rumour. As the late Archie Roy showed in his book The Eager Dead, "the Plan", as its participants called it, really was put into effect, and the SPR figure Gerald Balfour, president of the Society in 1906 to 1907, fathered Winifred's son Augustus Henry, born in 1913.
Henry did not become a messiah, the reviewer notes; he became a monk.
King himself had a small experience there. As a boy in 1960 he crept into the then empty Cadoxton Lodge, not knowing its history, and was frightened by the sound of a window slamming and breaking, though he had not seen any window open. It is an odd footnote to a house that, half a century before, had been the scene of a secret experiment in communication with the dead.
Comments