The Hamilton Files

7

My father’s health had begun to fail in 1934. On April 7, 1935, he died of a heart attack when he was a little more than sixty- one years of age. A tragic blow to us all—to his family, to his friends, to his profession, and to his research, which by that time had become an absorbing interest. Our complete acceptance of survival made the period of readjustment much easier. Within the year my mother had re-formed the experimental eroup, and would carry on for several more years with the help of Dr. Bruce Chown and Mr. hugh Reed.
Then came the tremendous upheaval, tragedy and sorrow of World War II. Yet in spite of the many months of personal anxiety we knew as a family while my brother Glen was serving in England as a volunteer Medical Officer, my mother and my younger brother James (by now holding his M.Sc., from the University of Toronto) had begun work on a book which would tell as fully as possible the story of the Hamilton researches up to the end of 1934.
The text was based on extracts from earlier published papers, newspaper articles, lectures and the verbatim seance records, and was copiously illustrated with many of the original flashlight photographs of the Poole and Marshall trance, and of the telekinetic and materialisation phenomena. The introduction was written by the well-known Winnipeg lawyer, H. A. V. Green, Q.C. The book was finally published in 1942 by MacMillan’s of Canada, with the title, Intention and Survival.
As this name suggests, the theme of the report was tracing the statements of intended activity made by the trance intelligences, outlining the steps which led to the fulfilment of these statements of intention with the appearance and the recording of the various phenomena. The book was well received by reviewers across Canada, the United States, Great Britain and parts of Western Europe, and it had a steady sale. Unfortunately it has been out of print for some time.
Due to wartime restrictions at the time of printing, we found it necessary to limit the size of the book, As a result, discussion of one particular phenomenon, deep-trance automatic writing, had to be greatly curtailed. The purpose of this present essay is to offer a full discussion of the automatic writings which manifested through Mrs. Marshall at intervals from 193 1-1933, and from 1942-1944.
Quite as impressive in their own way as were any of the other phenomena appearing in the Hamilton group, these automatic scripts also appeared to be the result of a plan of action deliberately set in motion by our unseen associates. Their coming was found to have been foretold by a series of predictions, or statements of intention.
When the series had been completed and studied, we could clearly see the steps which had been taken to present the material. We also discovered definite references in the Marshall scripts to certain of the Poole communicators who had appeared up to the end of 1927. as well as definite links with certain of the personalities who had demonstrated by way of the materialisation and trance speech of Mrs. Marshall.
Finally, when we surveyed the entire Poole-Marshall output from 1920-1944, unmistakably we could trace the steps of a master programme which appeared to have been carefully dc. signed by our communicators to eliminate as thoroughly as possible any unconscious or subconscious mental activity on the part of either mediums or sitters which might slant or colour the contents of the scripts.
In my opinion, it is this prediction feature which makes the Hamilton inquiry unique. As far as I have been able to discover, never before in the history of a prolonged scientific inquiry into the nature of paranormal phenomena has this prediction feature played so prominent a part. In the pages which follow, the reader will be able to judge this for himself.