Stewart Alexander Archives (audio recordings)

In the 1990’s I was, for some years, the Archives officer and for a while the President of the now defunct Noah’s Ark Society for Physical Mediumship. Prior to that, over a period of several years I had been most fortunate to meet, on a number of occasions, elderly Spiritualists who some years earlier had sat with legendary Physical Mediums who by then we could only read about. However, when relating to me their experiences it was almost as if they were telling of séances which they had attended the previous night as against 10/20/30/40 and in one case, 50 years earlier. Such had been the impression made upon them by what they had witnessed that those séances had been indelibly stamped into their memories.

Always, as I listened, it had invariably struck me that I was as close to living history as it was possible to be.

When, therefore, I became the Societies Archives Officer I determined to appeal to such people to come forward – to make contact with me and arrange to leave on record audio recordings of those wonderful inspiring sittings that, in past years, they had been privileged to attend. Now, no matter how harsh this may seem, the fact is that one by one our forebears were leaving this earth and taking with them their recollections and one by one their experiences – their stories - were being lost to our movement.

So - in an effort to address that situation and catch them whilst there was yet time, I placed, on behalf of the Society, an advertisement in its monthly Newsletter and in various Spiritualist publications inviting and imploring them to send in their invaluable accounts. Pleasingly many responded and eventually I was too select a number of them which I grouped together onto a single cassette under the heading; ‘The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism – Archives Compilation Tape 1 – (1995)’ and this was subsequently marketed by the N.A.S. for its members and understandably proved to be extremely popular.

However, with the later collapse of the Society that single cassette was to be the only one produced with the result that so many voices from the past were for many years to remain silent and unheard upon my library shelves.

Then, one day, two years ago, I was working at my computer when my eyes fell upon those cassettes and suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, it struck me that I had been guilty of failing to fulfil the wishes of all those contributors. Inadvertently, I had been singularly responsible for failing in my duty to them to keep their inspiring memories alive.

Thereupon I decided to select a number of them – take them with me to my next Seminar, and allow the attendees to hear those voices from our movements past. Imagine then my absolute horror when, on the occasion of my seminar talk, with the first cassette loaded into the machine, and everyone eagerly waiting to hear it, I pressed the play button and the tape snapped. However, what seemed at the time to be a literal disaster actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for I -realised then that all such tapes in my supposedly ‘safe keeping’ would, with the passage of years, have been similarly deteriorating!

Enter; Lew Sutton (friend of many years) who, with the necessary equipment, graciously volunteered to take on the project of transferring all the cassettes onto CD and, in the process, clean up the sound quality which, on some of the tapes, was far from good. Anyway, it was when Lew was working on the old Ark compilation cassette that he telephoned to say that unfortunately the final accounts would not fit onto the one CD and in consequence they would have to be carried over onto a second one. Instantly, it then occurred to us both, that if we made a further selection of accounts to follow on beyond the Ark recording we could fill up the second CD and perhaps issue and make available to anyone interested in Physical Mediumship a double CD album.

Now – following months of work – months of engineering by Lew and the recording of new applicable introductions etc. the project has at last been completed and, to the best of my knowledge, with the single exception of that Ark cassette, I know of no other such multiple recording within or outside of our Movement. I therefore believe that not only is this present album historic but it is also unique and it is my absolute intention to make it widely available both in this country and abroad. I believe it to be ‘that important’!

To me this is a duty to keep faith with those contributors who, prior to their own transition, took the time and the trouble to record their verbal accounts for posterity so that they would not be lost to our present day and our future movement. It is my firm belief that what these Spiritualists of yesterday have to tell us will prove to be educational, fascinating and extremely interesting to all listeners and hopefully this album will be followed by others. Listeners will enter into the séance rooms of mediums such as ; Helen Duncan, Alec Harris, Frank Havard and William Olsen etc. and the past will once again live as the contributors tell of their wonderful experiences.

Little wonder then that I entertain the hope that all interested parties – Spiritual or otherwise - will take the opportunity to hear of these past séance room wonders from the people who personally witnessed them for I am of the opinion that to give yesterday’s Spiritualists a voice in our movement today is extremely important to our contemporary movement which sadly, remains largely ignorant to the séance room wonders of the past.


There you have it - friends!!!!

Please feel free to order your copies of this superb Double CD Album!!!

Robin