Pioneer - Volume 9

• Hydesville Day 
  
• Let’s get it right:
  
• Outline of the murder and phenomena as recorded
  
• How to account for all these errors
  
• But Who Were These Girls?
  

• Public Debates: Spiritualism – Christianity
  
• Spiritualism Vindicated – Emma Hardinge Britten
  
• The Relation of Modern Spiritualism to Christianity – Ernest W. Oaten
  

You can read this issue  HERE

Some very interesting reading in this issue of Pioneer.
I especially enjoyed reading about Arthur Conan Doyle
- Candlelight.KK

• Knock, Knock - Who’s There
  
• ACD’s Australian Helper
  
• The Physical Phenomena of the Past, An Historical Survey: The Rap - “God’s Telegraph” by W. Leslie Curnow, B.A
  
• How to account for all these errors
  
• But Who Were These Girls?
  

• 92nd Anniversary of the passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  
• A. C. D. As I Knew Him - Psychic Science
  
• A. C. D. As I Knew Him - Stanley De Brath
  
• Addendum note - Garth Willey
  
• Conan Doyle Exhumation Makes Front Page News - The Two Worlds, July 9th, 1955
  
• Coverage of the funeral - The Two Worlds, July 18th, 1930
  

• One-Stop Website - Research - Study Weeks at the Arthur Findlay College 2022
  

• Public Debates: Spiritualism - Christianity
  
• The Relation of Modern Spiritualism to Christianity – Ernest W. Oaten
  
• Concluded from the last issue
  

• New SNU Pioneer Page
  

.........
His headstone there bears the additional words “Knight, patriot, physician and man of letters”.
A ‘man of letters’ indeed he was: not only a writer of fiction and a prolific writer on all manner and kinds of factual and spiritual matters but also he was a poet and song writer (he even finished an operetta – Jane Annie: or The Good Conduct Prize, 1893 – for James Barrie who had suffered a nervous breakdown).


One of ACD’s poems, The Farewell, seems particularly poignant here:

The Poems of Arthur Conan Doyle
Collected Edition (1922)

The Farewell

THE SOUL TO THE BODY:

SO SORRY, dear old friend, you have to die,
We’ve been such goodly partners, you and I,
Such comrades in our work, and mates at play,
We’ve lived together many a happy day.
It’s only lately that you disappoint,
Sluggish in limb and clogged in every joint;
But that is not your fault, for grim old Time
Has blocked your tiny arteries with lime,
And cut your sap and left its withering trace
In every wrinkle of your dear old face.
No, faithful comrade, I have nought but praise;
If there were fault, ‘twas mine. You walked the ways
On which I led you, be they low or high,
Thanks for all services! And so good-bye!




THE BODY TO THE SOUL:


GOOD-BYE, old friend! You've used me many a year,
And, as you say, I'm rather out of gear,
And quite disposed to rest. No doubt you’ll find
Some other form congenial to your mind,
And moulded on this wreck you leave behind,
For that, they say, persists. May it be one
That serves you faithfully, as I have done.
Of course it's right our partnership to sever
Since I am old and you as young as ever.
I’ll find some cancer cell or handy germ
To bring my waning forces to a term
And break the framework of the old machine.
Then down at Woking or at Golder’s Green
They’ll do the trick. And you, friend, from afar,
Will see the oaken chest or cinder jar,
And know that I have gone without a pang
Back to the elements from which I sprang.

Garth Willey.