On the 14th September, 1915, Second Lieutenant Raymond Lodge, the youngest of six sons of Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished British physicist, was killed in action in Flanders. Eleven days later, on 25th September, Raymond began communicating with Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge through the mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard and Alfred Vout Peters. His initial message was that Frederic Myers, who had become Sir Oliver’s good friend before his death in 1901, was assisting him in adapting to his new environment.

The first very evidential information was about a group photo (see below) taken 21 days before Raymond’s death, which Raymond referred to in sittings with both Vout Peters and Leonard. It was a photo which had never been sent home or otherwise seen by the Lodge family. Raymond mentioned that the photo showed him sitting while holding a walking stick, and that the officer behind him was leaning on him.

About two months later, the mother of one of Raymond’s fellow officers sent such a photo to the family. It showed Raymond sitting on the ground with a walking stick over his legs and the officer behind him resting his arm on Raymond’s shoulder.

Sir Oliver concluded that this evidence went beyond fraud, coincidence and telepathy and saw it as a kind of cross-correspondence, in that messages about the photo came through two different mediums. Mrs Leonard was primarily a trance-voice medium, but occasionally communication came by table tilting. In one such table sitting, on 28th September, the table began to tilt and Raymond identified himself by his nickname, Pat. As a further test of identity, Sir Oliver asked him to name one of his five brothers.

The table spelled out N-O-R-M-A before Sir Oliver interrupted and commented that Raymond was confused. He told him to begin again. The name N-O-E-L was then spelled out, which was one of Raymond’s brothers. It was not until Sir Oliver later discussed this with his other sons that it began to make sense. His sons explained to him that ‘Norman’ was a kind of general nickname used by Raymond when they played hockey together. He would shout, ‘Now then, Norman,’ or other words of encouragement, to any of his older brothers whom he wished to inspire.

Here again, Lodge saw this as evidence against telepathy, since neither he nor Lady Lodge knew of the name. He also saw it as an indication that Raymond, who had discussed psychical research with his father when he was alive, was attempting to provide veridical information by giving a name unknown to his father and mother.

 

Alec Lodge, one of Raymond’s older brothers, sat with Mrs Leonard on 21st December, 1915. As a test of his own, Alec asked Raymond about his favourite music. Alec noted that he then heard Feda, Mrs. Leonard’s spirit control, questioning Raymond, asking him sotto voce, “An orange lady?” Still confused, Feda then told Alec that “he says something about an orange lady.” Alec felt that this was very evidential as My Orange Girl was the last song Raymond bought when ‘alive’.

Raymond also mentioned Irish Eyes, another of his favourites.

By the time Sir Oliver sat with Mrs Leonard on 3rd March, 1916, he was convinced that she was not a charlatan, but he still felt a need to test her in various ways. Thus, at a sitting with her that day, he asked Raymond if he knew about “Mr Jackson”. Feda struggled with understanding Raymond’s response, but she communicated, “Fine bird… put him on a pedestal.”

This was especially evidential as Sir Oliver was certain that Mrs Leonard did not know that Mr Jackson was the name of Lady Lodge’s pet peacock, nor that he had died a week earlier and was in the process of being stuffed and mounted on a wooden pedestal. On 26th May, 1916, Lionel Lodge and his sister, Norah, drove from the Lodge home, near Birmingham, to London for a sitting.

Knowing that his brother and sister were scheduled to meet with Mrs Leonard at noon, Alec Lodge asked two other sisters, Honor and Rosalynde, to sit with him in the drawing room and focus on asking Raymond to get the word “Honolulu” through to Lionel and Norah during the sitting. Lionel and Norah knew nothing of this request.

When Sir Oliver later read Lionel’s notes of the sitting, he saw that Raymond said something about Norah playing music. Norah replied that she could not. Feda (through Mrs Leonard’s voice) then whispered to the invisible Raymond (attention directed away from Lionel and Norah), “She can’t do what?” Upon getting a response from Raymond, Feda then said: “He wanted to know whether you could play Hulu – Honolulu. Well, can’t you try to? He is rolling with laughter.”

By the end of April 1916, a preponderance of evidence that Raymond had been communicating with them had been accumulated by the Lodge family. “The number of more or less convincing proofs which we have obtained is by this time very great,” Sir Oliver wrote, adding that some of them appeal more to one person, some to another; but taking them all together, every possible ground of suspicion or doubt seemed to the family to be removed. “I am as convinced of continued existence on the other side of death as I am of existence here,”

Sir Oliver later offered. “It may be said, you cannot be as sure as you are of sensory experience. I say I can. A physicist is never limited to direct sensory impressions; he has to deal with a multitude of conceptions and things for which he has no physical organ – the dynamical theory of heat, for instance, and of gases, the theories of electricity, of magnetism, of chemical affinity, of cohesion, aye, and his apprehension of the ether itself, lead him into regions where sight and hearing and touch are impotent as direct witnesses, where they are no longer efficient guides.”

Michael E. Tymn is author of “The Articulate Dead,’ available from www.amazon.com,

and from which this article was taken.  Re-printed with author’s permission.

Copyright Michael E. Tymn.

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Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) spent his retirement in Salisbury and is buried in the churchyard of Lake-cum-Wilsford church in the Woodford Valley - just five miles from Wilton Spiritualist Church.

A notable British scientist, he invented the spark plug, which made the motor car possible; made several vital discoveries in radio technology, which Marconi used, causing Lodge to sue him.  Marconi settled out of court.  He also invented electro-magnetism, but his friend Heinrich Hertz beat him to the patents office.   Otherwise, we would now be measuring the outputs on our loudspeakers in megalodges, rather than megahertzes!

Lodge was the first man actually to transmit a message by a wireless signal, performing this feat at a meeting of the British Association at Oxford in 1894.  He was also the first principal of Birmingham University College.  GG.