A Lodge in Some Vast Wilderness
Baptist minister, miracle-worker, rogue and vagabond, Brooklyn healer: the several lives of Dr Monck, and the wager that outlived him.
A bound volume of Punch for 1877 lives on our shelves. We were leafing through it for pleasure, not for work, when we stopped at page 64. A small engraving: two grotesque old sitters at a pedestal table, fingers spread on its top, and rising between them, out of the table itself, a spectre with a horrified face. Beneath it, three short paragraphs of gloating about a man the magazine was delighted to see in prison: “the soi-disant Dr. Monck”, left “to work out his term of durance as a rogue and vagabond”. We did not know who Dr Monck was. By the time we did, the cutting seemed the least strange thing about him.
The butcher’s son
Francis Monck was baptised at Portsea in November 1841, the son of a butcher. The “Ward” came later, and the doctorate he awarded himself. He began respectably: a Baptist minister, first at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, then at Totterdown, outside Bristol. Somewhere in the pulpit years the spirits found him, and he went over to them entirely, touring as a medium with a spirit guide named Samuel and a reputation, among believers, for the rarest feat in the repertoire: materialisation, full spirit forms, and not in the usual darkness but by the light of a lamp.
The cigar-box
In October 1876 he was in Huddersfield, giving seances at the house of a Mr Heppleston at two pounds a night. Among the sitters was Henry Bedford Lodge, and we have Lodge’s own account of what happened, set down thirteen years later in a letter printed by Angelo Lewis, the barrister better known to every conjuror as “Professor Hoffmann”, whose Modern Magic had laid the craft’s secrets open the very year of the seance. A musical box played untouched, but only, Lodge noted, after he had been allowed to cover its works with a cigar-box, “and even then only in a very dim light”. At the end of the sitting Lodge made the doctor an offer: a handsome sum, fifty pounds he thought, if a search of his person did not produce a duplicate musical box and the “spirit hand” the company had seen. The host joined in: “If you have nothing concealed, why not allow Mr. Lodge to see for himself?” Monck struck Lodge in the face, ran upstairs, and locked himself in his bedroom. By the time a policeman had been fetched and the door burst in, the window was open and two sheets were tied to the waterspout. The Reverend Dr Monck, as Lodge put it, “had certainly ‘flown,’ and without either hat or overcoat.”
What he left behind filled two locked boxes and a large bath: “spirit hands,” “spirit faces,” “floating rods,” “illuminated names,” “spirit lamps,” quantities of white gauze, and sixty or eighty keys, some of them skeleton keys. Among the evidence was a slate message the spirits had delivered while Mr Lodge sat at the table: “Oh for a Lodge in some vast wilderness!” The line is Cowper’s. The application was the spirits’ own.
Term of durance
Monck was arrested within days and came before the Huddersfield magistrates on 11 November 1876, charged as a rogue and vagabond under the Vagrancy Act, the same statute that had caught the medium Henry Slade in London days earlier. Three months’ hard labour at Wakefield. His appeal reached the Exchequer Division that winter and failed, eight days after Slade’s had succeeded on a technicality in another court across town. That was the occasion of the item in our Punch: the Law, it said, had for once been guided by “the Light of Common Sense”. As far as Punch was concerned the story was over. It had thirty years to run.
Out of his left side
Monck was caught, and that is the least strange thing about him. What came after is stranger. He served his term, and within months of his release he was producing the most celebrated phenomena of his life, in front of witnesses much harder to wave away than a Huddersfield parlour’s.
The Reverend Thomas Colley, a Church of England clergyman later Archdeacon of Natal, sat with him from the autumn of 1877 and published what he saw: a spirit form, “by the light of the lamp”, “seen to grow out of his left side” before the whole company. He watched one figure drawn back into the medium “like a waterspout at sea — funnel-shaped or sand column such as I have seen in Egypt — horizontal instead of vertical”, and “kissed the dainty hand as in process of absorption it dissolved and was drawn through the texture and substance of his black coat into our friend’s bosom”. Once, by agreement beforehand, “as a most dangerous experiment”, he seized a materialised figure to keep it from returning: “I was, by an invisible force, levitated… right up to where the medium stood, whom, strangely and suddenly, wearing white muslin over his black coat, I found in my arms just as I had held The Mahedi.” He kept relics, among them the chewed remains of a baked apple eaten by a spirit: “here it is before me now after all these years in this screwed up bit of paper for any scientist to analyse.”
Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-author of natural selection, sat with Monck in Bloomsbury in the same period, and would describe it under oath thirty years later: a faint white patch on the left side of the medium’s coat that grew, lengthened, moved six feet clear of him, and “seemed as it moved to grow more distinct and to become the outline of a woman in flowing white draperies”. “I was absolutely certain,” Wallace swore, “it could not have been produced by any possible trick, even had Mr. Maskelyne been there with all his apparatus.”
Thirteen years after Huddersfield the argument was still running in the journals, and the conjuring writer who printed Lodge’s account closed his letter with a sigh: “the most scathing exposure does not shake the firm faith of thorough-going Spiritualists.”
The Door of Hope
Monck’s own life ran on less gloriously. Stranded when Colley sailed for Natal, then kept for a time by a wealthy believer in Switzerland, he crossed to New York in August 1881 and reinvented himself once more, now as a Christian healer. In Brooklyn he ran the Unsectarian Church, then the Apostolic Church of Divine Gifts, with a residential mission at 257 Adelphi Street called the Door of Hope. A correspondent reported it to the London spiritualist press in 1883: “Dr. Monck has turned Christian healer… He is making a mint of money.” Then the familiar shape reasserted itself: sued by his own secretary for unpaid wages; out of healing and into fur-dyeing; in receivership by 1885; gone from Brooklyn by 1886; still answering, in 1889, a Brooklyn lawsuit over nine thousand and fifty-five muskrat skins. After that, nothing certain. Probate hearings on the estate of one Francis W. Monck ran in the Cleveland papers through 1896 and 1897, and that may be him, or may not. Nobody has found a death date, or a grave.
An absurd travesty
Colley never wavered. By the new century he was rector of Stockton in Warwickshire, a retired colonial archdeacon who, his parish remembered, kept a glass-topped coffin in his study. In his sixties he made his faith a matter of public money: a thousand pounds to anyone who could reproduce what he had seen Dr Monck do thirty years before. John Nevil Maskelyne, the most famous conjuror in England, took it up, staged an imitation at St George’s Hall, and claimed the money. Colley refused to pay. Maskelyne circulated a pamphlet declaring, among other things, that Colley was no archdeacon at all, and in April 1907 the whole affair arrived in the King’s Bench, Colley suing for libel, Maskelyne counterclaiming for his thousand pounds. On the first evening the trial adjourned so that the jury could go to St George’s Hall and watch the ghost.
Wallace, now eighty-four, came to court for Colley and was withering about what the jury had seen: the imitation spirit merely “pokes an arm or a head out behind a black-coated figure which represents Dr. Monck, without any growing whatever… I should call Mr. Maskelyne’s performance an absurd travesty of what I saw.” Maskelyne’s counsel called Colley “a man with a passion for notoriety”, and Monck “a low, cunning trickster”. The jury found for Colley on everything: the pamphlet was a libel, and the imitation had not met the terms of the challenge. Seventy-five pounds and costs. Thirty years after Wakefield, with Monck himself vanished and very possibly dead, twelve jurors in London declined to agree that England’s greatest conjuror had done what the butcher’s son from Portsea used to do in a parlour by lamplight.
The last of him
Of everything in Monck’s file, the report we keep returning to is not Punch’s, and not Colley’s. It is Lodge’s memory of the railway station at Huddersfield. Monck was leaving town. With him was a small box, ten or twelve inches long, that had been kept back from the search on the night of the exposure. He waved good-bye from the carriage, and when the train had gone thirty or forty yards, he held the box out of the window, shook it, and laughed. Lodge took the meaning to be: “I have done you here, at all events.” It is the only record we have of Dr Monck plainly enjoying himself, and, like every other record in his file, it can be read both ways.
