Sunlounger

Introduction to Billy Hope's work

These pages about Billy Hope, the psychic photographer, are taken from a journal kept by my grandparents. This journal records the results of their work with Billy Hope during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Everything on these pages (unless I've indicated otherwise) is transcribed faithfully from this record. For those unfamiliar with Billy Hope, he was a psychic photographer (1863 - 1933). He is best known for his work with the 'Crewe Circle' during the early 1920's and was the centre of a controversy following an 'exposé' by Harry Price. Details of the 'exposé' and the information that has come to light about Harry Price and his methods can be found online elsewhere.

The journal was written in 1942 by my grandfather from notes made at the time of the events they describe. The earliest sittings took place at Billy Hope's Crewe home on the 11th June 1928 and the last of the recorded sittings took place at my grandparents' home in Bradford on the 20th June 1932.

The journal starts with an introduction describing the background to the sittings and my grandfather's personal impressions of Billy Hope as he knew him.

The images he obtained were called 'extras' and show three different types - mask, veil and cloud:

One of the more newsworthy episodes was the sitting held shortly after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The sitter was the Rev Charles H Tweedale and the sitting was held on the 14th July 1930, one week after Conan Doyle's death. (The Conan Doyle sitting)

There have been many attempts to show Billy Hope as a fake, and the vast majority are based on his switching the photographic plates with ones he had prepared earlier. Looking at the statistics for the journal sittings you can get an idea of the huge scale of operations he would have needed to carry out this substitution. Considering only the sittings in Yorkshire, there were 226 covering 17 visits over 4 years. Expand this to cover a period of 30 years and you can start to imagine how many 1,000s of models he would have needed (and bear in mind that the sitters could provide their own photographic plates, so he would always need to have a sufficient quantity of prepared plates for any conceivable brand that the sitter might have). And think of all those people who sat as models while he prepared his ‘fake’ plates — there must have been hundreds of them over the years, and not one of them broke the silence around this conspiracy, but all of them took the secret to their graves!!

And my own feelings about whether he was a fake or not? I tend to believe he must have been faking it, but when it comes to proving something my experience of testing labs comes into play. The usual criteria for accepting a test result depend mainly on three things — the test result must be something measurable or quantifiable, it must be repeatable (the same person gets the same result every time when the same procedure is followed) and it must be reproducible (no matter who performs the actions, the result is the same every time). With Billy Hope the 'extras' he produced can loosely be called quantifiable, and he repeated his results many times, but it fails on the need to be reproducible.