Frank Podmore

Podmore is the most useful of the founders for a reader trying to work out what the early Society for Psychical Research actually established, because he spent his career inside it disbelieving most of what it published. He was a Post Office clerk by profession and a Fabian socialist by conviction, one of the small group who named the Fabian Society, and he brought to the investigation of mediums a temperament suited to the work: patient, unimpressed, and interested in exactly how a thing had been done. He co-signed Phantasms of the Living while remaining considerably less persuaded by its argument than Gurney was. His own position settled into a narrow one. He allowed that telepathy between living minds might turn out to be real, since the experimental evidence for it seemed to him not yet explained away, and he rejected essentially everything else, including every form of physical mediumship he examined and the entire case for communication with the dead. That is a harder line than most modern sceptics need to take, because most of the phenomena he was refuting are no longer claimed. It is also a reminder that the categories sceptic and believer were never as clean as later summaries suggest. Podmore was a founder of the field and one of its most destructive critics at the same time, and he held both roles for nearly thirty years without apparent strain.

Modern Spiritualism, published in two volumes in 1902, is Podmore's major work and is still cited by historians of the movement, which is unusual for a book written as a debunking. He traced the movement from the Fox sisters in New York State in 1848 through its spread across Britain and America, and worked through the major mediums case by case, setting out what had been claimed, what had been observed, and what ordinary explanation fitted. He was also the author of a substantial and unfriendly biography of Robert Owen and of a history of mesmerism, and the same method runs through all of them: establish the documentary record first, then ask what it will bear. His value to a reference work is that his scepticism was applied from inside, with full access to the society's files and to the investigators who had produced them, so his negative verdicts cannot be dismissed as the judgements of someone who had not looked. He drowned in a pond near Malvern in August 1910.

The inquest did not determine how he came to be in the water, and the circumstances have never been explained. What the book cannot do, and does not claim to do, is prove a negative. Showing that a given effect could have been produced by a given trick is not the same as showing that it was, and Podmore was more careful about that distinction than many who have cited him since.