Anyone learning mediumship today at the Arthur Findlay College in Stansted works in rooms that might no longer exist but for one man: Gordon Higginson. They called him "Mr Mediumship". He was the longest-serving president of the Spiritualists' National Union, for years the principal of the College – and one of the few mediums of the twentieth century to demonstrate physical mediumship publicly before large audiences. His career began on his twelfth birthday and ended the day before he died.
The boy who began at twelve
The story starts a generation earlier, with his mother. When Fanny Higginson was fourteen, she received a message at Longton Spiritualist Church: her own mother had just passed to the spirit world, she herself would become a medium, her son likewise – and their name would be linked with that church for over a hundred years. On returning home, Fanny found her mother had indeed died. So the memorial site devoted to him tells it; it cannot be verified, but it is the story with which the family explained its own origins.
Fanny became a medium and remained one for seventy years, until her death in 1978. Her son Gordon Mons Higginson, born on 17 November 1918 in Longton near Stoke-on-Trent, sat in her circle from the age of three – but was allowed to pass messages to others only from the age of ten. His mother paid for elocution lessons so that he could hold his own before an audience. On his twelfth birthday he demonstrated publicly for the first time at Longton church. They called him "the boy wonder".
Names, addresses, telephone numbers
Higginson is regarded by many as one of the greatest mental mediums of his time. He became famous for the accuracy of his platform work: in his messages, according to the accounts, he gave full names, addresses and even telephone numbers. He would often work several links in the audience at once and return to each until the evidence and message were complete – the same technique still seen today with mediums like Paul Brereton. He demonstrated for over sixty years, sometimes more than a hundred times a year, and filled large halls up to the Royal Albert Hall.
He shared the platform with many of the well-known mediums of his era – Estelle Roberts, Helen Hughes, Bertha Harris, Nan Mackenzie. He called Estelle Roberts the "perfect medium" for the range of mediumship she demonstrated to the highest standards; his own gifts, it was said, reached almost as wide.
The monk in the library
In 1970 Higginson became president of the Spiritualists' National Union – at the worst possible moment. The Union was deep in debt, and Stansted Hall, home of the Arthur Findlay College, carried a mortgage that would have forced the sale of the house. Higginson did not want the office at first and turned it down; he thought the task hopeless.
The memorial site tells what changed his mind as an anecdote – and it is best taken as what it is, a story handed down within his own circle. Driving back from the south coast, Higginson grew tired and lost his way, close to the College. He telephoned and was given a bed for the night. The next morning he was told a man wished to speak with him. In the library stood a monk in a habit, who told him he must accept the presidency of the Union. Higginson stepped out briefly to fetch the general manager, who was waiting – and when the two came back, the monk had vanished, though the only way out led past Higginson.
How one reads that scene is left to each reader. What is documented is what followed: Higginson accepted the office, organised countless demonstrations to raise money, and founded the "Friends of Stansted Hall". Under his presidency the Union was saved from bankruptcy and the debt on Stansted Hall cleared. He remained in office for 23 years, still the longest-serving president in the SNU's history – and in doing so also saved the College where much of the world now learns mediumship.
The physical medium
Higginson was known for the platform, but for the movement itself another part of his work was almost more significant: he was also a physical medium. In the library at Stansted Hall he showed, before groups of around ninety people, phenomena usually known only from closed home circles – materialisation, transfiguration, independent voice, apports. The memorial site shows a rare infra-red photograph from 15 November 1974 in which ectoplasm flows from his mouth.
What was unusual was less the phenomenon than the audience. Physical mediumship traditionally takes place in a small, trusted circle – the long struggle of a Stewart Alexander too unfolded over years in the home circle. Higginson, by contrast, wanted more people to see this form of mediumship with their own eyes; on one occasion he demonstrated it before 300 spectators at the Glasgow Association of Spiritualists. He accepted injuries for it – reportedly more than once through sitters interfering thoughtlessly with the séance – but would not be deterred. He also stayed self-critical: in the physical phenomena above all, he said, he could have achieved more had he sat more regularly.
Trance, healing – and Dr John
Higginson also worked in deep trance. Different personalities then spoke through him: his main guide Choo Chow with quiet wisdom, his childhood friend Cuckoo and his Irish guide Paddy with humour, and a guide called Light who – so the accounts go – appeared only once a year, in the trance address at the Christmas morning service in Longton. Trance mediumship was especially dear to him; he considered it one of the purest forms of communication and the foundation of physical mediumship, and he worked all his life to pass it on.
Less well known is Higginson the healer. Together with his healing guide, whom he called "Dr John", he gave spiritual healing in Longton until his death; queues regularly formed outside the church before the sessions. He also healed animals, and vets are said to have confirmed particular recoveries in which they themselves had given up hope. These are accounts from his own circle, not clinically documented cases – but they belong to the picture the movement has kept of him.
What remains
Higginson taught from the very first Summer School in 1965 at the Arthur Findlay College and stayed faithful to the house for 28 years; from 1979 until his death he was its principal. He called Stansted Hall his "greatest love". For 47 years, from 1946 to 1993, he was also president of the church in Longton – and so, together with his mother, fulfilled the old prophecy of a hundred years of service to that one congregation.
Permit us a wink: a legendary headmaster with special gifts who saves a venerable school for invisible arts from ruin and serves it to his final day – anyone who feels reminded of a certain white-bearded hero of fiction is not so far off: Stansted Hall is, after all, considered by some a real-life model for Hogwarts. Except that Higginson's story is on file with the SNU.
He died on 18 January 1993 – by the accounts, he had demonstrated only the day before. His line reaches into our own directory: mediums such as Margaret Falconer, who teaches today in Germany and Britain, count him among their teachers. Anyone who sits with her, or with other graduates of the College, sits in a line that runs back through Stansted Hall to that boy who first stepped before an audience on his twelfth birthday.
Sources: The Gordon Higginson Tribute Site, gordonhigginson.co.uk (biography by Martin Twycross, "Gordon Higginson Remembered" by Lew Sutton); the "About Us" page of the Stourbridge Spiritualist Church; the portrait "Pioneers of Spiritualism: Gordon Higginson" by the Croydon Spiritualist Church. Statements on physical mediumship and healing report what these sources describe.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it gathers further articles on mediumship, training and British Spiritualism.