Quite a few years ago now, I worked part-time for a few weeks for a television documentary company who needed a historical researcher for a specific project. The documentary was never made, so my research didn’t go anywhere, but the experience was interesting in many ways. It was a stark lesson in how the priorities of a privately-funded television documentary were far from those of academic historians. The environment was also strange to me. The open-plan office was far from the academic environments I was used to, with its casual, decidedly masculine atmosphere: among its primary decorations were posters of nude or scantily-clad women, their physical features glistening with a general sense of plasticity.
Next door was another media-related company called the ‘Blue Room’. I don’t know what went on in there, but it involved a lot of attractive young women auditioning for something. They sometimes passed through a corridor separated only by a glass wall from the office where we were working, eliciting various comments from my colleagues. I assumed it was some kind of modeling agency. But the comments of the full-time researcher – a middle-aged former journalist who was the owner of the nude posters – suggested activities that were, at the very least, risqué.
Unlike that of the company I was actually working for, this name stuck in my mind. This was in part because of its slightly sordid mysteriousness, but also because at the time I was doing research into another ‘Blue Room’ from the 1920s. This one was very different. Clive Chapman was a Dunedin, New Zealand-based house painter whose true calling, for at least a decade in the 1920s and 1930s was as a spiritualist investigator. A ‘self-taught scientist’ he oversaw a series of séances with his niece and research subject, a young woman named Pearl Judd. Chapman experienced visions of angels as a boy, the study of sounds and light ‘vibrations’ as an adult, and engaged in various other experiments with psychic phenomena. In 1922, during a period of ‘domestic trouble and mental strife’ he visited his mother’s home, where he used a ‘closely guarded’ secret method to investigate each of his female relatives (his grandmother, mother, sister and niece were present) for psychic gifts. In his niece, Judd, he found a young woman in whom the ‘power manifested itself to a remarkable extent’.
The two of them continued a series of experiments, claiming powers of levitation, disembodied voices and – the staple of all spiritualism in this era – regular contact with a cast of interesting dead people. In the Blue Room they conversed with the Arab sage Sahanei, the late film actress Martha Mansfield (who had died unpleasantly in a film fire, but who claimed to the séance that she had ‘felt no pain’), various relatives of the participants, and the mischievous and loving little girl ‘wee Betty’ along with a number of other colorful characters. All had distinctive voices and personalities. This was not an unusual collection of figures in a spiritualist séance: almost every medium had a wise old Arab/Egyptian, as well as dead celebrities and the inevitable sweet little girl. What strikes me about this case is not so much its (relatively few) unusual characteristics as the dynamics between the real people involved. Who were Pearl Judd, Clive Chapman and the unnamed other people who participated in these spiritualist ceremonies in Dunedin for over a decade? What did they think they were doing? Why did they do it?
The book in which the story of the Blue Room is told was written by Chapman and a more middle-class friend, ‘G.A.W.’ Pearl Judd, the central figure in all these antics, did not contribute directly. Historians have suggested that in this and earlier periods, spiritualism offered unusual opportunities for women to play central roles in religious activities because of its focus on mediums. Men tended to be the gentlemanly, scientific investigators, while the part of the sensitive, spiritual medium was taken by the woman. As always with spiritualists, I wonder how much each of the people really believed, and how much this was a case of either a clever young girl deceiving her earnest, romantic uncle. Or were the pair of them collaborating to fool their wider audience of gullible people, most of whom were of a higher class than they? Either way, Pearl Judd, as the figure at the center of this story, remains both the most interesting, and the most inaccessible and mysterious, figure in this episode.
Source: Clive Chapman, The Blue Room: Being the Absorbing Story of the Development of Voice-to-Voice Communication in Broad Light with Souls who have Passed into the Great Beyond (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1927)