When Christ came to court: the Mrs Meurig Morris case

This is the most detailed account ever published of an unusual story about Spiritualism, which has local connections to West Hampstead and Hampstead.

Louisa Ann Meurig Morris (Getty)

On Sunday evening 11 January 1931, the audience at the Fortune Theatre waited in anticipation of something special. They had come to see a young woman trance medium, Mrs Meurig Morris. Also on the stage was Lady Jean Conan Doyle and her 22-year old son Denis. Her husband, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had died six months earlier, and had spent the last years of his life speaking and writing to promote Spiritualism. Lady Doyle said they were there to show their support for Spiritualism and a collection would be made at the end for a memorial to Sir Arthur. After the audience had sung hymns, the producer and playwright Laurence Cowen spoke about how he met Mrs Morris at his local Kenton Spiritualist church in 1929. He said he had gone as a lifetime agnostic but after hearing her speak he had become a committed spiritualist.

Fortune Theatre today

Cowen decided that he would make the Fortune Theatre in Russell Street Covent Garden, which had been built for him in 1924, available for her Sunday sermons. This was the first of a regular series when people would hear the voice of her control ‘Power’ speak through her. Then he introduced Louisa Ann Meurig Morris, an attractive young woman, who spoke with a soft soprano voice. Sitting on a chair, she passed her hands several times around her head and soon went into a trance. Then she stood up and grasping the collar of her velvet dress with both hands, began speaking in the powerful bass voice of ‘Power’. Louisa gave a 45-minute sermon about Christianity and how the spirit continues after death. Male speakers of the time frequently held the lapels of their suits.

Laurence Cowen and Mrs Louisa Morris (Getty)

Charles Sutton, a journalist with the Daily Mail, was in the audience, he was very impressed by Mrs Meurig Morris and wrote a positive article saying, ‘she has leapt into fame as one of the leading trance mediums in the world’. The resulting publicity drew huge crowds for the second sermon on Sunday 18 January when they began queuing for three hours until they filled the surrounding streets. The police had to be called as the crowd rushed the theatre doors and smashed a window. About 500 people took all the seats leaving another 1,000 to go home disappointed. Laurence Cowen, while exaggerating the numbers to 10,000, later said ‘For the first time in the history of Spiritualism as much public notice was given to ‘Power’ as if he had been Charlie Chaplin’. He also noted that there were many more men than women, the reverse of attendance at normal spiritualist church meetings.

Capitalizing on the enormous interest, Cowen arranged for Louisa to make a talking film with Movietone News on 20 January at their studio in Berners Street.

You can see the three minute film here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxjewi39vzU&t=103s

There is also another part of the film where Cowen speaks, but the end is missing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12Bo6U8oI9E

There are several reports which say that during the recording of the film a thick rope holding a microphone snapped and it crashed onto the stage, swinging within an inch of Mrs Morris’s face. But as you can see in the film, she went on delivering Power’s address as if nothing had happened. Talking pictures were still very new and people did not realise that it was an overhead light, not the microphone, which fell. The Movietone production manager said the supporting rope had burned through from the heat of the powerful light.

Cowen also arranged to make a gramophone record with Columbia on 20 March at their studios in Petty France. It was released in August 1931 as, ‘A Trance Address delivered by Mrs Louisa Meurig Morris’. This was played at meetings in some spiritual churches.

Charles Sutton met Louisa at Cowen’s flat in Ortygia House, 6 Lower Road Harrow, and suggested that a test should be made of her ability as a trance medium. They agreed, and the editor of the Daily Mail chose a text from the Bible which was sealed in an envelope. This was opened and read out on stage by Sutton at the Fortune, when Mrs Morris was in a trance at the third meeting on 25 January. The sentence was from Proverbs: ‘Where there is no counsel, the people fall; But in the multitude of counselors there is safety’. With her eyes shut, Louisa began speaking in the voice of ‘Power’ and she delivered a continuous 40-minute sermon.

When the session was finished Sutton was not impressed, and this time he wrote a negative article which was published the next day in the Daily Mail. He said, ‘I have discovered one thing definitely about Mrs Meurig Morris the young trance medium whose sermons at the Fortune Theatre have attracted much attention. Her sub-conscious mind is crammed with Spiritualist jargon, which she can trot out and hang on any peg which may be given to her as a text or a subject for a sermon. Last night she peached a sermon in a trance. She launched straight away into one of her scientific-philosophical-theological messages, and whenever she dragged in the words ‘counsel’ or ‘counsellors’ they were not material to her sermon, for other words could have been used’. The Daily Mail ran street posters saying, ‘Trance Medium Found Out’.

Outraged, Cowen and Louisa sued the Daily Mail, part of Associated Newspapers, for libel. To pay for the lawyers Sunday collections were made at the theatre for the ‘Meurig Morris Defence Fund’. The trial at the High Court began a year later on the 6 April 1932 and it attracted a great deal of interest. It was unusual, as this was a case where the spiritualist was the plaintiff rather than the defendant which had happened on many occasions. The newspaper defendants pleaded they were justified, and it was fair comment made in the public interest.

At one point as Louisa was giving evidence, she grew pale and staring straight ahead she said, ‘The Christ, – a vision of Christ came’. The judge adjourned the case for ten minutes. When it restarted various witnesses including the scientist Sir Oliver Lodge and Lady Conan Doyle, were called to support Louisa’s case as a genuine trance medium. The opposition called witnesses who said they had overheard Cowen coaching Louisa when she practiced her ‘Power’ and ‘Little Sunshine’ voices and that she was not in a trance. At this point, Laura began to cry and said, ‘It is so dreadful to say these sort of things against me’ and she had to be helped from court.

The jury were played the gramophone record and taken in a coach to the Movietone studios to watch the film.

Louisa’s husband William Meurig Morris was said to be too ill to attend court. More importantly, Laurence Cowen did not give evidence, much to the defense counsel’s annoyance, who said Cowen had exploited Louisa for financial gain.

During the Judge’s summing up, he happened to point to Mrs. Morris with an outstretched hand. She slowly rose and apparently in trance, said in the deep voice of ‘Power’, ‘Harken to my voice, Brother Judge.’ Obviously astonished, Justice McCardie ordered her to be removed from the court. When she was approached the same deep voice said: ‘Do not touch her till I have left the body.’ The Judge ordered a 15-minute adjournment while friends helped Louisa into an adjoining room.

After hearing evidence for 11 days, the jury found in favour of the defendants Associated Newspapers Ltd, but also said no allegations of fraud or dishonesty against Mrs Morris had been proved. Cowen and Louisa appealed against the verdict, but the Court of Appeal dismissed their case on 17 June 1932. They took it to the House of Lords who also turned down their appeal the following February.

The publicity from the trial and the fact she was found not guilty of fraud, meant Louisa was in high demand as ‘the Joan of Arc of Spiritualism’, and she continued giving sermons as ‘Power’ for several years.

The background
Louisa Ann Baylis was born on 17 November 1899, the daughter of a market garden worker in Evesham Worcestershire. (In interviews she said he was a manager of a market garden). She was brought up in a devote Wesleyan family with eight children, and attended the local school until she was 14.

William Meurig Jones Morris was born in 1876 in Denbighshire North Wales. He married Elizabeth and had a daughter, Dorothy born in 1898 in Newport Pagnell. When his wife died, Dorothy was brought up by a relative in Shrewsbury.

In 1916 William was working as an assistant at Boots Chemists in Bridge Street Evesham when he met Louisa who was working at the Woolpack Inn. He was a widower and 25 years older than 17-year old Louisa. They moved to Birmingham where Louisa was living with her elder sister, and were married in 1918 in Kings Norton, a suburb of Birmingham. Their daughter Audrey was born in 1922 in Harwarden Flintshire and she lived with an aunt.

In 1922 William and Louisa moved to Newton Abbot in South Devon where they rented rooms in Powderham Road for about five years. From 1923 to 1926 William worked as an assistant at Stow and Pursers, a chemist shop in Queen Street. Mrs Kate Lavis, a neighbour, who had recently lost her daughter, took Laura to the local spiritualist group. After the sixth visit, Louisa was overcome and began speaking in the voice of a six-year old child who she called ‘Little Sunshine’.

William and Louisa organised seances, where people held hands in a darkened room, at their house and elsewhere in Newton Abbot with a medium called Mr Evans from Plymouth until he was exposed as a fraud in August 1925. The couple moved to Chard the following year and Louisa began travelling around the south west of England giving sermons at spiritual churches. She said she used her married name of Mrs Meurig Morris to distinguish herself from another medium called Louisa Morris who was already working in spiritualist churches.

In 1929 during the depression, William and Louisa Morris came to London living in poverty in one room as he was unemployed. They survived on her fees of between five to 10 shillings for each spiritualist meeting until he got a job in October. By 1930 they were living in 19 Archibald Road Tufnell Park. In 1932 they were with Laurence Cowen at 68 Anson Road in Islington.

Louisa gave Sunday sermons at the Fortune from January 1931 until 26 February 1933 when Cowen sold the theatre. From 22 October 1933 the services transferred to the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street. During the summers she and Laurence toured cities throughout the country. At the height of her popularity she spoke to 4,000 people in Bristol.

Number 6 Ellerdale Road Hampstead, (Marianne Colloms, 2020)

Then in 1934 Cowen obtained possession of a large house called ‘Hampstead Towers’ 6 Ellerdale Road, which had been built for himself by the architect Richard Norman Shaw between 1874-76. (Today this is the Institute of St Marcellina, a residence for foreign students). Mrs Morris and Cowen went on a tour of South Africa, Egypt, and Palestine. They sailed on the 1 June and returned on the 2 September 1935.

In 1936 William and Louisa Morris were with Cowen at Flat 1 Compayne Mansions, 36 Compayne Gardens, on the corner with Fairhazel Gardens in West Hampstead. Also living there was Kate Lavis, Louisa’s friend from Newton Abbot and Sir Pomeroy Holland-Pryor, a retired Army officer and committed spiritualist who often chaired Louisa’s sermons.

From 1937 to 1938 the group had moved locally to 69 Priory Road, near the corner with Woodchurch Road. The 1939 register shows that Laurence Cowen and William Morris were at 94 Greenhill, a block of flats on Heath Street Hampstead, while Louisa and Sir Pomeroy Holland-Pryor were back at 6 Ellerdale Road. It looks as though William and Louisa split up about this time and we lose track of William who died in Wandsworth in July 1950.

Laurence Cowen died on 7 October 1942 in the Hampstead General Hospital and he left £4,000 to a solicitor. He was buried at the Jewish cemetery in Willesden. He had been born in 1865 in Newcastle. He married the actress and novelist Baroness Eugenie Helene Alexandra Gingold in 1896 in Marylebone. She died in December 1926. As a teenager, Laurence with the help of Israel Zangwill, began a career as a journalist. He stood as liberal candidate for Harrow and in Coventry, and from 1907 to 1911 was the lessee of the Pavilion Theatre. The plays he wrote were produced here and at other theatres. He opened the Fortune in November 1924.

Using electoral registers and old phone books, we have managed to trace Louisa Morris who was still at the house in Ellerdale Road, and from 1945 to 1948 her daughter Audrey, who had been brought up by relatives, was with her. Louisa ran it as a hotel and stayed there until 1955, perhaps when a 21-year lease ran out. The following year she moved to 9 York House, in York Place, near Kensington Palace. In 1962 she moved to 24 Peel Street in Kensington where she lived until her death on 4 November 1991.

Unfortunately, we do not know when Louisa stopped preaching or how she got her money. But it is clear that from her poor beginning, she lived in a fashionable area of London and died a rich woman leaving £128,287, worth about £272,000 today.

Interest in Louisa as a trance medium continued in the spiritualist world, and her story was given wider coverage when on 17 July 1979 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme called,

‘Libel: When Christ came to court, Mrs Meurig Morris v The Daily Mail’.