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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2018
This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.
1 Bedford, Panacea Society Archives [hereafter: PS] F6.2/11, C. E. H. Dolphin to Miss Hilda Green, 3 May 1925.
2 Established in 1902 as a day to teach schoolchildren the importance of the British empire and their responsibilities to it, by the 1920s Empire Day was being questioned in some quarters: English, J., ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, HistJ 44 (2006), 247–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 For details of this movement, see Shaw, Jane and Lockley, Philip, The History of a Modern Millennial Movement: The Southcottians (London, 2017)Google Scholar.
4 On the Panacea Society, see Shaw, Jane, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (London and New Haven, CT, 2011)Google Scholar. The Panacea Museum in Bedford tells the community's history and displays its rich material culture; see its website, at: <http://panaceatrust.org/the-panacea-museum/>.
5 On migration to the dominions in this period, see Constantine, Stephen, Emigrants and Empire: British Settlement in the Dominions between the Wars (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar.
6 These figures were compiled by Alistair Lockhart of Cambridge University, and will be published in his forthcoming book on the Panacea Society's healing ministry.
7 Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O., ‘Introduction: Being At Home with the Empire’, in eaedem, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge, 2006), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 23. On the slow demolition of the imperial mindset in the twentieth century, see Thompson, Andrew S., ‘Social Life and Cultural Representation: Empire in the Public Imagination’, in idem, ed., Britain's Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2012), 251–97Google Scholar.
8 Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, 1991), 11Google Scholar. On conservative modernity, see Harris, Alexandra, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London, 2010)Google Scholar; Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar; Saler, Michael, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: ‘Medieval Modernism’ and the London Underground (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.
9 Constantine, Stephen, ‘“Dear Grace . . . Love Maidie’: Interpreting a Migrant's Letters from Australia, 1926–67’, in Fedorowich, Kent and Thompson, Andrew S., eds, Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World (Manchester, 2013), 192–213Google Scholar, at 193.
10 On the opening of the Panacea Society archive, see Shaw, Octavia, ix–xiii; Shaw and Lockley, History, 2, 204–6.
11 Kent Federowich and Andrew S. Thompson, ‘Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Migration and Identity’, in eidem, eds, Empire, 1–41, at 15. On migration, see also Harper, Marjory and Constantine, Stephen, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2011)Google Scholar.
12 PS, F6.2/11, C. E. H. Dolphin to Octavia, 11 December 1924; C. E. H. Dolphin to Miss Hilda Green, 9 April 1925, 5 May, 1926, 27 July 1928.
13 PS, A3.5/8, Adrian Barltrop to Miss Mason, 19 May 1927.
14 PS, F5.2/27, F6.3/10, Richard Maguire to the Panacea Society, 5 December 1920, 29 May 1921; F6.3/7, D. M. Killingley to the Panacea Society, 15 June 1922.
15 ‘Newspaper Opinion must not Determine our Opinion’, The Panacea 11/126, 129–30. Issues of this magazine were not dated.
16 PS, F6.3/19, Donald Ricketts to the Panacea Society, 25 March 1925.
17 Information from A. C. Green, Assistant Archivist, Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 28 October 2009; The Times, 28 June 1924, 20 January 1943. The London Gazette reported of Ricketts's bravery in 1943: ‘During the early stages of the evacuation of Rangoon, Mr Ricketts was in charge of the construction of all labour camps and welfare work in these camps. Later, when making arrangements at Mohnyin for housing and feeding evacuees, he was ordered, owing to the rapid Japanese advance, to start for India with his able-bodied refugees. Mr Ricketts[,] however, refused to leave behind any of the refugees in his charge and set out with a large number, including women, children and invalids. He led these overland 300 miles and was able to get more than 300 to safety. Mr Ricketts showed courage, determination and devotion to duty’: online at: <http://www.angloburmeselibrary.com/extracts-from-the-london-gazette—awards-for-the-1942-evacuation.html>, accessed 15 July, 2016. See also Shaw, Octavia, ch. 7, for a discussion of the sexual relationship that Donald Ricketts had with an American man, Edgar Peissart, at the Panacea Society in 1922–3, and the impact it had on community life.
18 See Shaw and Lockley, History.
19 PS, F6.3/10, Joseph Gardner to Octavia, 16 February, 7 May 1920.
20 PS, F5.2/34, Louise Coventry to Octavia, 12 April 1923; Octavia to Louise Coventry, 26 June 1923.
21 Ibid., Ellen Burke to Octavia, 1 July 1923.
22 PS, F5.2/27, Jemima Ramm to Peter Rasmussen, [December 1920].
23 PS, F6.3/11, Caroline D'Aguilar Henderson to the Panacea Society, 7 July, 25 August 1920.
24 These statistics are taken from Shaw, Octavia, ch. 8.
25 PS, F6.2/3, Geraldine Bartrup to Miss H. Green, 14 March 1932; S6.1/7, Elinor Partridge to the Panacea Healing Department, 4 November 1935.
26 PS, F5.2/17, Joseph Taylor to Emily Goodwin at the Panacea Society, 11 September 1929.
27 ‘Our Towers in Five Continents’, The Panacea 7/76, 94–5.
28 Mark Proctor [Octavia's male pen name, which she assumed when she wrote some articles, especially on political or church-related topics], ‘Buy British’, The Panacea 8/93, 198–9.
29 Editorial, The Panacea 8/95, 242.
30 Cyril Carew-Hunt, ‘Our Troubles in India and some of the Causes: The Present Constitution’, The Panacea 7/80, 180.
31 For an analysis of this dynamic, see Schwarz, Bill, Memories of Empire, 1: The White Man's World (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 PS, F2.4/33, Octavia to Mark Kerr, 29 November 1931.
33 Proctor, ‘Buy British’, 20.
34 F. S. Stuart, ‘Wembley and After’, The Panacea 1/4, 80–1.
35 Seeley, J. R., The Expansion of England (London, 1883)Google Scholar. On this idea and its development, see Bell, Duncan, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar. On the attitudes of the dominions to it in the inter-war years, see Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chs 8–9.
36 E. Stone, ‘Signs of the Times in Australia’, The Panacea 7/82, 226.
37 Baldwin, Stanley, On England (London, 1926)Google Scholar.
38 Fox, Rachel J., How we Built Jerusalem in England's Green and Pleasant Land, Part II (Bedford, 1934), 68–9Google Scholar, 75–7.
39 Woolf, Virginia, The Years (Oxford, 2009; first publ. 1937), 357Google Scholar. Woolf's husband Leonard had been a colonial administrator in Ceylon and had returned home.
40 PS, F6.4/8, Ethel Scales to Ellen Oliver, 4 July 1919.
41 PS, F6.2/11, Harold Dolphin to Octavia, 11 December 1924.
42 The Panacea 2/21, 210.
43 PS, F5.1/24, Mary Payne to Emily Goodwin, 28 October, 26 December 1928.
44 For a discussion of this theological idea and its impact on the origins of, and rationale for, the British empire, see Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially ch. 3.
45 See, in this volume, Stewart J. Brown, ‘Providential Empire? The Established Church of England and the Nineteenth-Century British Empire in India’, 225–59.