Patrick Comerford
Bedford has a cluster of churches, buildings and sites of importance in religious history. The town is associated, in particular, with John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, and John Howard, the campaigner for penal reform.
Bunyan’s Chapel and Howard’s former chapel stand close to one another on Mill Street. But Bedford is also home to one of the most unusual and eclectic religious movements in Britain, the Panacea Society, which believed Bedford was the original location of the Garden of Eden and the chosen venue for Christ’s Second Coming.
The Panacea Museum offers a glimpse into the lives of members of the Panacea Society, who tried to create their own Garden of Eden in the centre of Bedford in the early 20th century, and who are still remembered for their constant advertising demanding the Bishops of the Church of England open ‘Joanna Southcott’s Box’.
The museum is set in beautiful grounds and is spread across several Victorian buildings on Newnham Road, Castle Road and Albany Road that once formed the society’s headquarters, including the Haven, Castleside and the Founder’s House. It is close to the site of Bedford Castle and the banks of the Great Ouse River, and also near both the Bunyan Museum and the former Saint Cuthbert’s Church.
The Panacea Society was a millenarian group founded in Bedford in 1919 by Mabel Barltrop. Its members were inspired by the teachings of the Devonshire ‘prophetess’ Joanna Southcott (1750-1814) and campaigned to have her sealed box of ‘prophecies’ opened according by the bishops of the Church of England.
Joanna Southcott was a self-proclaimed prophetess from Devon. Originally a member of the Church of England, she joined the Wesleyans in Exeter around 1792. She was persuaded that she had supernatural gifts and wrote and dictated prophecies in rhyme. She then proclaimed she was the Woman of the Apocalypse, referred to in Revelation 12: 1-6, and predicted a messiah would spark ‘the millennium’ or the Second Coming in England.
Joanna Southcott announced at the age of 64 that she was pregnant with the new Messiah, the Shiloh of Genesis 49: 10, and that she was going to give birth on 19 October 1814. Of course, the child was never born, and when she died on 26 or 27 December 1814 a post-mortem revealed she never was pregnant.
Her prophesies were kept in a sealed wooden box, which she instructed must only be opened at a time of national crisis and in the presence of all 24 current bishops of the Church of England, who were to spend time beforehand studying her prophecies.
The Panacea Society was founded in 1919 by Mabel Barltrop (1866-1934) at 12 Albany Road, Bedford. She was the widow of the Revd Arthur Henry Barltrop (1856-1906) and the mother of four children, and she originally heard of Joanna Southcott through the writings of Alice Seymour (1857-1947).
Mabel Barltrop had lived at 12 Albany Road, Bedford, close to the remaining ruins of Bedford Castle, from 1904. With her 12 followers or apostles, she founded the Community of the Holy Ghost in 1919 at Albany Road, which they claimed was the site of the Garden of Eden. For them, Bedford was a new Glastonbury and the sacred centre of Britain, and at Albany Road they sought to create their paradise on earth, which they believed Jesus would return to one day.
Barltrop took the name Octavia, identified herself as the Shiloh mentioned in Joanna Southcott’s prophecies and went on to declare herself the ‘daughter of God’. She decided in 1923 that her husband had been Jesus and declared that she and her followers were waiting not for the second coming but for the third coming of Christ.
The Community of the Holy Ghost was renamed the Panacea Society in 1926. A central purpose of the society was to persuade 24 bishops of the Church of England to open Southcott’s sealed box of prophecies. As part of this demand, the society placed advertisements in national and provincial newspapers and magazines and on the sides of buses.
A psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) claimed to have come into possession of the box in 1927 through a rival group. He arranged to have it opened in the reluctant presence of Bishop John Hine of Grantham, but it contained only a few oddments, some miscellaneous papers, a broken horse-pistol and a lottery ticket.
Price’s claims to have the true box were disputed by Octavia’s followers in Bedford, and they continued to press for the true box to be opened. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the society collected over 100,000 signatures to petitions calling on bishops to open the box.
The Panacea Society also offered healing of all diseases, including cancer, to people who wrote to the headquarters in Bedford, sending them one-square-inch pieces of linen blessed by Octavia and telling them to place the linen in a jug of water, pray, and drink the water four times a day. Doubtless, many regarded their linen patch as a panacea for all ills.
The society had its headquarters on Albany Road. Another property, an end-of-terrace house at No 8 Albany Road, was named the Ark and was maintained as a residence for the Messiah after the Second Coming. They even agonised over colour schemes and whether Christ would need a shower.
Southcott’s box was a corded, nailed box the size of a coffin and weighing 156 lb, said to contain the ark of the testament predicted in the Book of Revelation. It was kept in the Bishops’ House on Newnham Road, bought by the society in 1930 and prepared for the day the Church of England bishops would come to open the box. It has bedrooms, bathrooms and a dining room, as the society expected the bishops to stay for about three days.
Mabel Barltrop died in 1934, and Emily Goodwin then led the society until she died in 1943. The Panacea Society began to dwindle in numbers in the 1930s, as did the membership of Alice Seymour’s smaller rival group. As old members died, the society rarely recruited new ones. About 70 members were living in the Bedford community in the 1930s, and about 30 members were still living there in 1967.
Despite this, the Panacea Society continued placing advertisements in newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s that I still remember, making those demands on the bishops of the Church of England. In the 1970s, the society rented billboards that proclaimed ‘War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the bishops open Joanna Southcott’s box.’
Only two members of the Panacea Society – John Coghill and Ruth Klein – remained by the 1990s. The society was wealthy, owned several properties in the Castle Road area of Bedford and was reported to have assets valued at £14 million. It started to sell off some of its property in 2001 in order to retain its status as a charity.
John Coghill was 22 when he joined the society in 1934, the year Octavia died, and he was an active member until he died in 2008. The last member, Ruth Klein (1932-2012), died in 2012, and the Panacea Society ceased to exist as a religious community.
Today, the Panacea Charitable Trust holds the society’s assets, said to be worth about £34 million and including 29 properties. It maintains the museum and gardens and sponsors academic research into prophetic and millenarian movements.
The bishops never came to Bedford, and Joanna Southcott’s box was never opened. It remains under the guardianship of the trust, but it will not reveal where the box is kept for ‘security reasons.’ Instead, a replica is on display in the museum.
The Bishops’ House on Newnham Road was never lived in. It has been preserved in its entirety and is now part of the Panacea Museum. The museum was developed from 2012 and incorporates several buildings and the gardens that formed the original community’s campus.
• The museum is open every Thursday to Sunday between February half-term and the end of October, from 11 am to 5 pm. Entry to the museum and is free, with the last entry at 4:30 pm. More information about visiting the museum is available on the society’s website here.
