An enigma, but one whose stop, such as it is, explains some elements of what it meant to be a post-War Fortean.
Agnes Ritchie was Scottish. Between 1947 and 1952, at least, she lived in Ayrshire, albeit she used several different addresses in those five years. Ritchie was her married name. That’s all I can say about the usual biographical topics. Her Fortean efforts are also difficult to track. Her anew appeared ten times in the pages of “Doubt.” In all but three cases, she was mentioned in a long list of contributors, giving very little clues as to her Fortean interests.
And yet, her story is not without its Fortean educational value, shedding light on the intersections of social credit, anti-Semitism, and the particularly British line of Forteanism.
Agnes Ritchie was Scottish. Between 1947 and 1952, at least, she lived in Ayrshire, albeit she used several different addresses in those five years. Ritchie was her married name. That’s all I can say about the usual biographical topics. Her Fortean efforts are also difficult to track. Her anew appeared ten times in the pages of “Doubt.” In all but three cases, she was mentioned in a long list of contributors, giving very little clues as to her Fortean interests.
And yet, her story is not without its Fortean educational value, shedding light on the intersections of social credit, anti-Semitism, and the particularly British line of Forteanism.
Exactly when or how Ritchie came to Forteanism isn’t known—though it is clear that she didn’t get to the Society via Fort, but, instead, Fort via the Society. Likely, as will become clear, she came to the Society via Eric Frank Russell’s writings in the magazine “Tomorrow.” The first indication of her connection to Forteanism came in a letter she wrote to Russell—preserved at the University of Liverpool—dated 30 June 1947 in which she thanks him for Doubt 17, something called “Freedom and Plenty,” and sends in payment for that issue of Doubt plus Doubt 18, when it is published. She must have continued to be pleased, as on 6 October 1947 she wrote Russell again, sending him payment for Doubt 19. And two months later, on 16 December 1947, she sent him money for the omnibus edition of The Books of Charles Fort.
Most probably, then, Ritchie came across an advertisement for the Society and was drawn in by its come-ons about dissent and thinking for one’s self. These ran in a number of publications, and Ritchie doe seem to have had several fringe interests that could have put her in touch with one of these, but “Tomorrow” seems the most reasonable guess, given Russell’s strong presence in its pages and her reading habits, such as we know them. Thayer’s pamphlet then kept her intrigued enough to look into the works of the man himself.
That was not as easy as one might have thought, though. Thayer had the omnibus edition put out in 1941, a few months before America joined the War, and when Britain was already deeply involved. The worldwide conflagration out a damper on interest and the ability to get the books, obviously, but the immediate post-War years did not make getting ahold of the tome any easier. Russell passed on Ritchie’s payment an request to King, Littlewood, & King, Ltd., a bookseller associated with N. V. Dagg, “Tomorrow” the magazine, and Tomorrow the London bookshop. H. Littlewood sent a receipt and thanks for the order, dated 5 January 1948, but warned to book’s arrival would not be timely: “We are not able to make delivery before four months and we wonder whether your client will wait that amount of time. There is a long waiting list and we are only allowed to import under license a small quantity each quarter.”
A week later, Ritchie answered a non-extant letter from Russell, thanking him for his efforts and seemingly somewhat impressed that Fort was in such demand. She wrote, “quite prepared to wait patiently until my turn comes along. The Books shall be welcomed eagerly when the time comes for me to get them!” Meanwhile, she ordered Doubt 20 to tide her over. This ordering of individual issues was a habit she would share with another Brit, Henry K. B. Stanton and may be related to the difficulty of obtaining cash: if money was not guaranteed, and if publications frequently went out of business, it meant more sent to by each issue separately: there might not be the money to pay for four issues at once, and if one did, and the company then went belly up, that money might be gone, and for nothing. Indeed, she would have exactly that problem with “Tomorrow.”
For as it happened, there were problems with that company. One of them was that Fort’s books were not coming in as fast as they had promised. In June, she wrote Russell mentioning that she thought the had ordered Forte’s books—as she spelled them—in March, but still hadn’t gotten them. Only when she reached her P.S. and checked back through her accounts did she realize it had been December. Apparently, she checked her records in part because she was contacting King, Littlewood & King. Russell wrote them on the 20th (Ritchie’s letter to him had been sent the 11th) and H. Little mentioned, in his response of 23 June, that Ritchie had already written there. He explained the delay, and hoped that the oder could be expedited. The problem had been the vagaries of Britain’s post-War import regulations:
“After a complete relaxation of import restrictions in middle of 1947, in the Autumn they were all re-imposed with forms to be filled up and much of one’s back history to be gone through. However we have now got our new license, last week in fact, and we should have copies of the book in about three weeks, Despite the time and trouble it has proved to be worth it for we are allowed to import a few more copies each quarter. We shall therefore send Mrs. Ritchie her copy very shortly. We note her new address.”
Over the next several years, Ritchie would continue to write to Russell sporadically, ordering back issues or skipped issues when she did—again, likely reflecting an uncertain income. (She continued to spell Fort’s name as Forte.) She also sent in some clippings—what they were is unknown, Russell having presumably passed them on to Thayer. She ordered a book advertised frequently by the Society, “Rape of the Masses” by Sergei Chakhotin, which was about the social psychology of totalitarianism. (Thayer advertised it as a guidebook needed to defeat the upcoming propaganda wars.) Ritchie was meticulous in her accounting, noting when Thayer was forced to increase the price and sending the different. (In point of fact, acknowledging the difficulty of converting moneys, Thayer allowed British members to keep paying the old rate.) She mentioned, as well, that she was in contact with another Scottish Fortean, Alexander Grant, who wrote Russell long letters and contributed a great deal of material to the Society. She clearly felt part of the Fortean community: she hoped Thayer would visit Scotland, and asked if she could get a photographs of the Russells and the Thayers together from the Thayers’s trip to Europe.
On 11 September 1952, she penned another letter to Russell, requesting and paying for Doubt 38. She then asked if the Tomorrow bookshop had closed, She’d sent money for a year’s subscription, but had not gotten a reply, even after a letter of inquiry. The last she’d heard from them was March. Russell told her it was true, the magazine had folded—and she was upset. “It was a journal which deserved support!” She hoped they could pay their debts and return to publishing. In the meantime, she was sharing back issues that had articles by Russell with Alexander Grant. He was very impressed. She herself liked his “racy” style, and especially his article on flying saucers. “Glad that no authority can ‘pull the wool’ over your eyes,” she said, reflecting the language of Doubt.
“Tomorrow,” though, as has been made clear several times, was more than a journal of the occult and paranormal. Under N. V. Dagg, it developed as an organ in support of the monarchy and strongly anti-Semitic. The conservatism was so strong that it even irritated Thayer. Other Forteans, such as Judith L. Gee and Sam Youd, found it unconscionable, and a mark against Russell that he continued to be associated with it. The evidence suggests that Ritchie read it not just for the paranormal and fringe scientific ideas—though she had some of those—but for the anti-Semitism. Late in her correspondence with Russell—4 February 1953, the penultimate letter of hers in Russell’s papers—she came out as a holocaust denier, or, at least, minimizer: she said the claim that Hitler killed 6 million Jews was a fable, one even admitted to by some Jewish publications. She quoted various sources that the Jewish population had hardly changed between 1939 and 1947. (In passing, she also sniffed that the New York Times was “Jew owned.”)
In Ritchie’s case, her anti-Semitism went hand-in-hand with her support of Social Credit. As has been mentioned before, social credit was a monetary reform that emerged out of the 1920s, and was taken up by Ezra Pound, among others. Ritchie’s order of “Freedom and Plenty” likely referred to a series of pamphlets on the topic put out by Hugo Fack. Apparently, she read widely on the subject, sending in material from the New Zealand magazine “Democracy” which was another Social Credit paper. She sent that clipping in 1950, though it had originally run in 1945. Around the same time that she sent in the piece from “Democracy,” she had also invited Russell to be a guest of honor at a meeting near where she lived. The organization was “The People’s Common Law Parliament,” which was yet another Social Credit group—and also had grown out of political efforts by Fortean the Duke of Bedford. Like the Duke, it had Fascist sympathies.
“Don’t laugh!,” she pleaded with Russell when she approached him on the matter, but her humility seems to have had less to do with the organization’s politics than that Russell would be associated with a group or travel to Scotland. Indeed, Ritchie seemed to think that there was a strong overlap between social credit, anti-Semitism, and Forteanism. At the same time, she was approaching Russell to come to the meeting, she was asking him for used copies of The Books. She wanted to make a gift of it to Robert Scruton, a friend and the president of The People’s Common Law Parliament.
Perhaps Ritchie was right—perhaps there was some elective affinity between Forteanism, social credit, and anti-Semitism. It’s been a while since I read all Fort. At the time, I do not remember anything jumping out at me as anti-Semitic or pro-monetary reform; when I read him next, though, I will be more tuned in to the possibility, Until then, I’m going to consider that this overlap of ideologies may have been particular to England, or perhaps Europe. Social Credit was enough of an issue among British Forteans that is was sometimes a point of debate—no surprise given the struggling economy, especially in the post-War years, when America was, by contrast, doing much better. Anti-semitism, too, seems to have been most vocal among British Forteans, and perhaps a small cadre of European expatriates around New York City. There were a few exceptions, of course, just as there were some American conservative Forteans, including some real reactionaries, but even among them Fascism was not usually seen positively.
Which raises a number of questions, but one that falls out prominently from the story of Agnes Ritchie is, What effect did import difficulties have on the development of British Forteans. Getting the books was difficult, and getting individuals of the four books even more so. “Lo!” had been serialized in “Astounding,” but that was also difficult to come by—and had run in the mid-1930s. In the years just after World War II, when Thayer’s Society was hitting its stride, that was a decade in the past. And so the Brits who became Forteans often did so with little to no knowledge of Fort himself, beyond his being an icon of someone who refused to knuckle before authority. That could be a powerful enticement to even those who had power, at least relatively, if they felt their moment had passed, that the time of Fascism and open anti-Semitism was over, that economies were being re-organized in way that was even less to their advantage.
Whatever the quality of such speculations, it is clear that Ritchie herself came to Fort late, drawn in by overlapping commitments to monetary reform, anti-Semitism, and an interest in the paranormal.
Because that interest is there, too—her Forteanism is not exhausted by the other two enthusiasms. Two of the three clippings she sent in that can be identified had to do with weird happenings. (The third was about the development of a knew technique for tagging house flies to facilitate insecticide research, but which Thayer made think of boondoggles: he suspect the army would overpay and promise to use it in battles to save the earth from aliens.) One of those had to do with a wind that lifted a haystack several hundred feet off the ground. The other had to do with another windstorm, this one knocking down thousand-pound tombstones.
Ritchie’s connection tot he Society ended in the mid-1950s: or was no longer traceable. Her last letter to Russell was dated December 1954: she hadn’t received Doubt in a while, which was probably because she never officially became a member but paid issue by issue. (Her first mention, in 1947, qualified her as “non-member,” and in 1952 Thayer wrote Russell wondering if she had ever become a member—he and his wife had different memories.) She paid for the two most recent Doubts. Her last appearance in the magazine came not long after, number 47, January 1955.
She continued to have some paranormal or fringe scientific interests, though. Later, she wrote in to the Oklahoma-based ‘zine Aberree, which was an irreverent look at scientology as well as related self-help movements and science fiction concepts such as flying saucers. She was enthusiastic to have found the publication—the bets thing she’d read in along time, she said—and wanted to get a hold of back issues as well as make connections with other subscribers.
It is, given the state of the evidence, impossible to prove, but hard to resist the temptation to interpret Aberree as a replacement for Doubt, which itself had grown far from social credit, anti-Semitism, disliked flying saucers, looked askance on Dianetics, and even moved marginally from Theosophy.
Most probably, then, Ritchie came across an advertisement for the Society and was drawn in by its come-ons about dissent and thinking for one’s self. These ran in a number of publications, and Ritchie doe seem to have had several fringe interests that could have put her in touch with one of these, but “Tomorrow” seems the most reasonable guess, given Russell’s strong presence in its pages and her reading habits, such as we know them. Thayer’s pamphlet then kept her intrigued enough to look into the works of the man himself.
That was not as easy as one might have thought, though. Thayer had the omnibus edition put out in 1941, a few months before America joined the War, and when Britain was already deeply involved. The worldwide conflagration out a damper on interest and the ability to get the books, obviously, but the immediate post-War years did not make getting ahold of the tome any easier. Russell passed on Ritchie’s payment an request to King, Littlewood, & King, Ltd., a bookseller associated with N. V. Dagg, “Tomorrow” the magazine, and Tomorrow the London bookshop. H. Littlewood sent a receipt and thanks for the order, dated 5 January 1948, but warned to book’s arrival would not be timely: “We are not able to make delivery before four months and we wonder whether your client will wait that amount of time. There is a long waiting list and we are only allowed to import under license a small quantity each quarter.”
A week later, Ritchie answered a non-extant letter from Russell, thanking him for his efforts and seemingly somewhat impressed that Fort was in such demand. She wrote, “quite prepared to wait patiently until my turn comes along. The Books shall be welcomed eagerly when the time comes for me to get them!” Meanwhile, she ordered Doubt 20 to tide her over. This ordering of individual issues was a habit she would share with another Brit, Henry K. B. Stanton and may be related to the difficulty of obtaining cash: if money was not guaranteed, and if publications frequently went out of business, it meant more sent to by each issue separately: there might not be the money to pay for four issues at once, and if one did, and the company then went belly up, that money might be gone, and for nothing. Indeed, she would have exactly that problem with “Tomorrow.”
For as it happened, there were problems with that company. One of them was that Fort’s books were not coming in as fast as they had promised. In June, she wrote Russell mentioning that she thought the had ordered Forte’s books—as she spelled them—in March, but still hadn’t gotten them. Only when she reached her P.S. and checked back through her accounts did she realize it had been December. Apparently, she checked her records in part because she was contacting King, Littlewood & King. Russell wrote them on the 20th (Ritchie’s letter to him had been sent the 11th) and H. Little mentioned, in his response of 23 June, that Ritchie had already written there. He explained the delay, and hoped that the oder could be expedited. The problem had been the vagaries of Britain’s post-War import regulations:
“After a complete relaxation of import restrictions in middle of 1947, in the Autumn they were all re-imposed with forms to be filled up and much of one’s back history to be gone through. However we have now got our new license, last week in fact, and we should have copies of the book in about three weeks, Despite the time and trouble it has proved to be worth it for we are allowed to import a few more copies each quarter. We shall therefore send Mrs. Ritchie her copy very shortly. We note her new address.”
Over the next several years, Ritchie would continue to write to Russell sporadically, ordering back issues or skipped issues when she did—again, likely reflecting an uncertain income. (She continued to spell Fort’s name as Forte.) She also sent in some clippings—what they were is unknown, Russell having presumably passed them on to Thayer. She ordered a book advertised frequently by the Society, “Rape of the Masses” by Sergei Chakhotin, which was about the social psychology of totalitarianism. (Thayer advertised it as a guidebook needed to defeat the upcoming propaganda wars.) Ritchie was meticulous in her accounting, noting when Thayer was forced to increase the price and sending the different. (In point of fact, acknowledging the difficulty of converting moneys, Thayer allowed British members to keep paying the old rate.) She mentioned, as well, that she was in contact with another Scottish Fortean, Alexander Grant, who wrote Russell long letters and contributed a great deal of material to the Society. She clearly felt part of the Fortean community: she hoped Thayer would visit Scotland, and asked if she could get a photographs of the Russells and the Thayers together from the Thayers’s trip to Europe.
On 11 September 1952, she penned another letter to Russell, requesting and paying for Doubt 38. She then asked if the Tomorrow bookshop had closed, She’d sent money for a year’s subscription, but had not gotten a reply, even after a letter of inquiry. The last she’d heard from them was March. Russell told her it was true, the magazine had folded—and she was upset. “It was a journal which deserved support!” She hoped they could pay their debts and return to publishing. In the meantime, she was sharing back issues that had articles by Russell with Alexander Grant. He was very impressed. She herself liked his “racy” style, and especially his article on flying saucers. “Glad that no authority can ‘pull the wool’ over your eyes,” she said, reflecting the language of Doubt.
“Tomorrow,” though, as has been made clear several times, was more than a journal of the occult and paranormal. Under N. V. Dagg, it developed as an organ in support of the monarchy and strongly anti-Semitic. The conservatism was so strong that it even irritated Thayer. Other Forteans, such as Judith L. Gee and Sam Youd, found it unconscionable, and a mark against Russell that he continued to be associated with it. The evidence suggests that Ritchie read it not just for the paranormal and fringe scientific ideas—though she had some of those—but for the anti-Semitism. Late in her correspondence with Russell—4 February 1953, the penultimate letter of hers in Russell’s papers—she came out as a holocaust denier, or, at least, minimizer: she said the claim that Hitler killed 6 million Jews was a fable, one even admitted to by some Jewish publications. She quoted various sources that the Jewish population had hardly changed between 1939 and 1947. (In passing, she also sniffed that the New York Times was “Jew owned.”)
In Ritchie’s case, her anti-Semitism went hand-in-hand with her support of Social Credit. As has been mentioned before, social credit was a monetary reform that emerged out of the 1920s, and was taken up by Ezra Pound, among others. Ritchie’s order of “Freedom and Plenty” likely referred to a series of pamphlets on the topic put out by Hugo Fack. Apparently, she read widely on the subject, sending in material from the New Zealand magazine “Democracy” which was another Social Credit paper. She sent that clipping in 1950, though it had originally run in 1945. Around the same time that she sent in the piece from “Democracy,” she had also invited Russell to be a guest of honor at a meeting near where she lived. The organization was “The People’s Common Law Parliament,” which was yet another Social Credit group—and also had grown out of political efforts by Fortean the Duke of Bedford. Like the Duke, it had Fascist sympathies.
“Don’t laugh!,” she pleaded with Russell when she approached him on the matter, but her humility seems to have had less to do with the organization’s politics than that Russell would be associated with a group or travel to Scotland. Indeed, Ritchie seemed to think that there was a strong overlap between social credit, anti-Semitism, and Forteanism. At the same time, she was approaching Russell to come to the meeting, she was asking him for used copies of The Books. She wanted to make a gift of it to Robert Scruton, a friend and the president of The People’s Common Law Parliament.
Perhaps Ritchie was right—perhaps there was some elective affinity between Forteanism, social credit, and anti-Semitism. It’s been a while since I read all Fort. At the time, I do not remember anything jumping out at me as anti-Semitic or pro-monetary reform; when I read him next, though, I will be more tuned in to the possibility, Until then, I’m going to consider that this overlap of ideologies may have been particular to England, or perhaps Europe. Social Credit was enough of an issue among British Forteans that is was sometimes a point of debate—no surprise given the struggling economy, especially in the post-War years, when America was, by contrast, doing much better. Anti-semitism, too, seems to have been most vocal among British Forteans, and perhaps a small cadre of European expatriates around New York City. There were a few exceptions, of course, just as there were some American conservative Forteans, including some real reactionaries, but even among them Fascism was not usually seen positively.
Which raises a number of questions, but one that falls out prominently from the story of Agnes Ritchie is, What effect did import difficulties have on the development of British Forteans. Getting the books was difficult, and getting individuals of the four books even more so. “Lo!” had been serialized in “Astounding,” but that was also difficult to come by—and had run in the mid-1930s. In the years just after World War II, when Thayer’s Society was hitting its stride, that was a decade in the past. And so the Brits who became Forteans often did so with little to no knowledge of Fort himself, beyond his being an icon of someone who refused to knuckle before authority. That could be a powerful enticement to even those who had power, at least relatively, if they felt their moment had passed, that the time of Fascism and open anti-Semitism was over, that economies were being re-organized in way that was even less to their advantage.
Whatever the quality of such speculations, it is clear that Ritchie herself came to Fort late, drawn in by overlapping commitments to monetary reform, anti-Semitism, and an interest in the paranormal.
Because that interest is there, too—her Forteanism is not exhausted by the other two enthusiasms. Two of the three clippings she sent in that can be identified had to do with weird happenings. (The third was about the development of a knew technique for tagging house flies to facilitate insecticide research, but which Thayer made think of boondoggles: he suspect the army would overpay and promise to use it in battles to save the earth from aliens.) One of those had to do with a wind that lifted a haystack several hundred feet off the ground. The other had to do with another windstorm, this one knocking down thousand-pound tombstones.
Ritchie’s connection tot he Society ended in the mid-1950s: or was no longer traceable. Her last letter to Russell was dated December 1954: she hadn’t received Doubt in a while, which was probably because she never officially became a member but paid issue by issue. (Her first mention, in 1947, qualified her as “non-member,” and in 1952 Thayer wrote Russell wondering if she had ever become a member—he and his wife had different memories.) She paid for the two most recent Doubts. Her last appearance in the magazine came not long after, number 47, January 1955.
She continued to have some paranormal or fringe scientific interests, though. Later, she wrote in to the Oklahoma-based ‘zine Aberree, which was an irreverent look at scientology as well as related self-help movements and science fiction concepts such as flying saucers. She was enthusiastic to have found the publication—the bets thing she’d read in along time, she said—and wanted to get a hold of back issues as well as make connections with other subscribers.
It is, given the state of the evidence, impossible to prove, but hard to resist the temptation to interpret Aberree as a replacement for Doubt, which itself had grown far from social credit, anti-Semitism, disliked flying saucers, looked askance on Dianetics, and even moved marginally from Theosophy.
