If a Mr. J.H. Davidson, assistant head of variety (music) at the BBC, had had his way in 1948, the British public would never have experienced a two-year media frenzy—as it wasn’t called in those days—over the mind-reading abilities of a personable young couple whose deeds baffled everyone who tried to explain them.

Davidson had been approached by an agent on behalf of a couple of performers from Australia, Sydney Piddington and Lesley Pope, who had had some success with their mind-reading act on Australian radio. Their agent “wondered if it would be possible to do anything with them” on the BBC. “I cannot sincerely endorse the Piddington show as a feature of long-term radio interest,” Davidson replied. How wrong he was.

In fact, over the next few months, with persistence from Piddington and the help of one or two more adventurous executives, the BBC decided to put its toe in the water. In a BBC memo on April 3, 1949, titled “Thought Transference Proposal,” John McMillan wrote, “I think it would be worth while making a sample, which should be most inexpensive.”

That “sample”—or pilot program—led to a contract for the Piddingtons to do eight live shows before an audience in a prime-time radio slot on Thursday evenings. McMillan clearly hadn’t caught on to the fact that this was just a mind-reading act, because he suggested in his memo that the listening audience could participate in the “actual thought transference.”

For the next two years, the entire nation was transfixed by the Piddingtons’ exploits in weekly radio shows on the BBC’s Light Programme, television specials, and a series of theatrical shows around the United Kingdom, culminating in a week at the London Palladium—Britain’s biggest and most prestigious variety theater.

The radio shows attracted a regular audience of twenty million. That’s 40 percent of the total population and probably more than half of those over sixteen, a similar proportion of the population to the U.S. viewers of I Love Lucy.

The best way to understand the impact of their effect is to listen to extracts from some of the original radio programs (available online at https://www.thepiddingtons.com/broadcasts.html). Stripped of the show biz elements, each program had several different types of “answer,” which Syd “received” from someone else in the studio or Syd “transmitted” to Lesley, either elsewhere in the studio or somewhere more exotic outside it.

Much of the glamor, and indeed the validation, of the Piddingtons’ act came from the appointment of celebrity judges—singers, actors, “personalities”—who were asked to fix Syd’s blindfold, collect things from the audience, or write things on a blackboard. There were also BBC personnel stationed strategically near Syd or Lesley on the lookout for cheating (or “conjuring,” as it’s sometimes called).

Lesley was an attractive young woman, and, understandably, there was a certain amount of jostling among BBC staff to be allowed to accompany her to remote locations. On one occasion, there was a need for someone to accompany Lesley while she tried to receive Syd’s thought in a Stratocruiser aircraft over southern England. In this case, there was a BBC memo marked “Confidential,” which hinted that one particular announcer was not a safe pair of hands: “I understand they [the producers] have already spoken to M—– B—- suggesting that he should accompany Lesley Pope on the latter occasion. For reasons which I shall discuss with you privately I would rather have another announcer.”

In the Stratocruiser show, the climax of the program was when a BBC producer, Ian Messiter, went around the audience asking people to hand him small personal items that he put in a large envelope. When he had collected enough items, he took the envelope on stage and tipped the items on a table for Syd to pick up one by one and “transmit” to Lesley in the aircraft. Apart from saying “Stand by” to the celebrity judge who accompanied Lesley in the plane, there was no communication between Syd and Lesley. After ten seconds or so, Lesley started naming and describing the objects one by one, sometimes more accurately than others—a pencil was called a pen and a wedding ring a brooch. When Syd selected a pound note, Lesley named it and then asked Syd to think of the note’s number, which she “received” and relayed to the live audience with amazing accuracy.

An even more dramatic feat consisted of Syd collecting a sequence of numbers from random members of the studio audience, with one of them adding them up to get a total that led to a line in a 1,600 page book. Lesley then recited the line—from inside a diving bell—when given the cue to do so.

This was the true Piddington trademark repeated over and over again: some complicated piece or pieces of information gathered in public, from the public, and relayed and then recalled with uncanny accuracy—even though no visible or audible communication occurred between the two of them. This was often a point missed by the many people, including professional magicians, who complained that there was nothing different about the Piddingtons’ act from other mentalism. However, these critics’ attempts to explain the “trick” always involved some kind of visual or audible signaling between the two, which clearly didn’t take place.

From the very first program, transmitted live on Thursday, July 7, 1949, the Piddingtons were a sensation. This was mainly due to their performances, of course, but it was helped by the youth and glamor of Lesley and by an exotic and moving backstory of how the mind-reading performance came to be developed. This was only four years after the end of World War II, during which Syd spent several years in the Japanese prisoner of war camp at Changi. It was there, according to Syd, that he and a couple of other prisoners developed a mind-reading routine to relieve the boredom of the harsh camp life. When Piddington returned to Australia after the war, he trained his girlfriend and later wife, actress Lesley Pope, to “read his mind” using skills developed in Changi.

While life in Britain was returning to normal after the war, there were housing shortages, fuel shortages, and food rationing, and radio was one of the cheapest forms of escapism for a public having to deal with the slowness of post-war recovery. There was television, for the wealthy few, but the real mass medium was radio, and the Piddingtons were offering something the average listener had never come across.

A selection of press comments that followed the first few programs show the impact they had. From the Daily Mail:

Last night Syd Piddington, the tall slim 31-year-old man who first learned of telepathy when he was in a Japanese prison camp, and his beautiful 26-year-old actress wife, Lesley, convinced a panel of judges in a BBC studio that their “act” is genuine. During last night’s half-hour broadcast there appeared to be no possibility whatsoever of collusion between the pair. Any “cheating” during the broadcast would have entailed the cooperation of the panel of judges.

In his column in the Daily Express, Roy Rich wrote: “There is no doubt in Rich’s mind that the Piddingtons are entirely genuine. Mr Piddington had to protest his authenticity far too often.” Again, from the Daily Mail: “An astounding broadcast in which Sydney Piddington from a BBC studio, ‘transmitted’ by telepathy a chosen line from a pile of books to his wife, Lesley, who was locked in the Tower of London. BBC officials commented ‘It’s beyond us. There is no swindle.’” In an item from the News Chronicle: “After a thought-reading performance on the BBC Light Programme last night one of the three judges, Dr. Ellis Stungo, Harley Street psychiatrist, declared ‘I am sure there’s no possibility of fake.’”

One sign of the total preoccupation of the radio audience with the Piddingtons was the uproar when one of the shows overran and was faded out to make way for a prerecorded program of songs. According to an article in the Daily Mail:

It was 9.30; their telepathy act was running late; the next program was due but so many listeners rang the BBC to ask how it ended that a special announcement was made before the 10 o’clock news. At once the bell started ringing at Broadcasting House as listener after listener telephoned. The BBC switchboard was completely blocked by the incoming calls. Said a BBC switchboard girl “We’ve never had anything like it.”

All this might seem like merely an interesting piece of British broadcast history, but drilling down into the BBC archives and newspaper cuttings of the time reveals issues that have been central to every successive media storm over claims of the paranormal, from the psychic photography of Ted Serios, the psychic surgeons of the Philippines, the antics of Uri Geller, and even the storm over the Bible Code.

At the heart of all these stories, with the Piddingtons as a classic example, is the simple issue of “claims of the paranormal.” If you say you are doing something paranormal—or even, as in this case, if you refuse to deny it—people would rather believe you, however extraordinary the claim, than accuse you of lying.

The success of the Piddingtons was because they never denied that they were “transferring thoughts.” They even occasionally maintained that they were. How else to explain the following remark by Syd in a newspaper interview? “Lesley’s reception is not word-perfect,” the journalist writes, “but the meaning is invariably there. ‘That’s because I have to translate the words into images,’ explains Sydney apologetically.” In fact, he had to do nothing of the sort, as later revelations showed.

“You be the judge” was the Piddingtons’ catchphrase, so of course the nation became a panel of judges. So too did BBC staff. As the title on McMillan’s memo shows, even he thought that what the Piddingtons did was some kind of genuine telepathy.

The height of this gullibility came when one of the BBC producers, Freddy Piffard, wrote in Radio Times:

I won’t attempt to prove the genuineness of the Piddingtons’ telepathy; I will just say it is genuine. Having produced five programmes, knowing every detail and every precaution taken, I can say quite truthfully that there never had been a single instance of fake thought transference by Sydney Piddington and his wife.

Considering that everything the Piddingtons did was known at the time to other BBC staff as “fake thought transference,” this was a huge error by Piffard, and he was criticized internally by the BBC for saying it. It certainly contributed to the continuing belief of many people, including some who had been researching the paranormal for years, that at last the phenomenon of telepathy could be said to exist.

During the entire period of their radio programs, TV specials, and stage shows, there was no real resolution of the “genuineness” of the Piddingtons’ act. The BBC tried to undo the damage, as they saw it, of Piffard’s statement, as some kind of imprimatur of telepathy, by pointing out that it was all good, light-hearted fun. However, with each new demonstration in ever more contrived location, more people, some of them invited judges, gave personal testimony to the miraculousness of the events.

Before a second Piddington series in 1950, more memos flew trying to undo the damage done by Piffard the year before, including one that said: “I take it that every possible precaution has been taken to ensure that the commentators in the forthcoming series will not claim that the Piddingtons have para-normal powers and will not suggest that the programmes are tests of telepathy.”

But even after their last program in 1952, a journalist in Two Worlds headlined an article, “Amazing Success of BBC Thought Transference Test: Triumph for Psychical Research.” The article continued: “A great step forward towards nation wide recognition of the powers of ‘extra-sensory perception‘ was achieved by the most impressive and successful demonstration of ‘Thought Transference’ on the Light Programme last Thursday evening.”

Looking back at the whole phenomenon, it seems to me that what the Piddingtons did was akin to taking candy from a baby. Because Lesley knew, even before a show began, what Syd would transmit—the sentence from the book or the list of objects from the audience—the run up to the climax of each show could be dramatized and milked for all it was worth.

Syd appeared to rule out all possibilities of trickery. One of his boldest moves was to offer a £10,000 reward to anyone who could reveal that they used accomplices. In the light of the fact that they did use accomplices, this was a breathtaking offer to make, and a risky one, at a time when their fee from the BBC each week was just £30.

The appointment of “judges” was in the hands of the Piddingtons and one of the BBC producers, Ian Messiter. Many of them were well-known actors or celebrities, but, unnoticed, a couple had personal connections to the Piddingtons. One judge, “Dudley Perkins,” was presented as a well-known lawyer with a special interest in fraud. In fact, he was not a lawyer at all but merely a student friend of the Piddingtons’ manager. He was playing a part, so anything he did in the show was of very questionable objectivity.

There have been—and still are—two-person mind-reading acts that depend on verbal codes. But such a method was ruled out with the Piddingtons. There was no verbal or visual communication between the Piddingtons. As their act developed, they weren’t even in the same studio, and their supposed thought transference took place despite greater and greater obstacles, culminating in Lesley receiving Syd’s thoughts in a diving bell or an aircraft.

If the thousands of words written about the Piddingtons at the time are an indication, their act often provoked anger. But the anger was multifaceted. One outburst came from a leading journalist, Kingsley Martin, who had appeared as a judge and complained that the BBC was trivializing the topic:

Telepathy is an extremely interesting and controversial subject in which serious enquiries under controlled conditions have been made and are being made. The BBC might have aided these experiments. In my opinion it will be difficult for the BBC again to persuade thoughtful people that it is really “investigating” telepathy or any other subject. Who is going to take its claim seriously? If the BBC is prepared to fool the public for the public’s amusement, it puts itself in the same category as the music hall.

Another group annoyed at the furor was professional magicians. One of them, N’Gai, was quoted in the Daily Herald: “Why the BBC should put the Piddingtons on, when many British conjurors can do better beats me. It’s all based on codes and tricks.”

I should here reveal a personal interest in the story. As a child, I was interested in conjuring, and I used to listen to the Piddingtons in a way I suspect many magicians did, convinced that if I listened carefully enough, I would understand how they did it. Because, like all skeptics, the one thing I knew—even at the age of ten or so and even before listening to the programs—was that no paranormal abilities were involved. Because, of course, such abilities do not exist.

But after reading the BBC files and the newspaper cuttings, it’s clear to me that people who were not as curious as I am about how “paranormal” effects can be created, even those whose starting point was a kind of uninformed skepticism, were driven to believe in the Piddingtons’ abilities as paranormal. Not only did they trust the claims made by these personable young people, but ESP was still part of the zeitgeist in a way it is no longer.

The results of J.B. Rhine’s experiments, as well as the Soal-Goldney experiments, suggested that telepathy was real. It showed a modest increase in probability over randomness that gave hope to some that the power of telepathy could be harnessed. However, these results were later shot to pieces in investigations by Mark Hansel and others.

Holding the skeptic line is not easy when somebody tells you that black is white—“no accomplices,” ”randomly selected audience members,” “neutral judges,” and so on. While I can’t say that I ever for a moment faltered in my skepticism, I got pretty near to it when thinking about the Piddingtons, because their effects seemed so inexplicable.

In the years after they disappeared from the British scene, long after their names were regularly in the headlines, I would occasionally try to find out if they, or someone else, had ever revealed the secret of how they did it.

I even visited Lesley Piddington in Australia in the 1980s and had a very pleasant but unrevealing conversation with her. By then, she had divorced Syd, and he had married another actress with whom he was still performing the telepathy act.

Then, in the 2000s, enter Martin Hart.

I have been careful not to give away the method, or methods, used by the Piddingtons, partly because they are irrelevant to the issue at the heart of this article—the human desire to believe the impossible and the way in which this is exploited by entertainers or less scrupulous people in other areas of public life.

But I cannot deny the deep sense of satisfaction I felt when I read a book written by conjuror Martin Hart (2015), who discovered in 1998 some notebooks kept by his grandfather that revealed the Piddingtons’ secrets.

Unlike the feeling of disappointment that can come when you discover how an amazing conjuring trick is done, I felt no such let-down. Rather I merely had an admiration for the way the Piddingtons had pulled off the biggest feat of chutzpah in entertainment history. They were just conjurors!

And of course, they were among the first of a succession of conjurors whose acts filled audiences in the second half of the twentieth century with the hope that there was something science couldn’t explain. These acts were fundamentally different from those of James Randi, David Blaine, Penn and Teller, and David Copperfield, who use(d) their consummate skills to achieve effects that are often impossible to explain but never assumed to be paranormal.

It is much more difficult to do real “magic” (i.e., conjuring) than fake magic (i.e., lying). What Syd Piddington exploited was the fact that if he said, “This sentence has been chosen randomly from a book, by a process involving random members of the audience and objective judges,” people believed him. There was no explanation other than telepathy for Lesley’s success. If Donald Trump says, “The election was rigged,” and you believe him, there is no other explanation for his loss of the presidency, and you are understandably outraged.

Arthur Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes say, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The one truth no one ever considered at the time was that Piddington, BBC producers, a handful of judges, and even some members of the audience were lying.

The Piddingtons’ last broadcast took place on Friday, June 13, 1952. BBC producer Ian Messiter—who, according to Martin Hart’s book, knew the most about the inner workings of the act—wrote in Radio Times a piece that reveals little and conceals much of what he knew:

I shall not enjoy producing the Piddingtons on Friday the 13th, because it is their swan song. All the broadcast I’ll be thinking of the past triumphs, and wondering why two such young people are going into retirement so early. The air of mystery which is not so much with them as following in the wake also engulfs this early retirement. …  It is curious that after all these years of the Piddingtons’ name being a household word that no one has ever satisfactorily answered the question “Are they genuine telepathist, or are they clever conjurers?” Themselves? They make no claim either way.

Now that question has been answered. Of course, Messiter and a handful of others knew the answer all along.

Acknowledgment

BBC copyright content reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.

Reference

Hart, Martin T. 2015. Piddington’s Secrets. Manipulatist Books Global.