About
Minnie Theobald
by
Beryl
Pogson
I first
met Miss Minnie Theobald in the
spring of 1948. We were both attending a Council Meeting
of the Francis Bacon
Society in South Kensington and stayed to talk afterwards with some of
the
other
members. She told us that she had returned after the war from the West
Country to her home in Ovingdean
in response to inner instructions to write her
Autobiography which she had now completed. She had thought
that this meant that
she was to return home to die, but she found herself, at the age of
seventy-four, still very
much alive. And indeed, I had never before seen anyone
of that age who had such an air of youth and vitality
and such a lively spirit
shining through her dark eyes.
This
was the beginning of a delightful friendship
which lasted until her death in September 1958 at the age
of eighty-four. We
had many talks in London and it was not long before I went down to stay
with
her at
"The Four Winds" in Ovingdean. She had begun to write a new series of
automatic scripts on the mystery of
dimensions, a subject which I had been
studying for many years. I found the clear formulations in these
scripts
most
enlightening. We would discuss them and my questions seemed to invite
the
scripts that followed. Miss
Theobald would write at night. In the morning she
would type all that had been written, and then she would
drive me into the
country and on our return we would sit in her garden with its view of
the Downs
and the sea,
or in her Sun-Parlour among the flowers, and read the scripts
aloud and ponder on them. She was no recluse.
Friends continually visited her,
and she enjoyed her days in London. She was interested in all that went
on,
particularly in the life an welfare of the nation. At this time she was
strong
and active and had a most lively
and penetrating mind.
In
June, 1952 Miss Theobald had a
haemorrhage and lost the sight of one eye. She recovered from
this but had to
lead a quieter life and stop driving her car. She was, however, able to
continue her writing,
learned to touch-type, and accepted the blow to her sight
with complete equanimity. But she now began
to feel her age and for the most
part stayed at home, spending much time in her garden, and enjoying
the
conversation of her friends.
On her
eightieth birthday Miss Theobald
gave a party to all her friends, many of whom had once
been in her Dance
Groups. She had had privately printed a small booklet called Death and
After
for
the occasion. She told us she had received inner information that the
next
four years were to be very
difficult for her but that joy and peace awaited her
when she reached the age of eighty-four. Now,
the day of her birthday, January
13th, 1954, had been a very strange one. I had been staying with her.
During
the morning there was a violent thunderstorm, the electricity fused,
and we
were left in the dark
with no possibility of cooking or heating except by means
of a tiny oil-stove. Candles were lit and we
spent a quiet afternoon in the
darkness which continued. Then light and heat became once more
available
in
time to prepare supper for the party. I felt at the time that this
augured a
year of shock, if not darkness,
and this was borne out as that year she
suffered a stroke which put an end to her automatic writing and
she was obliged
to live very quietly from that time until her death four years later.
This was
a very
difficult period for her as she could no longer read, being now almost
blind, and she missed the
companionship of her inspirational writing from which
she had continuously drawn her inner strength
since her early youth.
Some
year before she died she had asked me
to take charge of all her writings in the event of her
death and to publish her
Autobiography first and the other material later. She had inner
instructions
that nothing was to be published in her life time, during which she was
to
remain in seclusion.
She was a true mystic to whom it made no difference
whether she were in or out of the body.
During the eleven years of my
friendship with her I had been a continual witness of
a way of life lived on three levels of
consciousness.