Around 60 miles from London, Bedfordshire’s county town of Bedford is a pleasant enough place, home to around 168,000 residents. Interestingly, 30% of Bedford’s inhabitants are of at least partial Italian descent. Mainly a result of labour recruitment in the early 1950s by the London Brick Company in Southern Italy and Sicily. Bedford boasts an Italian Vice-Consulate, and BBC Radio Three Counties radio has a weekly programme called Mondo Italiano, dedicated to the Italian community.
Other than demographically, Bedford is pretty much your standard English shire burg, although as the birthplace of Pilgrim’s Progress author and nonconformist preacher John Bunyan (1628-88), there is a certain air of religious fervour associated with the town, which brings us to the subject of this particular investigation.
Bedfordshire
Founded in 1919 by Mabel Barltrop, the female-led millenarian Panacea Society followed the doctrines of Devonshire virgin ‘prophetess’ Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), campaigning for her sealed box of prognostications to only be opened when the world faced certain destruction.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joanna_Southcott%27s_Box_-_The_Panacea_Museum,_Bedford.jpgThe group believed the original site of the Garden of Eden was located within a three-mile radius of their church in Bedford. The Panaceans held if they conquered personal sin they would achieve immortality. However, after members eventually died, they then came to believe they would somehow join a race of immortal beings on the planet Uranus until Jesus returned.
The Society was led by a vicar’s widow Mabel Barltrop, who in 1919 proclaimed she was the ‘Daughter of God’, the messiah prophesied by Shiloh in the New Testament book of Revelation. Renamed Octavia by one of her appointed ‘apostles’, her mainly middle-class, middle-aged female acolytes left their homes and moved to Bedford, creating a community that peaked at around 70 members in the 1920s and 1930s. The group sent squares of linen breathed on by Octavia that they claimed would heal any affliction to more than 120,000 believers worldwide. ‘Patients’ were instructed to put the linen in a jug of water, pray, and drink this "Water A" four times a day; this could then be diluted with additional water, producing "Water B," which should be applied to the body as bath water or through sponges.
The Panacea Society posted billboards across London demanding all England’s bishops visit Bedford and open the Southcott’s box, preparing bedrooms for the bishops to stay in; they also provided a fully-furnished terraced house named ‘The Ark’ for Jesus to stay in when he chose to come back to Earth. Octavia was unable to venture far from her HQ as she believed Satan would attack her if she traveled more than 77 steps from the front door.
When the society started to sell off some of its property in 2001 in order to retain its status as a charity, it was reported to have assets valued at £14m.The trust boasts considerable wealth. In The Guardian, Frances Stonor Saunders stated it had, "a long-term investment portfolio worth £20m, in addition to £3m in own use assets", with a donation of around £500,000 to the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology’s Prophecy Project (2003-2010).
unknown and before 1934, Public domain, via Wikimedia CommonsBedford’s Panacea museum houses a gilded cradle with embroidered baby clothes, intended for the baby messiah that Southcott mistakenly claimed to be carrying at the age of 64; the swelling was probably a cancerous growth.
In 2023, the society’s weeping ash tree named ‘Yggdrasil’ (the Tree of Life and Knowledge in Norse mythology) collapsed in the grounds of the museum; whilst Panacea was ostensibly Christian, the members incorporated elements of other faiths, such as Ancient Norse mythology.
Despite their outwardly refined manners, however, strict discipline was maintained in the society. Punishment for infringements included physical threats, blackmail and verbal abuse, enforced by Octavia and her ‘Divine Mother’ consigliere Emily Goodwin. Members were also required to be celibate, although lesbian affairs and homosexual behaviour amongst the few male followers was not unheard of. The Daughter of God was reputedly bossy, snobbish, vain, paranoid, fascism friendly and, despite her ‘divine’ female status and following, hostile to feminism and suffragism.
The supposedly immortal Octavia died in 1934, aged 68; her warmed cadaver was watched in a vigil for three days in the belief she would revive, but when she began haemorrhaging from the mouth and other orifices, the undertakers sealed the mouldering body in a coffin.
Goodwin took over as leader until she also passed away 9 years later. Members thence began to decline; Ruth Klein, the last remaining Bedford member of the group, died in 2012.
TV reporter Claire McGlasson’s 2019 novel The Rapture used the Panacea Society as the setting for a sapphic love story. Her research revealed Octavia and her followers were “terrible snobs”, with petty rules on the approved method to fold napkins or to eat toast or baked spuds.
Ms McGlasson commented: “There’s a contrast between this very domestic, middle class, respectable society of women and these radical beliefs; a kind of feminist interpretation of the Bible. But the two seem to go hand in hand. You'd think against the backdrop of the salvation of the human race and an end to suffering on Earth, they wouldn’t be bothered about the correct fork to use. But they were.”
The society was very wealthy and in some ways prescient: “They had their own printing press; they made pamphlets and books, they had billboards across London. If they’d been on Twitter they would have absolutely nailed it, I think, because they were good at promoting their own message."
Southcott’s box of prophecies remains unopened and confined to a secret location, but there is a replica at the Museum. In 1927 a fake version of the box was sent to the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, where psychic researcher Harry Price x-rayed it to find a busted horse pistol, dice box, purse, books, lottery ticket and night cap.
Southcott’s beliefs are still practised today by two successor religious sects - the Christian Israelite Church and the House of David. The Christian Israelite Church was founded by John Wroe (1782–1863), whose alleged naughty antics were depicted in BBC2’s 1993 series Mr Wroe’s Virgins:
The House of David also courted controversy with the sexual shenanigans of “King of the House of David” Benjamin Purnell.
The Panacea Founders House
Jonathan A Jones, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia CommonsThe Panacea Chapel
Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia CommonsLINKS
Italians in Bedford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jan/23/britishidentity.features113
Pizza, Pasta, and… Pubs? Bedford is England’s Most Italian Town https://italysegreta.com/bedford-is-englands-most-italian-town/
The Panacea Museum https://panaceamuseum.org/about
The world's most unlikely cult leader: Edwardian housewife Mabel Barltrop https://www.dailymail.com/lifestyle/article-7083357/amp/The-worlds-unlikely-cult-leader-Edwardian-housewife-Mabel-Barltrop.html
Octavia, Daughter of God by Jane Shaw – review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/30/octavia-daughtrer-god-jane-shaw-review
Delving Into The Mystery Of Joanna Southcott’s Box https://londonist.com/2016/10/in-search-of-joanna-southcott-s-box
Holy Places and Religious Language in New Religious Movements https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-blackfriars/article/abs/holy-places-and-religious-language-in-new-religious-movements/C0885A45F14BB346F2CF888F00D19122
The Panacea Society – Posts in the Graveyard https://www.postsinthegraveyard.com/2024/01/08/the-panacea-society/
How 120,000 people thought they could cheat death https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20170123-this-ordinary-town-hides-an-unopened-box-of-prophecies
Peeking behind the curtains of Bedford's strange, feminist Panacea Society https://www.bigissue.com/culture/books/peeking-behind-the-curtains-of-bedfords-strange-feminist-panacea-society/
The Cult that put Eden and Yggdrasil in Bedford https://dazzasaint.medium.com/the-cult-that-put-eden-and-yggdrasil-in-bedford-afb9b2706fbb
Prophets reading prophecy: the interpretation of the Book of Revelation in the writings of Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott and William Blake https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:76ab3c3f-eb74-4bd8-b970-89113dddc39f https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=8845
Whatever became of Joanna Southcott’s Box? https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-4563,00.html
'Tree of Life' falls down due to decay https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3g710npzwzo
The mysterious religious cult whose followers believed Bedford was the Garden of Eden - Bedfordshire Live https://www.bedfordshirelive.co.uk/news/bedfordshire-news/mysterious-religious-cult-whose-followers-5203971?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target
Thelonious Monk - Panacea