Hypnotised 80ft Up in Swansea 😵‍💫

Good morning, Swansea!

In March 1949, six members of Swansea's Evening Post staff volunteered to be hypnotised by a visiting stage performer named Peter Casson.

Before long, one of them was standing high above the city in a position that would make most people think twice even while fully awake.

This week, we're looking back at the extraordinary Swansea stunt that blurred the line between stage entertainment, psychology and something much stranger.

Peter Casson was appearing at Swansea's Empire Theatre when the Evening Post decided to put his claims to the test. Six members of the paper's clerical and photography staff put themselves forward as what the report called his "guinea pigs" - though time only allowed Casson to work with two of them.

The demonstrations began in the newspaper's own offices, which at the time were next to Swansea Castle. The building had opened in 1858 as the town's head post office before later housing the Cambria Daily Leader and then the South Wales Evening Post; it stood beside the castle until 1976, when the offices were demolished and the medieval ruins were opened back up to the city centre.

Inside, Casson put the volunteers to sleep, convinced one that his feet were itching, and had another drink a glass of water before sending him off to ask the personnel manager for an ice cream. The paper put it down to Casson's "irresistible persuasion." From there, the demonstration moved out onto the roof.

One volunteer, June Thomas, was taken outside and photographed walking along a parapet some 80 feet above the ground - it looks like the tower seen in the photo above. She stepped across gaps of around three feet, the report said, with a stiff breeze blowing. In a second performance, a hypnotised member of staff was made rigid and laid out horizontally across the rooftop.

Within weeks of the Evening Post experiment and accompanying show, Casson was back in the city, and by October the paper was advertising what it called his "third time at Swansea's Empire Theatre." The Empire, on Oxford Street, had opened in 1900 and would go on to close in 1957 when Moss Empires scaled down its variety circuit; it was demolished in 1960.

On one return visit, a local report described the theatre filled to capacity and "a small army of subjects" volunteering to be hypnotised. Casson made people "drunk" with a glass of water, suspended a slightly built young woman rigid between two chairs before sitting on her stomach, persuaded a young man to take an imaginary bath, and pierced another woman's forearm muscle with three thin needles without any apparent ill-effect. Thirty-five people were pulled up as "victims of mass hypnotism" that night, and on another visit he hypnotised part of the audience through the microphone alone.

Casson was among the performers who built hypnosis into a headline draw rather than a supporting act: by 1948 he was one of the first to run his own one-man show, playing seven nights a week to full houses. At the time, television was still a rarity in British homes - in 1950, fewer than one household in twenty owned a set - so variety theatre remained the default night out, and Casson went on to sell out 2,000-seat theatres with regularity.

Swansea became a regular stop. In 1952, the Daily News reported that Casson would begin an 18-week tour of British variety theatres in the city, and quoted the 30-year-old hypnotist on the scale of his career: "In the Forces and on the stage I have hypnotised over 25,000 people without complaint."

Unlike later performers, Casson didn't treat hypnotism as pure stagecraft. He lectured on psychotherapy, painless childbirth, natural anaesthesia, and "personality change" - and by his own account devoted one week in three to a free clinic at the height of his earning power. Speaking to the Daily News in March 1952, he said it took "at least a year of weekly one-hour sittings to bring about any fundamental personality change - in, say, a juvenile delinquent or neurotic."

That same month, the MP John Rodgers asked the Home Secretary what could be done to control hypnotism as public entertainment, citing "public disquiet" and reports of young people needing hospital treatment after stage shows. The Home Secretary said at the time that he had no power to act and wasn't convinced legislation was necessary - but that August, Parliament passed the Hypnotism Act 1952, giving local authorities the power to license or ban public hypnotism performances and barring anyone under 21 from taking part.

Casson always maintained the criticism was aimed at the wrong people. Decades later he founded the Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnotists, drawing a line between his own act and the "cowboy" hypnotists he blamed for giving the craft a bad name.

He might not have liked it, but three years after Casson had an Evening Post employee walking a parapet 80 feet above the streets of Swansea, that was exactly the kind of act the new law was written to stop.

I'll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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