A documentary by Grant S. Clark
As a trained conjurer with an eye for deception, Harry Edwards attended Spiritualist meetings in the 1920s and '30s expecting to expose trickery. Instead, the London‑born printer became Britain's most celebrated spiritual healer — packing halls and receiving millions of letters over decades from people seeking his help, including royalty. Edwards, a working man with no credentials, wanted nothing more than to collaborate with the Church and the medical establishment. They fought him every step of the way.
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"My part is simply that of being used as an instrument by the spirit powers. I cannot tell you how it is done. I cannot tell you what forces are used. I only know
these things take place."
Harry Edwards
The Film
The Man
Harry Edwards was born in Islington in 1893, the son of a print compositor and committed atheist who raised him to believe only in evidence and logic. He became a conjurer — trained alongside members of the Magic Circle — and a rationalist of the most thorough kind. A man professionally equipped to identify exactly how the apparently impossible was manufactured.
He spent thirty years accumulating evidence he refused to accept. In Mesopotamia during the First World War, he healed injuries with almost nothing available and was astonished by the results. Back in South London, he visited Spiritualist churches with the sole intention of exposing fraud — and could not find it. Different mediums, week after week in Balham, told him the same thing: you are born to heal. He dismissed it. He kept returning anyway.
The healings began quietly. A TB patient at the Brompton Hospital. A man with terminal cancer, sent home to die. A young woman with one collapsed lung whose recovery was so complete she became a nurse at the very sanatorium that had treated her. Edwards — the conjurer who knew every trick — could not trick himself out of what he was witnessing.
By the time he purchased Burrows Lea near Shere in Surrey in 1946, the evidence had been accumulating for thirty years. He was fifty-three years old. He could no longer pretend he had not seen it.
A Life Chronology
The Film
A documentary that follows one of the most extraordinary lives in twentieth-century Britain — told through archive, expert testimony, and the remarkable documentary record Harry Edwards himself left behind.
The film follows Edwards from his Edwardian childhood through the First World War, his years as a South London printer, and the slow, inexorable accumulation of evidence that transformed a confirmed rationalist into Britain's most remarkable healer.
Styled in the tradition of the best BBC historical documentary — measured, intelligent, and quietly astonishing.