Psychics have always been around in upmarket circles - from King David visiting the Witch of Endor onwards - but recently they have appeared in the glossy environs of Selfridges. Article appeared originally in the November issue of International Life.

When her guard’s blood spattered the wedding dress of Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, following her 1906 marriage to King Alfonso of Spain, she was apparently not as shocked as she might have been. Months or years beforehand, she had been taken anonymously to see a famous lady psychic who had told her: ‘There will be blood on your wedding dress, but it won’t be yours.’ This is the kind of story that circulated among the British upper classes, and persuaded them to believe in psychics. Seances were held at grand country house parties and ouija boards were as common as chess right up until the mid 20th century.

People as grand as Arthur Conan Doyle and Winston Churchill openly believed in the paranormal. Churchill credited it with saving his life during the Boer War: “Suddenly…” he wrote in My Early Life, “It just felt quite clear that I would go to the Kaffir kraal. I had sometimes in former years held a ‘planchette’ pencil and written while others had touched my wrist or hand. I acted in exactly the same unconscious or subconscious manner now.” A planchette is the central piece of an ouija board that points out the letters – supposedly guided by a spirit.

Contacting the dead as a mainstream activity reached fever pitch during and after both world wars, when bereaved families from all walks of life, practiced spirit writing and visited mediums in an attempt to contact the beloved dead. Tarot even crept into the work of poet T.S.Eliot:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards.

But since the skeptical 1960s, spiritualism suffered a decline in class in the UK. Although we all secretly read our horoscopes, and websites and television programmes dealing with astrology and related matters receive huge audiences, the whole thing went steadily downmarket into the realms of tabloid sensationalism and overt flakiness. The late Princess of Wales lost a lot of credibility for her compulsive visits to psychic Simone Simmons between 1993 to 1997. According to the Princess’s very crumbly rock Paul Burrell, she often spent up to eight hours a day on the phone to Simmons. It seemed fitting that after her death, an alarming looking pair called Jane and Craig Hamilton-Parker “called her up” during a séance for a US television channel. Their £2,000 fee apparently went to one of the Princess’s charities. And Simmons, claiming that the Princess has told her to, wrote not one but two books.

There were exceptions: everyone who was anyone read the elegant Patric Walker, ‘Celeste’ for Harpers & Queen magazine until his death in 1995, and psychics practiced from the back rooms of society hairdressers. And the paranormal is seen as anything but downmarket in East. In China and India, everyone who is anyone has a personal astrologer, without whoe advice nothing can be done. Horoscopes are used to make business decisions, plan the date for a wedding and generally find an auspicious time for anything important.

Earlier this year, new legislation was proposed to demand that spiritualism, mediumship and the rest of it was properly classified as a branch of entertainment: ‘For display purposes only’ and not to be taken seriously. There was an outcry – but laws have been in place to police fraudulence in this area since the 18th century.

In 1944, a medium called Helen Duncan allegedly during a seance ‘materialised’ a sailor with HMS Barham on his cap. The ship had indeed gone down, but the government had suppressed the information for morale reasons as 861 sailors had been lost. Duncan was arrested and tried under a 1735 Witchcraft Act which, far from prosecuting ‘witches’ for communing with evil spirits, was designed to banish superstition by prosecuting people who pretended to be witches and ‘undertake to tell fortunes’.

Duncan was imprisoned for nine months and the story has been distorted to suggest she was tried as an actual witch. Campaigns to repeal laws against phony psychics were pursued during the19th century and the first half of the 20th, led by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle among other high profile believers who wanted to keep spiritualism pure. In 1951, that the Witchcraft Act was finally repealed and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which was supported by the spiritualist MP Thomas Brookes, and prosecuted ‘deliberate deception’ but protected the genuine and sincere.

Actress and novelist Amanda Lees first read the tarot cards at her convent boarding school. She worked as a psychic between acting gigs, and found herself discreetly reading for very illustrious company, including pop stars and oligarchs. According to Lees, the world of the paranormal is now a £1 billion industry, and the top people – mostly US based – are flown all over the world for readings. Entirely sincere herself, she has given up reading, saying, “I don’t think commercialism and the psychics interact in a helpful way. I have seen an awful lot of charlatans. The responsibility became too much and my own moral sense stops me from doing it for money.” When asked to explain, she said, “I don’t sense dead people hovering around. I just try to be a conduit for information.” She has researched the subject closely, taking a great intereset in James Randy, the famous debunker.

In the privacy of grand country house parties, super yachts and top nightclubs such as Chinawhite, psychics continued to read for an upmarket audience. But it was only when the Psychic Sisters were invited to pitch their velvet tents in Selfridges that the psychic move back upmarket came out in the open.

Jayne Wallace, a rather beautiful dark haired woman with a sweet appealing voice, closeted me in her mini-pavilion for a reading. First she asked me if I minded her saying anything alarming (I shook my head), then she detected my late father in the tent with us, which was a surprise. The Sisters are doing brisk business with Arab clients particularly – Jayne mentioned that she has to be culturally sensitive - apparently the ladies don’t particularly mind if she tells them their husbands are being unfaithful. Other sitters, such as our Shop Smarts editor Geraldine Maxwell, have had an enjoyably spooky time as well.

Regarded as entertainment, which is what the new Act wishes to emphasise, it is all rather fun. There is always the possibility that something eerie is going on after all – although numerous experiments and the techniques of ‘cold reading’ – picking up clues and using psychology to feed back evident truths to subjects – cannot be discounted. And Selfridges is leading the vanguard in taking the whole concept back to where it was in the days of Princess Victoria Eugenie.