“Throw me into a trance!”

A kaleidoscope of visitors once passed through the doors of Theobald’s Park, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, the home of Lady Valerie Meux. They were primarily sportsmen, artists, theatricals, and writers, including Sir Henry Rider Haggard, (1856–1925), author of numerous and hugely popular adventure stories, including King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, She, Ayesha. “Certainly it was a queer household,” Rider Haggard wrote to his friend E. A. Wallace Budge, of the British Museum, another frequent visitor to Theobald’s Park, and the man who catalogued Lady Meux’s collection of Egyptian antiquities.

The newspaper mistakenly calls Alfred Capper Charles

One of those visitors was a Victorian equivalent of Derren Brown — ‘thought-reader,' entertainer, and magician Alfred Capper (l865-1921). He had toured the world with his humorous drawing-room entertainment and thought reading séances.

Unusually, his encounter with Lady Meux was deemed memorably enough to appear as an illustration in an American newspaper in 1925, many years after the original encounter.

As a newcomer to Theobald’s, Capper was seated at dinner next to Lady Meux. As usual, bedecked in jewels, her arms covered with serpents with diamond bodies and emerald eyes. As Capper enjoyed his third course of chicken cutlet, Lady Meux suddenly gazed into Capper’s eyes and imperiously ordered: “Throw me into a trance!”

Choking and spluttering on the chicken cutlet, Capper tried to tactfully explain that it was impossible to read anybody’s thoughts when savouring such a delicious dish. A private séance later took place, the secrets revealed remain unknown.

Capper never claimed any supernatural powers. “As far as my own thought-reading is concerned, there is nothing uncanny about that, although, presumably, it is a gift which very few possess, otherwise I should have more rivals. There is, however, nothing supernatural about my performances; the truth is that I have a power, as I have stated in a previous chapter, of adapting my mind consciously to the will of any other person. No mesmerist, I am sure, could mesmerise me; but I can in a way mesmerise myself so that my mind becomes a perfect blank, willing to receive the impressions of others. Naturally, I can always succeed better with those who have the power of concentrating their thoughts than with those who are weak-minded or of a nervous disposition,”

Alfred Capper died in a taxicab on the way to the Gare du Nord, Paris, in March 1921. He was returning to England following a European tour, raising money on behalf of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society. In 1912 alone, he had travelled more than 50,000 miles, giving 200 séances.

Alfred Capper