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Angel Of Mons / Doidge's Angel Hoax

Justin_Anstey

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This all follows BBC Radio4's broadcast of 'The Making of an Urban Myth- The Angel of Mons' on Mon. 14 Oct 2002 at 11:00am.

http://www.thisisgwent.co.uk/gwent/archive/2002/10/16/news1034764604ZM.html

First published on Wednesday 16 October 2002:

`Film' was just a hoax

AN elaborate hoax involving a Monmouth shop has featured in a special radio programme on urban myths.
The spoof was started in 1999 by Stroud architect Danny Sullivan who wanted to raise the profile of a gothic house in the area and hit on the idea of simulating the filming of an angel above the mansion.
He claimed that the idea came to him after purchasing a film canister from the Agincourt antiques shop in Monmouth's Agincourt Square featuring the Angel of Mons - a ghost-like image said to have hovered above the trenches in the First World War.
The story gained creditability when Mr Sullivan later `sold the movie' to film producer Tony Kaye - also part of the hoax - who was in partnership with Marlon Brando, for £350,000.
The world's media then started to take an interest in the story and devoted pages on it. The hoax was highlighted in Radio 4s The Making of an Urban Myth this week, when Mr Sullivan confessed that it was all a spoof.
He told reporter Chris Morris there was never any film: "But when people asked to see the film I told them it was being restored.
"I chose the antique shop in Monmouth, because if the nature of it - it is a true junk shop! The story was made to stand up because the film producer Tony Kaye told the media that he brought the film from me for 0,000 and that he had secured the interest of Marlon Brando to play a leading role.
"It was fun to see how far you could go with a story like this. I'm an ordinary bloke who made it known that he made a lot of money from the discovery of a £15 reel of film from a Monmouth junk shop. It made an interesting rags to riches story."
Owner of the antique shop John Read Smith said: "I was stunned while listening to the programme to discover that it was all a hoax. We had purchased 400 films following the death of a local film producer, and among the films was a canister with a number of letters securely attached to it, and written on them was the word angel.
"So when the story broke, we weren't surprised that there was a connection with our film and an angel.
" But I'm disappointed that the whole episode was a scam, and as there has been so much publicity, I think there will still be a Hollywood film based on the Angel of Mons."
PICTURED: John Read Smith outside his antiques shop.

http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co...layContent&sourceNode=74403&contentPK=2847256
THE MYTH MAKERS

11:08 - 18 October 2002
An old-fashioned first world war ghost story has taken on a 21st century twist by turning into a modern day urban myth.

West architect Danny Sullivan who claimed he had made a film proving the Angel of Mons existed has now admitted it was all an elaborate hoax.

Mr Sullivan made his confession to BBC producer Martin Kurzik who yesterday said: "It was a great con.

"He was offered £500,000 for it but although it was based on a true concept, there was never any film of an angel."

The Angel was an apparition who saved the lives of fleeing British troops by stopping the enemy in its tracks.

And last year Mr Sullivan made headlines worldwide when he claimed he had uncovered secret film footage and letters from a West soldier which proved the legend about an angel who cared for soldiers.

At the time Mr Sullivan claimed he bought a film and a cache of documents which proved the angel's existence for £15 from the Agincourt House Antiques shop in Monmouth in 1999. Now he has told the BBC the material never existed and he didn't sell them to a film company making a Hollywood movie starring Marlon Brando for £350,000 as claimed.

He says it was all spoof to create interest in Woodchester Park, Stroud where the angel was allegedly filmed because he had written a book about the ghostly goings on there.

He said: "I'm an ordinary bloke who made it known he made a lot of money from the discovery of a £15 reel of film from a Monmouth junk shop. It made an interesting rags to riches story."

According to Sullivan's story William Doidge, a west country soldier, fell in love with a Belgian woman and became so convinced the angel would lead him back to her he launched a 40- year quest to track down the vision.

The 46-year-old of Leonard Stanley, near Stroud claimed Mr Doidge eventually captured on cine film a vision of an angel at Woodchester Park in 1952.

Mr Kurzik, who researched the Mons legend for a Radio Four programme which will be repeated today said Mr Sullivan managed to get away with it because he used true facts.

John Read Smith, who runs the Monmouth antique shop, was philosophical about the 'find' when it emerged last year. But yesterday he warned Mr Sullivan could be pulling a double bluff and there might be a new chapter to be written on the legend.

"It is in any case a story and a half. The Angel of Mons is a myth distorted continuously and we have now become part of that myth," he said.
 
The Doidge's Angel Homepage

I think it is a good idea to make a copy of the text apparently written by Danny Sullivan on The Doidge's Angel Homepage in case he changes it.:

http://www.doidgesangel.com/

The Doidge's Angel Homepage

WILLIAM DOIDGE
Adventurers in search of the Holy Grail are all too few and far between in these rather dull and careworn days. In England, this kind of thing has long been the preserve of the affluent upper-classes. William Doidge is a man who has a strong claim to the title of the UK's very own Indiana Jones (without all the swashbuckling Hollywood heroics). From what we can tell, he was a man with a lifetime's mission. That mission began when he witnessed one of World War I's most infamous events. He pursued it - largely fruitlessly - through the mystical movements of the interwar years. Then, by chance, he came upon - or captured - the evidence he had sought for 30 years. Then he disappeared. The evidence was rediscovered late last year. Many questions are as yet unanswered. Most importantly: who was William Doidge, and did Doidge's angel really exist?

THE ANGEL OF MONS
In "On The Side of the Angels", Harold Begbie recounts the testimony of a trusted lieutenant who described to him, in detail, a sighting of the Angel of Mons in August 1914 when British forces were fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the Germans. The lieutenant reports watching the angel - or rather angels, because there were three of them ranked together - for over 45 minutes. It was around eight o'clock at night. There was a tall central figure flanked closely by two smaller figures on either side.

For himself, and for the battalion beside him, it was no mere matter of faith that the angels had protected them: it was a matter of fact. The advancing German forces on the right flank recoiled in disorder. Interviewed later (again by Begbie) a German officer verified the story. He reported that he, his men, and their horses were rendered powerless by the force of an apparition. And so, miraculously, these British troops survived.

Writer Arthur Machen strenuously sought to undermine conjecture concerning the sighting. He always maintained that the Angel of Mons was a fiction born out of a short story he wrote, which appeared in the Evening Post on 29th September, 1914. If so, it is peculiar that there should be such a long-established body of evidence from enormously diverse sources which pre-dates that article, which is remarkably consistent and which all points towards some form of supernatural intervention at a time of immense military crisis. There is a suspicion that perhaps Mr.Machen exploited a true story for his own commercial ends - he later published "The Bowman and Other Legends of the War".

What is interesting is that Begbie's interviewee spoke of a soldier who witnessed the event, with him, who was in the Scots Guards, and was at that time convalescing at Netley Hospital. Then, on 22nd August 1915, almost 12 months to the day after the original sighting, the Reverend AA Boddy, Vicar of All Saints, Sunderland, reported in The Observer that he had met with a nurse who had worked in the self-same convalescent hospital and fully recalled tending to an "educated, well-bred, gentleman soldier" (as she described him) who claimed to have seen the Angel. She knew him only as "BD".

THE DOIDGE PAPERS - AND DOIDGE'S ANGEL
I was aware of none of this until late last year, when I was prompted to research into the Angel of Mons because of some papers that came into my possession. At the end of August 1999, I was browsing in a junk shop in Monmouth. I bought some old tins (from the fifties or early sixties), three decrepit lever arch files of handwritten and typed notes and a box of papers, all of which I found in a trunk which was full of military paraphernalia and memorabilia, some pieces of decorative china and glass, a worn leather writing case, and bits of an old camera. I put the stuff aside, and it wasn't until September last year that I began to look through it.

There was one outstanding item: a still picture, which clearly incorporates the image of an angel. I was aware of angel myths before finding the picture, and I'd encountered some vague references, around Gloucestershire, but nothing specific. This is it: make of it what you will, but for me - and for expert professional photgraphers who have examined it - there is no hint of forgery about it.

The papers had been left by someone called William Doidge. From the fragments that I pieced together, he was born in Monmouth in 1896. He enlisted in the Scots Guards at the outbreak of World War I, and - though it's far from conclusive - the correspondence seems to suggest that he may well have been posted near Mons at the time of the sighting. Much of this is conjecture, of course, but there is a strong possibility that the "BD" the nurse referred to at Netley Hospital was William (Bill) Doidge.

The photograph that I found amongst Doidge's papers, could not, in any way, be a picture of the Angel of Mons itself. The image was captured years later - in all probability by Doidge himself - and carefully kept by him. I say this because whether William Doidge saw the Angel of Mons or not, he evidently became interested in mysticism. He corresponded with the Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club (founded by Alfred Watkins in the 1930s, to investigate the existence, routes and nature of ley lines, as outlined in Watkins' 1925 thesis "The Old Straight Track") and Egerton Sykes'Avalon Society, a group of mystically inclined researchers who picked up the mantle of the Straight Track Club after its demise in 1948.

WOODCHESTER MANSION
It's a curious story. But what's more curious still, and what truly fired my interest in the matter, is a link to Woodchester Mansion, which is an abiding interest of mine.

During World War II, US and Canadian servicemen were stationed at Woodchester Park in the Cotswolds in preparation for the D-Day landings. Woodchester Mansion is a vast, unfinished Gothic masterpiece, which historically has always formed a focus for rumour and folklore. It's surrounded by stories of personal tragedy, murder, ghostly apparitions, bizarre nocturnal activity, and secret wartime experiments. In 1945, some US servicemen drowned in one of the park's lakes, and the mansion has been linked with strange Victorian cults, the Freemasons and satanic worshippers.

In 1990, I undertook an extensive study into the house's history, its owner (William Leigh), his architect and the folklore of the valley in which it lies. This was published as "The House of the Holy Spirit". Many of the stories about the house were simple superstition. But various pieces of hard evidence did emerge. What was established was a connection between the house's owner and the secret religious reformists of the Oxford Movement in the mid 1800s, and further links with alchemy, mathematics, and the sacred architecture of the medieval masons who raised the great cathedrals of Europe. There is a clear correlation between William Leigh's Grand Design and the activities of an 18th century occult brotherhood and its three infamous Rosicrucian manifestos.

My belief is that, after the Second World War, William Doidge met someone who had been at Woodchester, and that the photograph of the angel was taken there. A single letter refers to his meeting a US veteran during a visit to America in the late 1940s, a soldier who had been stationed at Woodchester Park in 1945. The inference of the letter is that this soldier had witnessed a paranormal event in the Park around the time of the infamous accident in one of the Park's lakes when over 20 servicemen accidentally drowned.

I went back to Bonita - the junk shop - in September, specifically to see if there were any other papers which could provide additional information about Doidge's link with Woodchester. But the trunk and the rest of the contents had gone.

DOIDGE'S STORY
In all probability, Doidge was "BD" from Netley Hospital, and the obsession that he developed for mysticism and angel myths was born on the battlefield at Mons. He then pursued his interest in the subject, and was led to Woodchester Mansion where he captured the image of the angel, or was given it by someone for safe-keeping.

Doidge's story does not conclude at Woodchester. The next stage is to track his path back to America. It is (very very remotely) conceivable that he could still be alive today, a sprightly 105 years young. Or perhaps his descendants are out there, and this tale of their family's heritage will reach them somehow. Only then may we learn the true story behind Doidge's Angel.

My appeal - via the internet because I know that researching genealogy is one of the web's most favoured applications - is for information on Doidge, and for any clues as to who, ultimately, captured this image of an angel.

I love to receive feedback; please email me on [email protected]
Add your email address below, and I will inform you of my progress in hunting down Doidge.
Picture of Danny Sullivan:
Image4.jpg

The Angel image:
angel_frame.jpg

Woodchester Mansion, Glos.:
Mansion4.jpg
 
Past local newspaper stories.

The Citizen (Glos.):

-13-3-2001-pg2- 'Danny's windfall- an angel on film.'

-2-5-2001-pg3- 'Could mansion movie deal be heaven sent?'
---(News of the deal done with director Tony Kaye for £350,000.)

-24-5-2001-pg9- 'The shine is taken off Hollywood film hopes.'

-28-5-2001-pg2- '"Angel" film in doubt after new footage row.'
---(I don't have the actual clipping but this has to do with some chap named John Reynolds supposedly having a second film and his intention to use it in the videos for his band Ghostland which p****d off Tony Kaye.)

Links:
Http://www.ghostland.co.uk/
Google search.


For stuff on Woodchester Mansion click here. (I wonder if it was Sullivan's story that attracted the TV programme makers there.)
 
Discussion

First of all, what is the situation surrounding the Angel of Mons?

From: Http://www.doidgesangel.com/
In "On The Side of the Angels", Harold Begbie recounts the testimony of a trusted lieutenant who described to him, in detail, a sighting of the Angel of Mons in August 1914 when British forces were fighting a hopeless rearguard action against the Germans...

...Writer Arthur Machen strenuously sought to undermine conjecture concerning the sighting. He always maintained that the Angel of Mons was a fiction born out of a short story he wrote, which appeared in the Evening Post on 29th September, 1914. If so, it is peculiar that there should be such a long-established body of evidence from enormously diverse sources which pre-dates that article, which is remarkably consistent and which all points towards some form of supernatural intervention at a time of immense military crisis. There is a suspicion that perhaps Mr.Machen exploited a true story for his own commercial ends - he later published "The Bowman and Other Legends of the War".
-Danny Sullivan (?)

Is this the case or is this part of Sullivan's hoax? Is anybody familiar with Harold Begbie's book 'On The Side of the Angels'?
----------

The most interesting thing, it seems to me, about the whole thing is why and how do these ideas catch on, what are their importance? This is one for the social scientists, I suppose.

In the Radio4 documentary people said things like: "It just seemed to take on a life of it's own", "it justs blows out of control at home", "He's got something that makes it live" and "Momentum of bullshit" but didn't take it any further, as far as I can recall.

This seems to explain Tony Kaye's involvment, what with his ideas about 'Hype Art' and all.

For example:
Http://www.fadeinmag.com/kaye/interview1.html
But Kaye's most radical work of "hype art" to date is no doubt his highly publicized clash with New Line over the release of his feature film debut, American History X. Several months ago, Kaye manufactured the attention of the entire industry by placing a series of thirty-five cryptic full-page ads in the showbiz trade papers Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Quoting everyone from Abraham Lincoln to John Lennon, the mysterious entreaties to New Line top brass and personnel involved in the X production instantly set Hollywood abuzz. When the story was picked up by the Los Angeles Times in June, the struggle became a lightning rod for the ongoing conflict between directors and studios over the issue of final cut.
Google search.
 
The best part of the radio prog was when Danny Sullivan (why does that name sound familiar?) claimed never to have bought anything from the junk shop - yet the owners remember selling the film cannisters to him! Do they have a bill of sale?

The whole "Angels of Mons" tale always seemed to me like a morale-boosting story... tell the young, scared, soldiers that "god is on their side" and some of them will believe it, and even claim to have seen the evidence for themselves, or know someone who knew someone... Classic UL.

Jane.
 
Excellent article in 170 about this.

I think the author, David Clarke, is giving a talk at uncon... will one of you lucky things please let me know what he says?

David Sutton's sidebar about the true conditions at Mons was also excellent. A pleasureable, if distressing, read.

Jane.
 
http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co...layContent&sourceNode=73927&contentPK=6100625

GHOSTBUSTERS TO PROBE MANSION

11:00 - 21 June 2003

For 130 years it has stood in a timewarp, a half-finished Victorian country pile preserved for future generations. But experts believe there is more to Woodchester Mansion than its beautiful golden limestone exterior.

Tonight , the imposing Gothic building that dominates a tranquil Gloucestershire valley is set to reveal its grisly past on live TV.

A leading team of paranormal investigators is descending on the 27-room house to unlock its dark secrets in a bid to solve a long-forgotten murder riddle.

The mansion is steeped in stories of personal tragedy, mysterious deaths, ghostly apparitions, bizarre nocturnal activity and secret wartime experiments.

In spring 1944, two US servicemen drowned in a lake at Woodchester, which was used as a training ground, when a pontoon bridge collapsed.

The GIs are now rumoured to haunt the area. Two colleagues said they had seen an angel hovering over the area shortly before the tragedy occurred and in the 1950s a cameraman claimed he had caught the same white apparition on film.


Woodchester has also been linked with satanic worshippers. Other ghostly sightings include a Roman centurion, a dwarf, a headless horseman, and a floating coffin.

The strange events have been linked with the mansion's beginnings. Workers downed tools in the 1870s after 14 years of building, apparently because the owner had run out of money.

But speculation has mounted that their disappearance, like sailors from the Marie Celeste, had more sinister connotations and that a French stonemason was murdered.

Victorian scaffolding, a wooden arch prop, a 30ft ladder and their tools were simply left behind at the abandoned shell and have stayed intact ever since.

The Grade I-listed building has been run by the Woodchester Mansion Trust, whose patron is the Prince of Wales, since 1992 to restore and preserve the property while leaving it incomplete.

Chief executive David Price said he had never experienced anything ghostly but many others had. He said: "I have heard things from people I can't explain and you have to keep an open mind."

The mansion's office manager Wendy Milner became involved with the trust during the first paranormal investigation two years ago as a member of The Ghost Club.

She said: "I have had three experiences I can't explain, mostly strange sounds, including hushed voices in a room near the drawing room.

"The strangest one was when my hair and that of four colleagues was pulled upwards when we were standing in a corridor. The feeling did not leave us until we left the mansion."

She said that while there was no evidence of a murder, several psychics believed someone was pushed down a set of stairs or a ladder to their death.

Living TV is broadcasting a three-anda-half hour live special called Most Haunted Live from 9pm tonight.

The house will be open tomorrow from 11am to 5pm. Admission is £5 for adults and free for children.
 
A new book on the Angel of Mons:

The Angel of Mons : Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians
by David Clarke

Hardcover: 240 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.10 x 8.56 x 5.60
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; (May 14, 2004)
ISBN: 0470862777

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470862777/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470862777/

Book Description

The Angel of Mons recounts the tale of the advancement of German troops through Mons in 1914, to meet the ill-prepared British Expeditionary Force. The British troops were forced to retreat, with little hope of saving the lives of those at the front. It is in these extreme circumstances that many of the wounded and dying soldiers brought back from the Western Front, reported having been rescued by strange angelic forms in the sky that protected them from massacre - The Angels of Mons.

David Clarke follows this and other myths and rumours in an effort to trace the reality behind the Angels of Mons and discover what it was the soldiers saw.

Emps
 
The most recent Fortean Times (Nov. 2018?) that I read had an article on the Angels of Mons, which had a first person(ish) account that I thought was pretty interesting. In particular, the ball of light that the soldiers followed sounded a lot like a will o' the wisp... the wartime conditions that the area were experiencing might have created conditions that might have created a will o' the wisp-like effect that beckoned to the soldiers as they travelled through the area.
 
The main problem with these stories for me is the presumption that British forces had 'god on their side' in the First World War - there were xtians fighting on both sides of the conflict, and the whole reason for the war was nothing to do with 'righting wrongs' etc, it was an imperialist war.
 
The main problem with these stories for me is the presumption that British forces had 'god on their side' in the First World War - there were xtians fighting on both sides of the conflict, and the whole reason for the war was nothing to do with 'righting wrongs' etc, it was an imperialist war.
Exactly so.
 
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