Case Profile: The Woods and Greene Collection of 'Direct Voice' Recordings

Sydney George Woods and Betty Greene oversaw the recording of 500 audio tapes documenting the Direct Voice phenomena (disembodied speech) heard during seances of medium Leslie Flint.  (link to Recordings Directory)

   

Known as George and Betty, Mr. Woods and Mrs. Greene dedicated themselves to documenting the Direct Voice phenomena occurring in the presence of medium Leslie Flint (1911-1994).  Information about their lives is described in Flint's autobiography Voices in the Dark (1971) and in Life After Death (1975) by Neville Randall.  Flint remembered George as "a psychical researcher and a man of great integrity" while Betty was "a charming lady."

There is available at The Leslie Flint Educational Trust "Betty Greene Explains Direct Voice", a 12-minute video version of an undated audio recording.  In an introductory way, she expressed her understanding of what was happening during a seance; however, I'm certain the explanations of Flint's 'control' Mickey as heard in some of the recordings are those that should be the most carefully considered.

Betty is heard stating: ". . . the voice of the spirit communicator does not come through the medium . . . but [is] in mid-air about three feet away from him or wherever the voice box has been constructed.  So many people have the erroneous idea that the voice comes through the medium, through his own lips but in Direct Voice this is not the case.  The voice is completely independent of the medium.  That is why the phenomenon is called Direct Voice or Independent Voice.  Some Direct Voice mediums go into trance but this particular medium does not do so and is conscious the whole time.  He often laughs or makes comments when we do."

Betty reported: "The medium has been through every scientific test and the genuineness of his mediumship and his integrity have been proved beyond all doubt."  She said that Mr. Woods had been studying psychic phenomena for over 40 years.  "He has even had the experience of walking around the room with a materialized spirit at a materialization seance."  She stated about the variations of results during seances: "People do not understand that a successful seance depends on the condition not only of the medium physically and mentally, the atmospheric condition, but above all are the conditions mentally and physically given out by the sitters."

Leslie Flint wrote in his autobiography about George Woods: " . . he would play his recordings not only to members of his local Spiritualist church but to anyone else he thought might benefit from the knowledge that man lives on after death whether he likes the idea or not."  Flint described a memorable sitting that occurred after two or three years of Woods and Green sittings.  The communicator named on this occasion was a famous Shakesperean stage actress during her Earth life.

Ellen Terry came to speak to them and this is what she said: "You are going to have some remarkable communications and I suggest you keep this contact regularly to build up the power and strengthen the link which has been deliberately arranged for your tapes.  There are souls on this side of life with a great desire to make use of these opportunities to pass through information about life in our world and the mechanics of communication between your world and ours.  The tapes you record will give us the means to reach people in your world and we shall use them to the best of our ability.  We shall bring various souls from different spheres of life over here to give talks and lectures which can be sent out and played all over your world to millions of people.  That is why we want you to sit regularly with this medium to build up the power and make possible the way for these various entities to come and talk to you about themselves and about many things of importance to mankind."

About this Flint commented:

I had never doubted the reality of my voices nor questioned the integrity of my spirit helpers, but as I listened to the familiar voice of Ellen Terry suddenly I felt miserable and uncertain.  How could George's tape recordings be heard by millions of people all over the world?  I knew that George during many years of psychical research had received such proof of survival that his great desire was to share his conviction with as many people as possible but — millions?  It did not make sense.  When Ellen Terry's voice faded I leapt from my chair to switch on the light, and asked George if he would play back the recording.  When I heard Ellen Terry's extraordinary message for the second time I knew that however fantastic it might seem sooner or later George's tapes would be heard all over the world by millions of people.  Then and there it was arranged that George and Betty would sit with me regularly and from that day to this they have done so.

Neville Randall wrote in the Introduction of his book Life After Death:

My part was quite small.  The work had already been done by Woods and his colleague Mrs. Betty Greene.

It is their book.  And their life's work.  I am just the last link in a chain that begins in an unseen world.

Neville Randall provided some information about George Woods.
 

. . . early in August 1914, George Woods embarked for France as a trooper in the Northamptonshire Yeomancy with the British Expeditionary Force.  He was twenty.  A sensitive and non-conforming son of a typical shires squire who, though crippled when a horse fell on him and crushed his thigh, still rode to hounds, and read family prayers every morning to his wife, children and servants.

Young Woods had suppressed a horror of killing, either humans or animals, and joined up because his father wished it.  He found himself caught up in a bloody battle which the history books call the Retreat from Mons.

 
In 1915 he was wounded in his head and blinded.  After six months in hospital the sight of his right eye was restored.

One incident that he couldn't forget was a mortally wounded fellow trooper asking him, "Is there an after life?"  Woods was motivated by a compelling ambition to find the answer to the question.
 
After being discharged, he returned to help manage his father's new 400-acre farm at Hardwick in Buckinghamshire.  At the end of the 1930s, his father was dead and farming had become a struggle.  "He moved to Croydon, on the southern fringe of suburban London with a wife and son called Nigel recovering from meningitis."  He attended his first Spiritualist service.
 

The service, and a promised demonstration of clairvoyance, made little impression.  He was preparing to slip out when the officiating female announced: "I want to come to the gentleman at the back."

With a shudder of horror and embarrassment, he realized she was pointing at him.

"I have your father here," she began.  "He says his name is William Woods, and he is a cripple.  When he was on earth he had an accident.  He says he wants to speak to his son George.  He says he lived in a place called Hardwick.  He is also saying he is very concerned about your son Nigel.  He must go to bed earlier or he may have a recurrence."

Woods stayed on stunned.  Was it a trick?  How could a woman he had never met have got this information?  Was it possible that his father had come back from the dead to answer his question?  His mind was confused.  As he went home he could think of nothing else.

Woods investigated Spiritualism and joined the Society for Psychical Research.  The Rev. Drayton Thomas introduced him to Leslie Flint.   The author described what was theorized about Flint's mediumship.

Leslie Flint was said to have a strange and rare gift, the ability to attract the spirits of human beings who had died and moved on to another place of existence, and to provide them with a substance called ectoplasm which they drew from his and his sitters' bodies to fashion a replica of the vocal organs — a voice box or etheric microphone.
 

Woods went for a sitting.
 

His question was answered.  His mission seemed to be at an end.  In fact it was only just beginning.

George's first sitting with Flint was in 1945.  He acquired what Randall described as an early model of the portable tape recorder to use at Flint's sittings.  There were some other anomalous incidents in George's life, culminating in his work with Betty Greene to preserve audio records of the Direct Voice phenomena manifesting at Flint's seances.  There was an occurrence of automatic writing when George was on a tram from Croydon to London.  Feeling an urge to write, George got out a pad and pencil.

His hand, controlled by some unseen force, covered the paper so quickly that he became physically exhausted.  When it was released, he found that he had written a philosophical account of the next world, as strange to him as an unopened book, in the handwriting of his father.

After a sitting when the voice of Michael Fearon gave an account of his life, George was able to bring Fearon's mother to a seance.  "The voice came through again.  Mrs. Fearon announced it was her son."  At another seance, a female voice announcing herself as Mrs. Patrick Campbell (an Edwardian actress who first played Eliza Doolittle in "Pygmalion") had a message for George that quite soon he would meet a woman who would be sent to join him in his psychic studies and help him to send his recordings around the world.  "He registered it vaguely . . . and immersed himself in the activities of a growing circle who met every Sunday in the Woods home to hear and discuss the tapes he recorded with Flint."
 

The years passed.  he had almost forgotten the message.  Till in June 1953 a woman called to ask about a flat he had advertised in his home in Barclay Road, Croydon.  He had just let it to another tenant.  But to ease her disappointment he showed her round and took her name and address, promising to let her know if it ever became free.  Her name was Mrs. Greene.

Betty Greene was the daughter of a Croydon bank clerk and church organist who had retired to live in the Cornish fishing village of Polperro.  She had married, separated, and was earning her living as a medical secretary at the St. John's Hospital for Diseases of the Skin.

On August bank holiday she was walking down Barclay Road to the paper shop.  Woods was working in his front garden, saw her passing and called her over.  He had given his tenant notice, he said.  Was she still interested in the flat?  She moved in two weeks later.

Landlord and tenant soon became friends.  He lent her books and played recordings of his sittings with Flint.  She listened astonished to the conversations with Michael Fearon, a cockney girl called Rose, and recognized the American accent of a voice claiming to be Lionel Barrymore.

Randall reported that as Betty began attending Flint seances herself she became George's indispensable companion at every sitting.
 

One Saturday a month for the next five years, Woods and Mrs. Greene caught a train from East Croydon to Victoria, lugged the tape recorder on a 36 bus to Paddington in time for a sitting at eleven o'clock.  In 1960 they moved to Brighton, in 1964 to Worthing, and caught the Brighton Belle [train] with the recorder on a table or spare seat to protect it from vibration.

When Flint gave up working at weekends, Betty Greene changed her job to one where she could work on Saturday and take Monday off for what was now a fortnightly sitting.


Arriving at the flat, they were greeted by Flint's dogs and went straight to the seance room to set up a microphone over a hatstand above the chair where Flint sat, attached it to the recorder on a coffee table and plugged it into the main.

A three-sided cardboard box, specially made by Woods, was placed round the recorder to protect Flint from a dim light that showed Mrs. Greene that the reels were turning as they should.

Flint sat down, announced the date and names of the medium and sitters, and turned out the light.  They sat waiting in the dark for something to happen.

As soon as a voice was heard, Mrs. Greene started the tape running, and kept it running until the two-way conversation was ended by the communicator, or Mickey . . .

Flint mentioned in his autobiography that there was newspaper coverage of his work with George and Betty, resulting with a televised interview of the medium.  Recordings of spirit voices were played during the program, "one of them fittingly that of Ellen Terry." 
 
Flint commented about George and Betty's library of spirit communications tape recordings: "The communicators speak in all manner of accents and dialects and though many were famous during their lives on earth, others were ordinary men and women who returned to tell us of their experiences when they died and what they found when they reached life's other side."  (link to Recordings Directory)
 
There are also humorous moments that may be heard when one listens to recordings, such as during the experimental first tape recording (made in 1953) of Flint with another group of sitters when the voice of Rose Hawkins—in her Earth life a flower seller in London at the time of World War I—is heard among a succession of nine communicators (beginning with Flint's 'control' Mickey).  Rose concluded her comments by quipping to Mickey: "You're a bit of a case you are, aren't you dearie?"  This is the same phrase that he frequently said to sitters and he then spoke exasperatedly: "You talking to me?  She said I was a bit of a case?  I pulled her skirt and let her know her time was up.  You're a bit of a case yourself, ain't you, Rosie."