Harry Edwards (healer)

Early years

Harry Edwards was born in Islington, London, one of nine children, to a printer and a dressmaker. At age 12 he joined the London Diocese Church Lads Brigade.

He left school in 1907 for a seven-year printing apprenticeship. Dissatisfied, he turned to politics, campaigning for the Liberal Party. After returning to the UK in 1921, he married Phyllis, opened a stationer's shop and printing works in Balham, and stood unsuccessfully for parliamentary and council seats as a Liberal candidate while supporting four children.

Spiritual healing

Harry Edwards' path to spiritual healing began in 1935 after a visit to a spiritualist church, where mediums informed him he possessed healing abilities. His initial efforts proved effective, and word of his work spread. During the war, he balanced his printing business with service in the Home Guard, while his healing practice steadily expanded. Eventually, healing demanded so much of his time that his brother took over the printing business.

After the war, he settled in Stoneleigh, Surrey, converting his front room into a healing sanctuary. The growing number of patients soon forced a move, and in 1946 he relocated his family and practice to Burrows Lea in Shere, a large house with gardens and woodland, where he established the Harry Edwards Healing Sanctuary. At his fame's peak, he received around 10,000 letters each week seeking help or distance healing.

In 1948, a Manchester healing demonstration drew 6,000 attendees. He appeared at the Royal Festival Hall during the 1951 Festival of Britain, filling the hall for a spiritual healing demonstration. He became the first president of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers in 1954, and that same year traveled to Cyprus for initiation into Daskalos' inner circle, the Researchers of Truth.

An Archbishops' Commission on Divine Healing, formed in 1953 to investigate spiritual healing, heard from Edwards in 1954; he submitted documentary evidence of successful cases and held a Royal Albert Hall demonstration to promote the 10 o'clock Healing Minute. The commission's 1958 report rejected spirit healers' claims, stating neither the Church nor medical profession accepted them, and Edwards never received a copy. He claimed deceased scientists like Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur worked through him, and Aetherius Society founder George King praised his abilities. Edwards died in December 1976 at age 83.

Sceptical reception

In 1954, a medical study examined one hundred cases of spiritual healing and found no evidence that a healer's actions alone ever cured a measurable physical illness. Harry Edwards, a prominent healer, claimed to have healed roughly one hundred thousand people in Britain, but the researcher could not confirm a single case. During one of Edwards's sessions, an elderly woman said she had been healed and walked without her walking sticks, yet by the end of the meeting she needed both sticks to leave the hall.