The Bloxham Tapes Revisited

When an acquaintance first suggested to BBC producer Jeffrey Iverson that he should visit the renowned hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham in their shared home town of Cardiff, he had little expectation of it coming to much.[i] Bloxham was by then nearly eighty years of age, but for the past twenty years he had been regressing subjects back into previous lives, and had tapes from sessions with more than four hundred subjects to prove it. Despite his initial skepticism, Iverson made a number of visits and spent many hours listening to the tapes, becoming increasingly intrigued. Like most people he had accepted the misconception that people always claim to remember only famous and exciting lives, yet here he encountered regression after regression that was ordinary, humble and often somewhat boring. Not only that but many subjects used entirely different voices and words from their normal, conscious personality. But he also knew that the only way to satisfy his mounting curiosity would be to concentrate on cases containing detailed and obscure historical facts that might be verifiable. This he did, even bringing in the famous journalist and broadcaster Magnus Magnusson to assist in the investigation. The results were aired in 1976 in a BBC documentary entitled ‘The Bloxham Tapes’, accompanied by Iverson’s book More Lives Than One. Between them they caused quite a stir.

Iverson was intrigued by one of Bloxham’s subjects, a mild-mannered Swansea man called Graham Huxtable who, when regressed, transformed into a coarse, illiterate gunner’s mate in the English Navy of the late eighteenth century.[ii] Using what appeared to be contemporary naval slang he described how he was on board a ship called the Aggie, which was part of a fleet of ships involved in blockading the French just off Calais. Indeed this case had come to the attention of two high ranking Naval officers, in the shape of no lesser personages than Lord Mountbatten and Prince Phillip, who had been sufficiently impressed that they helped to investigate it. Some partial names were given but, coupled with incomplete contemporary Naval records, the details were insufficient to prove exactly what ship the man had described. What is more, the trauma Graham had suffered when he apparently relived his leg being shot off in battle convinced both him and Bloxham not to attempt to elicit more details.

However skeptics like Melvin Harris – a journalist, broadcaster and indefatigable debunker of past lives whose 1986 book Sorry, You’ve Been Duped was republished in 2003 under the less confrontational title Investigating the Unexplained – are not at all convinced by cases such as this. We all know that most researchers attempt to trace the factual historical records for past-life cases in their attempts to verify them. But he reminds us that it is easy to forget that historical fiction is an even more likely source. In this instance he suggests that Graham provided no information that could not easily be found in the scores of historical novels and boy’s adventure stories about life in the Royal Navy during that period.[iii] He also insists that naval records for the period are not incomplete and that, although there was one similarly named ship at the time called the Agamemnon, it had a massive sixty-four guns, double the size cited by Graham for the Aggie.

For Iverson the case that seemed to hold out most promise was that of a local housewife, who he dubbed ‘Jane Evans’ to protect her identity. She originally visited Bloxham in the late sixties after seeing a roadside poster about his health treatments, but she also proved to be an excellent regression subject. Over a number of sessions she explored what appeared to be six different previous lives, the earliest in Roman Britain in the late third century, the most recent as a nun in Maryland at the turn of the last. Iverson asked to meet her, and by coincidence found out that they had both attended the same secondary school in Newport, although a few years apart. From this he was able to independently establish that the she had never studied history at an advanced level, and none of the relevant periods in any detail, and that neither of her parents had read much or showed any great interest in history when she was younger.

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