Frederick Bligh Bond

Frederick Bligh Bond studied at Marlborough College and Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is architecture, visual arts and archaeology. Places of work recorded in the authority are Glastonbury and London. Employment is recorded with Church of England and American Society for Psychical Research. Positions recorded include bishop. Distinctions recorded are Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

• Name — Frederick Bligh Bond • Born — 30 June 1864 • Birthplace — Marlborough, Wiltshire, England • Died — 8 March 1945 30 June 1864 • Place of death — Dolgellau, Merionethshire, Wales • Occupation — Architect and psychical researcher • Employer — Church of England, American Society for Psychical Research

Bligh Bond was the son of the Rev. Frederick Hookey Bond. He was born in the Wiltshire town of Marlborough. His family was related to William Bligh, through his nephew Francis Godolphin Bond, Bligh Bond's grandfather. He was also a cousin of Sabine Baring-Gould. He was educated at home by his father, who was headmaster of the Marlborough Royal Free Grammar School. His brother, Francis George Bond, became a major general in the British Army.

• Illustration — Glastonbury Abbey As early as 1899 Bligh Bond had expressed his belief that the dimensions of the buildings at Glastonbury Abbey were based on gematria, and in 1917 he published, with Thomas Simcox Lea, Gematria, A Preliminary Investigation of the Cabala contained in the Coptic Gnostic Books and of a similar Gematria in the Greek text of the New Testament, which incorporated his own previously published paper, The Geometric Cubit as a Basis of Proportion in the Plans of Mediaeval Buildings. In 1908 the Church of England appointed him director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. Before he was dismissed by Bishop Armitage Robinson in 1921, his excavations rediscovered the nature and dimensions of a number of buildings that had occupied the site. Bond's work at Glastonbury Abbey is one of the first documented examples of psychic archaeology. Bond with the retired navy Captain John Allan Bartlett ("John Alleyne") as a medium claimed to have contacted through automatic writing dead monks and the builder of the Edgar Chapel at Glastonbury, who advised him where to excavate. In 1919 he published The Gate of Remembrance, which revealed that he had employed psychical methods to guide his excavation of the Glastonbury ruins. As a consequence of these revelations his relations with his employers, who strongly disapproved of spiritualism, deteriorated and he was sacked in 1921. Archaeologists and skeptics have found Bond's claims dubious. Joseph McCabe suggested that Alleyne and Bond had "steeped themselves, all through the year 1907, in the literature of the subject. They read all that was known about Glastonbury, and lived for months in the medieval atmosphere." In 1922 Rev. H. J. Wilkins published a detailed criticism of Bond's psychical claims. Wilkins concluded "there is absolutely nothing supermundane in the whole of the script... All that is true in the script could be gathered from historical data or reasonably conjectured by intelligent observation of existing facts and conditions." Archaeologist Kenneth Feder commented that the "tall church towers, whose existence and locations we are to believe were provided by spirits, actually were recorded and located in a historical document Bond almost surely had already seen. Beyond this, an early drawing of the abbey, and even structural remains visible on the surface, provided clues as to the location of these towers." Feder also noted that "there was no scientific controls whatsoever" and that it is impossible to tell whether he was actually advised by spirits or whether his expertise in church architecture and information from early drawings helped him locate the chapels he discovered. In a series of articles published in The Skeptic, Chris French discusses in depth the possibility Bond's automatic writing may have instead been the result of the ideomotor effect and facilitated communication which was influenced by Alleyne. French also outlines a study which indicates Bond and Alleyne may have already been aware of the information they communicated in the writings but did not realise it at the time.

Bligh joined the Freemasons in 1889, the Theosophical Society in 1895, the Society for Psychical Research in 1902, the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in 1909 and the Ghost Club in 1925. From 1921 to 1926 he was editor of Psychic Science (then named Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psychic Science). In 1926 he emigrated to the US, where he was employed as education secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and worked as editor on their magazine, Survival. Bligh Bond broke with the ASPR and returned to Britain in 1936, also rejoining the Ghost Club in the process, after supporting accusations against the medium Mina Crandon that she had fraudulently produced thumbprints on wax that she presented as being produced by the spirit of her dead brother, Walter. During his time in the USA Bond was ordained, and in 1933 consecrated as a bishop, in the Old Catholic Church of America.

He returned to the United Kingdom in 1935, spending his time in London and Dolgellau, Merionethshire, where he died of a heart attack.

The following is established of the heading itself.

The following works and productions are recorded by name or by count.

Bond is mentioned as part of the background to Deborah Crombie's mystery novel A Finer End (Bantam, 2001). On 30 December 2008 Bligh Bond was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, The Ghosts of Glastonbury, hosted by Tony Robinson, which examined Bligh Bond's claims that he received archaeological information through automatic writing from deceased monks.

The scholarly and documentary record stands as follows.