Stead, William T.

Estelle Stead, daughter of William T. Stead, whose image appears on her photograph taken by Ada Deane in October, 1915. W.T. Stead died in the Titanic shipwreck of 1912. Courtesy Fortean Picture Library.

Stead, William T. (1849–1912)

William T. Stead was a great British champion of Spiritualism. He edited the Northern Echo in Darlington, Yorkshire, and in 1883 took over the editorship of London’s popular Pall Mall Gazette. In 1890, he founded the Review of Reviews where, at December, 1891, he published his Real Ghost Stories. This was the start of his demonstrated interest in psychic matters. The following year Stead discovered that he had the ability to do automatic writing. On March 14, 1893, he addressed the members of the London Spiritualist Alliance and told of his receipt of communications from a Chicago journalist, Julia Ames, who had died shortly before.

In 1893, Stead began publication of Borderland, a quarterly psychic magazine that ran for four years. In the Christmas, 1893, issue of the Review of Reviews, Stead published a story of his own, about the dangers of icebergs to shipping on the Atlantic Ocean. This theme cropped up a number of times in his writings. In the Pall Mall Gazette one year, he carried the story of a survivor from the sinking of a liner and in his editorial said, “This is exactly what might take place if liners are sent to sea short of (life) boats.” More than twenty years later, he was invited to speak at Carnegie Hall, New York, on April 21, 1912. He set out aboard the Titanic to visit America. Before he left he wrote to his secretary, “I feel as if something was going to happen, somewhere, or somehow. And that it will be for good.”

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