To many the name of Arthur Constance [born c.1891] will mean little if anything. But the contribution he made to Ufology and other fields should never be under estimated Albeit brief, I am hoping that this article will rekindle an interest in this ‘lost’ researcher.
Born c. 1891 to a poor Victoria, British Columbian family, Arthur’s early life was fraught with many problems apart from what appears to have been a rather unhappy childhood. To be poor in those days meant real hardship. Following a number of bad educational experiences, at the age of 11,Arthur began to educate himself. In the Winter of 1912, aged 21 years and in deep despair, he contemplated suicide. But he fought back with “youth and energy.”
Everything from the natural world to science and technology fascinated him. In 1925 he began to collect data on all manner of unexplained things. This made him a contemporary of Charles Hoy Fort, the so called “Father of Fortean Research”.
In the pre-war years of the 1930s Arthur set up and built a business in London which provided him with a regular income between 1940-1949. this meant he could devote all of his time to writing, having been a freelance journalist since 1927,writing thousands of uncredited articles, not unusual for that period. But his writing output in that ten year period was staggering. He wrote 23 books totalling nine million words –most still unpublished in 1959. The only thing published from that period were four poems under the title A Tetralogy, in 1951.
It was also in 1951 that he began a career in broadcasting; starting with a broadcast on BBC West Region Radio titled Poetry Without Tears. This break came at a time when his financial situation had become quite bad. Success on Radio led to more work and eventually he had a show of his own on Radio Luxembourg,”Fantastically Yours”.
The semi biographical book, The Glazier, was published in 1956; a book many predicted would be a future minor classic, though it seems to have sadly vanished completely. The next book of Arthur’s to be published was The Inexplicable Sky dealing with flying saucers amongst other things, in 1957. This was followed, in 1958, by The Impenetrable Sea. There were also a series of articles for The Flying Saucer Review under the title “This Amazing Universe”.
Arthur Constance was a famous, nationally recognised, expert on flying saucers and in 1955, the British Flying Saucer Bureau’s Flying Saucer News [no.9,Summer,1955] wrote:
“Britain’s Number One “Flying Saucer Detective”.
Many readers will have seen the article in a recent issue of The Sunday Dispatch featuring the activities of
ARTHUR CONSTANCE
The well known journalist, author and broadcaster, who has for thirty years collected cuttings and books on “odd” happenings and “inexplicable” phenomena.
His library contains 16,000 reference books –and he has two million press cuttings!
During May,Mr.Constance visited the Air Ministry with his 18,000 word report on the “Meteor Incident” of March 24th [reported in our Stop Press last issue].
FLYING SAUCER NEWS has secured, for next issue,an
EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE
with full documentation, maps, sketches, etc.,by this veteran researcher.”
On page 16 of the same edition, is a reference to Arthur’s visit to Bristol where he met and talked with the British Flying Saucer Bureau/Flying Saucer Club Director of Research and Investigation, Mr Graham F. N. Knewstub, and others. Mead Laynes “MAT/DEMAT” theory was discussed and the BFSB/FSC offered to help as much as possible with him on his new book.
The “Ask Me Another” radio show in which questions on every and any subject were fired at contestants with only 10 seconds for an answer, was to go on tour. As was his habit, Arthur crammed as much knowledge from books on all subjects and in the evenings his wife became questioner; testing him as far as possible. On Friday,9th January,1959, at around Midnight, his wife was reading questions when Arthur felt an “aching pain in my throat. At the same time a beating began in my left ear –I could hear, quite loudly, the zzzz, zzzz, zzzz of my heart.” Feeling exhausted he retired to bed but next morning the condition was still there. It got worse and a visit to his doctor led to a specialist. His health got worse, then better as he struggled to type the stencils for his 28th June, 1959 newsletter which eventually took months. All the time financial worries grew worse though he hoped for a “miracle”.
Around 1959/60,David Jones and a friend had gone along to a meeting taking place in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The subject of the meeting was flying saucers and the speaker Arthur Constance. David and his friend were quite sceptical but by the end of the meeting they had “joined the fold”. Jones helped to set up the Cheltenham Flying Saucer Group and edited Saucer Forum, as well as assisting Constance on his “Fantastically Yours” radio show.
David Jones has help provide some information on the period and Arthur –including photographs of the man himself.
Then, in The Flying Saucer Review 7/3,May-June,1961 [p.29],came a bombshell announcement:
“ARTHUR CONSTANCE
We regret to announce the death, in Cheltenham, on March 15,of Arthur Constance, who used to used to write regularly for the Flying Saucer Review.
He was a man of many parts and was well known as author, broadcaster and competition expert. Among his published works was THE INEXPLICABLE SKY [1957], which surveyed a whole range of mysterious sky phenomena and established him as an expert on flying saucers on both sides of the Atlantic. This was followed by THE IMPENETRABLE SEA, a companion volume on the unsolved mysteries of the Oceans.
Perhaps his greatest work,however,was THE GLAZIER [1956],a study of his father’s struggle against adversity.
Set in Cheltenham, this biography revealed a great in- tensity of feeling and sympathy for his misunderstood parent’s suffering;Arthur Constance explained that he wrote the work “in the white heat of remorse” in order to vindicate the memory of a man he felt he had cruelly misjudged. THE GLAZIER was greeted with a chorus of very high literary acclaim,though it was admitted that the book might have to be rediscovered by a subsequent generation before it could be fully recognised as a minor classic.”
At the time of his death,Constance’s private library contained over 17,000 books on all subjects and a news cuttings archive of well over 3,000,000 items. Just prior to his death,Arthur had asked friends to disperse the items amongst themselves but even this meant that an incredible amount was lost. Arthur had, since the age of 11 years,kept a diary –these were all lost. There were files and notes, correspondence and so much more including, according to Graham Knewstub, some “absolutely incredible flying saucer photographs” –all gone.
When I joined the British Flying Saucer Bureau in 1975,Arthur Constance was still a legend. In 2006 it is my intention to try to find anyone who knew or worked with Arthur and who might know where some of the lost material has gone. The fear is that the majority of material ended up in rubbish vans.
I would like to thank David Jones for his invaluable help and,of course, those photographic images.
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