Hugh Francis Shearman (1915-1999) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and attended the Belfast Academy and the Queens University of Belfast, and completed his PhD in history at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1944 with a thesis entitled: “The economic results of the disestablishment of the Irish church”.
Dr Shearman was the author of some twenty books on Theosophy. He was Regional Secretary of the Theosophical Society in Northern Ireland for many years and had been a member of the General Council of the Theosophical Society. He was awarded the Subba Row Medal in 1996 for his contribution to theosophical literature. He was a Priest of the Liberal Catholic Church.
A number of Shearman’s Theosophical articles are available on-line at: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/other/c/c_hshear.html Some additional articles are available on-line at: http://www.austheos.org.au/clibrary/bindex-s.html
His writings on Leadbeater include:
(1) Modern Theosophy Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, 1952 (2nd edition 1965)
This work deals briefly with “The Leadbeater Case” (pp.51-56) including a brief reference to the Police investigations in Sydney in the 1920s.
The whole incident was useful in some ways tending to break down old-fashioned inhibitions and to cause members to meet certain aspects of life in a more balanced and realistic spirit. But even that would hardly justify so lengthy a reference to this old-world comedy of prudery were it not for the fact that the affair had long-continued repercussions.
It also deals, again briefly, with the Krishnamurti affair (pp. 61-64), and the author clearly denies that any claim was made by Mrs Besant that Krishnamurti was going to be the “vehicle” for the World Teacher.
(2) “C.W. Leadbeater in Retrospect” The Theosophist January 1964
Available on-line at: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/his/shearman5.html
C.W. Leadbeater had a personality early formed in a certain way, and he carried the eccentricities of that personality with him all through his later life. He wore about him the cloak of a conventionally high-minded Church of England clergyman, a sturdy conservative, a staunch upholder of Queen and Empire. It was a personality – or, as psychologists might now call it, a persona – which he found adequate and did not trouble to change. But repeatedly he outpassed its apparent limitations, carrying it lightly and showing himself capable of acting as if it were not there.
To understand him at all it seems necessary to recognize in him a powerful individually living largely in that wholly different order of experience of which he was from time to time the interpreter. He was one for whom the standards of his colleagues and critics often did not exists. He was able to take simply and naturally decisions which would have cost others great anxiety and much screwing up of courage. To drop the Church of England and every security which life seemed to hold for him and throw all his energies into the work of the Theosophical Society was probably a relatively easy course for him to take. Having reached a certain stage in the development of his new understanding of things, any other course would have been unthinkable to him, and there was probably little sense of conflict. His tranquil and good humored self-assurance in the most difficult and delicate situations arose from a “self” more deeply based than that of other people. He did not reply to critics; he did not defend himself or engage in controversy or argument; he did not criticize others. All these activities he regarded as ineffectual and irrelevant to the work that absorbed him. He was in no two minds about it. To him it was pointless to do these things and so he did not do them.
Such a person is deeply disturbing to others. His certainty is a standing reproach to their own instability. He was satisfied that he knew who he was, where he was going, what he had to do and why; and he was courteously content that others should similarly do whatever they had to do. It is an attitude which can render almost frantic those who do not know who they are and who are psychologically insecure.
(3) “A Study in Evidence” in C.W. Leadbeater: A Great Occultist compiled by Sandra Hodson and Mathias J. van Thiel, ca 1965
Available on-line at: http://www.alpheus.org/html/articles/theosophy/oncwl1.html#t2
The text of the whole work is available on-line at: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/his/leadbeat.html
An attack on E.L. Gardner’s There is No Religion Higher Than Truth.
It is a rule of scientifically written history that all relevant evidence must be taken into account before a final conclusion is offered. On some of the matters to which Mr. Gardner referred it would be difficult to assess the value of the evidence that is available, since it consists of testimony relating to individual experiences of a highly subjective nature. But to ignore that testimony and write as if it did not exist amounts to a suppression of the truth. Thus Mr. Gardner wrote, “Obviously there has been no Coming.” That this was not obvious to many people who were close to Krishnamurti is evident from many personal testimonies. It will suffice to quote one of these as an example. Miss Clara Codd, writing on the nature of love, wrote: “I knew and remember something of what that Divine Love – agape – is, from that wonderful meeting in Benares, long years ago, when Krishnaji was overshadowed. I seemed to see then, momentarily, through the eyes of the Lord Christ, the Buddha Maitreya, the World Teacher, and I knew then that with Him was no shadow or sense of difference, no big or small, no important or unimportant. All were equally important, equally dear.”
Such a statement is not something that can be evidentially proved, but equally this type of testimony cannot wholly be left out of account, nor should it – in a Society devoted to brotherhood, truth and the communication of experience – be, as it were, shouted down or devalued and obscured by a mass of untrue statements.
In another place Mr. Gardner stated that “the Lord Maitreya and the Masters with whom Leadbeater was on such familiar terms were his own thought-creations.” Again this is perhaps not a matter that it would be easy to prove evidentially one way or another; but one cannot ignore or with honesty suppress the fact that Bishop Leadbeater’s testimony on this subject was supported by that of many other people, including three successive Presidents of the Theosophical Society.
(4) “Theosophical Ontologies” The Theosophist October 1971
Available on-line at: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/other/shearman20.html
Attempts to compare the ontologies of Blavatsky and Leadbeater
…the ontology set forth in Bishop Leadbeater’s work is obviously very much conditioned by the kind of person he was, the thought idiom in which he expressed himself, the values of the age in which he lived. His writings today are those of a man who obtained nearly all his formal education over a hundred years ago.
So far as his writings describe things relatively close at hand, the psychic realm that lies beyond the physical, the invisible anatomy of mankind and the “hidden side of things”, what he has said responds admirably to the demands of other people’s experience. In these fields he differed from Madame Blavatsky in that he was dealing with material which can to some extent be verified by others, whereas she confined herself to the perhaps safer field of things large, relatively remote and incapable of testing. But it is when Bishop Leadbeater dealt with things remote in time and space that he too, like Madame Blavatsky, has aroused scepticism. Modern approaches to dating and timing the past or assessing the likelihood of physical life on other planets are at least not providing confirmation of what he wrote, and current progress in atomic physics and aeronautics, to say nothing of other human activities, does not square well with his account well with his account of the state of these pursuits some centuries in the future. The most that one can perhaps claim for some of what he wrote is that he perceived in general terms something that was true but clothed it – and how could anybody do otherwise? – in the details of his own experiences and thought images.
One of the most interesting aspects of Bishop Leadbeater’s ontology was his description of “atoms”. What he described, however, has no correlation with the discoveries of modern physicists. It is often pointed out that the kind of atom that he described was very like that speculatively sketched by a writer called Edwin D. Babbitt who published in New York in 1878 a book entitled The Principles of Light and Color Bishop Leadbeater quite openly referred to Babbitt’s work on a number of occasions, and there was no question of his plagiarizing surreptitiously from Babbitt. It would seem that he had a certain experience with regard to the nature of matter and bodied it forth in the idiom and thought images of the age in which he had grown up. In extending, with Mrs. Besant, a system of occult chemistry, he was particularly influenced by the periodic law first expounded by Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeleev in 1879 and developed by Sir William Crookes, who joined the Theosophical Society on the same day as the young C.W Leadbeater system seems to have no place for isotopes.
(5) “Some Basic Problems of the Theosophical Society’s History” The Theosophist July 1972
Available on-line at: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/his/shearman3.html
Includes attacks on Lady Emily Lutyen’s Candles in the Sun and E.L. Gardner’s There is no Religion Higher Than Truth.
Many an individual has ridden high upon the afflatus of some great interior experience. It is predominantly an experience of the “heart”, an experience which is supra-rational. Though leaving some imprint upon memory and the discursive mind, it is not predominantly and experience of that mind. In the light of that experience the individual does various things, express himself in various ways. Then, later, he loses that experience and is left with nothing but its elusive imprint upon memory.
Looking back upon that past era of his life, he now tries to rationalize what happened, quite omitting the real core of that central experience which gave meaning to his acts at the time. Often, too, there is in his loess a certain resentment, and the story of his past which he now tells exhibits factual inaccuracy and sometimes an embittered or often at least an unfriendly interpretation of other people upon whom he puts blame for having misled him in some way.
When an individual describes the past in this way, trying to give a rational account of it and yet omitting a certain experience or enthusiasm which at one time was the motivating heart of his own actions, there is nearly always a visible flaw or incompleteness in the rational structure which he tries to erect. A good example of this may be found in a book by Lady Emily Lutyens called Candles in the Sun. Those who are acquainted with past events in the Theosophical Society will know of Lady Emily figuring in the early 1920s as an immensely devoted and committed worker in certain causes. Then a kind of disillusionment set in and she dropped out of sight, to come before the public again in her old age in the 1950’s as the writer of several very readable works of reminiscences, of which Candles in the Sun deals with her activities in the teens and twenties of this century in the Theosophical Society and other movements.
At first glance Candles in the Sun deems to be a very candid and honest book; but the reader who has some background knowledge of the history of the Theosophical Society soon begins to find that on certain points the narrative, however convincing, is just not factually accurate. To take one simple and outstanding example, one of the most prominent figures of the various movements with which Lady Emily was concerned was Mr. Oscar Kollerstrom. One looks in any detailed narrative of those events for some account of the part he played, and we known from other sources that he was a person well in the foreground of Lady Emily’s life at that time; but his name is simply no to be found in Lady Emily’s book. She wrote as if he had never existed. Thus, although the book appears to be a coherent narrative, reliably consistent with itself, a very little research shows that Candles in the Sun is not factually reliable or complete as an account of those events.
Another example of an attempt to rationalize in old age a past that had been lived through with a certain inspired enthusiasm was a pamphlet published in 1963 by Mr. E.L. Gardner, entitled There is No Religion Higher than Truth. This again does not stand up to critical examination at the factual level. Based, as would appear from its own opening paragraphs, upon an impression that Mrs. Besant was influenced in decisions which she took in 1909 and 1910 by letters which Bishop Leadbeater wrote to her from 1916 onwards, the booklet just does not stand up to critical investigation at the factual level (Sandra Hodson and M. J. van Thiel, C.W. Leadbeater, a Great Occultist, p 3 et seq.) and can be regarded as having significance mainly or solely in relation to the personal psychological adjustments of its writer.
(6) Charles Webster Leadbeater, A Biography St Alban Press, Sydney, 1980
In 1980, the St Alban Press, official publisher for the Liberal Catholic Church, published Charles Webster Leadbeater, A Biography by Hugh Shearman. This small booklet – of 39 pages – appears to have been produced in anticipation of The Elder Brother, and presented (without acknowledgement) some of the material discovered in research for that work which had been made available to the President of the Theosophical Society in 1979.
It is necessary to consider the ways in which Shearman has dealt with the problems inherent in the “orthodox” biography of Leadbeater perpetuated within the Theosophical movement, revealing as it does the means whereby the inheritors of a “myth” endeavour to reconcile the myth, or “sacred biography”, with the seemingly incontrovertible facts of history.
Bishop James Burton, formerly Regionary Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church in Great Britain, noted in his foreword to Shearman’s booklet:
Today some would-be biographers… go out of their way to over-emphasize (to the partial exclusion of the positive achievements of their subjects) any eccentricities, presumably to engage the attention of the casual reader.
He declared Shearman’s work to be “an example of the way in which an outline biography should be presented. It is objective, informative, balanced.”
Shearman begins by dealing with some of the inconsistences in the traditional biography of his subject. For example, Leadbeater declared that he had been born on February 17, 1847, but his birth certificate shows February 16, 1854. Shearman comments:
Circumstances sometimes make errors of this nature more easy to accept than to correct, but this one caused various accounts of his career to convey the impression that at each stage of his life he was seven years older than he actually was.
It is difficult to imagine what the “Circumstances” might have been which could lead to a seven year error in birthdate. But Shearman goes on to imply that this false information was given (a) only occasionally and infrequently, (b) by people other than Leadbeater himself, and c) by an “impression”. These suggestions are patently false. Leadbeater himself repeatedly gave, and failed to correct others when they gave, a wholly false account of his early life. Similarly, Shearman avoids the difficulty of Leadbeater’s story of a brother (for whom there is no evidence) by saying, in passing, “He seems to have been an only child”. This is the same method he uses to deal with claims of an Oxford or Cambridge education.
When dealing with the better documented period of Leadbeater’s life – after he joined the Theosophical Society – Shearman tends to reinterpret history, glossing over controversial periods (for example, the 1906 “troubles”), or simply misrepresenting the facts. Two examples will suffice to show his method. The discovery of Krishnamurti and his presentation to the world as the future Vehicle for the World Teacher, or the Christ, are presented in the following way:
She [Mrs Besant] said that, if he proved fit for it, Krishnamurti would be the ‘vehicle’ through which the ‘World Teacher'”, the Master of the new revelation of spiritual truth, would speak to the world.
But Mrs Besant and Leadbeater both declared – privately and publicly – that Krishnamurti was to be the Vehicle for the Coming, and indeed was the Vehicle on several important occasions. Shearman seeks to move the responsibility from Mrs Besant to Leadbeater, when, in fact, Mrs Besant tended merely to echo Leadbeater’s statements in such matters.
A second instance of Shearman’s dishonest method is found in his reference to Helena Blavatsky as Leadbeater’s “teacher”. His passing reference to this “fact” implies that it is simply a fact. But there has been a heated debate in Theosophical circles over many years as to Leadbeater’s relationship with Blavatsky, and the evidence is strongly against Leadbeater’s claim to have had Blavatsky as his teacher.
Shearman’s brief biography was also included at the beginning of what was claimed to be a previously unpublished work by Leadbeater, published under the title, The Christian Gnosis, by the St Alban Press, Sydney, in 1983.
Shearman’s historical and political writings include:
Belfast Royal Academy: 1785–1935 (1935)
Not an Inch: A Study of Northern Ireland and Lord Craigavon (1942)
Anglo-Irish Relations (1948)
Ulster (1949)
Finland. The Adventures of a Small Power (1950)
How Northern Ireland is Governed. Central and Local Government in Northern Ireland (1951)
Modern Ireland (1952)
Ireland Since the Close of the Middle Ages (1955)
Northern Ireland: Its People, Resources, History and Government (1962)
Northern Ireland (1968)
Conflict in Northern Ireland (1970)
How the Church of Ireland was Disestablished (1970)
Newsletter 1737-1987. A History of the Oldest British Daily Newspaper (1987)
Privatising a Church: The Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of Ireland (1995)
Shearman was also the author of two political novels:
The Bishop’s Confession (1943) “being a memoir found among the papers of the late Right Reverend Percival MacPeake, D.D. Lord Bishop of the United Diocese of Bangor, Dungannon, and Strabane”
A Bomb and a Girl (1944) “the fantastic story of Stanislas McOstrich, who blows up his hated professor in small town Ulster during World War I; injured youthful ego of spoilt child, and reaction thereto”.
For Shearman’s conservative and unionist approach to writing about Northern Ireland, especially in the six books he wrote for the Northern Ireland Government, 1942-1971, see Guy Woodward Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War Oxford University Press, 2015: 190-194.
C.W. LEADBEATER 