Dan Snow's History Hit - Hellfire Club: Scandal & Satanism in Georgian England

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Sex, Satanism and Scandal surrounded the Hellfire Club that operated out of a network of caves in the country estate of 18th century aristocrat Francis Dashwood. The most powerful men in the country came to Dashwood's underground lair. Rumours swirled of everything from orgies to human sacrifice and Satanic spirits. But was it all as diabolical as it seemed?Maddy tells Anthony the story this week.Produced by Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm very happy to say it's that time of the week when we celebrate a sibling podcast of ours, one of our network. This time it's After Dark, our smash hit podcast about myths, misdeeds, and the paranormal. I mean, it's fair to say this episode is probably weighted more towards misdeeds. Sometimes it's easy to think that we're so enlightened and chilled and permissive in our modern world, but let me tell you folks, you're nothing compared to the Georgians, or I should say elite, aristocratic, rich Georgian gentlemen. They had a wild old time, let me tell you. As you're about to find out, in fact, because this is a very brilliant episode of After Dark, it talks about the bizarre story of the Hellfire Club

in Georgian England. It's a wild ride. Enjoy. 1750, deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside north of London. We're standing in the last of the evening light on the outskirts of West Wycombe, a rolling parkland peppered with classical temples and follies, all nestled amid the Chiltern Hills. Somewhere behind us in the dark is a magnificent house, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood, politician. It's Dashwood who has brought us here, a mysterious invitation delivered by one of his footmen, arrived only hours ago. But we're not here for the house, or even the grounds. Before us is what looks like a rocky cliff face, with a dark, roughly hewn opening at its centre.

This is the entrance to the West Wycombe Caves, a system of underground tunnels and cells first excavated as a chalk mine and which now serve quite a different purpose. We hesitate on the threshold. We've heard the stories. That Dashwood's life away from Parliament is controversial. There are rumours of pagan worship, of bacchanalian festivities and rituals to worship the flesh. His friends, it's said, dress like monks, imitating the habits and routines of a monastic order turned on its head, an inverted holy sect dedicated to the hedonistic. Voices are coming from within now, and as we move closer, the faint orange glow of torches can be made out, lighting the way down

a long, winding and jagged corridor. We step inside, about to find the truth, whatever it is, the Paranormal. of after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal. Now, if you ever thought that you had a successful house party, that recollection of Sir Francis Dashwood's escapades in his country seat will have put your party to shame, no doubt. We are talking today under the expert guidance of Dr. Maddy Pelling about the Hellfire Club. Hi, Maddy. Hello. You're introducing me like I'm a guest. I know. Yeah, you do live here. Yeah, I do live here. I'm always here. Yes, we're talking about the Hellfire Club, or clubs more importantly. Before we get on to the context of the time, so we'll talk a little bit in a moment about what's going on in the world, I think it's kind of important to point out that the word of the title for this club, the Hellfire Club, is not contemporary to the 18th

century. It is attributed later. And I always found this frustrating because there's a really famous one in Dublin that was conducted up on some hill somewhere out near Wicklow or Killiney or that side of the county. I'm not from Dublin, so I don't know the exact geography, but it was out there somewhere. And I always found it frustrating that it was called the Hellfire Club. And then any little bit of research I did into it when I was an undergrad or whatever, I was like, this is not that interesting. Like, why is this called the Hellfire Club? So do we know?

I don't know why it was specifically called the Hellfire Club afterwards. I don't either. And I'm not sure when that name is first attached. I think it's probably the end of the 18th century into the 19th century when you start to get the publication of sort of essentially salacious gossip that's fed into fictional accounts of 18th century life and you start to get these references to these seedy private lives of certain politicians associated with some of these clubs and it's about inverting the moral life of the British aristocracy I guess, it's about evoking the devil,

evoking darkness, evoking immorality in some way and it's that idea that we'll discuss today, how far the reality actually reflects that is, is maybe another thing entirely. But this idea of hellishness, of evil at the heart of the British establishment, we're talking about people who really are at the centre of British infrastructure. We have the writer and politician and satirist Paul Whitehead. We've got John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, who is, at various points in his career, is the Lord of the Admiralty, he's the first postmaster general.

You know, people who are really seriously in charge. And we have potentially even Benjamin Franklin, founding father, visiting the caves a few times. So these are men involved in the highest offices of power in the 18th century world, the real sort of movers and shakers of this world. And so the rumours about them and about what they're getting up to in their personal private lives is so important to how they're presented in the public eye. And I think that's why the name the Hellfire Club has survived so long. So let's just set the scene a little bit in terms

of the time that we're talking about here specifically. So we're talking about the 1750s into the 1760s. So we've got George II on the throne. We're in the middle of the so-called Enlightenment. There's scientific advancement going on. And there is a kind of cultural reaction to that as well. There's an interest in darkness and folklore. And we're only a generation away at this point from the last woman to be killed for witchcraft in Scotland in the 1730s. So there's still a sort of crackling just beneath the surface, this fear of the unknown, of darkness. And the roles that individual characters, individual figures, white upper-class men play in this world, and how they wield their power in public life and behind the scenes becomes central to British identity, I think. So one of the things that's worth establishing at this point, I think, is the correct, shall we say, way in which men were supposed to socialise in the middle of the

18th century. So we're talking 1750s, Maddy, that's correct, right? Yes, yeah, the 1750s, so smack in the middle. So in the 1750s, men are supposed to socialise in the public sphere. They are supposed to be seen so that they can be measured and that they can be pitted against ideal masculine types. So when men come together, we're expecting to see them in coffee houses, we're expecting to see them in taverns, we're expecting to see them, yes, in gentlemen's clubs, but in establishment places in town, in London, for instance, where they can be monitored. It's about monitoring. And the reason it's about monitoring is because men are powerful and power plus secrecy gives rise to a lot of suspicion.

So what's happening with these hellfire clubs and why they've endured, as Maddy's been describing, is because it takes masculinity and it takes privacy and it puts them together in an unregulated environment, either the private home or, as Maddy was saying, in the cave or other kind of chaotic locations, certainly not within regulated parameters. And so this gives rise to suspicion, intrigue, rumour, and it means these stories start to escalate from these private relationships between these men. So let's get to Dashwood's Hellfire Club. So Francis Dashwood is a politician and his country seat in West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire is, for anyone who's ever seen, I think it's 2002, the film The Importance of Being Earnest with Colin firth and rupert everett the house in

that is west wickham house so it gives you an idea it's this incredible beautiful classical building it has columns running the length of the lower floor and the first floor it's this really kind of regulated yeah neo-classical roman style building and again we're talking about these sort of the tension between public and private life, that once you go literally underground on this estate, there's this very not neoclassical, complicated, strangely shaped cave system that he excavates first as a chalk mine, looking to make some money off his land, and soon realises this is the perfect place to host some of these parties and to to move this semi-public performance and parody of public life to move it somewhere private because that's what's

needed but more than that it becomes it grows a whole culture of itself doesn't it so he calls his friends who take part in this they're called monks he calls himself an abbot and the whole thing is called the order of the friars of saint francis of wickham obviously francis a play on his name and so francis saint francis of assisi and he calls them sometimes the medmenum monks so there's a sort of a catholic overtone which is interesting here as well we are in the 1750s, only a decade away from the last Jacobite rising of 1745. And there's huge Catholic support at that time for King James. And this is very much, again, an inversion of Protestant, sober, Georgian public life. And it comes with a whole iconography. So he fashions himself as the abbot and he makes

everyone supposedly, and we're going to be using that word a lot because this is really crucial, but it's really hard to pin down these details. But supposedly he makes his members wear ritual clothing. So they wear white trousers and some kind of jacket and a cap to look like a monk. And he wears this sort of red ensemble as the abbot in charge of all these rituals. And they have Latin mottos, they inscribe little dedications to each other in sort of hidden clues throughout the West Wickham parkland and in the cave itself. And interestingly, if you go there today, the walls are absolutely covered in later 19th century graffiti left by tourists. But actually, there are a series of deeply carved, scary monster faces, sort of masks,

a bit like the sort of tragedy theatrical masks, if you can imagine those. And I read those as being potentially from this period. And I think they are part of this iconography that Dashwood and his friends adhere to and create there. And interestingly, above the ground where the caves are, there is a church, I think it's St. Lawrence's Church, which is part of the West Wickham Parkland. And so the caves underneath are literally the underworld, the antidote to this Christian world above. This is meant to be a kind of underworld, a kind of transformative portal into darkness, in which the rules of Georgian society are laid to one side. So it's absolutely fascinating. And

they meet twice a month there. And they take part in these choreographed rituals. There's a lot of drinking. There's supposedly a lot of sex. We know that Frances Dashwood's sister attended sometimes. We know that there were potentially sex workers from the local area or brought in from London who attended. There were mistresses, there are family members. So it's not purely a masculine gathering, but it's very much, I would say, about expressing masculine virility and quite heterosexual masculine virility. Is that fair? Yeah. I mean, we're talking about circumnavigating traditions and regulations of masculinity in the mid-18th century. But actually, think about what they're doing. They are, as elite men, shoring up their power to regulate, that they cannot be regulated because

they inform the regulation. So they are free to have these bacchanalian, debauched, you know, sex parties, drinking parties, indulge in copious amounts of food, because they know other people can't. And they also now know that nobody can really stop them because they're in their own country seat. They're on their own land. They're doing whatever they want to do in their own space. So in many ways, this is not a revolutionary or a revolt against that regulation.

It's just showing where the regulation comes from. We have examples of that in our own time with things like the Bullingdon Club. Absolutely. And that kind of, that performance in a private space of privilege. These are the men. There are women on the periphery, absolutely.

But these are the men that are going to be making the rules so they can break them. They can break them. And, you know, we can talk about the COVID regulations now and we're talking about those people who are, you know, privately educated through secondary school, who then go on to Oxbridge, and they know they're going to be making those rules, but they also think they don't have to follow them. And that's exactly, this is the origins of all of that attitude, or this is the personification of all of that type of attitude in the middle of the

18th century. It didn't originate in the middle of the 18th century, but here it is nonetheless. And it's from this period that it's become so notorious and has been imitated ever since, I think. Let's talk about Dashwood specifically and some of his self-styling, because within the privacy, as you say, of his own estate, he very much performs this role as someone who is breaking the rules. And he doesn't necessarily try to keep it secret within this space that he owns, he's in charge of. And one of the things that he does is commission a series of portraits of himself as a monk. So let's talk about one of these. It's a painting by Hogarth, by the artist William Hogarth.

Anthony, tell us a bit about it. What are we looking at here? Okay, let's start in the background of the picture. I see a country seat to the left of Dashwood, who's central to the picture. That's probably his, I'm sure. Oh yeah, and there's the cave. So in the foreground, then Dashwood is leaning up against the caves

that Maddy has been describing. Well, I presume they're those caves. It would make sense. Dashwood is depicted in, I guess, Monk's Habit. He has a brown what looks like a brown costume on over a white shirt he also has a kind of halo of a half of a crescent moon rather with a with a face in the crescent moon over his head again i'm assuming kind of alluding to that costume element and the but also the it also inverts ideas of the halo in religious portraiture.

Then he is pointing to a tiny little naked woman who is reclining on some white satin sheets on part of the cave. There was a mask lying in the background, waiting for him to adorn, I guess, as part of his secret rituals. There is also an upturned plate on the ground and that plate was full of fruit and now the fruit is spilling away. Often, Maddy's far more adept at art history than I am, but often fruit in pictures represents offspring and family and so potentially this is representing something about upturning family notions or the traditions of family, and this is spilling all over the ground. So that's what I'm seeing. How wrong am I?

No, I think that's really fair to say that it's depicting this disruption of aristocratic patriarchal life, this sense that you have your family seat, you must produce an heir to pass it to and protect your wealth and your land. And what I think is just so fascinating about this painting is his gesturing to, yes, he's got the mask that he's going to put on, you know, this reference to him having a secret life or masking the reality in some way, and this idea of, I donning a costume and and for revelry but the tiny woman i mean she's probably just slightly bigger than a barbie but she's depicted as a real fleshy person and it's it's a literal the literal visual the visual representation of female objectification that that that she is just part of this selection of pleasures that are on offer.

And that, you know, wine and women is very much on the menu at these parties. I just think it's fascinating that he commissioned this, that there is a visual record of what he was getting up to and that this version of himself, he wanted to commemorate it and to... Well, that's funny, isn't it? Because you say what he was getting up to. Is this what he was getting up to? Or is this what he was leaning into portraying

that people thought he was getting into? And he's like, I'll give them what they... I mean, if I see this in the 18th century, the first thing I'm doing is laughing. As a Georgian, I'm laughing at this. Not as a 21st century historian. As a Georgian, I'm laughing at this. Not as a 21st century historian. As a Georgian, I am going to laugh at this. So I think that's what the purpose is. That's just my interpretation. There's no hard and fast here. But I think this is comedic. I think this is

self-fashioning. But also leaning into the gossip as opposed to going guys this is here's a historical account of what we do when we get together yes and this is absolutely crucial to understanding the history of the hellfire clubs in the 18th century that they rely on the rumors that are told about them as much as anything else they're trading on them in their public life until they can't anymore and we will get to how this starts to become a problem rather than an advantage and we're going to hear a little bit more about one of these famous anecdotes and have a little think about just how how we can identify what is true here what's really going on or if that's the point at all I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Among the more salacious stories to circulate about Dashwood's club was one involving the initiation of two of its members, each of whom despised the other. The first was John Montague,

the Earl of Sandwich. Montague was born to privilege and raised to serve as a statesman, his place beside Dashwood and his band of hedonistic monks virtually a birthright. The second was John Wilkes, a radical politician known as much for his ugly face and squinting eyes, a favourite subject among satirical artists, as he was for his populist and xenophobic views. Wilkes was an outsider, a disruptive voice for change, a supposed man of the people whose unpolished manners left much to be desired by his upper-class associates, but whose rise through the ranks had nevertheless secured him a spot in the hellfire. For any joining the club, an initiation in the caves was paramount. And so, one dark night,

the group gathered together to welcome Montague and Wilkes into the fold, Montague visibly balking at the idea of standing side by side with Wilkes as equals, but Wilkes had already planned his response to Montague's snobbery. The men gathered in a small cell beneath the chalk, a mock altar set up on one side, with benches before it, and a large wooden chest nearby. The pair took to their knees, as instructed, ready to begin their symbolic investment. But without warning, the chest flew open, and from it sprang the devil himself, dressed as a monk, bearing fangs and covered in terrible hair. Montague screamed and ran for his life, convinced he was about to be dragged

to the underworld. The rest fell about laughing. Wilkes had planted a live monkey in the chest, a practical joke that humiliated his rival, but one that would ultimately cost him. I wonder if Montague went home and had himself a sandwich, because he is the Earl of Sandwich, right? He is the Sandwich Man. Did he? He invented sandwiches? I think he did. He's the fourth Earl, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fourth Earl is the Sandwich Man, he did he's the fourth earl right yeah yeah yeah fourth earl is the sandwich man yeah he's the sandwich man wow you learn something new every day and after dark do we think this story is true no um why do i think nothing is true like i'm i'm way too you're you are very suspicious as is as is the want of a historian that's fine so this story comes down to us it's published in a text called crystal or the adventures of a historian, that's fine. So this story comes down to us, it's published in a text called Crystal or the Adventures of a Guinea, which is what is known in the 18th century as an it narrative. So this is a story that's written from the perspective of an object that moves through Georgian society. In this case, it's Guinea, a coin that finds its way into the

pockets of different members of society, including a member of Dashwood's so-called religious order. And it's from his pocket that he witnesses, that the coin witnesses. I'm gendering the coin. The coin could be female, who knows. But the coin, importantly, witnesses some of these scenes in the caves. Now, this is published at a moment when there's resentment building towards these men and the things that they're getting up to. There's grumblings in parliament amongst other politicians. There's reports in the press that they're getting up to no good, that they're worshipping the devil, that they're involved in all this kind of ritualistic, dark stuff. And I think we can take this account with

a pinch of salt. And this story is repeated in other texts. And in some texts, it's a monkey. In other texts, it's a baboon. Quite where John Wilkes would have got this animal from and how he would have got it all the way out to Buckingham Shire to pop it in a chest and for it to appear at the opportune moment is interesting. But I think what it does tell us is so much about the class tensions here. John Wilkes is not necessarily from this highest strata of society. He's a radical politician. He famously is the editor of the North Britain, which is a newspaper that is critical of, first of all, the Prime Minister. At this point point it's John Bute, and also critical of the

King, who from 1760 is George III. And he is very popular, he has these quite xenophobic views, he's very anti-Scottish, the Prime Minister Bute is Scottish. He has sympathy for the Americans, and goes on in the American Revolution to play quite a significant role there. So he's quite a divisive figure. It's so interesting to me that he makes his way into the Hellfire Club because he is going through the ranks of political life and therefore is invited to this secret world. But he's absolutely not welcome there. And Sandwich, when he's not busy making sandwiches, is appalled by Wilkes' presence there. And he feels that it is in some way an insult to him. Yeah, I think as far as I'm aware with Wilkes, he has this anti-establishment streak to him, certainly. They do try to bring him down though,

they try to discredit him, if I'm correct. They do, they absolutely do. So Sandwich is absolutely seething about what's happened and whether or not there is a prank with a monkey involved. It's very clear that there is tension between the two men and that this has stemmed at least in part, not only from the difference of their political views, but from something that's happened during one of these meetings at the Hellfire Club. And Sandwich takes a very public form of revenge. So as part of the Hellfire Club culture, Wilkes has written a pornographic essay, essentially a poem, called An Essay on Woman. And it's in and of itself a parody of Alexander Pope's essay on man,

which is all about male morality and soberness. And it's dedicated to a courtesan, Fanny Murray. And it's basically, it's just porn. It's just poetical porn. And Sandwich actually reads this text out in Parliament as a way of exposing Wilkes as being immoral, as being a bit of a cad and as being part of this underworld that Sandwich himself was being initiated into but this is his opportunity to expose wilkes and he does so he's discredited i guess yeah so his his standing within the political system is damaged and he's pushed more and more to the edge and eventually he is arrested not for an essay on woman but for one of the issues of his newspaper the north britain the 45th edition in which he critiques the king himself, which is obviously a problem, you know. And Sandwich's revenge, it's just so damaging. And I

think what's interesting for us here is the way that these behind the scenes tensions, this performance of masculinity and the ways that it can go wrong at these secret societies, and the ways that it can go wrong at these secret societies, the way that bleeds into their public life. And by the end of the 1760s, what you have is this quite fierce debate in the public space, in parliament, in the press, about the morality of some of these figures who are meeting in private. And questions are raised about their suitability to lead the country. And questions are raised about their suitability to lead the country. It's also been theorised that Sandridge, Montague, contrived that document that Wilkes didn't write it at all, and thatague and Wilkes are tied to the Chevalier Dion, who was a French spy that was operating in London at the time. And the story of the Chevalier Dion

is a queer history. And it's probably worth mentioning at this particular point that these hellfire clubs are very much heterosexual, as we would term them today. They're very much heterosexual outlets, particularly for the men involved. That is interesting in its own right, because we know, or we think, that at the Vine in Hampshire, for instance, John Shute and Horace Walpole now, so the son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole, plus more of their friends who we would now identify as queer or gender non-conforming. They had very similar type gatherings and activities in the chapel at the Vine. They would dress up as monks, they would have magic, role reversal, irreligious events,

but it was a group of, again, what we would now identify as queer men doing this together. And just as the Hellfire Club is bringing these men together, they are a type of, again, what we would now identify as queer men doing this together. And just as the Hellfire Club is bringing these men together, they are a type of man, a man who is able to conform to and wishes to conform to heterosexual life. So it's interesting, these clubs and this idea of switching things on their heads is very much an elite idea but also crosses boundaries between gender regulation, gender non-conformity and lives in this murky world where again privacy is the real problem. What are men getting up to when we cannot monitor them? We need to be able to monitor men because if we don't they're dangerous. What are they plotting? Especially if they have power what could come

from these secret meetings that could disrupt England, Britain, the world as we know it? The eventual decline of Dashwood's hellfire came in the 1760s with a series of scandals surrounding its members. In 1762, Dashwood was appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a role he far from excelled at given his infamous financial illiteracy. Then there was the arrest of Wilkes for seditious libel the following year, most likely the work of Montague in revenge for his humiliation. Gradually, the private and public lives of Dashwood and his monks became incompatible, and the not-so-secret club, whatever the truth behind it, an insurmountable stumbling block for any aspiring statesman.

But such clubs would hardly disappear. Instead, they slipped further into the shadows, where their activities would be harder to discover. A generation after Dashwood, his own nephew set up the Phoenix Society, its Latin motto translating to, when one is torn away, another succeeds, a direct reference to his uncle's previous exploits. And there were more like this. In Scotland, the Beggars' Benison, a club whose members met to drink and fornicate, survived long into the 1780s. Among its members was the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV, who bequeathed to the group a snuffbox filled with his mistress's pubic hair.

What a way to end on pubic hair. I was waiting for something else. I was like, oh, we're ending on pubic hair. There we go. It's too tempting for them, isn't it? It is too tempting for them. And by them, I mean elite, privileged men who are controlling the narrative historically, politically, socially, culturally. It is too tempting for them not to try and retreat together to show that they don't need to adhere to the rules that they're instigating. It is too tempting for them. The thing that we have to take away from that is, thus it ever was, thus it ever shall be. Absolutely. And that is why I think it's endured these clubs, the Hellfire Club, whatever the Hellfire Club is, whenever it's taking place, this idea of the Hellfire Club

has survived in our cultural imagination. So we have it in historical novels like Robert Graves' novel Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. We have, for any Outlander fans out there, Diana Gabaldon actually has a historical novella called Lord John, who is a character in Outlander, Lord John and the Hellfire Club. There are references to the Hellfire Club in Blackadder, in the Marvel comics, in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. There's a sort of underground bar called the Hellfire Club. It's everywhere, this idea of secret societies. And we live in an age of sort of conspiracy theories now and anxiety around there being a sort of a secret elite in charge of everything. But that really, to a certain extent,

was the case in the 18th century. And they're not even secret. They're not even secret. They're performatively secret. Everyone's talking about them, but they are happening behind closed doors and the rumours are seeping out of that. And I think you're right that we're still seeing the legacy of that. And certainly, certainly in popular imagination, it's very much still there in our collective consciousness. Didn't we in the last few years as well have a potential incident with a pig's head in one of these secret clubs? You know, we tend to think all too easily when we're looking at these documents and we're hearing these histories, gosh, it must have caused such, society must have stood still trying to unpick the nuances and the realities and take away the gossip and put in the facts. It didn't.

Society kept going. These are just things that were whirling around in the background, and we still have them whirling around in the background now. And I think it's a really good way to find a way into history and realise that, you know, historians often caution about drawing too many parallels between what people in the past are feeling and what we are feeling today. But I've got to do it nonetheless, because how else are we supposed to experience history? We know what this is like because we have experienced it too. Yes, I agree. And I think that that is the appeal of history, is to make those comparisons. And the Hellfire Club for me in the 18th century is so useful as a way in to think about the 18th century political system how power was dispersed how people performed their gender specifically their masculinity

what's fascinating is we can never really get to the concrete facts of what they got up to in those caves because there is such little material culture left of it so we do not have their their uniforms their monks habits and that's suspicious i'm sorry to interrupt but that's suspicious because if you have 12 men who apparently have these uniforms then likelihood is one of them is surviving somewhere maybe do you have it in your attic at home if so right into us oh you're asking me no i wish i had it but i don't yeah if you do have one let us know yeah let us know but you know there's we have one thing that we do have is things like the accounts for the West Wycombe estate and we can see for their monthly meetings the club ordered

in significant amounts of alcohol for example so we know that there were gatherings taking place we have the visual record, we have the painting by Hogarth, there are several other portraits of Dashwood himself dressed as a monk with these sort of symbolic allusions, these visual clues hidden in plain sight that make reference to some of the anecdotes we know about the club, some of their ideas, the way that they sort of fashioned themselves so there are these little tantalizing glimpses but it's really hard to get to the evidence and oh to be a fly on the wall in those caves i would not want to be i'd be like get out of this cave i have no interest in

seeing this manic chaotic scene well actually i do subjectively i have an interest but yeah no it just wouldn't be wouldn't be my gig yes but you know i think the fact that this these such societies and dashwoods in particular they still interest us they still cause us to debate ideas of privilege ideas of masculinity it's fascinating i think that's a really good place to leave it thank you for joining us on after dark myths misdeeds and the Paranormal this week and for exploring the Hellfire Club with us. We would love to know your thoughts on what you think the Hellfire Club might have been or if you have any further insights,

please do let us know. We have another request from our listeners, Maddy. We certainly do. We want to hear from you. So if you have experienced anything spooky, to hear from you. So if you have experienced anything spooky, if you want to suggest a episode topic to us, if you've been to a really great graveyard, if you have a murder in your family tree, or if you just want to let us know the episodes that you've enjoyed, you can get in touch with us. You can email us at afterdarkathistoryhit.com. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Now, if you're a long-time listener to After Dark, you'll know that we are no strangers to an additional hidden scene every now and again, and we've got one for you today. We have talked, myself and Maddy, in this episode about how the Hellfire Club was, when you boil it down and you look at the historical archive, an elite group of men playing with the symbolism, I suppose, of the devil and the occult and looking at what that

means for their masculinity. But others will tell you that there's more to it than just that and that the Hellfire Caves are well and truly haunted. Well, this is After Dark after all. So we sent our producer Charlotte to visit the Hellfire Caves for herself and the information and the stories she gathered from one of the guides there is truly remarkable. We hope that you enjoy this and we'll see you on after dark again next time before i worked here about two and a half years ago or so now i didn't really believe much i was

very open to the idea of paranormal life and whatever but i was more if it slaps me in the face i'll believe it literally within my first week i was hearing just a lot of voices down there as rocks started me i got at one point um my hair was a lot longer i got pulled against a wire that had to go to the sports again stitches in the back of my head it's nuts here i probably should tell you that after we've gone down the cave hi i'm producer charlotte and i thought i'd take a trip to the Hellfire Caves to have a look at them in person and speak to the general manager, Willow Randall, all about the paranormal activity that's happened here over the years. And there have been a lot. It's a very spooky place.

Hi. Hello. Do you know where willow is she should be just inside let me go check for you cool thank you Hi, I'm Willow Randall. I've worked here for about two and a half-ish years, and I am the general manager, among many other things, of the caves. I'm also a medium, whether, again, I use the blanket term medium, but whether it's sensitive, whether it's spiritual, it's a lot of things that I can see, feel, hear and interact with spirits both on negative and positive sides of world but this place is amazing and I'm so glad you guys have come here as well thank you guys for visiting it's amazing. I didn't believe much before I worked here but literally within my first week I was hearing screams down here knowing I was on my own, disembodied like voices

of my colleagues you know shouting for me down here and then they weren't, they were at the surface kind of thing. It's for us weirdly, I mean I literally grew up 30 seconds away so we don't really think much of it, it's like oh yeah it's just the caves and then when you sort of learn all the history and all the stories and sort of grow to love it, you realize actually how special it is just to have this location on your doorstep. It's absolutely incredible. The thing is though, it's some days I come down here and it's literally nothing.

It's silent, whatever. And other days it is literally like Clapham Junction in my head. It is, you know, just kind of depends on the day. It's a lot bigger than I thought it would be. This isn't even halfway down what nope so this is the Banksy Hall is the halfway point and as I said it's the largest man-dug chalk cavern in the world and you can hear the difference in acoustics

and look up 60 foot up 40 foot across where did all the rumors come from all the satanic cults and worship and isn't there a temple for satan somewhere in these caves yeah so the bottom very bottom chamber is called the inner temple it is 300 feet directly underneath the altar of the church and again it's sort of they've got heaven above and this man dug hell below which is past this point past the back to him where you can see where the old door hinges used to be literally unless you were one of these 12 superior members you weren't allowed past this point and past there was where they would cross the river Styx and they would have their supposed satanic meetings and perhaps sacrifice people again Again, we can't confirm or deny.

We do not know. Originally, it's said that the Hellfire Club had one of the largest collections of satanic and pornographic material at the time as well. We've actually just passed on our way down. They've carved the face of the devil into the walls. I saw the devil. So again, you can see two horns, a very, you know,

cheeky smile and was painted a bright red originally. You alright? I'm not trying to be Derek Accora, but I felt like I just saw like some smoke. There is one of the spirits we have down here, Suki the White Lady. She is said to be, you alright? Said to be depicted by white smoke or a full white body apparition. So it is very likely that you did see her because I, in a past life, knew her.

So we found out on an investigation that in a past life my name was Catherine and I was the only person that knew where Suki was going the night she died which she was coming here and people always say literally for decades have said you're always meant to work at the caves and people come here for a reason and it's sort of like I have found my reason of why I'm here and literally sort of I dedicate my life to this place and it's incredible but she actually died right there so she was a maid in the old coaching which is now the georgian dragon pub in in west wickham village which is literally 30 seconds down the hill and she would often tend to a lot of the finer gentlemen that would come into the pub so obviously as I said it was the main port between London and Oxford so people would stop in overnight and she once fell in love with

this fine gentleman we have no idea who he is it's just believed it was a lord from London and later on in the day she went about her activities and she actually resided in room 12 that's there now which obviously maids at those times lived either on the top floor or the bottom floor of the house and in here they were in the top floor two maids Catherine those times lived either on the top floor or the bottom floor of the house. And in here, they were in the top floor. Two maids, Catherine and Suki, or Susanna. And she received a letter underneath her door telling her that this man had fallen in love with her and that she needs to come to the caves that night as he would run away with her. Were the caves open to the public at that point?

No, so this is believed to have happened in the early 1800s, sort of the 1820s, essentially. And what you could do is if the bars I can't remember if the bars were built or not If not, you could just wander in if not, you'd literally go and pick the key up from the neighbor opposite Didn't have you know, I think it was pay a couple of shillings grab a candle and you could literally just go down She donned a white dress came up to the caves with a lantern obviously candle lit at the time And she came all the way up and she didn't find the lord but she did hear a voice from within the caves calling her so she followed it all the way down to the mounting hall where she didn't find this lord she found three of the

local village boys who burst into fits of laughter they found it hilarious that they had managed to trick her all the way down here so she picked up some rocks off the floor threw them at the boys in anger they thought again this was absolutely hilarious so they picked up some rocks off the floor threw them at the boys in anger they thought again this was absolutely hilarious so they picked up some rocks threw them back at her one struck her in the head and we don't know if the story ends in three different ways either that she died on the spot and her body was not found until someone came down obviously could have been days or weeks down the line it was either the boys you know didn't realize what happened they freaked out and they just ran and left her here

or dragged her body back up or that she didn't actually die on the spot it only knocked her out but then she sort of made her way back up to the surface of the caves died on the surface and that's when she was found the next day are there any like records of her birth records so we only have a sort of manuscript that tells us that there was a young girl found with a you know blow to the head is what killed her and that's the only technically confirmed death we know to have happened down here obviously do i believe that absolutely not because it's very likely that people were killed during excavation because you know chalk is such you know a very fragile rock you literally can hit it and the entire cave system could collapse kind of thing so it's very likely that unfortunately

people would have died but again back in the 1700s it was very poor farmers it's unlikely that they would have kept any record of that but she was believed to come from a very poor family and again in those times you know very poor people their birth probably wouldn't have been registered we know that she moved here from afar and then again it's sort of what we've been told through people working at the George and again I went there with the team that I'm a part of and they were like no we have full like poltergeist activity, doors slamming, things falling off walls, that kind of thing and now they have six mirrors in the wall in the room because the mirrors always come off and smash. You've spoken a lot about the power of all sightings but how many do you have on record

from like visitors and like media? As in like physical evidence with videos or pictures or just go evidence and then also just anecdotally as well anecdotally i couldn't count we have people come in every day telling us experiences or we've had them ourselves i mean i'm a walking talking like spirit box so and again for me i as i said i'm always up for debunking things i'm always up for proving it wrong and I didn't even believe it before so I'm like yeah definitely something isn't or I'm going mad it's one of the two but pieces of evidence we literally have people emailing us with pictures

that have got you know again it's you don't know what to believe or not because people go oh there was no one standing in that hallway but you're like is there was there someone standing in there but we probably weekly we get emails or you know messages on social media people sending us evidence but literally every day we are open we have people coming in telling us their experiences whether it happened that day or in the past so it's pretty incredible it's one of those things as well it's because it's so like sensory deprived down here often I freak myself out if my trousers brush together if I'm walking or you know I feel like I hear an echo you know or I mean the bats when they you know communicate it's so high pitched it can almost sound like someone else so it's a lot of it to me

I'm like is it something or am I just going mad or am I hearing myself because I freak myself down here so much and I have to call someone be like I'm scared please call to me on the way up but you know but there are some things that we literally cannot explain that happened. you