On one occasion, there was a need for someone to accompany Lesley while she tried to receive Syd’s thought in a Stratocruiser aircraft over southern England. Braddon was himself in the dreaded Changi prisoner-of-war camp with Sydney Piddington, where they first practised telepathy. Piddingtons Funeral Directors is located in 10640 Uralla Rd, Armidale, NSW 2350 for its Funeral Services services. Following the war, Sydney married Lesley Pope, to whom John Wood introduced him at a homecoming party given for Wood by the Minerva Theatre.

If you want a whole sentence, “Mrs Piddington is told the phrase ahead of time, and Mr Piddington forces the audience to pick that phrase. One night, around midnight, came the news that Emperor Tenno Heika of Japan had surrendered unconditionally. But after reading the BBC files and the newspaper cuttings, it’s clear to me that people who were not as curious as I am about how “paranormal” effects can be created, even those whose starting point was a kind of uninformed skepticism, were driven to believe in the Piddingtons’ abilities as paranormal.Samples of the soils were sent away for pollen analysis but, sadly, the results were negative, as Piddington’s soil is highly alkaline. Jillette notes that the whole show rests on a single misdirection; while the audience is trying to figure out the secret method that Sydney is using to talk to Lesley given the strange settings like being underwater, the real trick is that no communication is required and everything is pre-arranged. The air of mystery which is not so much with them as following in the wake also engulfs this early retirement.

Skeptics from all walks of life have never offered a viable explanation, other than it was all a hoax by the BBC that could account for the Piddington's performance. Because Lesley knew, even before a show began, what Syd would transmit—the sentence from the book or the list of objects from the audience—the run up to the climax of each show could be dramatized and milked for all it was worth.One of the late Iron Age roundhouses, found below the earliest phase of the proto-villa, is shown bottom left.