Name That List, #8

She left a sealed wooden box of prophecies, usually known as Joanna Southcott's Box, with the instruction that it be opened only at a time of national crisis, and then only in the presence of all twenty four bishops of the Church of England (there were only 24 at the time), who were to spend a fixed period of time beforehand studying Southcott's prophecies. Attempts were made to persuade the episcopate to open it during the Crimean War and again during the First World War. Eventually in 1927 one reluctant prelate (the Bishop of Grantham, not even a diocesan bishop but a suffragan of the diocese of Lincoln) was persuaded to be present at the box's opening, but it was found to contain only a few oddments and unimportant papers, among them a lottery ticket and a horse-pistol.

However, the followers of Southcott later claimed that the box opened was not the authentic one. An advertising campaign on billboards and in British national newspapers such as the Sunday Express was run in the 1960s and 1970s by what is viewed as the most prominent group of Southcottians, the Panacea Society in Bedford (formed 1920), to try to persuade the twenty four bishops to have the box opened. Their slogan was: "War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott's box." According to the Panacea Society, this true box is in their possession at a secret location for safekeeping, with its whereabouts only to be disclosed when a meeting with the bishops has been arranged.