Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson

Who was Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson?

Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson was an Anglo-Indian barrister, spiritualist, socialist and amateur architect.

After three years at school, Peterson ran away to sea, working at a salt works in India. Returning to England, he trained as a lawyer and married Charlotte Myers St Clair, daughter of a colonel in the Royal Artillery. In 1846 he left to practice law at the Supreme Court in Calcutta. Retiring in the 1870s, he bought land near Sway, Hampshire, building and extending his house, Arnewood Towers, "from a small villa into a commodious country residence of somewhere near forty rooms, with the necessary outbuildings, built entirely of concrete".

Becoming a convert to spiritualism, Peterson met an uneducated sensitive called William Lawrence. After Lawrence had completed a three-month sentence for fraudulent imposture at Coldbath Fields prison, he became Peterson's personal medium, channelling spirit messages from 'controls' including Pythagoras, Aesop, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Brutus, Julius Caesar, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, Martin Luther, John Knox, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine.