3 days ago
The Countess of Wemyss, trepanning enthusiast who researched the medical benefits of psychedelics
The Countess of Wemyss and March, better known as Amanda Feilding, who has died aged 82, spent decades as a lonely voice crusading for the legalisation of LSD and its rehabilitation as a medical treatment, and claimed that the war on drugs had caused 'more suffering worldwide than any other act'.
Once ridiculed as 'Lady Mindbender' or the 'crackpot countess of Brainblood Hall', she lived to see her life's work vindicated in the 'psychedelic renaissance' of recent years, with acid microdosing now evangelised in Silicon Valley and psychedelics heralded by regulators as a breakthrough in treating severe depression.
When Amanda Feilding first encountered LSD in the mid-Sixties, she discovered with her friends that small doses – enough to feel 'sparkly' but not high – sharpened their faculties, helping them to win at the Chinese strategy game Go, or bowl better in cricket. 'We used to call it a psychovitamin,' she recalled.
But the international flourishing of medical research into LSD was squashed in 1968 when a panicked US government classified psychedelics as 'Schedule 1 substances', designated as having the highest potential for abuse, and no medical value whatsoever.
This anti-psychedelic backlash would last until the late 1990s, a combination of stigma and prohibitive red tape putting off any serious scientist interest. During those decades Amanda Feilding's campaign on behalf of psychedelics – 'the flesh of the gods' – was largely pursued through art, which she admitted was 'an uphill struggle'.
It did not help that she was easily characterised as a batty aristocrat, living in her family's triple-moated Tudor hunting lodge, Beckley Park, which lent her pronouncements on legalising drugs a touch of 'de haut en bas'. She was also given to unguarded comments such as: 'I have always considered myself my own best laboratory.' As the Daily Mail once asked: 'Is the countess just an amusing and irrelevant eccentric? Or could she be a real danger to society?'
But perhaps the greatest hindrance to her credibility as a drug policy reformer was that, between the 1960s and the 1990s, she had been more visible as a trepanning enthusiast, who in 1970 was filmed in a floral shower cap, boring a hole into her shaven skull with a dentist's drill to create more room for blood to pulse through her brain. She then ate a rare steak to replace the lost iron and went out to a party in Chelsea.
The resulting documentary, Heartbeat in the Brain, was later screened in New York, where – as one reviewer put it – the fainting audience members could be seen 'dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums'.
Amanda Feilding went on to stand twice for parliament, in 1979 and 1983, on a platform of free trepanation on the NHS, but she was later canny enough to distance herself from the practice, which the new science of brain imaging had failed to support.
For the rehabilitation of psychedelics, on the other hand, brain imaging proved a watershed, giving 'you a visual perspective that you can't deny,' she said.
Realising that she would have 'to use science as a tool to prove what one was saying was true, not part of a kind of druggy fantasy,' in 1998 Amanda Feilding launched the Beckley Foundation as a 'trojan horse' to infiltrate the establishment. She assembled a board of leading neuroscientists and borrowed her family crest for its double-headed eagle logo, 'to make it look like a college,' she recalled.
She converted a 17th-century cowshed knee-deep in manure into the nerve centre of her operation – nicknamed 'World Consciousness House' by her husband Jamie Charteris (Lord Neidpath, and later Earl of Wemyss) – and from it she built the Beckley Foundation into one of the largest organisations campaigning for drug reform around the world.
The rarefied atmosphere of Beckley Park lent the organisation a gravitas not ordinarily to be found in drug reform circles. Amanda Feilding was able to give seminars at the House of Lords and in 2011 the foundation's open letter calling for an end to the war on drugs attracted the signatures of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Mario Vargas Llosa.
In 2008 she co-founded the psychedelic research programme at Imperial College London with Professor David Nutt, who shortly afterwards was fired as government drugs czar for observing that alcohol and tobacco did more public harm than LSD, cannabis or ecstasy – a decision Amanda Feilding likened to the Vatican's treatment of Galileo.
In 2016 the Beckley/Imperial partnership produced the first ever images of a brain under LSD. It was still hand-to-mouth, but a crowdfunded appeal for £25,000 to process the images met its target within 36 hours. The findings suggested that the drug limited the brain's 'ego' mechanism, known as 'the default mode network', and might be able to rewire the repetitive cycles associated with depression, addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder.
That year another Beckley/Imperial study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, became the first of its kind to demonstrate that psilocybin – the LSD-like active ingredient in magic mushrooms – in conjunction with psychotherapy could be effective against treatment-resistant depression. By 2019 US regulators had fast-tracked further research by designating psilocybin a 'breakthrough therapy' for treatment-resistant depression.
Despite being, in her own words, 'a female with no letters to my name', Amanda Feilding was widely judged to have contributed to a step change in our understanding of the brain mechanism of psychedelics and in laying the foundations for a new era of clinical research. 'I am very, very happy to be proved wrong,' she said. 'What I want to do is know.'
Amanda Claire Marian Feilding was born on January 30 1943, the fourth child of Basil Feilding and his wife – and distant cousin – Margaret (Peggy), née Feilding; both were descended from the Habsburgs, and from two illegitimate children of Charles II.
Amanda's early life was reminiscent of I Capture the Castle: money and fuel were forever running out, while she ran wild in the topiaried garden, her greatest delight being to coax laughter out of her private god: 'that kind of orgasm experience that I think a lot of young children have and then forget'.
Her father, a great-grandson of both the Earl of Denbigh and the Marquess of Bath, farmed at night so that the day could be free for painting. 'Violent-tempered, very eccentric, charming and mercurial,' he had an anarchist temperament, and advised her: 'Whatever the authorities or the government tells you to do – do the opposite.'
The Tudor house, seemingly adrift in a sea of mist, inspired free-thinking, like 'an island outside culture in which you are free to explore,' Amanda recalled. Aldous Huxley was said to have been inspired to write his debut novel Crome Yellow after visiting Beckley Park for tea in 1921. Her own father read to her at bedtime from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Third Eye. There was, Amanda Feilding recalled, 'a deep feeling that one didn't need to follow society because one was slightly above it'.
Although her father was an atheist, her mother was a Catholic and sent her to convent school. Amanda abandoned formal education at 16, however, when she won the science prize but the nuns refused her request to be given as a reward a book on Buddhism.
With £25 in her pocket she set off for Ceylon to visit the godfather she had never met, a Buddhist monk called Bertie Moore, but lost her passport in Syria and instead lived for a time with the Bedouin. On her return to England she studied comparative religion with an Oxford professor and became an art student at the Slade.
Her first encounter with LSD was not auspicious. Michael Hollingshead, an unhinged associate of Timothy O'Leary, spiked her cup of coffee with a thousand-fold dose of acid. She took three months to recover, finally venturing out to go to a party where a Ravi Shankar performance was promised. There she met Bart Huges, a bright young Dutch doctor who converted her to the cause of trepanation and with whom she began controlled experiments with LSD.
She lived for a time in a 'threesome' with Huges and another of his disciples, Joe Mellen, who remained her partner for 30 years and the father of her two sons, Rock Basil and Cosmo Birdie. Huges, however, was too vocal about trepanation and found himself on the front page of a Sunday tabloid under the headline: 'This dangerous idiot should be thrown out of the country.' A knock on the door duly came from two burly government officials and Huges was barred from Britain for the remainder of his life.
She would have followed him to Holland had it not been for her tame pigeon, Birdie, whom she had saved as a pigeon chick and fed on bits of Weetabix from the end of a paintbrush. They lived together for 15 years, communicated telepathically and were, she said, 'madly in love'.
The pigeon would jealously attack her partner Joe Mellen whenever his hands were occupied and he was unable to fight back. Birdie would also peck her on the eyeball but this was, she said, 'how they show love'. 'I have two obviously wonderful children, but this? It was a unique type of love,' she recalled.
She was a talented painter, and as well as immortalising Birdie in oils, she earned a living for a time selling hand-coloured prints on the Portobello Road; she and Mellen also ran The Pigeon Hole Gallery in Chelsea.
After four years of failing to find a doctor to trepan her, she decided to go it alone. 'I was trained as a sculptor, so I thought, 'I spend all my time making holes in objects, I might as well make one in my own head.'' When asked whether she was scared, she replied: 'Well, skiing is terrifying.'
Four hours later she experienced a feeling of peace and an uplifting. 'You remain the same personality, with the same hangups, character defects, et cetera, et cetera,' she observed. 'But we all have our neurotic bag we carry around. I think trepanation, by increasing the brain-blood volume, it lessens that bag.'
When in 1995 she married Jamie Charteris, she persuaded him to be trepanned in a Cairo hospital, which he claimed cured him of his lifelong headaches.
Amanda Feilding worked 15-hour days for her cause. Among her supporters was the 'father' of LSD, the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann, who was president of the Beckley Foundation until his death in 2008 aged 102, but who lived to see her fulfil her promise to him that she would obtain permission to carry out the first LSD research on human subjects since the early 1970s.
Amanda Feilding is survived by her husband, who in 2008 succeeded as 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March, and by her two sons by Joe Mellen.
The elder, Rock, is involved with Beckley Retreats, which organises psilocybin retreats; the younger, Cosmo, is CEO of Beckley Psytech, which aims to develop psychedelic medicines for the market, and has received a $50 million investment from the Peter Thiel-backed Atai Life Sciences.
Amanda Feilding, born January 30 1943, died May 22 2025
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