Philip Heselton - Doreen Valiente Witch

Child of the Goat-God

Doreen seems to have been the sort of person to attract 'highly coloured' stories:

I've had rumours circulated about me for years. The one I like best is that I'm the illegitimate daughter of Aleister Crowley - I really rather fancy that one. My mother is supposed to have been a dashing 1920's deb of high family, and I was farmed out to foster parents who brought me up as their own because their own child had died. Unfortunately it clashes with the other story that I am a Polish Jewess who came here in wartime as a refugee, having been initiated into the darker secrets of the Qabalah in my own country. The New Forest gypsies took me in, and that is where Gerald Gardner found me. (I've had this one told to me in total solemnity by someone who didn't know who he was talking to - and I didn't let on!)

The truth, which I shall try to tell in this book, turns out to be far more interesting, as is often the case!

Doreen Edith Dominy was born at 10.45 pm on Wednesday 4th January 1922 at 1 High Street, Colliers Wood, Mitcham, Surrey.

This was a building, now unfortunately demolished, on the southern corner of High Street, Colliers Wood and Robinson Road in South London. The Dominys probably had a flat above a shop, which they had moved into the previous year.

Doreen states that she was "brought into the world by a doctor in full evening dress and Masonic regalia". His identity is not known but he may well have been a member of Mitcham Masonic Lodge No. 2384, which met at Vestry Hall, Lower Green, Lower Mitcham.

After giving Janet and Stewart Farrar her time of birth so that they could calculate her astrological chart, Doreen states:

I can be fairly precise about this, because I was expected around Christmas, but nothing happened. Then on the night of January 4th, I decided to get a move on, and the doctor was hastily summoned from a Masonic dinner.

7. Doreen aged 6 weeks with her mother at Blagdon House

Whilst her middle name, Edith, is presumably taken from her mother, the name 'Doreen' has an interesting derivation. It is a combination of the name 'Dora' with the suffix -een, which is commonly used in Irish names. In Irish it would be spelt Dhoireann. The name Doreen was probably first used in the novel Doreen: The Story of a Singer by Edna Lyall.

It is a story set during the Fenian agitations of late 19th Century Ireland, featuring a young girl, Doreen O'Ryan, who is very much involved in the cause of Irish Home Rule. Harry and Edith may well have read the book, and their sympathy for the Irish cause may have resulted in this choice of name for their daughter. Certainly the popularity of the name Doreen increased significantly in the 1920s.

When Doreen was less than a year old, the Dominys moved into a terraced house, 56 Pitcairn Road, on the borders of Colliers Wood and Tooting, about half a mile away from their previous flat. They lived there for about four years until Doreen was of an age to start going to school.

8. 56 Pitcairn Road

Then, in 1927, they moved to a flat at No. 4 Renshaw Corner, Mitcham. This was an impressive building dating from the 18th Century built out of the typical yellow brick of the area. Indeed, it is probably one of the most impressive houses in that part of Mitcham, with a large garden fronting onto Streatham Road, incorporating a curved driveway up to the front door, which has a projecting mid-19th Century pilastered porch. The garden facade of the building has an ornate iron canopy, which can be seen in some of the photographs on page 18.

9. Doreen and her mother at Renshaw Corner

We only have glimpses of Doreen's childhood, but from an early age there were hints that she was a somewhat unusual child. Doreen realised in later life that she had been a great disappointment to her parents because she wasn't a boy. Perhaps they had been hoping for someone to take the place of young Harold, or perhaps they simply felt, probably correctly in those days, that a boy could make his way in the world more easily than a girl. Indeed, Sally Griffyn remembers Doreen saying to her that she didn't experience any love as a child.

10 - 13. Doreen and her parents at Worthing beach 1924

Doreen describes her parents as being very conventional people, and that her mother was a prude and a snob. She says it was "the era of ghastly good taste, when social climbing was a religion". Indeed, their religion is not straightforward. The Dominys were Methodists and the Richardsons were Congregationalists, yet Doreen says that she was never baptised because her mother "had a row with the vicar". And later she was sent to a convent school.

14 - 17. Doreen in the garden of Renshaw Corner

I suspect that Doreen's father only had intermittent work, but that her mother wanted to live somewhere prestigious, as Renshaw Corner undoubtedly was. Doreen says that they lived in "genteel poverty" and mentions that her father "outwitted the bailiff", which certainly sounds as if they were trying to live beyond their means.

18. & 19. Doreen and her parents, Harry and Edith Dominy

It is likely that, at the age of five, in 1927, Doreen was sent to elementary school. There were two schools about equally distant from Renshaw Corner - St. Mark's Church of England School in Mitcham town centre and Gorringe Park School on the corner of Streatham Road and Sandy Lane, a local authority school which had opened in the 1920s. As Doreen's mother had had a row with the vicar, I think the latter is the most likely. Indeed, it was on the walking route from their former house in Pitcairn Road to Mitcham town centre, so they would undoubtedly have been familiar with it.