One of nine children born to a printer and a dressmaker in London in 1893, Harry was to serve in WW1 in what is now Iran, overseeing labourers building a railway. With only rudimentary medical knowledge and skills, Harry was able to make such a difference to those who were injured or sick, that he soon gained a reputation as a healer.
After the war he set up a successful printing business but was soon persuaded by friends to explore his potential as a Healer. His first attempts, on a person dying from tuberculosis, and one with diagnosed terminal cancer, saw remarkable recoveries. More such cases followed and requests for healing quickly grew, prompting him to start evening and weekend clinics which saw queues of people at his house.
During WWII Harry was in the Home Guard and his healing abilities were soon put to good use on injured servicemen and women, including his own son. With his house bomb damaged and his distant healing records destroyed in the blast, Harry and family moved home, setting up a Healing Sanctuary in his front room.
By 1946 he was in such demand as a Healer that he handed over his printing business to his brother. With the help of other family members, he was able to buy Burrows Lea in Shere, Surrey, a large house with extensive grounds, which served both as a home and as a Healing Sanctuary. The Harry Edwards Healing Sanctuary still provides that service to this day.
Harry needed to employ many typists to answer the increasing volume of distant healing requests, while other locals helped out managing the grounds and chauffeuring him to his various public appointments. At one point Harry was receiving 10,000 healing request letters a week. He gave a number of public demonstrations which attracted huge crowds – notably 6000 in Manchester in 1948, and famously packing out the Royal Festival Hall in 1951. He also gave demonstrations to large crowds in Trafalgar Square and travelled the length and breadth of the country to reach as wide an audience as he could.
Although Harry was the most famous healer in the UK, there were many others. Already Healers in various counties had started to form groups, and in1954, a proposal to bring these disparate groups together under one united umbrella was launched by John Britnell in Essex. Harry was invited to be the President of this new organisation which was to be called the National Federation of Spiritual Healers (NFSH). Harry accepted and became ‘Member No 1’, with his home at Burrows Lea becoming the National HQ. He remained President until his death in 1976. His vision was for Healers and Doctors to work together and for Healing to become available to all.
As the popularity of Spiritual Healing grew, both Church and Medical establishments showed their public disapproval of it, regardless of the fact that some Healers were also priests or doctors.
In 1953 an ‘Archbishops’ Commission on Divine Healing’ was created to investigate the phenomenon. In 1954 Harry Edwards provided the Commission with substantial case study evidence and personally addressed the Commission. Several Commission Members even attended Harry’s public demonstration at the Royal Albert Hall along with 6000 others at which he launched the ’10 o’clock Healing Minute’ which is still observed globally today.
When the Commission’s Report was finally published (a report which was never sent to Harry Edwards) they concluded that no other agency (outside the church or medical profession) could produce successful healing. The mass of evidence which clearly flew in the face of this conclusion was dismissed as ‘being outside the scope of the investigation’.
In service to the very end, Harry died quietly at his desk, answering correspondence to those who'd requested Healing.
