Dover Famous Face – Samuel Shelton

The beauty and the curse of the internet is that everybody can have a voice and a platform on which to air that voice.

While that can do wonders for uplifting marginalised voices, it can also give presence to others whom we might find it difficult to agree with. The important thing to remember when dealing with people who might hold views utterly opposed to our own is that we will never be able to understand each other if we don’t listen. We don’t have to agree, but if we can understand where someone is coming from, we will have taken a vital step toward harmony. It is with this level of empathy that we should approach organisations like the International Flat Earth Research Society. The Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, who ran the Society out of his flat in Dover.

Shenton was the son of an army sergeant major, and he was born at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Great Yarmouth in March 1903. Not much is known about his early life, but we do know that as a teenager Shenton enjoyed astronomy and geography, and he left school at the age of sixteen. Both artistic and technical, Shenton worked as a sign writer, and in the 1920s he claimed to have invented a radical new kind of airship which would revolutionise travel. He sent out his design to universities and government departments, but when no positive response was forthcoming, he began to suspect that “the man” was trying to hide something. In a Guardian article from 1969, Shenton declared that the reason his machine would not have worked was because of one vital component that he had not taken into account: the earth was flat.

Keeping Shenton’s disappointment in mind, we can begin to see a little of why he might have started to embrace ideas about a flat earth. After all, it’s far easier to blame the general system of authority than accept one’s own flaws, and by focusing on a seemingly irrefutable conspiracy Shenton may have been able to make his own lack of progress into a part of something much grander and more important.

With the beginning of the Space Race, Shenton’s theories began to attract more media publicity. Some members of the Society were convinced by the images of Earth that they saw, but Shenton remained steadfast in his beliefs, insisting that the photos were doctored, the astronauts hypnotised, and the whole thing was cooked up by NASA and globe manufacturers in order to make a profit.

Samuel Shenton travelled and lectured around the world on his largely self-funded mission, but reportedly only ever managed to convince his wife, Lillian, of the truth of his message. He died in Dover on 2nd March 1971 at the age of 67.

by Alice Smales