SEVERAL times on our many meetings, I asked Bill Gwilliam which of all the tales he had researched in his lifetime was his favourite, and his answer was always the same.

"The remarkable life story of the woman who stood for the Presidency of the United States in the 19th Century and was labelled by puritan Americans as 'Mrs Satan', but who went on to become a pillar of Worcestershire society and of the English 'upper crust'!"

In tribute to Bill Gwilliam and his inspiring life's work, I repeat here today the Memory Lane feature on Mrs Satan which I wrote in collaboration with him back in the mid 1980s.

WE look today at the life of a remarkable woman who was at the centre of a huge scandal that rocked America, but who became a pillar of Worcestershire society.

She was the first and probably only woman ever to be officially nominated for the US Presidency yet, instead of becoming Mr President, was scorned and derided by puritan Americans as Mrs Satan.

Nevertheless, in later life, she was to be a well-known and widely-respected Lady of the Manor, living in the shadow of South Worcestershire's beautiful Bredon Hill and being a considerable local benefactor.

The fascinating, almost incredible story of Victoria Claflin has been recounted for me by Worcester historian Bill Gwilliam who has been researching her life in this county.

Victoria was born at Homer, Ohio, in 1838 to a family living in dire poverty. She and her sister Tennessee had a primitive upbringing and, in their teens, travelled from place to place claiming to be clairvoyant physicians, able to cure cancer and other diseases but moving swiftly on just ahead of the law and disillusioned clients!

At 16, Victoria was married by her parents to a middle-aged drunken womaniser named Woodhull who kept going off and leaving her.

However, in 1868 the good-looking Claflin sisters fell in with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the elderly millionaire broker. He had just lost his wife, but so effectively did the sisters console him in the following years that he showered gifts and stock market tips on them and introduced them into American society.

Soon the sisters were extremely rich in their own right as bankers - something quite unprecedented for American women of the 1870s. Not surprisingly, they attained celebrity status and were regularly featured in the New York and Washington newspapers and magazines.

Both also became active in politics, particularly in support of women's rights, and produced their own newspaper in New York, The Woodhull and Claflin Weekly.

They sought to expose the hypocrisy of the "respectable classes", but made what was to prove a disastrous mistake in openly advocating free love. This horrified Americans and sparked furious attacks on them from the churches.

Unrepentant, however, Victoria faced a hostile crowd of more than 3,000 in New York's Steinway Hall and shouted: "Yes, I am a free lover. I have an unalienable, constitutional and natural right to love when I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, and to change that love every day if I please."

For millions of Americans, her stark declaration was seen as proof that Victoria and Tennessee were lost in shame and would do anything to court notoriety.

A famous cartoon in Harper's Weekly depicted Victoria as a devilish figure advocating free love. The caption "Get thee behind me (Mrs) Satan" gave her a tag she was to carry for years.

Even so, in 1872, the Equal Rights Party nominated Victoria to run against American Civil War hero, General Grant for the Presidency of the United States, though her chances were clearly negligible from the start.

Great condemnation was next heaped on the two sisters when their newspaper exposed allegations that one of America's most respected preachers, the Rev Henry Wood Beecher was having an affair with the young wife of one of his church elders and had virtually "a harem" in his church.

Realising the potential damage to them all, the churches banded together and, even though Beecher's affairs were common knowledge, they had the sisters arrested and jailed for obscene libel.

American newspapers quickly headlined them as "The Sisters of Sin".

Such was the nationwide clamour against them that, when they were released from prison, they decided to leave straight away for England.

Over here, their fortunes changed dramatically, as did their personalities. They were soon moving easily in English society and made no effort to join the women's suffragette movement. Victoria even had a complete change of view and denounced free love!

In 1885, Tennessee married Francis Cook and became Lady Cook when her husband was elevated to the peerage.

Victoria, twice divorced by this stage, also fared well, capturing the heart of John Biddulph Martin, 11 years her junior at 36 and a partner in nationwide Martins Bank. The couple resided in London for some years but, when John died at a comparatively early age, Victoria came to live permanently on his family estate at Bredon's Norton, being known as Mrs Woodhull Martin.

She enjoyed a long reign as Lady of the Manor and, with reforming zeal, restored the old manor house and workers' homes on the estate, had a village school built, and turned a farm into a women's agricultural college.

She took up the cause of world peace and, upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, crossed the Atlantic with sister Tennessee to promote American support for Britain. When the USA eventually entered the war in 1917, Victoria flew the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack over Bredon's Norton.

Victoria died a wealthy woman in 1927, just a few months off her 90th birthday.

Those 19th Century puritan Americans who had branded her "Mrs Satan" would no doubt have been amazed that, in 1943, the Bishop of Gloucester dedicated a large memorial tablet stone to her memory in Tewkesbury Abbey - a building she had helped so generously to restore.