Born in British Ceylon, Dingwall moved to England where he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge (M.A., 1912), and the University of London (D.Sc., PhD).

Assistant Keeper in the Reference Division, cataloguing private case material of erotica, magic and the paranormal.

[25] In 1988 the museum proposed combining the remaining funds with part of the bequest left to the Clockmakers Company by Reginald Beloe (a wealth City of London financier, noted horological collector and Past-Master of the Clockmakers Company).

Since 1989 the joint fund has supported the annual Dingwall Beloe Lecture Series, held at the British Museum.

First, I have come to the conclusion that the present immense interest in occultism and in the grosser forms of superstition is due, to a certain extent at least, to the persistent and far-reaching propaganda put out by the parapsychologists.

With the gradual decline in the West of belief in Christianity has come not, as one might have hoped, a leaning toward the rational way of looking at the world but a decided tendency to adopt the magical way.

One reason, therefore, for my ceasing work is that I do not wish to be associated with persons who actively support such superstitions as are today everywhere apparent.

I cannot accept such responsibility... After sixty years' experience and personal acquaintance with most of the leading parapsychologists of that period I do not think I could name half a dozen whom I could call objective students who honestly wished to discover the truth.His essay The Need for Responsibility in Parapsychology: My Sixty Years in Psychical Research (1971) was reprinted in A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology (1985) by the CSICOP founder Paul Kurtz.

[38] According to authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman when investigating the medium Mina Crandon; Dingwall told her to take off her clothes and sit in the nude.