34 | New Scientist | 7 May 2022
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Book
The Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight
FaberIN OCTOBER 1966, around the
time a colliery spoil heap in
Aberfan in Wales collapsed,
burying a school and homes and
killing 116 children and 28 adults,
an English psychiatrist called John
Barker was working on a book
about people who appeared to
have scared themselves to death.
In some ways, it was a precursor
to the work of writers such as
Oliver Sacks: Barker was boldly but
thoughtfully exploring the odder
reaches of the psyche. In other
ways, however, his research was
sensationalist and foolish – Barker
was also a member of the Society
for Psychical Research and he
had suggested that people could
become aware of the moment of
their death. By telepathy, perhaps.
In the aftermath of the Aberfan
disaster, Barker heard that a boy
who had escaped the wave of coal
slurry had later died of shock.
Barker drove 160 kilometres from
a psychiatric hospital where he
was a consultant to investigate.
But while touring Aberfan, he
heard stories of forebodings and
warnings, and he had a new idea.
Within a week, in collaboration
with Peter Fairley, the Evening
Standard’s science journalist, he
was inviting the newspaper’s
readers to contact him with their
“dreams and forebodings”. These
would be recorded and, in the
event of ensuing disaster, verified.
This was the “premonitions
bureau”, and its story (and
Barker’s) is the subject of a bookby journalist Sam Knight.
Barker was certainly an
interesting man. Intellectually
ambitious, he researched
Munchausen’s syndrome and
experimented with aversion
therapy, claiming to have cured a
man of desire for an extramarital
affair by administering 70-volt
electric shocks. He was a pioneer
of longboard surfing. And he
kept a crystal ball on his desk.
In the 15 months it existed, the
bureau collected 723 predictions,
of which 18 were recorded as
“hits”, with 12 coming from just
two correspondents. One was a
London music teacher, Kathy
Middleton. She saw pictures,
with words flashing as if in
neon lights. The other “human
seismometer”, as Fairley put
it, was a switchboard operator
called Alan Hencher, whoKnight finds that Barker
could be “credulous, or laconic;
doubtful, yet insinuating”.
Something similar is true of
Knight. Now a staff writer at The
New Yorker, his non-fiction heroes
include sophisticated literary
storytellers such as W. G. Sebald
and Joan Didion. He likes jump
cuts, internal resonances and
leaving things unstated.
Take the section where he
segues from a discussion of
entropy to a tragic outbreak
of foot-and-mouth disease in
England and then to a campaign
to shut Victorian-era asylums –
by a woman who dreamed
of the winning horses in the
Epsom Derby.
Or another where he moves
from the origin of the word
embolism to the nocebo effect and
Sweden’s uppgivenhetssyndrom^
(resignation syndrome), a
condition in which refugee
children appear to retreat into
near-comas of hopelessness.
With such manoeuvres, Knight
builds a subtle, allusive study of
his subject, and his evocation of
the frowsty yet aspirational mid-
1960s England feels just right. But
it is Barker who dominates the
book, with his “contained, quietly
belligerent energy”, and Knight
treats him with generosity, and
delivers a great deal of pathos.
Too much generosity and
too much pathos, because
premonitions aren’t true. If you
deal in them, you are deluded or
a charlatan. Barker was mostly
the former. Knight, I am sure, is
neither – but he still allows the
possibility to play, as a kind of
mood music. And for all that this
is a compelling, beautifully written
book, it feels like bad faith. ❚James McConnachie is a writer and
reviewer, and editor of The Author,
the journal of the Society of Authorsworked at the Post Office. His
visions were accompanied by
distress and headaches.
In one “major hit” for the
bureau, Hencher predicted a plane
crash involving 123 people. Nine
days later, a plane came down
near Nicosia in Cyprus, killing
126 people, 124 of them on impact.In another, Middleton wrote
to Barker detailing a vision of a
petrified astronaut. Earlier that
day – although it wasn’t reported
until later – Vladimir Komarov’s
Soyuz 1 capsule had crash-landed
in Russia, burning him to death.MARIODEBI
AS
I/MONDA
DORI^ VIA^ GET
TY
IMAGESA bad omen?
The story of a 1960s hunt for people who claimed they had premonitions is beautifully
written, but goes too easy on the pseudoscience, says James McConnachieThe Aberfan disaster in
Wales was caused by a
colliery spoil tip collapse“ While touring Aberfan,
John Barker heard
stories of forebodings
and warnings, and he
had a new idea”