In the weeks before Christmas, Fairley and Barker approached Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, to open what they called a Premonitions Bureau. For a year, readers of the newspaper would be invited to send in their dreams and forebodings, which would be collated and then compared with actual happenings around the world.
Created in the aftermath of the 1966 Aberfan disaster (which saw an overflowing hilltop waste tip send a landslide of mining slurry onto the tiny Welsh town at its base, killing 144, mostly schoolchildren), the Premonitions Bureau was envisioned as a clearinghouse for augurous information that might, somehow, prevent such tragedies in the future. Conceived of by psychiatrist John Barker — a mental health reformer with an interest in unusual mental conditions and precognition — in partnership with self-promoting newspaperman Peter Fairley, the Premonitions Bureau made for good newspaper copy, but poor proof of presentiment: Of the thousands of tips that were sent in, only three percent could be plausibly linked to eventual occurrences. More than the story of this questionably useful project itself, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story is really about the people involved in it (and especially Barker) and author Sam Knight makes a fascinating tale of it. This might be a little padded with information that I didn’t find quite relevant (did I need to know that Robin Gibb was one of the passengers on a London-bound train wreck?) but even the padding was interesting in its own right (it was Robin Gibb after all), and I found this to be a thoroughly satisfying read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother a second before she calls. There is no way for us to see, or feel, things before they occur but they often seem to hang around regardless.
Barker was interested in stories of people who had been literally scared to death — as in the “nocebo effect” (you can apparently kill yourself with inert pills if you believe them to be deadly) and “voodoo death” (dying of no apparent cause after your death has been predicted; even if just by your own hunch) — and he travelled to Aberfan as search and recovery was still ongoing, looking for stories that fit his thesis. What he found instead were many stories of people who had had mystical forewarning of the disaster (as in a girl who had reported a dream of the landslide and a boy who had drawn a picture of his school blacked out with the words “the end” written in the sky; both of whom would die in the tragedy), and that inspired Barker to co-create the Premonitions Bureau, initially focussed on recording premonitions related to Aberfan (and this was apparently not entirely an unscientific area of study: both Freud and Jung believed in telepathy and precognition to varying degrees). Knight tells the stories of several “percipients” (and especially the two who had had the most compelling visions of Aberfan), as well as the stories of Fairley and other newspapermen, Barker’s work as a reforming psychiatrist and the Victorian-era asylum where he practised — along with the stories of other psychiatrists and the Shelton Hospital itself — and if it can tend to feel like padding, it was interesting. Barker wrote and promoted the book Scared to Death (which has no reviews on Goodreads and a solitary one-star rating; whelp) during this period, and of it Knight states, “Barker wrote for a mass audience, presenting himself as an uncompromising investigator,” and that is precisely how I would describe the writing in The Premonitions Bureau as well. On Barker and his wife, Knight writes:
Barker had met Jane at St George’s Medical School, in London, in 1946. He was studying to be a doctor and she was training to be a nurse. Jane’s family was from Gloucestershire; the men served in the military or held posts in the colonies. Her father had been a district officer in Nigeria and died in a hospital for tropical diseases when she was seven years old. Jane grew up with her mother and two younger siblings in a cottage not far from Cheltenham. She had brown hair, which she kept short, above her shoulders, a wide mouth and extremely proper pronunciation.
I can’t call all of that pertinent (and there are many, many passages that are similarly detail-rich), but I did appreciate Knight’s thoroughness. And especially as Barker — the expert on dying by one’s own thoughts — would eventually be contacted (repeatedly and urgently) by his two most accurate percipients to warn him of his own impending death. As a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story that eventually rolls all of the disparate parts into a neat little ball, I am happy to report that I learned plenty about the times and was interested to the end. But the question remains: are premonitions a real phenomenon?
A useful definition of a delusion is not that it is an inaccurate belief about the world; it is a belief that you refuse to change when you are confronted with proof that you are wrong. The hypothesis fails. The pleasure principle is countermanded by the reality principle. Our best hopes and most extravagant fears rarely materialise. Prediction errors fire through the brain, turning the tiger back into a shadow. Prophecy reduces to coincidence. Your heart rate slows. The experiment does not repeat. The pattern won’t spread.
