Second sight
Journalist Sam Knight explores the efforts of a British psychiatrist, motivated by a Welsh disaster, to predict the future.
THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU: A true story, by Sam Knight (Faber, $36.99)
Is there really any way to forecast the future? Predictions – based on assigning meaning to events via superstition, astrology and premonitions, among other methods – have long offered the comforting illusion of control over our passage through life. But when it all goes wrong, we pin it on the exact opposite: fate, luck and chance. “We didn’t see it coming.”
The search for meaning where none exists is the definition of madness, says journalist Sam Knight in The Premonitions
Bureau, a mind-bending real-life mystery about an effort to establish the authenticity of premonitions. Our hero is Dr John Barker, a melancholic psychiatrist who set up the “British Premonitions Bureau” in 1967, with the help of a daily newspaper, so readers could submit visions or dreams that they believed to be of future events.
Barker’s hope was that by establishing the reliability of premonitions, specifically disasters, they could be prevented.
Knight notes that before Barker’s study, premonitions were routinely reported during the trench battles of World War I and the London Blitz of World War II. “Signs” allegedly saved lives. “A more predictable existence is, in theory, a less frightening one,” notes Knight in the book, which expands on his 2019 story on Barker published in the New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer.
Barker worked as a psychiatrist in an enormous, ghastly mental asylum called Shelton Hospital, near Shrewsbury, where “the primary means of discharge was death”. Barker was, according to Knight, outwardly “orthodox” but interested in bringing a “new dimension” to his profession, including the occult. At one point, he tried to buy a local pub called The Squirrel because it was haunted. Before he joined Shelton, Barker suffered a breakdown
exacerbated by a difficult case explored in detail in the book. Obese and depressed, Barker’s path of recovery included surfing.
Barker was a member of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, whose archives, held in the University of Cambridge’s library, included some of his memos and letters. One memo, dated towards the end of his bureau experiment in 1968, was headlined “Some Interesting Predictions and A Possible Death Sentence” – his own.
Barker’s decision to study premonitions was galvanised by the tragedy of Aberfan, the small Welsh community engulfed by a massive coal-waste slide on October 21, 1966, killing 144 people, including 116 children at the junior school. Aberfan shook the whole nation. Intrigued, Barker arrived a day later, where he discovered a number of children killed in the slip had told their parents about dreams or visions of seeing a “blackness” swallowing the school. Other kids, late for school because they had overslept or the bus was running behind, escaped death by a matter of minutes. Why? “Barker sensed he was on the scene of something momentous, though he wasn’t sure what,” Knight writes.
Shortly afterwards, Barker contacted a friend, journalist Peter Fairley, the science editor of London’s Evening Standard
(edited by Charles Wintour, father of
Vogue’s Anna Wintour). Together, they hatched an attention-grabbing prelude to what expanded into the British Premonitions Bureau. On October 28, Fairley’s column was headlined, “Did anyone have premonition of Aberfan disaster?” They received 76 responses, which Barker whittled down to seven because their visions were accompanied by physical symptoms.
The seven included two key figures who became consistent “percipients” during his 18-month experiment: a music teacher named Kathleen Middleton and Alan Hencher, a Post Office clerk.
Shortly after the Aberfan appeal, Barker and Fairley decided to take a longer, broader approach. They logged premonitions for a year, using a primitive computer system, to see if they came true. The Premonitions Bureau, a name fit for a Len Deighton thriller, was launched on January 4, 1967, the day racing car driver Donald Campbell, notoriously superstitious, died attempting to break the water-speed record. He’d predicted his death the night before.
Knight’s narrative bounces around between Barker’s professional career, as he struggled on at Shelton, his family life, and his efforts to establish the bureau as a respectable scientific vehicle, which could lead to a national early warning system set up by the government. Arthur Koestler, Arthur Conan Doyle, David
Barker worked in a ghastly mental asylum where “the primary means of discharge was death”.
Frost and Robin Gibb make brief appearances in this most unusual narrative. By spring 1968, the bureau had received 723 predictions, with 12 of 18 correct forecasts made by Hencher and Middleton. The most direct warning they issued was to Barker himself, that he – by now aged 44 – was going to die. His life, from that point on, was cast in the same fatalistic mould as the cases in his book Scared To Death, released in 1968.
Knight has won a solid reputation for wide-ranging, long-form journalism, including “London Bridge is Down”, outlining the procedural aftermath of the Queen’s death, published in the Guardian in 2017. And then there was his exposé of how the pre-packed sandwich took over the British lunch. The Premonitions Bureau, his debut book, is also the product of a luxurious level of research, and cleverly condensed. But it also invites the reader to confront an elemental horror: our what-when-where fear of death. He can’t offer much comfort. As he writes, “Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time.” ▮