FIRST FORTEANS
No 12. Strange bedfellows
Who were the First Forteans? British fortean lineage began in the early 1930s, when Charles Fort was still alive and his books quite rare in these isles. BOB RICKARD concludes his rummage for our fortean roots.
What follows are various brief notes which I could not incorporate into previous instalments of this series, some of which were too short for their own entries or were about people whom I felt knew of Charles Fort but on whom I could find little worth citing. I’m sure there is much more to discover about the first British Forteans; the fan archives are vast and I had no time to explore them fully.
There was no useful list of UK forteans in the early issues of The Fortean Society Magazine and Doubt and it was no fun trawling for scraps through Thayer’s eccentric and cramped layouts, extravagant prose and odd opinions. Worse still was his headache-inducing system for dating issues, adding an extra month to honour Fort. Still, there we see novelist John Cowper Powys among the founders of the Fortean Society (FS), and psychical researchers Harry Price and Raymond Cass among the members. Here too was Tomas Elsender (whom Thayer ranked with Eric Frank Russell in sending quantity and quality of newsclippings) and Hastings Russell (12th Duke of Bedford), made a Fellow of the FS in 1944. Other ‘Named Fellows’ included Aldous Huxley, Eric Dingwall, JBS Haldane and Eric Temple Bell (who wrote SF as John Taine), which means they were invited but there is no mention of their acceptance.
NANDOR FODOR (1895-1964) & HEREWARD CARRINGTON (1880-1958)
Psychical researcher Hereward Carrington who co-wrote Haunted People: The Story of the Poltergeist down the Centuries (1951) with Nandor Fodor, was an Honorary Founder of the FS. He moved to the US in 1900, joining the American Society for Psychical Research five years later and becoming one of their senior investigators and author of over 100 books in the genre. However, Carrington, while born British,
spent the rest of his life in the USA – like Ivan Sanderson, so I regard both as honorary American forteans.
On the other hand, Fodor – author of the 1934 Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science – was born in Hungary, though his most productive years were in Britain and America. After meeting Carrington, he gave up law and journalism, becoming a disciple of Freud, and developing a psychoanalytical approach to mediumship and spiritualism. He was a member of the FS – and like Dingwall, had corresponded with Thayer – and his books on poltergeists and psychical research – which cite cases from Fort – were touted in Doubt.
HARRY PRICE (1881-1948) & ERIC DINGWALL (1890–1986)
In 1934, the Council for Psychical Investigation was formed at the University of London to take over Harry Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research. Established by Price in 1925, the lab pioneered a scientific approach to investigating mediums, ghosts and poltergeists. Fodor wrote approvingly of Price’s methods and cautious curiosity, arguing that the field owed him “a greater debt” for making psychical research accessible to the public.
Eric Dingwall was an anthropologist who became a senior investigator for the Society for Psychical Research and, from 1947, catalogued erotica in the British Museum Library. His ground-breaking four-volume Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena (1967–68) is still a standard reference. Mediums would fear Dingwall’s unsympathetic investigations and his scepticism only increased with age.
Dingwall, for undiscovered reasons, took exception to Price, resulting in a hostile analysis of Price’s investigation of Borley Rectory, and worse, accusing Price of fabricating key evidence. Fodor sprang to Price’s defence with a remarkably personal statement, confessing that the
“ferocious intensity” of Price’s critics baffled him and was, itself “pathological and worthy of investigation”.
It is one of fate’s ironies that the libraries of both Dingwall and Price now lie adjacent within the archives of University College. For more on Price see FT116:40-43; for Dingwall, FT:299:44-49, FT300:50-54.
RAYMOND CASS (1921-1977)
Cass was one of the leading figures in British research into the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). Born in Hull, he was, apparently, interested in paranormal phenomena since, at the age of seven, he believed he heard a male voice call his name from an early radio that was switched off. Later, on joining a local spiritualist group he discovered that an ancestor, Robert Cass (d.1898), “could levitate a heavy table with three men on top to the ceiling”; and in 1773, another ancestor, Molly Cass, was persecuted for her mediumship. At the age of 17, Raymond was told by the famous medium Helen Duncan – the last person to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735 – that he would develop “voice mediumship”. He kept up his interest in “psychic affairs” until 1945, when his release from a German POW camp required him to find a profession. Interested in acoustics, he established a successful and long-lived business developing hearing aids. It was not until 1971 that Konstantin Raudive’s book Breakthrough re-kindled his interest in the electronic mediumship of tape-recorders and radios. By the time he died in 1977, at the young age of 56, his experimentation was studied in Germany, Japan and the USA.
Cass probably became a member of Thayer’s Fortean Society through his interest in science fiction around 1930. Douglas Mayer – then a young student in Leeds – had a letter published in Wonder Stories proclaiming his formation of the Institute of Scientific Research, one of the first regional SF fan groups which he describes as “a small English science society” also interested in radio research. In 1935, Mayer was rewarded by the American Science Fiction League with an affiliation. This stimulated a flurry of proposals to establish local SF groups across the UK, including Belfast, Nuneaton, Glasgow, Manchester and Barnsley. Fan historian Rob Hansen notes that one of these start-ups was by a “Raymond A Cass of Hull”. It is highly likely, then, that Cass learned of Fort through the fan community and the proselytising of Eric Frank Russell in the early 1940s.
WALTER GILLINGS (1912-1979)
Walter was crucial in providing the initial environment in which UK SF fandom took root, and within which the UK forteans flourished. Gillings lived in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London; he was 18 and training to be a reporter on The Ilford Recorder. In his school days, he had attempted his own SF magazine. It was handwritten, with ink illustrations to his own stories and “a circulation of ten” but it instilled in him a flair for writing and editing.
As SF historian Rob Hansen notes, it was Wonder Stories that set things in motion. In 1930, Gillings noticed a letter in the April issue of Wonder Stories, from another resident of Ilford, Len Kippin, an amateur radio enthusiast. As a commercial traveller in boroughs of east London, Kippin acquired SF magazines wherever he found them; at that time they were sporadically imported and randomly distributed. Kippin and Gillings met and formed the Ilford Science Literary Circle (ISLC). Gillings concocted a ‘Letter to the Editor’ and had it inserted into his own paper. Hansen calls it “the earliest known written record of fan activity in this country”.
The inaugural meeting of the ISLC was held in Ilford on 27 October 1930. Afterwards, Gillings wrote to Wonder Stories describing their success and other UK readers began contacting him directly. The Ilford gathering also inspired Colin Askham and Leslie Johnson in Liverpool to attempt a group. Johnson later went on to cofound the British Interplanetary Society. Many groups never got off the ground and, less than a year after forming, the Ilford group too disbanded.
BENSON HERBERT (1912-1991)
Herbert, a qualified physicist credited with coining the word ‘paraphysics’ in the early 1960s, believed that all psychical phenomena had either an electrical origin or – at least – an electrical component. An active member of the SPR for many years, Herbert had widened his investigations to include UFOs, witches and mediumistic ‘physical phenomena’. He took advantage of the schisms within the SPR in the mid-1960s to form his own independent unit, the Paraphysical Laboratory (the ‘Paralab’) on Lord Longford’s estate at Downton, Wiltshire, where he researched into ‘psychokinesis’ (PK).
Although not well known in the West today, according to one source Herbert is “much valued and still studied in the Soviet bloc”. In 1970, Herbert was invited by Soviet scientists to be the British representative at the Prague Symposium on Psychotronics (variously defined as the military use of psychical abilities or ‘applied psychokinesis’). In 1972, he went to Leningrad to study the famous Russian PK medium Nina Kulagina; a heavy chair moved at her will and her touch left a burn mark on his arm for a week. In the Paralab, he studied Suzanne Padfield, whose apparent abilities included bending beams of light.
Crucially for Western EVP enthusiasts, Herbert’s own periodical, the Journal of Paraphysics – (I was a subscriber) – became a regular conduit for news of continental research by Jung’s student Konstantin Raudive in Latvia, Hans Bender in Germany, and others in Russia. Both the ‘Paralab’ – which was once raided by British Intelligence agents – and the Journal ceased when Herbert’s health failed in 1987.
Even less well known is that between 1931 and 1943 Herbert wrote several SF stories and, in the mid-1940s, bankrolled Utopian Publications, which published two SF anthology magazines for the UK market – American Fiction and Strange Tales – which he edited with Walter Gillings. In 1947, Herbert pulled out of editing two issues of New
CASS WAS TOLD BY MEDIUM HELEN DUNCAN – THE LAST PERSON TO BE IMPRISONED UNDER THE 1735 BRITISH WITCHCRAFT ACT – THAT HE WOULD DEVELOP “VOICE MEDIUMSHIP”.
Worlds, which had to be finished by Sam Youd (who wrote SF as John Christopher) anonymously. Harry Turner remembers the issue as displaying a significant divergence from the fare that SF fans expected: “its coverage of psychical research, occultism, Spiritism, and astrology got a general raspberry from fans”. Also, in his memorandum about the 1938 London SF convention, Turner recalls “spending a lot of time arguing with Benson Herbert about surrealism, then currently attracting attention as a way-out and controversial art form in the British press.”
ERIC NEEDHAM (1921-1983)
Needham, another of the Manchester ‘Rocket Boys’ and a fan writer, said of Fort: “Plots come ready made to me. It is a literal fact that after heavy showers of rain I’ve looked for frogs on rooftops and fire-escapes. No luck. Then I find reference to falls of frogs and all sorts of Fortean phenomena in The Anatomy of Melancholy. And in Titus Livius, plus Machiavelli, too. They are there, if you look for them. Biggest snag is persuading fans that literature can be fun.”
MP SHIEL (1865-1947)
Shiel was an acclaimed writer of 27 novels and more short stories filled with discourses on supernatural, philosophical and mythological mysteries. His masterpiece, The Purple Cloud (1901), was praised by both HG Wells and HP Lovecraft.
In 1944, Malcolm Fergusson – an American soldier stationed in the UK – managed to track down and interview Shiel in Horsham, Sussex. Fergusson describes a letter he had from Shiel, with this interesting passage: “He read slowly, he said. He did not write of conventional ghosts or supernatural phenomena... He added that he enjoyed reading Charles Fort, the American writer who harangued at science for its myopia and thrust forward a bewildering array of data on the supernormal into its range of vision. Shiel spoke of the migration of lemmings and suchlike matters as typical of this interest.”
EGERTON SYKES (1894-1983)
Sykes – a renowned mythologist and amateur archæologist – was heavily influenced by the novels of Jules Verne as a boy. From the age of 18, he began collecting books on Atlantis and corresponding with every authority on the subject between 1912 and 1950. Most of his life was spent as a British Intelligence Officer working in 28 countries – the perfect cover for his determination to locate books in their native languages. His library – said to be the largest private collection on Atlantis in the world – is now housed with the Edgar Cayce Foundation’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE).
Like Rupert Gould, Sykes was hospitalised with ‘shell shock’. After WWII he retired to Brighton, from where he published journals – Atlantis (1948-1976) and New World Antiquity (1954-1979) – and his own 1970 expansion of Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1949).
Few know that Sykes appeared among the London Circle, shortly after it relocated to the famous White Horse pub in 1946. In 1948, Ken Slater was trying to organise a fan-run Science Fantasy Society to buy and swap books and magazines. As Rob Hansen records: “It was clear there was little real enthusiasm for the organisation. Ken Slater made a final attempt to inject some life into it around this time by arranging for one Egerton Sykes, an individual whose sole qualification seemed to be that he was perpetually on the verge of setting off for Mt Ararat in search of the Ark, to take over as secretary. However, the London Circle was as disinclined to be organised as ever and when Sykes showed up at the White Horse he was told, apparently none too diplomatically, that there was no money or publicity to be made out of organising fandom. He was never heard from again.”
HARRY TURNER (1920-2009)
A memoir of Eric Frank Russell’s interest in Fort is given by the artist and fan historian Harry Turner, one of the Manchester ‘Rocket Boys’. He writes that he first met EFR – “15 years my senior” – at a meeting of the BIS in July 1938 in Chingford. “Guest of honour was Bob Truax of the American Rocket Society, then a midshipman working at the US Navy experimental station at Chesapeake Bay and conveniently in the UK on a training cruise.” Arthur C Clarke also attended.
Turner described EFR as “very much a kindred spirit” and the pair kept in touch “through letters and exchanges in fanzines, and the chainletters that circulated in early wartime years… He won me over wholeheartedly to Charles Fort… bowled me over with Sinister Barrier in Unknown, and wrote some printable (and unprintable) letters of comment when I started pubbing a fanzine, Zenith, in 1941.” Turner adds that when, prior to his WWII overseas posting, he was in Blackpool searching secondhand book stalls “for reading matter for that journey, I was lucky to pick up the 1931 US edition of Fort’s Lo!, which accompanied me on the voyage. It’s survived the years and still lurks on my library shelves next to The Complete Books of Charles Fort.”
OTHER FORTEAN INFLUENCES
The period I’ve chronicled ends in the decade 1945-1955. This post-war period was an exciting time for curious and inventive minds. Certainly something wonderful was happening in the early 1950s and, in closing this series, I’d like to pay tribute to some of those writer-artists who inspired me: in particular Sydney Jordan (b.1928) and his colleagues, whose long-running strip ‘Jeff Hawke: Space Rider’ began in the Daily Express, in February 1954; and Nigel Kneale (1922-2006), whose ‘Quatermass Experiment’, broadcast in mid1953, was written while he was a staff drama writer at the BBC. This period began with Frank Hampson’s ‘Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future’, in the inaugural publication, in April 1950, of the kids’ weekly, Eagle (which, somehow, my Dad got for me when we lived in the Far East).
Looking back, it seems to me that the creators of these stories primed me to be receptive, later, to Charles Fort. They were my first introduction to SF and fortean tropes. Dan Dare, for example, was chiefly written and drawn by Frank Hampson but, during its first three months, Arthur C Clarke served as its ‘scientific advisor’.
As WWII ended, Sydney Jordan was training at a college “for would-be aeroplane designers” near Reading. A fellow student there was Willie Patterson (d.1986), who would, in 1956, join Jordan as co-writer of ‘Jeff Hawke’. Between 1956 and 1969, Patterson became the main writer, building up Hawke from a demobbed pilot to the level of a space and time travelling ambassador from
Earth, frequently frustrating the plans of galactic ‘civil servants’ and villains, or correcting the anomalies when those plans went wrong. The stories of this period have been described as the first British comic for adults; the quality of the writing was good enough for me to insist my parents get the Daily Express.
Both Jordan and Patterson also did some work for Eagle, and later acknowledged that their characters, institutions and plots in ‘Jeff Hawke’ were largely modelled on what they had encountered in their training days. Although their college was not within the RAF, it was visited by flyers and officials, and kept up with new wartime technologies. It is not unusual to hear of other writers who lived through WWII using their experiences as inspiration for their characters and plots.
Further, on this topic of transmission and influence, I’ve always felt that the adventures of Professor Bernard Quatermass might well have been inspired by Sinister Barrier, considering that some Quatermass plots also involved possession or control by aliens or invading entities.
From the web I take this description of Quatermass: “[He] is a pioneer of the British space programme, heading up the British Experimental Rocket Group. He continually finds himself confronting sinister alien forces that threaten to destroy humanity… In Nigel Kneale’s 1996 radio serial ‘The Quatermass Memoirs’, it is revealed that the Professor was first involved in rocketry experiments in the 1930s, and that his wife died young. The unmade prequel serial ‘Quatermass in the Third Reich’, an idea conceived by Kneale in the late 1990s, would have shown Quatermass travelling to Nazi Germany during the 1936 Berlin Olympics and becoming involved with Wernher von Braun and the German rocket programme.”
Doesn’t that put you in mind of those early boy rocketeers who formed the British Interplanetary Society and shared an interest in SF? BIS founder Philip Cleator even made a trip to Germany in 1934, visiting the pioneer rocket group that included Von Braun and Willy Ley. Could the young Nigel Kneale (who would have been 17 when Sinister Barrier was published) have been a member of the BIS or overlapping SF groups in London? If he had been, he would have had every opportunity to absorb all the ingredients of Quatermass’s background.
For example, in a rare article on ‘The Flying Saucers’ for Tomorrow magazine (March 1952), EFR claimed that ordinary people were being tricked by authorities into believing the saucers were all illusions and misperceptions. It is interesting to note that in this article – some 16 years before von Däniken – EFR had suggested that the Egyptian gods might have been visiting aliens. And in another, earlier story – ‘Titans of the Twilight’ (1941) – he mentions the discovery of a statue of an Inca god that seemed to be wearing a crash helmet… what EvD might have called a space helmet.
Jordan and Patterson also seemed unexpectedly prescient in their Jeff Hawke strip, featuring Egyptian pyramids on Mars long before von Däniken and the discovery of the infamous Sphinx-like ‘Face’. And again, in their 1958 story ‘Out of Touch’, in which a three-milelong spaceship enters our Solar System, inside which is a selfcontained world its inhabitants call “Rhaam”. This was 15 years before Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. However, their most famous glimpse of the future came in an innocent panel in their 1959 story set on the Moon, which showed a pillar of Moon-rock bearing a metal plaque with the legend “On August 4th Earth year 1969 the first being set foot on the Moon at this point. His name was Homo Sapiens.” Jordan shrugged off being only two weeks out for the eventual landing (21 July 1969), saying he based his date “on my knowledge of American/German spaceflight engineering”.
Nigel Kneale, though, is still my favourite with memorable TV adaptations, including First Men in the Moon (1964), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and The Woman in Black (1989); and among his own productions are Beasts (1976, a six-part anthology of horror shorts) The Stone Tape (1972, about EVP), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968, predicting ‘reality TV’), The Creature (1955, hunting the Yeti), Quatermass and the Pit (1955 & 1967, witchcraft, ghosts and Martians) The Crunch (a nuke in London) and, top of my list, The Road (1963, loosely based upon Glanvill’s story of the Tedworth poltergeist of 1662, but with a perfect final twist). To close the circle, this was one of Harry Price’s favourite cases, starring in his Poltergeist over England (1945).