Could disaster premonitions save lives?

In the 1960s, a psychiatrist and a hack set up a bureau to harness the power of spookily prophetic dreams

PREMONITIONS BUREAU by Sam Knight 256pp, Faber, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £6.02 ÌÌÌÌÌ

In October 1966, a 10-year-old Welsh girl named Eryl Mai Jones told her mother of a disturbing dream. “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there,” she said. “Something black had come down all over it.” The next day, she went to school and was killed in the Aberfan disaster, when a coalslurry tip on the top of a hill collapsed and buried the village below.

A maverick psychiatrist named John Barker, who worked across the border in an asylum, was intrigued, and teamed up with Peter Fairley, the Evening Standard’s science correspondent in London, to create the Premonitions Bureau, inviting readers to send in their precognitions of disaster. The same day as Eryl Mai Jones reported her dream, it turned out, a spiritualcent ist named Constance Milder had told six people in Plymouth that she had experienced a vision of a schoolhouse, a Welsh miner and an “avalanche of coal” rushing down a mountain towards a terrified boy.

Eerie coincidences, or something more? This was the 1960s, and it was not yet discreditable for scientists and medical men to take seriously the possibility of psychic phenomena. Barker, who was at the time working on a book about whether a person could die from fright, supposed precognition might be as common in the general population as left-handedness. And if premonitions were systematically collected via the Bureau, it might even be possible to avert future disasters.

Sam Knight first told this story in a 2019 article for The New Yorker magazine, and has now expanded it into a short book which is long on period atmosphere and enjoyably gratuitous detail. The brooding ambiance of Barker’s mental institution, Shelton Hospital, is only briefly leavened by the startling fact that it brewed its own one-perTHE hospital beer and that it employed “a butcher with an attitude problem”. A long description of its other qualities ends, in the authors’ characteristically stylish deadpan: “The hospital cricket pitch was acknowledged as one of the finest in the country. People did not get better.”

Hacks and the hack-curious, meanwhile, will be delighted by the smoky evocations of life in the Evening Standard’s offices, where Fairley reported on the space race and coined the phrase “brain drain” to describe the exodus of British scientific minds. His assistant, Jennifer Preston, was a phenomenon unto herself: “She exchanged letters with President François Mitterand of France as if that were a normal thing to do,” Knight reports.

Though now a book, his story still reads very much in the highmagazine style, focusing on biographical narrative with abrupt cross-cuts into personal authorial reflection, intimations of ghostly apparitions, diluted Greek philosophy or fragments of interviews with scientists. There are mild diversions into psychoanalytic theory, the science of entropy or the nocebo effect (the opposite of placebo), and the “predictive” model of consciousness attributed first to the 19th-century German polymath von Helmholtz and revived by modern cognitive science. According to this idea, the brain is not a passive receiver of sense data but is always actively predicting and creating the world it perceives.

How exactly this might be connected to the idea of precognition, though, or whether it is just a kind of pleasing conceptual rhyme, is not really pursued. There is no systematic attempt to sift evidence or theory, and no apparatus of endnotes or other references. Rather, the prevailing mood is one of placid musing and the comfortable juggling of semi-paradoxes: “Randomness is banal. It diminishes us. But the truth is that we resist meaning all the time.” Knight claims his book is about “time and our place in it”, but that is not a rigorous focus; its real virtues are archival and reportorial, in its rich depiction of an era and a sometimes cantankerous but undoubtedly brilliant man.

So are premonitions really possible, or are they all just examples of confirmation bias? You remember the times you were thinking of someone when they called you, and forget the more numerous times they didn’t. If, as one of Barker’s favourite prescients did, you have a foreboding about “danger at sea”, it probably won’t be long before some maritime misfortune comes along to prove you right. If you predicted some kind of air disaster in the 1960s, too, you were bound to be vindicated before long: jetliners crashed all the time back then.

On the other hand, it’s harder to explain the tragic vision of Eryl Mai Jones, or that of another of Barker’s stars, a London piano teacher named Lorna Middleton. One day she wrote to The Standard describing having seen a train crash and the words “Charing Cross”. Four days later a train from Hastings to Charing Cross derailed at Hither Green, killing 49 people. In a late gruesome irony, however, Knight describes how none of the seers managed to predict a fatal fire at Shelton Hospital itself. Despite Barker’s noble hopes, no catastrophe was ever prevented by the Premonitions Bureau before his own untimely death in 1968.

In the end, the book does not aspire to provide a definitive answer either way. It works powerfully, though, as a dramatic, sepiatinged illustration of the evergreen – indeed, historically always true – notion that stranger things are possible than can currently be rationally explained.