Book review: The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight

The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story
Sam Knight
Faber, 2023, £9.99 pbk

After the Aberfan disaster of 1966, it was reported that two of the 116 child victims had experienced some form of premonition of their deaths. 

The day before, ten-year-old Eryl Mai Jones had told her mother: "I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it." Two weeks before, the girl had said, out of the blue, that she was not afraid of dying.

And weeks after the disaster, the parents of another child victim, eight-year-old Paul Davies, found a drawing of massed figures digging in the hillside under the words 'the end' that he had made the night before it took place.

People far from Aberfan claimed to have had some form of premonition of the tragedy too. Some even said they had seen the name of the village.

John Barker, a psychiatrist working at Shelton Hospital just outside Shrewsbury, became fascinated by the claims of foreknowledge, both because of his interest in unusual mental states and because he wondered if it might be possible to act on them.

With the help of an Evening Standard journalist, Barker collected accounts of dreams and visions from members of the public that seemed to foretell death and destruction. Though the overall results were disappointing, he did recruit two people who seemed to have a genuine gift for anticipating such events.

The idea of acting on premonitions causes a logical problem: if you prevent an event taking place, how can people have foreknowledge of it?

And what exactly is it that people experience? Is it the event itself or the weight of public grief after it has taken place? One woman claimed to recognise the image that had come to her before Aberfan in a television report broadcast from among the debris.

Barker emerges as a progressive professional for his era: he was instrumental in ending the use at Shelton of electroconvulsive therapy without anaesthetic. Yet he performed leucotomies and had an interest in aversive treatment to change behaviour. At least the behaviours that worried him, gambling and adultery, cause more harm than those usually targeted by psychiatrists.

Knight paints an unforgettable picture of Shelton Hospital. A vast institution designed by George Gilbert Scott a couple of decades before he produced the hotel at St Pancras, it became a dumping ground for unwanted people from across the county. In its design and its governance, it most resembles Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast.

Shelton closed in 2012, but a friend of mine, who was head of the clinical psychology service in Shropshire for many years, had his office in a former nurses' home there when I first met him in the 1990s. He later moved to less stigmatising premises near the centre of Shrewsbury.

Barker's story is never less than engrossing, and Knight tells it wonderfully well. He is equally at home summarising Kant's account of perception and discussing the Bee Gees' first single.

He follows that story to its end, where tragedy, foreseen or not, both institutional and personal, breaks in.

The Glamorganshire Canal in 1945

Completed in 1794, the Glamorganshire Canal ran for 25 miles from Merthyr Tydfil to the sea at Cardiff Docks.

At first it did well, but the railways inevitably took the coal traffic from it. Closure began in 1898 and was effectively complete by 1942.

If you click on the still above you will be taken to a film on the British Film Institute site that shows members of the Cardiff Amateur Cine Society and their children exploring the canal in 1945. At that date it was a picturesque ruin.

Much of the route was lost under a new Cardiff to Merthyr road in the 1970s, but parts of the canal can still be walked today.

Six of the Best 969

Peter Kellner says Britain is about to discover the dismal reality of Brexit: "On October 16, the prime minister warned that the UK might enter 2021 without a deal on the future relationship with the EU and be forced to trade on World Trade Organization terms. With no hint of doubt or irony, he advised Britons to embrace this prospect 'with high hearts and complete confidence'. This was the economic equivalent of promising to stop the tides. King Cnut would never have believed such nonsense."

"In the days after the disaster, Lord Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board (NCB), attributed the tragedy to ‘natural unknown springs’ beneath the tip.  This was known by all the local people to be incorrect.  The NCB had been tipping on top of springs that are shown on maps of the neighbourhood and in which village schoolboys had played." Martin Johnes and Iain McLean on the political aftermath of the Aberfan disaster.

"Over four years since its launch in 2015, it’s become one of the biggest film channels in the UK. Today, it attracts an audience of over two million viewers a week (and that was before the current lockdown). And it deserves every single one of them." Sarah Philip goes behind the scenes at Talking Pictures TV. 

Chris French pays tribute to James Randi, who died this week.

"A Dolly Parton concert is like a local census, bringing together peoples across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and, miraculously, political affiliation." Lauren Michele Jackson reviews a biography of a remarkable woman.

Diamond Geezer finds Mr Benn's home in Putney.

Six of the Best 668

Examining the economic flaws and false assumptions of the Higher Education and Research Bill, Martin Wolf explains that universities are not supermarkets.

If you love wildlife and enjoy country walks, you've got the makings of a badger patroller, says Lesley Docksey.

Anoosh Chakelian reveals the secret anti-capitalist history of McDonald’s.

Amy Davies interviews Chuck Rapoport, the American photojournalist who recorded the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster.

On Saturday, it will be four years to the day since the town walls behind St Laurence’s church fell collapsed. Almost nothing has happened to get repairs underway." Andy Boddington reports worrying news from Ludlow.

"The outpouring of emotion when this news came out was like I had died ... but I was lucky enough to read the messages that people have sent to me." James Taylor talks about life since his hear condition forced him to retire from cricket.

Six of the Best 646

"During moments of national trauma, the public turns to the BBC for shared experience and understanding," says Ioan Marc Jones He examines the different ways the corporation handled Aberfan and Orgreave.

No one should be given a psychiatric diagnosis at a distance, argues Hannah Jane Parkinson - not even Donald Trump. And she's right.

Gillian Mawson blogs about her new book on evacuees during World War II: "Newspapers described court cases involving families, who, for various reasons, refused to keep evacuees. The Stockport Advertiser stated, ‘Mr and Mrs Jones of Offerton were charged with refusing to accept an evacuee. The clerk pointed out to the couple that it was unpatriotic of them and they were fined.'"

As I write this, Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin are deciding who is world champion with a series of speed games - it's like settling the Ashes with a Twenty20 match. Anyway, Carol Matlack examines the sport's inability to lose its political ties to tyrants.

"There’s a whole swath of early tracks that are missed by an audience that we think started at Dark Side of the Moon." Pink Floyd's Nick Mason is interviewed by Frank Mastropolo.

Benjamin Breen reads The Star Rover, the strange last book by Jack London.

Cliff Michelmore foresaw the horrors of Question Time

Embed from Getty Images

Like all sane people, I have come to the conclusion that the secret of a calm and happy life lies in not watching Question Time.

There was a far-sighted man who anticipated its horrors and refused to have any part in them.

That man was the late Cliff Michelmore.

Before I posted his report from Aberfan, I read the obituaries. They all contained the same anecdote, retailed here by Libby Purves:

After Tonight, he and his colleague Kenneth Allsop started the 24 Hours programme. Editor Derrick Amoore, later the creator of the current affairs show Nationwide, asked him to do a debate with a studio audience that Michelmore considered a bad idea. 

He reportedly snapped ‘I will not be associated with a third-rate Palladium show,’ and nearly left.

There is a good tribute to Michelmore by John Humphrys, who also reported on Aberfan.

Six of the Best 636

"The gargantuan task undertaken by all involved would, as we know now, have an outcome which seems completely deserved, and is now being rightly celebrated." Katharine Pindar reports on the Liberal Democrat campaign in Witney.

James Bloodworth asks why so many Westerners, from right and left, love Vladimir Putin: "Whether they like it or not, those who choose to appear on RT are acting as useful idiots for a revanchist imperial power that shows little interest in the causes conventional 'progressives' profess to care about."

Carolyne Willow argues that councils mustn't be excused from their legal duties to vulnerable children and care leavers.

Janet Harris looks at the dilemmas encountered by the media in commemorating disasters such as Aberfan.

"What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars?" asks Jack Shafer.

The curse of Winnie-the-Pooh did for both A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin, says Lucinda Smyth.

Tom Jones: Green, Green Grass of Home

In his 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Jon Savage writes:

It was the silence and dark tones that reinforced the horror of the news report, as both the BBC and ITV gave Aberfan blanket coverage. By the early afternoon, viewers nationwide were seeing the black tide, the faces contorted by grief and pain, the crowds of rescuers, the small bodies being carried out under blankets. 

The rolling reports would continue over the next few days: as Tony Austin later wrote, "Aberfan showed that TV observation of grief is acceptable to the vast majority, even if it opened eyes to scenes that they would not wish to see."

He goes on to say that the pall cast by Aberfan had an effect on Britain's pop culture beyond the two large charity concerts that were held in South Wales in December.

Part of that effect, he argues, was this song:

Dominating everything that month ... was Tom Jones's "Green, Green Grass of Home", which went to #1 on 3 December and stayed there for the rest of the year. ... It was a country song ... with a death-haunted lyric that offered some surcease within a nation still coming to terms with the events of late October.

For, despite its American origins, it remains hard not the see the success of "Green, Green Grass of Home" as a response to Aberfan.

50 years ago tonight: Cliff Michelmore in Aberfan

I posted this on Liberal England back in March to mark Cliff Michelmore's death.

It was broadcast 50 years ago tonight.

Aberfan was foreseeable and foreseen

Embed from Getty Images

I do not have clear memories of the day Aberfan happened - I was six at the time - but in my lifetime there has been no British tragedy that comes close to it in enormity.

As Huw Edwards' documentary made clear the other evening, the slide of the tip above Aberfan was foreseeable and foreseen.

That programme owed a lot to the work of Martin Johnes and Iain McLean, who wrote a book, Aberfan: Government and Disasters, on it in 2000.

In a new article for this week's 50th anniversary - The Political Aftermath of the Aberfan Disaster - they write:

The disaster simply would not have happened had the NCB [National Coal Board] taken local fears about the tips more seriously or enforced its own rules on tip safety. But it was an organization hampered by mismanagement yet protected from market and political pressure by being part of the state and a dominant local employer. 

Before the disaster, the NCB’s economic and local political power meant no one, including the small local authority in Merthyr, was able to challenge it to do more about fears on tip safety. After the disaster, the NCB’s economic and national power meant its interests took precedent over those whose children it had killed.

And in a point Edwards passed over, they emphasise that mines were being closed in the 1960s (at a faster rate than they were under Margaret Thatcher).

Lord Robens, the head of the NCB and a Labour Party bigwig, was seen as the only man who could oversee these closures without causing a coal strike. So he stayed on despite his organisation's culpability.

Cliff Michelmore at Aberfan

Cliff Michelmore belonged to the generation that pioneered television presentation and still possessed a certain decency and an innocence about the medium.

His heyday fell just before the point where my memories of television begin, but I do recall people like his Tonight colleague Fyfe Robertson. He gave the impression that he did not realise he was on television or at least that he was constantly surprised to find he was.

The 50th anniversary of Aberfan, the disaster in which a coal waste tip slid down the hillside and engulfed a primary school, falls on 21 October this year. In many ways it was the first televised disaster, and I do just remember it.

This is Cliff Michelmore's report from the scene on the evening of that dreadful day.

Six of the Best 486

Slogger O'Toole offers a host of reasons why the rise of referendums in British politics should be resisted.

"The former mining towns of the South Wales Valleys have one of the highest levels of antidepressant prescribing in Wales, attracting lurid newspaper headlines about areas 'hooked on happy pills'. According to Cwm Taf University Health Board, which covers former mining towns including Merthyr Tydfil, Aberfan, and Pontypridd, as many as one in six of its residents are on antidepressants, the highest prescribing rate in the UK." Anne Gulland on why medication is the the answer to social and economic problems.

Hynd's Blog knows what is wrong with our politics. Not referendums. Rosettes.

Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are examined in a BFI feature by Stephen Dalton.

"History is written by the winners. And good luck to the members of the Crazy Gang who have dined out on the stories of their victory in the 1988 FA Cup final for more than 25 years. But ... let’s get this straight: the stories have been embellished to the point where they bear little relation to reality. I know, because I was there." John Barnes on a famous match.

Spitalfields Life has some photos of this quarter of London in 1984.

John Humphrys remembers Aberfan

The Aberfan disaster took place 40 years ago today:

I have always said and I will always say that nothing - nothing - I will ever see will compare to the horrors of that day.