Tower and Town, September 2022 (view the full edition)Sam Knight - The Premonitions Bureau
Barker sought the help of John Fairley, a journalist who had made his name reporting on the space race and who had a science column with the Evening Standard. Together they came up with the idea of asking the public whether they had experienced any premonitions about Aberfan, and after advertising in the paper they received 76 replies from people convinced they'd had a foretelling, 60 of whom Barker felt were reliable and which convinced him that precognition was a reality. A few weeks later, Barker and Fairley persuaded the paper's editor to set up the Premonitions Bureau, asking people to send in their dreams and visions so they could be investigated. Sam Knight tells the history of the Premonitions Bureau in a series of pen portraits of the people and events involved. These fascinating descriptions range from the biography of one of the best Premonitions Bureau 'percipients' - 52-year-old ballet teacher Kathleen Middleton, who had a forewarning of Aberfan and other disasters - to the conditions at the rundown Shelton Hospital, where Barker worked his day job and where a fire killed 24 patients in 1968. It is told in a more journalistic way than a conventional non-fiction book, but the story flows brilliantly while instilling an eerie uncertainty about the paranormal and the weird predictions sent to the bureau. Do premonitions exist? Could we prevent tragedy if we paid attention to seers? The Premonitions Bureau found people who seemed to have an astounding hit rate in foretelling disasters - so perhaps we could... Kate Fry |
After the Aberfan disaster in 1966, toys, brandy, rubber gloves and other 'useful' objects were delivered to the town from all over the UK and abroad as newspapers, TV and radio spread the story of the tragedy. The publicity also led to the sharing of personal fateful stories: people who had just missed being in the path of the landslide; those who had changed their morning routine and had been killed; and, stranger still, those who had dreamed of the overwhelming blackness the night before, or knew that a catastrophe was coming. These premonitions caught the eye of John Barker, a middle-aged psychiatrist who was interested in the paranormal, and he decided he should investigate further - for if the next disaster could be predicted, perhaps it could be averted.