The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight: an ‘endlessly readable’ book
Story explores psychic ‘precognition’ surrounding 1966 Aberfan disaster
In October 1966, a ten-year-old Welsh girl named Eryl Mai Jones told her mother of a disturbing dream, in which “something black” had covered her school, said Steven Poole in The Daily Telegraph. The next day, she was one of 144 people killed in the Aberfan disaster – caused when a coal-slurry tip on top of a hill collapsed and buried the mining village below.
In the wake of the tragedy, a “maverick psychiatrist” named John Barker visited Aberfan and discovered that Eryl Mai wasn’t alone in having foreseen it: several other people had had similar premonitions. To Barker, it seemed that psychic “precognition might be as common in the general population as left-handedness” – and this belief led him to found a “bureau” to solicit premonitions from the public. Sam Knight first wrote about Barker in a 2019 New Yorker article. Now he has expanded that piece into “a short book which is long on period atmosphere and enjoyably gratuitous detail”.
Opened in January 1967, the Premonitions Bureau was a collaboration between Barker and Peter Fairley, the science editor of the London Evening Standard. Over the next year and a half, the bureau received hundreds of premonitions, the vast majority of which proved bogus.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
But Barker’s efforts did unearth a couple of “human seismometers”, with a seeming knack for prophesying calamity, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Between them, Kathleen Middleton, a London ballet teacher, and Alan Hencher, a post office telephone operator, accurately “predicted a train derailment, two plane crashes, the first death of an astronaut and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination”. Both also predicted the event that ultimately led to the bureau’s closure: Barker’s death, from an aneurysm, in August 1968.
The goal behind the Premonitions Bureau was to use the nation’s “dreams and visions” to create a “warning service analogous to a government seismology or meteorology bureau”, said Mike Jay in Literary Review. Such an aim, Knight shows, was never realistic, not least because of the “Jonah quandary” – the fact that a prophecy ceases to be accurate if the event in question is prevented from occurring.
While this is a “story of failure”, Knight relates it with “wit and intelligence”. And wisely, he doesn’t sneer at Barker, but treats him as a “questing intellect” deserving of respect, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Fizzing with ideas and “doggedly chased-down detail”, this is an “endlessly readable” book.
Faber 256pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
-
The ‘menopause gold rush’Under the Radar Women vulnerable to misinformation and marketing of ‘unregulated’ products
-
Voting Rights Act: SCOTUS’s pivotal decisionFeature A Supreme Court ruling against the Voting Rights Act could allow Republicans to redraw districts and solidify control of the House
-
No Kings rally: What did it achieve?Feature The latest ‘No Kings’ march has become the largest protest in U.S. history
-
Roasted squash and apple soup recipeThe Week Recommends Autumnal soup is full of warming and hearty flavours
-
6 well-crafted log homesFeature Featuring a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in Montana and a Tulikivi stove in New York
-
Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an AccidentFeature A nuclear missile bears down on a U.S. city, a sexual misconduct allegation rocks an elite university campus, and a victim of government terror pursues vengeance
-
Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’Feature Gertrude Stein’s untold story and Jane Leavy’s playbook on how to save baseball
-
Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into ArtFeature Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Dec. 7
-
Music reviews: Olivia Dean, Madi Diaz, and Hannah FrancesFeature “The Art of Loving,” “Fatal Optimist,” and “Nested in Tangles”
-
Gilbert King’s 6 favorite books about the search for justiceFeature The journalist recommends works by Bryan Stevenson, David Grann, and more
-
Ready for the apocalypseFeature As anxiety rises about the state of the world, the ranks of preppers are growing—and changing.