The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight

Author:Sam Knight [Knight, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

At the meeting in Birmingham, Barker had been cleared of any wrongdoing. But he took the opportunity to warn ­Littlejohn and the local NHS board about the other research projects that he was pursuing. For the first time, the psychiatrist told his supervisors about both Scared to Death (Barker had recently delivered a draft of the book to his publishers) and the Premonitions Bureau.

“Littlejohn said nothing,” Barker noted in a memo that he sent asking advice from a medical defense lawyer a few days later. The NHS officials, who had been sympathetic about the aversion therapy story, became alarmed. Barker was told that he would have to publish his book anony­mously and remove his name from any association with the Premonitions Bureau, or risk losing his job.

“What shall I do? Am I to walk into a trap?” Barker asked the lawyer. He saw himself approaching an impossible situation, caught between his research, which transcended the conventional borders of psychiatry, and the suffocating strictures of Shelton. In 1963, Littlejohn had asked both Barker and Enoch to submit their research papers and journal correspondence to him before sending them for publication. The two young doctors had refused. “Dr. Littlejohn was not pleased and said he was left out of the picture,” Barker ­noted. He thought the older man was jealous.

Barker wasn’t sure if he could alter his book or tell Fairley to stop collecting premonitions even if he wanted to. His account of his research to the lawyer had an edge of grandeur. He described momentous events sweeping him along, rather than esoteric research projects that he pursued in his spare time. “I am one of those people who is interested in work and has had some success,” he wrote. According to Barker, his publisher had already decided that Scared to Death was going to be one of their “big” books of 1968. “The publicity could be considerable,” he wrote. Barker described his work on Aberfan as “essential material and perhaps the largest study on precognition in existence.” The Premonitions Bureau, meanwhile, was entirely his idea and “the logical outcome” of the Aberfan work. Calls and letters were coming in every day. “At any time a major disaster could be forecast,” Barker wrote. He wasn’t sure how much power Littlejohn and the hospital board really had. The meeting in Birmingham had lasted an hour. “I was quite exhausted afterward and nearly collapsed,” Barker wrote. He was reminded of his traumatic departure from Dorset.

After being woken by Hencher’s telephone call that ­morning, Barker passed the prediction on to the Evening Standard. In the subsequent weeks, he made no effort to curb his extracurricular research or to stop drawing attention to himself. On April 11, he and Fairley appeared on Late Night Line-Up, a chat show on BBC2, to publicize the bureau. Nine days later, a turboprop Britannia passenger aircraft carrying 130 people attempted to land in Nicosia, Cyprus, during a thunderstorm. The plane, which belonged to Globe Air, a new ­low-­cost Swiss charter airline, was on its way from Bangkok to Basel, carrying mostly Swiss and German holidaymakers.

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