Dame Janet Vaughan, the ‘old dragon’ of Somerville

There follows an extract from a review in the Daily Mail by Quentin Letts of the book The Real Iron Lady: Working With Mrs Thatcher by Gillian Shephard.

Janet Vaughan, principal of Mrs T’s Oxford college [Somerville], is several times unveiled as a frightful Lefty snoot – she thought young Margaret Roberts no more than ‘a perfectly adequate chemist’ – but can we not have some description of the old dragon? Did Mrs T ever mention her? Did Vaughan’s dismissiveness fuel the great journey from Grantham to Downing Street? (22 March 2013)

Margaret Thatcher was at Somerville about a decade before I was, so Dame Janet was in situ at the time of the onset of the Welfare State. This shows how well worked out the egalitarian ideology of the Welfare State already was, although at that time seldom made explicit. For example, I do not think that anyone at that time would have said explicitly that there was no such thing as innate ability, or no such thing as genetically determined individual differences.

The appointment of Janet Vaughan as Principal of Somerville sheds a strange light on the underlying intentions of the establishment.

They could hardly have regarded such an appointment as unimportant, or been unaware of what Janet Vaughan’s attitudes were likely to be. Somerville was one of a small number of developing women’s colleges which could be expected to attract the cleverest and most ambitious young women from all over the world, a number of whom would return to their native country to become influential in its government. Dame Janet was strongly communistic in outlook, and communism is opposed to precocious ability. Furthermore, there is every reason to think that Dame Janet herself had an IQ which was well below that of the majority of the undergraduates in her college. It is therefore not surprising that she blocked the way of many of them.

State education might have been expected to provide opportunity for exceptional ability, whatever its original circumstances, but in fact egalitarianism was to mean that there was no such thing as an exceptional individual.

When undergraduates at Somerville encountered difficulties, Dame Janet would deny them permission to take the exams for which they were working and also tell them that they should content themselves with less exalted careers.

I knew of one undergraduate who went regularly to a college of further education in the centre of Oxford to work for an external Honours degree in physics from London University, having been told by Dame Janet that at Oxford she would only be allowed to sit the examination for a Pass degree (a degree without Honours).

Margaret Thatcher was told by Dame Janet that she was nothing more than ‘a perfectly adequate chemist’. I was told by her that I was ‘a competent mathematician, and wasn’t that enough for me?’ I wonder how many others, with IQs far above that of Janet Vaughan herself, were told similar things.

And, denying support for a research scholarship to a Somerville graduate I knew who had a high IQ and was really keen to do research, Dame Janet said – perhaps with the implication that the graduate should not mind about it – that ‘research is dull’. The so-called research which she (Dame Janet) did herself certainly was.

Suing your headmaster

It is a feature of modern society that it is impossible to express a need. If society has ruined your education and thrown you out without a usable qualification, this gives you no claim on anyone. The fact that you are suffering, for lack of the sort of high-flying academic career you should have had all along, gives you no claim. The only way to get anyone to take any notice is to assert that someone in the system did something wrong.

The local authority was wrong to persecute my father. But, of course, you cannot prove this. They are delighted to tell you that nothing can be proved. And then they say (as I was told by a Shadow Minister of Education) that you would have to sue for reparation from the actual individual who made a false statement or unjustifiable decision. This is not, I believe, legally correct; the person or persons involved were acting as servants of the local authority, and it is the local authority that should be sued, even if the individuals concerned are dead.

Bu you cannot claim that you were wrongfully treated in terms of your IQ, because IQ is supposed not to exist. And you cannot claim that you were forced to accept arrangements that were in no way in line with your own perception of your needs, because ‘education’ authorities do not have to provide what any child wants. ‘The child has no valid volition’, as someone with long experience of working in the ‘education’ system once said to me.

And then I know that if I tried to sue anyone I would only be risking money – money which I so badly need to work towards setting up my own institutional environment – and the judge would no doubt be in sympathy with the modern ideology.

A colleague of mine was in a similar position to mine, even if less extreme and less obvious. It should have been possible for her to sue her headmaster for his unjustifiable treatment of her. Her parents should have opposed him and demanded her reinstatement in the top stream, given her obvious ability. Or, better, taken her away from so bad a school and helped her to prepare for the scholarship exam at home.

In the event, it was an indictment of the ‘education’ system that she approached the end of it with no suitable opportunities open to her, and was forced to join forces with me in the establishment of an independent academic organisation. She could have no idea that the modern ideology would lead to her family discriminating against her financially, so that they gave her less support than families are in the habit of giving to those who follow socially recognised careers.

In fact what she was doing was no less respectable (even if less respected) than any normal academic career in a university. More respectable, in fact, because standards have declined severely, and a great deal of what goes on in recognised universities is rubbish.

I understand that her headmaster had no heirs. He should have left everything to her in reparation. If her parents had put her case to him forcibly enough, as they should have done, he might have actually done this. In fact, since her parents made no protest or complaint, he felt under no pressure to make amends.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of education, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic has continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. I make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

New pensions arrangements: ‘pro-family’, anti-intellectual

The population of existing pensioners is one which has an average IQ above that of the population as a whole, and therefore, as the modern ideology works, is one from which resources are to be transferred to populations with lower average IQs (a process known as ‘redistribution’).

Previously, suggestions were made by which all pensioners could pay some new tax on capital or income, but for the present these suggestions have lapsed, and the only new tax on existing pensioners is to be the ‘Granny Tax’ – a tax on their earnings, if they have any, which was not previously payable above a certain age.

Additional resources are being distributed to populations of pensionable age with lower average IQs, even if it is not clear where these resources are coming from. Extra resources are to be paid to pensioners in the future, but none are to be received by the existing population of pensioners.

The new proposals for taxing the elderly will adversely affect those, like myself, who need to employ people, for purposes of building up an independent academic institution or otherwise. In particular, employees over a certain age are currently free from paying national insurance contributions, which greatly reduces the bureaucracy involved in employing them, and it has been proposed that this exemption be removed.

Losers: Existing pensioners

The most aggrieved at the new rules will be ten million existing pensioners who currently get less than the proposed flat-rate pension. Only those retiring after the single-tier pension is introduced on April 6, 2017 will qualify for the new £155 a week payout. If you get less today, you will keep getting less.

This will create an apartheid. For example, a man who turns 65 on April 5, 2017, and who has worked all his life is likely to get about £118 state pension payout. But had the same person been born the following day, their state pension would be £37 a week more. Over 25 years of retirement he will have missed out on £48,100.

To compound matters, anyone who hits state pension age (currently roughly 61 and five months for women and 65 for men) between April 6 this year and April 5, 2017, will have a double blow. Not only will they fail to get the higher pension, but they will be victims of the so-called Granny Tax. This will strip them of the higher tax-free allowances that over 65s currently get.

Winners: Women and carers

Those who will gain the most in the state pension overhaul will be people who have long periods out of employment, such as stay-at-home mothers. This is because your entitlement to a state pension is [currently] accrued by paying National Insurance contributions [...]

Stay-at-home mother Kate Wilkinson, 36, is in line to benefit from the state pension shake-up. Under current rules, parents who take breaks from work frequently miss out on the full payout when they retire [...]

Mrs Wilkinson says: ‘These changes are fantastic because at the moment it feels unfair – as if you’re being punished for wanting to bring up your children. It is great to get that extra support and get a bit back for being a stay-at-home mum.’

(Extracts taken from Daily Mail, 16 January 2013)

Existing pensioners have qualified for their pensions by paying a full number of contributions, whether out of a percentage of their earnings or, if they were not earning, by making voluntary contributions. Thus this population has demonstrated above-average functionality over a long period.

Non-means-tested pensions are to be paid only to a population which is much less highly selected, including those who have been unemployed for long periods and have not taken the trouble to pay voluntary contributions.

So redistribution is again to take place, by distributing more resources to a population with a lower average IQ, without any additional resources being allocated to the population of pensioners with a higher average IQ.

The proposed legislation is said to be ‘incredibly pro-family’. What it is also, though this is not mentioned, is antagonistic to outcast intellectuals, still struggling at pensionable age to recover from their ruined ‘education’. But not ‘incredibly’ so, only anti them in the accustomed way.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Causes of absenteeism in a bootlace factory

text of a letter

You said that you found our questionnaire on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) ‘inspirational’. Please do not imagine that I myself found it so, when Charles McCreery and I did the projects on OBEs. The projects were just the best method I had available at the time of working towards a university appointment and a professorship as soon as possible.

You may object that it was a very bad method of trying to work towards it, but my position was determined by the impossibility of getting support from my college (Somerville) for any way of getting back into a career path, for example by taking another degree in any of a wide variety of subjects as quickly as possible.

So I was lucky to find that there was a way of getting a postgraduate grant from Trinity College, Cambridge, which did not depend on support from my college, in an area of research that was new to me.

It is true that I saw the possibility of further research by me on OBEs (unbiased by the prevailing ideology) on a much larger scale as leading eventually to significant theoretical advances on important and totally ignored issues. However, doing work on the restricted scale that was possible in bad circumstances was of no greater interest to me than would have been research, on the same scale and in the same circumstances, on ‘Causes of absenteeism in a bootlace factory’.

Research of extreme theoretical importance remains possible in this area, but this is only going to happen in a future which we need to be given help in working towards. The potential importance of the research is probably the reason for OBEs having been so totally ignored before I started to make my appeals for them. It is probably also the reason why Charles and I have been deprived of any source of finance to carry on further work, while money has been lavished (relatively speaking) on people who already have academic status and salary and who can be relied upon only to do research which will not risk challenging the prevailing ideology.

Although I was, and still am, represented as having some peculiar ‘interest’ in hallucinatory experiences, it was in fact the case that my only motive for doing small-scale work in bad circumstances was to increase my claim on academic career progression with the implied improvement of circumstances.

The theoretical importance of an area of research does not make it any more rewarding (or less damaging) to do boring and tedious work in that area, without even the hotel environment and other circumstances provided by a university career that could make life worth living.

After doing the research for which I got a BLitt, and eventually a DPhil, which I had hoped would give me an entrée to some academic career path, leading as soon as possible to a professorship, I found I was actually as devoid of opportunity as before.

I was not supposed to mind if I was as outcast and destitute as before, after attempting to establish a position for myself by doing research in previously unrecognised fields. Only those who already had academic status and salary would be permitted to do work in the new fields. I and any associates I had would be left without status or income; the years of hard labour having resulted in no reward, being as totally abortive as had been the decades of work in schools and universities which had been supposed to give one access to a university career.

So society threw me out again, as badly off as if I had never been to school or college at all, admittedly now with contacts among the establishment population who could have supported me but who unfortunately had made a universal decision not to do so.

An outlaw is defined as ‘a person who has broken the law, especially who remains at large’. I remained at large, having committed sedition; hence I was an outlaw. I was neither a drugged zombie nor a wage slave, so all the more beyond the pale.

Dr McCreery, in spite of the DPhil gained by his supervised research on OBEs, found himself unable to obtain funding for further research, or an academic appointment well-paid enough to relieve the pressures of survival sufficiently for him even to make progress with writing a book based on his DPhil work. Such a book would include more discussion of individual cases and future possibilities for research than had been possible in the thesis.

We are still appealing for financial support to make possible at least this level of productivity. Dr McCreery could now proceed with the editing and publication of this and other books if he were provided with funding of at least £100,000 per annum.

As the new fields of research developed, in universities in North America and elsewhere, we hoped that Dr McCreery might also become eligible for research grants and appointments. But with no financial support at all, he could only lose ground to academics with status and salary, who were able to publish books and papers at a much greater rate, so that they became the leading ‘experts’ in the field, although their work was far less analytical and free from prejudice than his had been.

People like to talk as though, provided you stay physically alive, you are competing on equal terms with salaried academics enjoying the facilities provided by their universities.

The figure of £100,000 per annum to finance Dr McCreery’s work has to be seen in the context of his having to pay for all the facilities, staff etc. which are provided for those having university appointments. Some years ago we worked out that the average Oxford University research department was spending about £100,000 a year to support each of its research workers. There has been inflation since then, so £100,000 is probably an underestimate and much more could be done with £200,000 per annum.

Letter about my Professorship applications

text of a letter

Dear ...

I attach herewith a copy of a letter which I have been sending to members of electoral committees when I apply for Oxford and Cambridge Professorships, for which I am not shortlisted.

I hope the letter will go some way to explaining how I got into a social position so bad that it not only arouses hostility against myself, but is liable also to arouse hostility against anyone, such as Dr Charles McCreery, who attempts to give me any support.

Modern education is geared against exceptional ability, which is how I came to be thrown out without a research scholarship at the end of my ruined ‘education’.

I went on, nevertheless, trying to return to an academic career by proceeding to do research independently, and this was seen as seditious, in the sense of implicitly questioning the meaningfulness of my rejection by society, and hence suggesting to the world at large that such acceptance or rejection was not the sole criterion of merit or ability.

copy of letter to members of Electoral Boards

Dear Professor [...],

I am writing to you as you are a member of the Electoral Board for the Professorship of [...].

I applied for the post in [...] and was informed later that I had not been shortlisted.

It is likely that my application was put in the ‘reject’ pile (on account of my age and other factors) before you read it. In which case I need to fully explain my situation to you.

I was a precocious child. I was reading books at the age of two; and given my extreme precocity, it was both cruel and unreasonable to expect my education to consist of taking about the normal number of exams at about the usual age. The post-war legislation which prohibited the taking of any exams at all until after the 16th birthday had a particularly terrible effect on my life. I therefore took many fewer exams and at much later ages than I could and should have done.

My life was one of agonised frustration and deprivation. I did not get to university until far too late an age, by which time I was too old and had been suffering for too long to take any interest in the process of taking a first degree. My college continued to apply the policy of refusing to accept that any problems which arose from a retarded education needed to be taken into account.

Recently people have been suing the educational system for providing them with inadequate skills and qualifications. I should have been able to sue for being left with no paper qualification with which to enter the academic career which, in view of my ability and aptitudes, I needed to have.

I did not accept that I could have any other sort of career or that life would be tolerable without a career.

In spite of my lack of paper qualifications I was perfectly well able to teach or do research in several subjects, so that the lack of a paper qualification and of support from my college was the only reason for my not applying for appointments teaching e.g. maths or physics.

My only motive in everything I did was to effect return to a full-time academic career as quickly as possible. The research I did was not determined by considerations of interest to myself but by what I could get funding for.

It may be considered that I was ill-advised to attempt to do research in what would be, even if accepted, a new area of academic work, as a means of returning to an academic career. In fact I was not advised at all, as my college refused to give any consideration to my need to work my way back to a university career. Whatever advice I had been given I would, in my desperate situation, have been forced to work on anything for which I could get funding.

There appears to be a social convention that a person is not subjected to suffering and hardship by being deprived of a career, however high their IQ and however great their temperamental need to put their drive and effort into a progressive situation. Anything they do in exile is supposed to have been done because of a particular interest in it. Neither of these things has been true in my case. My life without a career has been one of severe hardship and deprivation and the increasing desperation of my urgent need to return to a university career has caused me agonising frustration for many years past.

It is these difficulties that have prevented me from applying to return to an academic career at an earlier age (any applications I did make being turned down) so I must ask that my age be not held against me since I have made the best progress I could. So far as I am concerned I am just in the position of someone in their early twenties attempting to start on a full-time, full-length academic career.

It is an indication of the oppressiveness of modern society that nobody considers it their business to enquire into the predicament of the victims of social outrage perpetrated by the educational and academic systems, and to support them in recovering from it.

A form of help which you could certainly give me would be money. Without a salary, and having to provide myself with an institutional environment as best I can, it is almost impossible for me to write books expressing my views, to publish those which have already been written and stockpiled, or to carry out any of the research which I have now been prevented from doing for several decades, and which I need to do to enhance my claim on restoration to the sort of career I which I should have been having all along.

This is a standing invitation to you or any senior academic to come to visit me at my impoverished independent university, to discuss ways of supporting me, morally or financially, so that I do not continue to be prevented from contributing to the intellectual life of my time, as a headmistress (who perhaps lost her job for the crime of allowing me to be too happy at her school) once said that I was certain to do.

However, I am not inviting you or anyone else to come without warning, and an appointment would have to be made well in advance, and accompanied by a donation of at least £5000 towards the support of my institution, or to me personally. In fact, it would be better if made to me personally, as our affairs are too constricted and under-staffed to accept any additional burden in the way of processing and accounting for donations.

Yours sincerely,
etc.

Pretending that nothing is wrong

text of a letter

I am sorry that I have not yet been able to meet you again. I could have put you in the picture about all the interaction connected with Charles’s claims for reparation, up to and including the two years or so during which Richard Mead, the biographer of Charles’s father, has been writing his book. As it is, no one has heard Charles’s side of it, and it is probable that the fictitious distortions put around by his family have continued to circulate quite widely. From time to time we get indications of this from some quarter or another, as we did from Richard Mead himself.

We are in a position in which it is apparently considered right and proper automatically to presume that we are in the wrong, and to refrain from considering that anyone else might be at fault.

We have always thought that his family's treatment of Charles was so deplorable and unjustifiable that other upper-class people who got wind of it would, and should have, put them under pressure to reverse the harm that had been done, and to give Charles positive support in the future, to enable him to make up for the delay in his productive intellectual career.

We were shocked at the time that apparently no one attempted to put pressure on his family to do so, including relatives and former friends of Charles. We were shocked again when the publication of the biography of Charles’s father did nothing to produce any expression of sympathy with Charles's position, or of any intention to attempt to remedy it.

When we heard that Richard Mead was about to start writing this book, we hoped that this would make Charles’s family think that they should set their house in order before attention was drawn to the General's life, but they did not do this. Instead, both his brothers approached Charles with disingenuous attempts to embark on social interaction as if nothing had gone wrong in the past that needed to be set right.

As Charles did not accept these approaches, and had previously made it clear that the resumption of social relationships could only take place after reparation for the wrongs of the past had at least been started upon, it seems that his family relied on getting Richard Mead to accept their version of events, and he (Mead) certainly showed every sign of wishing to do so.

I have attempted to deal, in pieces which I have posted on my blog, with some of the worst misrepresentations which we have encountered, and I hope that you will take the trouble to read them, so that you will not support any misrepresentation of Charles's position which may be made. (In the same way that, even now, I am widely supposed to have 'followed my interests' in being thrown out of an academic career.)

Sedition

Things are often defined somewhat differently in modern English dictionaries, by comparison with dictionaries published earlier.

“Sedition”, for example, is defined in Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary (mid-century version) as

insurrection; public tumult; vaguely, any offence against the state short of treason

In the current Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, “sedition” is:

actions or speech urging rebellion against the authority of a state or ruler

It is clear that on the later definition I have not been able to avoid being seditious, since I was attempting to do research without having been selected by society to have the cachet of authorisation to do so. Why was I attempting this? Because I had been rejected by society. So either there was something wrong with the system which had rejected me, or there was something wrong with me which justified the system in rejecting me.

As I went on trying to do research without being socially authorised to do so, I was implicitly asserting that there was something wrong with the system which had rejected me, and that it was right and proper for someone in my position to act against the wishes of that system. Hence I was being seditious in the modern sense of the word.

This, I suppose, accounts for my having been treated as a criminal from the start, and continuing to be so treated to the present day. Practically everybody will immediately jump to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me, and not something wrong with the system.

When I met General McCreery (the only time I did) he said “Could we not get the University to accept us working under their supervision?” I said that, at present, the areas in which we were proposing to work were not recognised by the University but that we hoped to do research which would gain recognition, so that perhaps later we might aspire to status within the university system. I said that we had thought of seeking university affiliation straight away, but that we did not think it would be possible unless some senior person made an approach on our behalf, which no one was doing.

Apparently this did not satisfy General McCreery, and later he said to Charles that we should seek to become subordinate to the university before attempting to raise money to finance the research. Clearly he thought that we should actively refrain from doing anything that might fail to be approved of.

The General did not add that if Charles continued to support me in my attempts to raise money, he (Charles) would himself be regarded as a reprobate and an outlaw, whom it was right to slander and disinherit. However, in practice that was how the General proceeded to treat him.

The psychological syndrome requiring the subordination of ability to socially conferred status is evidently extremely strong, although not openly expressed. Several people, other than the General, had expressed the view that since I and my associates were attempting the impossible in setting up an independent academic organisation, it would be kindest to put an end to our suffering as soon as possible, while actively choking off support that we seemed about to secure.

In a similar way, General McCreery advised Charles, as if benevolently, that it would be impossible for us to succeed, and proceeded to ensure that it would be, by using his position as a Patron and ostensible supporter to disseminate hostility, and by impoverishing Charles and bringing about his exile from the social class of which he had previously been a normally acceptable member.

* * *

At the time of my conversation with the General, I had not published anything which was overtly critical of the prevailing collectivist ideology. I was treated as a criminal only on account of the seditious attitudes implied by my continuing to attempt to make a career in academic research despite having been rejected by my Oxford college. This, as may be seen, was apparently considered to be bad enough.

Since that time, I and my associates have published criticisms of various aspects of the modern collectivist ideology. My blog is one of those which have been blocked by China, presumably because China wishes to shield its population from any awareness that such critical attitudes are possible.

Although less explicit, the attitude to any expression of our views has been the same in the West. Our books are given as little publicity as possible, and we are treated as if we do not exist. Thus, although our books must have reached the attention of a wide readership, no financial or other advantage reaches us, of the sort which might make possible further publication, or intellectual activity of any kind.

Open letter to the family of the late General Sir Richard McCreery

We have posted below advertisements for some of the properties near here which supporters might buy or rent to help us expand our activities to a more adequate level.

I would suggest that buying the house advertised at £500K in the name of Dr Charles McCreery would indicate a wish on the part of his family to start making reparation to him for the damage to his prospects that was done, and continues to be done, by slander and disinheritance.

The value of this house is almost certainly far less than the present value of the Chelsea flat which Charles’s mother, Lady McCreery, left to his sister in her will, from which Charles was excluded.

Our current enquiries show that the value of such a flat at Cranmer Court in Chelsea is not less, and probably more, than £800K, this being the current market value of a one-bedroom flat there. In fact, his mother’s flat which was left to his sister appears to have had at least two bedrooms.

It should not be overlooked that, deprived of financial support as we are, the gift of a house would need to be accompanied by a gift of money which could be invested to provide for the running costs, insurance and expenses of the house. The cost of the house purchase would be £500K, so £500K in cash could be added to bring the total up to £1m. This would indicate a serious intention to start making reparation to Dr McCreery, but would still be a small fraction of the benefits which would have accrued to him over the years by investment of the inheritances of which he was unjustly deprived.

* * *

Further information about this situation can be found at Charles McCreery and his family.

Supporting us by buying or renting houses

Lenin is said to have declared that the way to crush the bourgeoisie was to grind them between the millstones of inflation and taxation.

This seems to be the programme that has been, and is being, followed in this country and throughout Western civilisation.

There is a smallish house for sale near here, and also a small house for rent near here. Any potential supporter could buy or rent one of them, as a holiday home and/or for us to use. It seems that in modern society we have no potential supporters, but I just mention it.

The agent for the house for sale is Penny & Sinclair.

The agent for the house for rent is Morgan & Associates.

Professor Colin Blakemore and 'near-death' experiences

‘Near-death experiences’, which have become a staple of popular journalism, were never heard of (or at least I had never heard of them) until a decade or so after the publication of my book on out-of-the-body experiences in 1968, so it may be supposed that they arose in reaction to my having publicised the concepts of out-of-the-body experiences, lucid dreams, and apparitions.

I should explain how it was that I came to publish work on these topics, as it has been widely assumed that I found them particularly interesting.

In fact, I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ with no usable qualification, after eleven years of state-funded oppression which was aimed at producing an egalitarian outcome, i.e. at cancelling the advantages which I might have been able to gain as a result of my exceptional ability. I had no research scholarship nor any way of proceeding with the high-flying university career which I needed to have, in any field.

In this shocking situation, serendipity led me to the Society for Psychical Research and I was able to obtain a research studentship (the Perrott Studentship) on account of the relationship of the SPR with Trinity College, Cambridge.

I do not know of any other way in which I could have obtained a grant for postgraduate work in any field in the absence of support from Somerville (my Oxford college).

I had therefore to survey the fields of potential research that fell under the auspices of the Perrott Studentship to find the areas most likely to enhance my claim on a university appointment.

Out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) appeared to me to be the phenomenon which would most readily lend itself to research leading to advances in scientific understanding. They were, however, and perhaps for this reason, ignored by those working or interested in parapsychology. They were predominantly associated with a belief in an afterlife, and the cases compatible with such a belief which were sometimes published by spiritualists or theosophists were supposed by those without such beliefs to be imaginary or dreamlike experiences.

Dr Charles McCreery and I made appeals to the general public for reports of anomalous experiences. As a result of our work, it now appears that such appeals can be expected to produce a substantial number of cases. The cases often had various characteristics in common, which could provide plentiful scope for further research, but we did not see any of this as having any bearing on the question of spiritualistic survival.

We hoped that we had released OBEs as a topic for research from this unrealistic issue. However, the way to our doing further research was blocked by a lack of interest in providing financial support for us to carry it out. (There had all along been hostility to our commencing research in this area, even from members of the SPR.)

After a decade or so, we started to become aware of the previously unknown category of near-death experiences, which began to receive publicity on the television and elsewhere.

For example, a near-death experience was quoted in the Daily Mail recently.

Death was beckoning but I was aware of everything around me. Suddenly, I felt my entire body being sucked up into the white light above. I found myself in a white tunnel — and I knew I had died. Away from the cursing of the medics and the bleeps of the machines, there was a wonderful sense of calm.

But I also became aware of somebody standing a few feet away from me... it was Ruby — wearing her new school uniform and with her hair tied neatly in bunches. She smiled and took my hand. ‘Come with me, Mummy,’ she implored.

At the end stood a gate. I stopped, feeling an urge to walk back down the tunnel, where I was sure my beloved grandmother and other family members who’d passed away would be waiting to greet me.

But little Ruby was insistent. ‘Mummy, step through the gates NOW!’ Her urgency brought me to my senses. I stepped through it and Ruby slammed it shut behind me.

The shock jolted my body — and I am sure it was at this moment that the defibrillator pads being used by the medics shocked my heart back into a rhythm. (Daily Mail, 10 October 2012)

Also recently Professor Colin Blakemore commented in the Daily Telegraph on a book (Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander) about near-death experiences.

... NDEs have taken on a new cloak of respectability with a book by a Harvard doctor. Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, will make your toes wiggle or curl, depending on your prejudices. What’s special about his account of being dead is that he’s a neurosurgeon. ... His, and the multitude of other memories reported by people who have been close to death, have to be seen first through the prism of hard science. The crucial question is not whether such astounding experiences should lead us to abandon materialist accounts of brain function, but whether materialist accounts can possibly explain them. ... Since the lucky survivor can only tell you about them after the event, how can we be sure that these things were perceived and felt at the time that their brains were messed up, rather than being invented afterwards? (Daily Telegraph, 16 November 2012)

And this is what has apparently resulted from our attempts to establish out-of-the-body experiences as a field in which we could carry out further research. The concept of OBEs has been replaced by the new concept of NDEs, and these are seen as only of interest in relation to the question of spiritualist survival.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.