Cecil King and extrasensory perception

It was not until after he met [his future wife] Ruth that King went public on ESP [extrasensory perception] and began actively searching for promising research projects. The International Publishing Corporation (IPC) – as King’s empire was named in 1963 – gave seven-year covenants of £1,500 annually to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and £5,000 to the Psychophysical Research Unit, founded by three young female Oxford graduates. ‘Mrs King is very right,’ wrote Sir George Joy of the SPR, after the three of them had visited the Unit, ‘when she says that if one is determined to pursue an objective, regardless of the means to carry it out, and willing to make any sacrifice that it involves – help comes from unexpected quarters – as in this case.’

‘CECIL KING GIVES £35,000 TO DREAM GIRLS’ was a Daily Express headline that caused both unease and mirth among King’s colleagues. The relationship with the young women quickly soured. To a blithe letter from the Unit’s Director, Celia Green, asking if he would like to finance a fund-raising tour of America (‘This might cost £2,000 to do properly’) King commented, ‘I have made many visits to the US, travelling “en prince”, but I never needed “£2,000”.’

‘Is she going round the bend?’ King enquired of Joy when he received what he reasonably described as a ‘preposterous’ letter with mingled demands and complaints. John Beloff, the Edinburgh University psychologist to whom IPC provided £1,000 annually to pay for an assistant, was professionally impeccable, but was unable to report anything very encouraging from their research into parapsychology.

(Ruth Dudley Edwards, Newspapermen, pp.318-319*)

The author of Newspapermen, a book about Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, here quotes derogatory remarks made in a controversial situation about a person still living (myself), without having made any attempt to hear that person’s point of view.

Cecil Harmsworth King

Cecil King was a newspaper magnate, and a significant figure in British post-war society. He was Chairman of International Publishing Corporation (now Time Inc. UK), which published the Daily Mirror among other newspapers.

King was our only significant financial supporter, and for a time sounded as though he might become a far more important one, enabling us to do full-scale experimental work which was our aim. He referred to his covenant of £5,000 a year as ‘priming the pumps’, when I pointed out that £5,000 would not go far in supporting research projects.

In practice, King behaved as though his small covenant had bought us as cheap labour.

We were effectively obliged to take on a mass card-guessing experiment, part of which King wanted conducted via the Mirror. It was an operation I would never have chosen to do, and considered futile. As it was a large-scale experiment, there were an enormous number of score sheets to be marked, which required research assistants. (When Dr Charles McCreery, then a young Oxford graduate, first made contact with me, he saw the front room of my house populated by groups of girls marking score sheets and questionnaires in relation to this project.) Research assistants do not work for nothing, and the covenant money did not go far in paying for them.

Since we were forced to do the experiment, I tried to improve the shining hour and make the operation a bit less futile, by thinking of a prediction simple enough to be tested in such circumstances. As it happened, the prediction I made (that deviation from chance would be correlated with birth order) proved successful.

Newspapermen quotes King’s response to our suggestion about organising a fund-raising tour in America, in imitation of a similar tour undertaken by Professor Alister Hardy. King’s reaction seems indicative of his personality, which (as the book shows) could be dismissive and irrational. A fund-raising tour around American universities and lecture halls, undertaken by two or three researchers, is a different matter from a single individual taking a business trip across the Atlantic.

Our correspondence with King was generally vetted by Sir George Joy, who acted as our intermediary with him. The author of the book asserts blandly that it was ‘reasonable’ of King to describe one of our letters as preposterous, a judgment made without full awareness of the facts.

* Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street, Pimlico, London, 2004.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Why I cannot write long books

Sir George Joy KBE CMG
(1896 - 1974)

Professor H.H. Price, my DPhil supervisor, when saying that I had an alpha mind, also said that I could say more in one page than most people would say in three. In this context he recognised the brevity of my writing as indicating the high quality of my thinking; but this brevity was generally a drawback, which made fulfilling academic requirements even more burdensome than it would otherwise have been.

My book The Human Evasion perhaps illustrates this brevity at its most extreme. In that case a few people seem to have regarded the brevity as a merit. R.H. Ward said in his Foreword to the book, ‘Few books, long or short, are great ones; this book is short and among those few.’ Sir George Joy described it as ‘a great book’.

One of the aphorisms in my book The Decline and Fall of Science states, ‘I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say’.

It was hard work for me to produce a postgraduate thesis of the expected length, even though I had plenty of ideas, and covered the topic exhaustively and in great analytical detail. By contrast, most DPhil theses contain far fewer ideas, but manage to spin their material out to great length.

Professor Price’s recognition of the quality of my writing did not lead him to suggest to the faculty that it had gone on long enough, when I was still far short of the average length. The bookbinding firm in Oxford to whom I eventually took the thesis in for binding commented on its shortness and the difficulty of finding a hardcover binding that was small enough. Perhaps, of course, they were trying to undermine me, as people often did.

A good deal of academic writing has the opposite characteristic to mine, as the reader has to plough through a lot of waffle to discover the point, or points, if any, of the piece of writing.

When people started to do nominal research in the area of lucid dreams, some years after the publication of my book Lucid Dreams, Dr Keith Hearne acknowledged my priority in this field at the beginning of his own book on the subject. I cannot remember whether it was here or elsewhere that he referred to my book as a ‘little book’. As in the case of my thesis, I had managed to say a lot in a very short space in Lucid Dreams, but this only made it possible to belittle it, rather than its conciseness being regarded as an achievement.

The same problem arose in connection with the speed at which I worked. When I was at school, the fact that I could take exams and get very high marks in them at very short notice was taken as indicating overwork on my part, or ‘pushing’ by my parents. I expect it was taken as a contributory reason for rejecting my DPhil thesis, and awarding it only a BLitt, that I had spent only four years on it, while commuting between Oxford and London to work half the week at the Society for Psychical Research.

W. Grey Walter and my DPhil thesis

copy of a letter to an academic

W. Grey Walter
(1910-1977)

Writing about the Perrott Studentship with which I returned to Oxford in an ostensibly normal way, much to Dame Janet Vaughan’s chagrin, has reminded me how extreme was the misrepresentation of the situation with regard to experimental work and my thesis.

From the very first, my intention was to make correlations between the psychological and the physiological, to work towards a better understanding of some of the anomalous experiences that people reported. None of my supervisors were prepared to help me get facilities for experimental work; they recognised my interest in working towards such things only by providing me with reviews of the literature in areas in which experiments might be done.

Dr Graham Weddell* said, ‘If you want to make correlations, the most obviously relevant area would be in working with EEGs, so I will arrange for Dr Grey Walter to be your supervisor, as he is the great expert in that field.’ But Grey Walter also would only provide me with book lists and surveys of the literature. I was constantly applying in various directions for funding and facilities to do experimental work, but received no support in doing this.

Grey Walter** said that he would not support my applications because if there was any funding to be had, he would want it for himself. In fact he did receive funding from the Parapsychology Foundation in New York to do experimental work on a supposed medium. I do not know why he should not have received money from the Parapsychology Foundation to do experiments himself, even if they had also funded my DPhil project.

I hope to write about this in more detail later, but there was no doubt in my mind that I was aiming at doing experimental work all the time I was working on my postgraduate degree.

* Graham Weddell was a physiology lecturer at Oxford who later became Professor of Anatomy.
** W. Grey Walter was a researcher at the Burden Neurological Institute near Bristol who later became a professor at Aix-Marseilles.

Psycho-physical correlation: taboo area

EEG waves

People on the outside of the Oxford academic world imagine that it is far more objective than it actually is. People who get research grants to do higher degrees are supposed to be, in some meritocratic way, ‘better’ than those who apply for them but do not get them. In fact it is necessary to be accepted by a supervisor who is going to oversee your work. No one in the faculty is obliged to accept a graduate student, however relevant the subject matter of a potential supervisor’s previous work may seem to be to the candidate’s proposed thesis.

Many factors may enter into whether the university wants to promote a certain person or a certain area of work. A supervisor is likely to want to believe that his students’ theses will develop or reinforce the ideas expressed in his own research. Hence tightly enclosed areas of permissible research may be expected to, and actually do, develop. Opening up new areas, or expanding those already existing, is almost impossible.

It is also easy to set graduates on tracks which will soon reach a blockage, so that although they may appear to have been accepted to work for a certain degree, it is determined in advance that no positive outcome for them will be possible. In effect, this is what happened to me.

When Professor H.H. Price had agreed to become my DPhil supervisor, my college, Somerville had telephoned him to try to dissuade him. On the face of it, he had not gone back on his acceptance, but from then on he never supported me in getting any financial or other advantages, although he continued to write glowing reports about my work to the Perrott electors at Trinity College, Cambridge, which was only allowing me to go on doing what I had already been accepted to do.

My potential DPhil thesis, for which I was awarded only a BLitt, was said to be interdisciplinary, and it appeared that it might include analyses of both physiological and psychological observations. What I did not realise was that avoidance of correlations between the physiological and the psychological, or the physical and the mental, had been a powerful determining factor in the revolutionary restructuring of the modern academic world. (My thesis was all about such correlations.)

As there was no precedent for a graduate degree in this area, I asked my supervisor Professor Price whether it would be necessary for a successful DPhil thesis in the area I was proposing to include experimental work. Professor Price reported to me that he had been told it would be possible for a thesis in this area to make a contribution to the field, sufficient for a DPhil, without including any experimental work.

If Professor Price had been acting in my interests rather than those of the academic establishment, he would have asked not whether it was a theoretical possibility, but whether it was the best possible way of ensuring that I got the DPhil. When I submitted my thesis, it was turned down for a DPhil and only awarded a BLitt, the reason given being that it did not include any experimental work. Professor Price then applied on my behalf for the thesis to be ‘referred back’, as it was called, so that the necessary additions could be made to it. This was refused, on the grounds that experimental work would not arise naturally out of the thesis in its present form, so such work would be an ‘unnatural addition’ to it.

In fact, this could hardly have been less true, as the thesis consisted of discussing correlations between the psychological states said to be favourable to successful extrasensory perception (ESP), and the electrophysiological activity of the brain as reflected in readings on an electroencephalogram (EEG). This had led me to conclude the thesis with a prediction of the outcome of EEG experiments on ESP subjects. Carrying out some of those experiments would seem to be the most logical development possible of the observations and analyses made throughout the thesis.

Experimental work arose very naturally out of the prediction in my thesis that successful ESP would be correlated with an acceleration in the subject’s alpha rhythm, as measured on an EEG. For example, two experiments carried out in America by Rex Stanford and others at the University of Virginia, after the publication of my thesis, measured correlations between scoring above chance on card guessing, and the frequency of the subjects’ alpha rhythm.

Professor Price entered into no further conflict with the examiners, but apparently accepted their judgement, or rationalisation, on this point without argument. Clearly Somerville had been opposed to my being accepted to work for a DPhil with Price as my supervisor. It is not difficult to suspect that the ultimate abortive outcome was anticipated, and planned for, in the faculty’s original replies to Professor Price about the desirability of experimental work.

Slandered by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

I had got to know J.B. Priestley through Mary Adams of the BBC, and after trying to make use of me to collect quotations for his coffee-table book about time*, he went on visiting me in Oxford and talked about a television programme or series of programmes which might be made about me. Perhaps this had something to do with the possibility that I might lead him into contact with young female undergraduates and postgraduates. After a time, on one such visit, he came into my lodgings looking portentous, and said to me and my two fellow lodgers (one of them being the daughter of Mary Adams), ‘Iris Murdoch says you are lesbians.’

Iris Murdoch was a well-known novelist and former member of the Communist Party, and at the time very much part of the fashionable literary scene. She was also a philosophy don at Oxford, so any gossip she was spreading was likely to be a reflection of the attitudes of the Oxford dons generally. None of the three of us had ever met her.

The allegation of being lesbians was one of many rumours that went round about me and my associates having zero basis in fact. (See also Oxford’s slanders about drug-taking.)

I could not bring myself to deny Iris Murdoch’s alleged slander, as it seemed merely boring to deny something for which there was no foundation, so I made no reply, nor did either of the others. After a pause, J.B. Priestley said, ‘Oh well, I didn’t expect you to deny it,’ as if our failure to deny it was an admission of its truth. After this meeting, he did not visit us again, and the plans for television programmes were heard of no more. In fact what Priestley had gained from Iris Murdoch was not information about our supposed lesbianism, but information about our lack of social acceptability.

When I see detective programmes on the television, I have noticed that the person who most vigorously denies the suspicions against them often turns out to be the culprit. Possibly this is in recognition of the psychological fact that those who have something they need to cover up are motivated to produce an alternative account of the situation, whereas those who have nothing to do with the situation, that is to say, who have ‘nothing to hide’, feel no need to suggest an alternative explanation of the facts. This was, in fact, my position, and if J.B. Priestley were being realistic, he might even have had enough insight to regard our silence as the reverse of incriminating.

Another example of Oxford reacting to us in a way for which there was no justification was provided by an official at the organisation which listed potential landlords who would offer rooms to student tenants. One of my associates who owned a small house, in which I had formerly lived for a short time, applied to this organisation and asked to be placed on their list. No reason for their refusal was given, but the official looked shocked and exclaimed, ‘Oh no!’ on sight of the address, as if it was well known as a house of ill repute, or something of the sort.

* Man and Time, Aldus Books, 1964.
Photograph of Iris Murdoch by Jane Bown.

It’s not what you know, but who you know

The lower middle class does not exist in official statistics, nor in conversational contexts, but in practice, when I was at Somerville College, Oxford, in the early to mid 1950s, I encountered several students who seemed to be being treated as belonging to a despised underclass, determined by social status rather than ability or achievement.

My impression that this was so was confirmed when I was living in digs in Oxford with two other postgraduate students, working for higher degrees. One of the other students was Margaret Eastman, and the third was the daughter of Mary Adams of the BBC. Margaret and I were of what might be called lower middle class origins, having won scholarships to Somerville, but coming from respectable middle class families which had sent us to State schools.

The daughter of Mary Adams, on the other hand, had gone to the Francis Holland School, a prestigious fee-paying school which had once been considered a possibility for Princess Anne, and had gone on to Somerville as a commoner (a non-scholarship student).

The digs, as was frequently the case with lodgings inhabited by Oxford students, were unhygienic and insalubrious. Among other things, the draining board in the kitchen was rotting. Mary Adams, visiting her daughter, and in the presence of Margaret and myself, expressed horror at the filthy surroundings. ‘This sort of thing may be good enough for Celia and Margaret’, she declaimed, ‘But my daughter was brought up to be a lady’. I was amazed that this should be said by an egalitarian socialist.

It would seem that she was not only voicing her own private views, but those which underlay the attitude of the Oxford University administration. I knew a postgraduate student who lived in lodgings where the lavatories were never cleaned, so that tenants would wish, if possible, to go out into the garden when they needed to use them. Less unhygienic lodgings were likely to have higher rents, so only those who could afford it could remove themselves from such unpleasantness. It must be supposed that the administration was aware of this situation, and so implicitly expressed the view that filthy lodgings were good enough for most students, but of course those who were rich enough could maintain the standards to which they had been brought up.

Other people who seemed to have similar underlying attitudes were the friends of Mary Adams, drawn from a population which hobnobbed with champagne socialists, even if not perhaps every one of them could be classified in this way.

I would certainly have expected, on the basis of the way my own family would have behaved, that on visiting a student living together with two other students, the visitors would all ask to be introduced to the friends of their friend, or have just entered the apartment and got to know the others in a less formal way. This, however, did not happen, whether or not they feared the apartment might be too filthy to be safely entered. Friends of Mary Adams would come to the door and take her daughter out with them without meeting anyone else.

This went on happening over a period of years, and on at least one occasion the daughter of Mary Adams said to her, ‘When your friends visit me, they take me out for a meal, but not Celia and Margaret. When Celia’s aunt Emmie visits us, she takes all three of us out for lunch’. Mary Adams responded, ‘Celia’s aunt must be a very rich woman then’. My aunt Emmie was retired and on a pension. Like all members of my mother’s family, she had a very high IQ, and she had become a highly skilled shorthand typist. However, as a member of a lower social class than the champagne socialists, my aunt had never had a salary approaching the BBC salary of Mary Adams.

On one occasion, as the daughter of Mary Adams told me, some of the visiting friends said they would like to buy her a birthday present, but they wanted to be sure it was something which she herself could use and which would be of no use to any other inhabitants of the apartment. ‘How about slippers?’ they had said, ‘We could buy you some, but do assure us that your feet are much smaller than Celia’s and Margaret’s, so they could not possibly use any slippers we buy for you’.

Oxford: stairway to the stars?

Margaret Eastman was an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford, with a scholarship in classics. This fairly clearly implied exceptional ability. She had acquired her expertise in writing Greek poetry by reading classics in her local public library.

Social mobility was allegedly desirable, so one might well have expected that people such as Margaret Eastman and myself would be welcomed to Oxford, and encouraged on their upward path. But this was far from being the case. People such as Margaret and myself were greeted by the Somerville dons as if we had got above ourselves and needed to be reminded that we were still inferior to people who had been to prestigious fee-paying schools such as St Paul’s Girls’ School.

Margaret had become able to write Greek poetry so well that she took the optional poetry writing paper in the Mods exam. She also wrote a Latin epigram which was published in the Oxford Magazine. Such publication conferred a considerable cachet, but was greeted by one of Margaret’s tutors with the comment ‘It’s the first thing you have done since coming up that justifies your scholarship’.

As Margaret was always spoken of by the dons as something of a second-rater, people who did not know about classics might have taken this at face value, but it is scarcely compatible with the facts. Margaret had got her scholarship by being able to read and write Latin and Greek at a high level, and she had not stopped being able to do so, but continued to read and write Latin and Greek throughout her first terms at Oxford.

A year or so later, when she wished to apply for a research scholarship to proceed to a higher degree, her tutors sounded uncertain whether she was ‘good enough’. They thought she was not ‘good enough’ for an academic career, although she should be able to ‘hold down a job’.

In my own case, when I started trying to explain to my first tutor how badly I had been affected by being held back and prevented from taking exams in several subjects at an early age, she had said ‘But you are just an ordinary person’, which seemed to rule out any attempt to understand how various factors might have affected my performance.

Somerville would never support either Margaret or myself in applying for grants for higher degrees. I think we were turned down on at least four occasions, although ironically we were both able to help other people who were doing higher degrees in different subjects, by picking up very fast on something which we had never studied before.

Eventually we both found ourselves without an academic appointment, or any way ahead within the university system.

Egalitarians and those ‘beneath’ them

When I was an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford, in the mid-1950s, feminist ideas were very much on an uptrend.

‘Feminism’ is usually taken to mean gender egalitarianism, i.e. that women are or should be the equals of men. This idea could, however, be interpreted in very different ways.

While I was at Somerville, a male undergraduate said to one of my college friends that women were ‘equal but different’, and this seemed to mean ‘equal but inferior’. Women could never have strong enough wrists to play tennis properly against a man, and there were various other things which they would never be able to do well.

Nowadays, it is often suggested that there should be equal numbers of men and women on the boards of companies.

Mary Adams OBE, a well-known ‘fellow traveller’ (communist sympathiser), was one of the first women to have a fairly high position in the BBC, and was also the mother of a college friend of mine. I was the top scholar at Somerville College, and her daughter was a commoner (non-scholarship student). I frequently visited Mary Adams’s Regents Park apartment.

On one occasion, my father came by car to pick me up from the apartment, and Mary Adams said about his voice on the telephone, ‘He sounds very common’. At least, this was what her daughter relayed to me a little later. I was surprised that Mary Adams, as an influential leader of thought at the BBC, did not find it necessary to demonstrate her social egalitarianism by asking my father up for a sherry, and taking an interest in his experience of education in working-class areas of London. After all, he was the headmaster of a school in the East End.

Lord Longford

When I told this story to Lord Longford* (a Labour peer) at the House of Lords, where he had invited me to visit him after I sent him an appeal to support my work, he looked taken aback by the accuracy of the wording. In fact I had not, at the time, known that ‘common’ was the word an upper-class person would use in talking about a social inferior. ‘Did you hear her say that?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said, ‘her daughter, who did hear it, told me afterwards’. ‘She should not have told you’, Lord Longford said, laughingly.

One may notice that he did not say, ‘Mary Adams should not have said that’, in line with the socialist egalitarian ideas which both Lord Longford and Mary Adams professed in public. Instead, it appeared he thought that her daughter’s loyalty should have been to her own (upper) class, and to her influential mother, rather than to someone of a lower social class but, probably, higher IQ (i.e. both me and my father).

At the same meeting, Lord Longford looked at me curiously, as if he were trying to work out my social provenance. He said to me, ‘You don’t sound working-class. You could be a peeress.’ He continued to look at me. I must have said something, and he then said, ‘I see it is an Oxford accent’.

I cannot recall my college contemporaries, or any more senior person, ever expressing admiration of my achievement in getting the top scholarship, or even any Oxford scholarship, coming as I did from a relatively disadvantaged background. People appeared to be impressed only by social institutions. Mary Adams seemed to be bowled over when I first told her of meeting Dr Charles McCreery, an undergraduate at that time. I mentioned that he had been to Eton, and Mary Adams went into church with admiration, breathing, ‘Eton is the best school’.

A similar reaction was shown by Oxford physiology lecturer Graham Weddell (later Professor of Human Anatomy), when speaking about Charles’s father, General Sir Richard McCreery, before he had even met Charles. ‘His father is a great man’, he said, although General McCreery had (it appeared) been slandering Charles.**

* Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, was a Labour politician who became Leader of the House of Lords in 1964. Photograph by Allan Warren.
** Further details can be found here.

Recognising that I was exceptional

When I was at Somerville College, Oxford, I got to know Mary Adams of the BBC, who was the mother of a college friend of mine, and hand in glove with Dame Janet Vaughan, the socialist Principal of Somerville, and with Professor Sir Alister Hardy. Upper-class top people of a certain age were those most likely to recognise my exceptionality, although not to give me any help.

Mary Adams OBE seemed to recognise that I was exceptionally advanced in understanding psychology. When, as an undergraduate, I was in a car with her and her daughter X, I was explaining someone’s psychology to her daughter, who had had difficulty trying to communicate something to this someone. I said that people have barriers. Mary Adams said, ‘She won’t understand that. You have to have years of experience to become aware of people’s barriers.’

J.B. Priestley
(1894-1984)

Some years later, Mary Adams tried to convince Sir George Joy that he should stop X and Y from working with me in my incipient research institute. ‘They are normal girls in their early twenties,’ she told him. ‘They are no match for Celia, who might well be twice their age in psychological understanding.’

Another time, earlier on, she had described me as ‘more man than woman’. J.B. Priestley (whom I met through Mary Adams), after having had a meal out with me and X, said to Mary Adams that I was ‘perceptive in a range that could be sinister,’ as Mary Adams told me later.

She also told me that I had impressed Priestley; he was (she said) afraid of me.

Further notes on Professor H.H. Price

Professor Price’s remarks on the quality of my writing were foreshadowed by my getting the Senior Open Scholarship to Somerville College, to a considerable extent on the strength of my essay papers, as it was said at the time. Some time in my first year, at a college sherry party, a don in another department, whom I did not know, came up to me and said she remembered my essay papers in the entrance exam. They were, she said, the most remarkable she had ever seen.

Some people were evidently impressed by me at first sight. W.H. Salter, for example – at least early on during my time at the Society for Psychical Research, while he was still under the influence of his wife. Salter, at some meeting of the SPR, said of me in a slightly jokey way (but as if he meant what he was saying) “Of course I know you are a genius”.

Soon after Professor Price had volunteered to become my supervisor at a meeting of the Board of Literae Humaniores, he was telephoned by Somerville in an attempt to dissuade him from accepting this position. Professor Price told me of this quite humorously, although he did not tell me of anything specific that had been said against me.

What they (for example the Somerville dons) felt against anyone who showed any open-mindedness to anything other than reductionist materialism seemed to be that they assumed them to have strong beliefs in something spiritualistic. On the other hand, those who condemned other people for supposedly having these beliefs (whether or not they really did have them) appeared themselves to have strong and unshakeable beliefs in other directions.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Professor H.H. Price

copy of a letter to an academic

I have been thinking about Professor H.H. Price’s role in my attempts to return to academia. These are preliminary notes.

* * *

Henry Habberley Price
(1899 - 1984)

Professor Price was unusually open to my ideas about the existential uncertainty. Nobody else at the Society for Psychical Research had taken any interest in Alexandra David-Neel, for example. His awareness of my ability did not seem, as it so often did, to arouse hostility, which would sometimes express itself violently.

Professor Price said that I was the ideal DPhil student. He always wrote glowing reports on my work to the electors of the Perrott Studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and to others who gave financial support.

He appreciated the way I wrote, and said that I could say in one page what it would take most people three pages to say. He said that I had an alpha mind.

W.H. Salter did not like Price having this attitude towards me. He said that it was all too easy to get Professor Price’s approval, so that he (Salter) would not find this of any use in obtaining financial supporters for me. I needed to get the support of people who were less of a soft touch, said Salter. I needed to get the support of someone such as Professor Dodds.

E.R. Dodds
(1893 - 1979)

I knew that I could not get the support of Professor Dodds, and did not think it was possible for anyone to do so who was not merely wanting to criticise other people’s work. The fact was that by this time Salter was hostile to me himself.

What Professor Price’s support did for me was that I had a clear run through the years for which I held the Perrott Studentship, and the widespread hostility could do nothing to deprive me of it, as it would have wished to do. So, in the hostile circumstances in which I found myself, Professor Price’s appreciation of my ability was a considerable asset.

Eight high-achieving siblings, from a poor home

Celia Green with
one of her uncles,
Leonard Green

It was not only the case that my father came top of the grammar school scholarship, in spite of living in an impoverished home with very little reading matter. It was also the case that each of his seven siblings similarly got grammar school scholarships, at a time when there were only twenty of them available per year in the borough, and that every one of them became successful and respectable in spite of their ostensibly disadvantaged early life. They all became headmasters, or entered similar professions.

The modern ideology likes to assert that if there is a correlation on a large scale between deprivation in early life and lack of success later, the relatively deprived should, by means of intervention, be enabled to ‘catch up’ during their time at school.

In fact it is unlikely that my father and his siblings seemed to be in any way ‘behind’ when they first went to school. They had, for example, probably learnt to read before they went to school, in spite of the lack of books in the house in which they were living.

On a large scale, there may be a correlation between lack of books in the home and lack of success in exams at a later age. However, there are many factors which affect the situation, and a sub-population, such as my father’s family, may occur in which the correlation does not apply at all.

In the case of my father’s family, which had aristocratic East European antecedents, genetic factors would appear to have prevailed over environmental ones.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Self-important academics

Researchers found that many parents ‘overvalue’ their children and believe them to be more special and entitled than others.

These parents are more likely to be conceited and self-important themselves, according to Dutch academics ...
(Daily Mail, 3 December 2014)

The ideology recently explicitly expressed by Dutch academics* (themselves agents of the collective) was present, although much less explicitly and universally, three quarters of a century ago when I was born in London in 1935. In retrospect it is easy to see that my father was habitually accused of believing me to be exceptional, or of ‘wanting to me to be a genius’, and as I was in fact precocious it was scarcely possible for him to say anything about my interests or achievements without arousing attacks on himself. Agents of the collective such as the Dutch academics referred to above, are, by virtue of being agents of the collective, regarded as an infallible source of value judgments.

The theory that some parents have a tendency to ‘overvalue’ their children, and that they should be corrected for doing this, had a deleterious effect on my education, and on the lives of my parents and myself. It was used to justify much of the hostility against me which resulted in my being prevented from doing things I wanted to do, such as take exams young.

* E. Brummelman et al, ‘My Child Is God’s Gift to Humanity: Development and Validation of the Parental Overvaluation Scale (POS)’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

A fellow undergraduate

Maria Casares (1922-1996),
star of Cocteau’s Orphée

When I was an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford, in the early 1950s, there was a fellow undergraduate called Jane* Smith. She had a strikingly self-possessed manner which made it difficult for people to become familiar with her, and her strong resemblance to Maria Casares, the film actress whose father Santiago Casares Quiroga had been Prime Minister of Spain, was often remarked upon. We spoke a lot to each other for several terms, and you could say we were friends.

We lost touch completely a few years after I left college, and I have never heard from Jane since. I was thinking of her recently, and looked her up on Google, via which I learnt that she had donated money to Somerville College recently, in 2010-11. (The Somerville College Report for Donors of that financial period does not say how much any of the donors contributed.)

Jane is likely to have known decades ago that I was attempting to set up a research institute in an attempt to remedy my position. If she knew that I was still appealing for funding at the time she made her donation to Somerville, she might have considered making a donation to me instead of, or as well as, making one to Somerville.

My education, paid for by the State, left me with no source of income and no way of working my way back into an academic career. Jane had not been exposed to State education, having attended St Paul’s Girls’ School, a prestigious private school in London, where contacts with wealthy families could be made.

One might have expected that college friends would be sympathetic to the needs of their friends (a friend in need is a friend indeed). However, Jane donated to a socially recognised institution but not to mine. Nor have any other of my college friends helped me in my attempt to remedy my destitute position, which I found shocking.

There were a good many people at Somerville who were aware of my impoverished position relative to theirs, but who gave me no financial or other help in response to my appeals, although they probably did make donations to socially approved organisations such as Somerville College or Oxfam.

People seem to think that if someone cannot get support from a socially recognised source, they should not receive any at all.

* Names have been changed.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Cheese-paring the winter fuel allowance

The government is always cheese-paring towards those of pensionable age.

The population of people of pensionable age is likely to have a higher average IQ than the population at large, because people with below-average genetic endowment, or dysfunctional ways of running their lives, are less likely to reach pensionable age.

The winter fuel allowance (now called ‘winter fuel payment’) is a sop that has been brought in to reconcile people to the fact that pensions had ‘withered on the vine’ to a much greater extent than previous governmental statements had led them to expect. Even the maximum winter fuel payment (£300 per annum to a person of 80 or over living on their own) is scarcely commensurate with the difference between state pensions now and what might have been expected. Moreover, the fuel payments are allocated in a way that may make the recipient worse off, rather than better off.

At present, a person who reaches pensionable age receives £200 per annum winter fuel allowance, but he has to be careful about having any other person living in, or even visiting, his house. Another person might realise that he is getting the fuel allowance, and this might make them less careful in their use of his electricity and gas. This may be an unconscious reaction, but some of the time may not be. I have had lodgers who left boilers running in an overheated house while they were out, apparently because they liked the idea of increasing the houseowner’s bills. Since this happened to me, it seems probable that similar situations occur elsewhere.

If another person living in the same house, whether or not related to the first person, also reaches pensionable age, the fuel payment of the first person is reduced by 50% (i.e. if he had been receiving £200 per annum, this is reduced to £100 per annum), and the second person qualifying will receive only half of one person’s full fuel allowance (i.e. he will also receive £100 per annum).

Even in the case of a married couple, living in the same house will be disadvantageous. However careful and cooperative they are, fuel for two elderly people is almost certain to cost more than that for one elderly person, yet the overall allowance will be the same as for one person.

Being married, incidentally, does not guarantee that the two people concerned are on particularly good terms, and either of them might be a particularly careless and wasteful person, even if with no malice towards the other.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Photo of All Saints’ Church, Cuddesdon by Edward Keene.

Oxford admission interview: underlying motivation

Will Durant (1885-1981),
author of
Outlines of Philosophy

When I applied to Somerville College, Oxford for my undergraduate degree, I took the entrance examination in maths. I was then called up for an interview although, as I later realised, it was with the candidates who might be accepted as commoners but not as scholars.

Actually the interviews were very brief and only consisted of meeting the Principal. People went to her office at an appointed time and stood in a short queue outside the door. On entry, one walked across her large room and took one’s place on a sofa facing another sofa on which the Principal was sitting. The interview consisted only of reviewing the most basic facts about one. Somewhat on the lines of: ‘So your name is XYZ, and you are applying in such a subject. You went to such and such a school from a certain date to a more recent date. Your hobbies are so and so. You play such and such games. Well, goodbye. We will be considering your application and will let you know very soon.’

All that such an interview could be said to show was that the candidate did not become completely inarticulate, or fall to the floor in a faint, in intimidating circumstances. I would not myself think that those who passed such a test would necessarily be the most suited to academic studies.

Although Somerville did not seem to be finding out anything much about me, I was, so far as I know, the only person from this first interview who was, a week or so later, invited to go to Somerville again, this time with people who were being considered as potential scholarship candidates. So far as I could find out, none of the people I was now with had attended any previous interview at Oxford.

On the second visit I was not interviewed by anyone specialising in maths, who might have been a future tutor. This may have been because the college’s leading maths tutor had been absent from Oxford for a year or so, supposedly in consequence of her need to recover from the tragic death of her husband. Instead I was interviewed by some sort of senior tutor, as were the other people who were being considered for scholarships.

It is difficult to believe that reports about my educational past contained no hint of my predominant preference for physics, or of the fact that I had taken the entrance exam to Somerville in maths only because I had been forced against my will into spending a year doing first-year maths at Queen Mary College, London.

The senior tutor said in the interview that I had written about philosophy in my entrance exam papers, so would I like to change to philosophy instead of maths? No, I said, because I wanted to do research in physics, for which philosophy would not be regarded as a preparation.

The senior tutor took no interest in what had led up to my taking the entrance exam in maths, rather than in the subject in which I said I wanted to make a career. Apart from whatever may have been said in reports to Somerville from my local education authority, I had made no secret of my position, and had spoken about it freely to fellow candidates.

My wishing to do research in physics was disregarded. Although reference was made to the content of my essay papers in the entrance examination, it seems unlikely that a senior academic would not realise, as I did myself, that being good at old-fashioned philosophy did not make it particularly likely that one could be successful in a modern university philosophy course. So proposing that I should change to such a subject was tantamount to steering me in the direction of a degree course which would leave me with no way ahead into a university career in any subject, let alone in the one which I wanted to have.

There was no sense in which my essays had revealed what interested me, so that I might wish to pursue it further, whether or not it led to a university appointment. I had read Will Durant’s Outlines of Philosophy, and some other books, as a deliberate preparation for the essay papers. University applicants were advised by their schools to prepare for the essay papers by taking an interest in current affairs, reading broadsheets and so on. I found these things uninteresting, so I had concentrated instead on classical philosophy.

* * *

It seems likely, in retrospect, that the senior academics involved in admissions to Oxford were motivated to steer me in a direction which could not lead to the sort of career which I said I wanted to have, but might well leave me exiled for life from the academic world with no usable qualifications.

This, in fact, they succeeded in doing by leaving me working for a degree in maths, which had never been my choice, and at what was for me an unnaturally late age, while refusing to consider anything I could say about the difficulties to which this gave rise, or conceding any of the changes in arrangements which I said would be of help to me.

* * *

When I ask my associates why people seem to be so irritated, and made angry, by my attempting to bring to light the motivation underlying the way I have been treated at crucial stages of my life, they may suggest either that the irritated people were once themselves treated badly but suppressed any analysis or complaint about it, or that the irritated people feel that they themselves would also act in the relevant ways towards anyone who happened to be in their power.

However, it is practically impossible to reach the point of realising that there is anything to complain of in what is happening to one; I certainly did not, at least not at the time. It was only in retrospect, as one noted constantly recurring elements in the ways people reacted, that one started to draw inferences about possible underlying motivation.

It seemed to me that the underlying motivation, although virtually universal, was too subconscious for people to talk to one another about it. I do not suppose that Dame Janet (the Principal) said to the other Somerville dons, ‘as we want to make her uncertain whether her maths is good enough, let us call her up for interview with the common entrants in the first place, and only after that with those who are in the running for scholarship.’

People do not consider the motivation of agents of the collective involved in education, such as teachers or tutors, or if they do, they seldom see it as grounds for complaint or rectification. A case in point is that of Christine Fulcher’s maltreatment by her primary school headmaster. I was present at a conversation with her uncle about this in which he seemed to accept that the headmaster’s treatment of her had been unjustified. ‘But why did he do that?’ he asked, as if her account of what had happened could not be admitted unless accompanied by an acceptable explanation. ‘He did not like girls, and when I was no longer there to come top of the form, his own son did so’, Christine suggested.

Her uncle seemed to find a dislike of girls an acceptable explanation, and to think that it contributed what is nowadays called ‘closure’ to the situation. If you have ‘closure’, you accept that the situation was the way it was, and give up on attempts to rectify it.

It seemed that a dislike of girls was an acceptable motive to ascribe to someone, even if it had resulted in ruining a particular girl’s academic career and prospects. Neither Christine’s uncle, nor anyone else, seems to have considered the possibility that Christine’s headmaster was specifically motivated to ruin her life.

Of my associates, several, as well as myself, entered university at what was, for them, an unnaturally late age. I was feeling very bad when I applied to Somerville College much later than I felt I should have done, on account of the age restrictions against my taking of exams, so I thought that I had no chance of a scholarship and was applying merely to get into Oxford, which it was necessary for me to do. When I was awarded a scholarship, in fact the top scholarship, I felt that I was only getting what I should have got at a much earlier age, which was a relief, but solved no problems.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

IQ tests and ‘near-genius’

copy of a letter to an academic

People were always implying that I believed things about my IQ, and that this influenced me in wanting to take more subjects than other people and/or to take exams in them at an earlier age.

It should be pointed out that ideas about IQ and genius were not in my mind or my environment at all, until statements about them were explicitly made by the psychologist who volunteered to do an IQ test on me in an apparently casual way when I was ten. This was just after I had taken the grammar school scholarship exam in Essex – and before my parents and I were told by the Reverend Mother, at a preliminary interview, that I had come top of the county with a 100% score on every paper.

A few days after my taking the test, my father transmitted the following information: my IQ was 180 which supposedly meant I was ‘near-genius’. The IQ of a child was said to be loosely equivalent to mental age* divided by chronological age, which implied that a ten-year-old with an IQ of 140 would have a mental age of fourteen, and that at the age of ten my own mental age was eighteen.

‘Genius’ was defined as having an IQ score of 200 or over. My IQ was 180, and that was allegedly ‘near-genius’. In fact, the cut-off value for the test I took was 180, so that it was impossible to get a reported value above this, but I did not realise this until some years later.

Such statements would not be made nowadays, but at that time they were transmitted to me (via my father) by the educational psychologist, employed by the local education authority, who had administered the test.

One wonders what could have been the motivation of the local council in allowing him to make such definite assertions.

In fact, I developed a view of the situation, as perhaps I was supposed to, in which there was a considerable population of people with IQs between 180 and 200, and even a considerable population of people with IQs over 200. So I felt there was nothing remarkable in the IQ that I had.

I did not think that they might have understated my IQ until decades later, when I read in C.W. Valentine’s The Normal Child and some of his Abnormalities – which had not been published at the time I took the test – that a girl who could read a primer fluently at the age of two (as I could myself) was said to have a possible IQ of 300, since reading implied a mental age of at least six or seven.

* The term ‘intelligence quotient’ was originally coined by German psychologist William Stern to express this relationship between mental age and chronological age.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Crisis at the convent

The motto of the
Ursuline convent schools

I want to write about my interview with my father, after he had been summoned to see the Reverend Mother in connection with her concerns about me. First I have to explain what happened.

I have always found it difficult to write about the constant disagreements throughout my education, because they were always rationalised and contradictory. But I think that the underlying forces which affected my position are clear, in retrospect, from the situation which arose when I was fourteen (after I had been prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at thirteen, and thus locked into years of delay before I could take any exams at all).

The ostensible cause of this particular crisis was that I was supposed to have said that I did not believe in God.

Actually Mother Mary Angela (the maths nun), finding it impossible to change my views on what I wanted to do in life, had brought matters to a head by peering at me and saying, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Even then I had not said that I did not, but had said, ‘Oh yes.’

I had always assumed that I would never be asked such a thing, because in the convent environment, saying that one did not believe in God would be too shocking. However, I knew that the tone of my voice was not likely to carry conviction. In fact, Mother Mary Angela reacted as if I had said the opposite.

I do not think her doing so was justified, as people (so far as I could see) often said things they did not mean very much, or meant very vaguely, this being accepted socially at face value. In most cases of people who said they believed in God, or were assumed to do so, I had little idea what they might mean by this. Retrospectively, or perhaps even at the time, I had more of an idea what Mother Veronica (the nun who habitually wore a beatific expression) might mean by professing belief in God. Mother Veronica always seemed to be maintaining a continuous awareness of some kind of presence external to her own mind.

Of course I had not said anything about such things to the other girls, although they knew that I was not actually a Catholic. I remember at least one occasion on which one of them, a grammar school scholarship girl a few years older than me, became very angry that she was unable to convert me to Catholicism on the spot.

One of the things that makes it difficult to write about the conflicts in my education, and made it difficult to understand them at the time, was that they had little or no relationship to reality, but were about fictitious states of affairs. In fact these fictitious problems were a cover for people’s real anxieties about me, which seemed to have more to do with a fear that I might do something radical, or unpredictable, on an intellectual level.

Of course, by the time this conversation with Mother Mary Angela took place, I had already been in the same form as two girls, Jane* and Sarah, who were notorious for their rejection of Catholicism, and presumably any form of Christianity. But I do not remember any expression of disbelief in God as such, and even if there had been, I would not have joined forces with it.

I thought of my own position as agnostic, on account of my awareness of the uncertainty inherent in the existential situation, and this ruled out disbelief in God (or in anything else), as well as belief.

Even if it was known that I talked a lot to Jane, I certainly did not talk about my rejection of Catholicism, whereas I think she did like to assert it frequently. It was known that I did not believe in Catholicism, since my parents always passed me off as ‘Church of England’, but I had no interest in expressing this disbelief.

With hindsight, the crisis regarding my alleged lack of belief in God seems to me to have been a cover for a crisis regarding some other aspect or aspects of my personality. The maths nun, Mother Mary Angela, was already aware that I had drives and ambitions of which she disapproved. What she and others may have been really afraid of was my analyticalness, my ability to see through society. They were afraid of my having any social success, and thus of having a chance to use these capacities to get on in life, and also to influence other people.

* Names have been changed.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Wasted talent

Writing about Christine Fulcher has reminded me of how difficult it is, and always has been, to say anything about our position.

In Christine’s case, she was clearly IQ-ful enough to have become an academic, even a professor.

It was a reflection on the educational system that, as her school life ended, she was not attracted by the possibility of making a university career in any subject, and not even interested in the idea of going to university at all, as she did not see how it could lead to a life that she could get anything out of. She went to university because her father put her under pressure, regarding it as disgraceful not to do so.

What would she tell her children (he argued) if she turned down the opportunity to go to university? She was told she should follow the example of her mother, who had been to college.

When Christine came to work with me in my independent and unrecognised academic establishment, a sympathetic family might have thought that it was a shame she had no easier way of making a suitable career, and they might naturally have thought that she needed support more than her brothers, or anyone else who was able to have a career that was salaried in the normal way.

But instead of this, they took care to discriminate against her, so that all financial support which might have come her way was cut off, and subsidies to her siblings were correspondingly increased.

Also they discouraged rich relatives and friends from subsidising her, whereas her brothers did receive subsidies (such as wedding presents etc.) from such people. Her family’s treatment of Christine discouraged her from socialising with them. This then gave them a (spurious) excuse to be even meaner to her.

Christine’s suitability for academic pursuits was shown by the fact that she naturally gravitated to subjects which only people with a ‘superior’ IQ are said to be able to do well. That is, sciences and languages – to which I myself was attracted.

Christine had wanted a career in science, but she did not pass her Chemistry O-level, having had mumps shortly before the exam. She wanted to retake it, but was discouraged from doing so by her school, and by her parents making unnecessary difficulties about it.

Christine could read French and German well by the time she left school, although merely attending the lessons provided in those subjects would certainly have been insufficient to produce this result. By the time I met her, she was widely read in the classics of French and German literature.

Many of those with the greatest aptitude for academic pursuits are thrown out by the system – whether at university or earlier – and the waste of their abilities is ignored. They are supposed not to mind, and indeed supposed not to exist except as rejects.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position and that of Christine Fulcher. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Books are better than blogs

text of a letter to an academic

I do not think that my blog is a good way of attracting potential associates. We need to publish and distribute hardback books.

I do not know how we would attract anyone like Christine Fulcher into reading my blog.

Christine Fulcher
of Oxford Forum

When Christine was in her late teens, she was interested in helping a genius. But if someone searched the web using the word ‘genius’, they would get thousands of hits, many of them about Einstein, some about Leonardo da Vinci and other geniuses, but they probably would not find my blog. Christine was not interested in parapsychology, nor particularly in mysticism or gnosticism, and would not have thought of looking for blogs about the problems of high-IQ people, although she is one herself.

So I do not know what keywords I would have to use to attract people like her who might be interested in helping a genius, and who are not necessarily aware that they have the problems that high-IQ people tend to have foisted on them.

In fact, the best way of attracting someone like Christine to come and become an associate would be by having plenty of our books on the shelves of university libraries, and on the shelves of bookshops in general.

There is a phenomenon in economics known as ‘framing’, in which the same cultural product can receive quite different reactions depending on the context. A famous violinist can give a performance at Carnegie Hall in which seats sell for $100, but if the same violinist gives his performance for free on a subway, few people take any interest. A famous professor like Richard Dawkins can write books which are published by a respected publisher and sell in the tens of thousands. If he was unknown, the text of those books, if available for free on the web, might only attract a few hundred readers.

Christine found my book The Human Evasion in the philosophy section of Heffers Bookshop at the University of East Anglia. The title attracted her, and my ideas rang a bell with her. By the time she had read something in the book to the effect that a genius might need help, she was determined to come and see me. After about six weeks, she had already corresponded with me, and she was ringing at the door of 118 Banbury Road. At that time, our books were published by Hamish Hamilton, and their reps were taking them round to bookshops automatically, along with all other current Hamish Hamilton publications.

For any chance of attracting people who are as interested and potentially long-term as Christine, we need to be publishing new books, reissuing all our old books in large quantities, sending thousands of free copies to university libraries in this country and worldwide, and promoting the books to bookshops so that they stock them, probably especially in university towns. For this we need hundreds of thousands of pounds, but any smaller contribution would certainly be welcome.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Modern students

Recently we have been making contact with various undergraduates. The impression most of them give is that they are determined to make things as easy as possible for themselves at university, without trying to make their work interesting, or to do as well as possible at it. Certainly of recent decades I have heard and read statements that might have been thought shocking before the onset of the Welfare State.

For example, one fairly well-off, upper-middle-class pre-undergraduate, who had expressed an interest in becoming associated with us, refused to consider working for us before college or during the vacs, although we said how badly we were in need of extra manpower. He said he could not take on either employment or voluntary work until he had got the full benefit of three full-time years at university. The attraction of which, according to him, was that he would not have to do much work while there. Presumably it was to be taken as understood that he would be able to spend most of his time having ‘fun’, as he and his contemporaries would call it. From what one hears, this would seem to include plenty of social life and getting drunk.

Nor, apparently, do students mind much about having to leave college with large loans, built up by not paying the fees themselves. Another pre-undergraduate was quoted in an article as saying that he did not mind about the debt which he would incur by going to university, because he would not have to start repaying it until he was earning above a certain level. This suggested the possibility that repayment could be avoided indefinitely by taking care to earn little or nothing.

I hear or read of many modern graduates and university dropouts who are disaffected by the difficulty of getting started on a career in the modern world. They are, however, not attracted by the possibility of becoming associated with us, where they could share in our sense of purpose and direction. In a way this is not surprising, as they have become identified with the avoidance of effort, intensity, and purpose.

Throughout my life there has been an almost universal rejection of my need to live with the maximum of intensity and purposiveness, and an unwillingness to accept that my life could be damaged by being deprived of the possibility of such things.

The modern educational system opposes purposiveness and favours its opposite. It has succeeded in creating, on a wide scale, what might previously have been described as ‘demoralised laziness’.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

The fear of breakthroughs

text of a letter to an academic

I remember that you once asked me why schools, even the Ursuline convent school, wanted me to do maths in preference to physics, which is what I wanted to do. I said, “I don’t know. It was crazy.”

But actually, although none of the rationalisations which were expressed or hinted at held water, it seems clear that everyone was afraid of my doing research in an area where I might easily find out something fundamentally groundbreaking.

Albert Einstein
in 1921

Theoretical physics bought you up against the inadequacy of the current set of concepts about the physical world, and that was why I wanted to do it. I felt a little like Einstein when he said:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which the books are written. *

When I was attending the Ursuline school, aged about eleven, my father thought it was now appropriate to ask me what I wanted to do in life. I replied without hesitation, “I am going to be a physicist and do research.” My father looked a bit shocked but also, as his initial reaction, impressed. But later I found that both he and everyone else opposed my doing physics. In fact, there was opposition to everything that I did want to do, including getting more degrees than other people, and doing so at an earlier age. So there was not only opposition to my doing research in physics, but to all my ideas for working towards that end result.

However, it is now seems likely that what underlay all the rationalisations, which were supposed to justify making me do something I did not want to do, was an absolute fear of the breakthroughs which I might make, in view of my lack of inhibitions. The same thing has also been true of my attempts to start doing research in the areas associated with perception and hallucination, in which I opened up what could have been new areas of research, operating with extremely limited resources.

In fact, everyone all along has been afraid of my doing any research at all, and actually quite rightly so. As I am uninhibited in considering possibilities, I certainly would have made at least a few breakthroughs, if I had not been prevented from doing anything at all.

It is still true that I would make progress very rapidly in either physics or the psychology of perception, if not kept rigorously starved of financial support.

* quoted in Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life, John Wiley, 1996.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Innate ability, and its enemies

The belief system associated with the egalitarian ideology has been increasing in influence for a long time, and is now overwhelmingly dominant.

Splitting pupils as young as six into classes based on ability – known as streaming – makes the brightest children brighter but does little to help the rest to catch up, according to new research into schools in England.

The analysis of the progress made by 2500 six and seven-year-olds in state primary schools in England, conducted by academics at the Institute of Education in London, found that the use of streaming appears to entrench educational disadvantage compared with the results of pupils who were taught in all-ability classes.

“Children in the top stream achieved more and made significantly more academic progress than children attending schools that did not stream, while children in the middle or bottom streams achieved less and made significantly less academic progress,” wrote the authors, Susan Hallam and Samantha Parsons.

The research ... [is] to be presented on Thursday at the British Educational Research Association annual conference ...

The authors [of the research report] conclude that the widespread use of streaming will do little or nothing to arrest the difficulties faced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those whose parents have low levels of education ...

“The data suggest that streaming undermines the attempts of governments to raise attainment for all children whatever their socio-economic status,” the paper concludes. “Overall, the evidence indicates that streaming, particularly where it begins at a very early age, is likely to be counterproductive in reducing the attainment gap.” (The Guardian, 25 September 2014)

Celia Green with mother,
Dorothy Green (née Cleare)

My own case might seem to provide a counterexample to the idea that there are no innate individual differences influencing ability and development. Early in my life, when the modern ideology was less dominant, my exceptionality was often commented upon. An early example of this was told to me by my mother several decades after it happened. A few weeks after I was born, some sort of health visitor or nursing aid for new mothers was helping my mother to bathe me. Presumably this person had a wide experience of babies, but she expressed surprise about me, soon after seeing me for the first time. She said something on the lines of:

“Gosh, isn’t she intelligent!”

“How do you know?” my mother said.

“It’s the way she looks at things,” the nurse said.

It did not appear to be the case, as people would like to think, that recognition of my exceptionality at an early age had no predictive value for my later development.

When I was two, I was found to be able to read. When I was ten, I came top of the Essex County grammar school scholarship exam. When I was seventeen, I was awarded the top scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford.

However, as time passed, and the modern ideology gained ground, people told me more often that I was not special, I was just an ordinary person, and that no conclusion could be drawn from early precocity.

At the same time, I was increasingly frustrated and deprived of opportunity, since what might have been regarded as indications of my exceptionality aroused hostility and obstructiveness.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Professor Otto Frisch and psychokinesis

Of course I knew when I was thrown out, to try to do research in the wilderness, that there was no sympathy with my position or predicament. I did not suppose that there was any great motivation in the world for the advancement of science per se, but the absolute negativity of the response to anything I could produce as evidence of my ability to make progress was a constant surprise, even to me, and one concludes that only the most absolute restriction and obstruction is to be expected. That is a simple law of human psychology, although not totally easy to understand.

Professor Otto Frisch FRS
(1904 -1979)

To give one example, the late Professor Otto Frisch of Cambridge University, who had been involved in the development of the atom bomb, once said to me that if there was such a thing as PK (psychokinesis), every physicist in the world should drop whatever they were doing and work on nothing else. This showed a theoretical recognition of its importance, although it would have been a stupid way of tackling the problem.

At that time, Professor Frisch asked me whether, among all the cases of possible PK that I had ever read or heard about, there was one that provided conclusive proof of the existence of PK. Of course I said that there was not, because proof of anything is, strictly speaking, impossible. However cast-iron a case might seem to be, the possibility would always remain that one’s informant was lying or misremembering. Professor Frisch seemed relieved at this, and said he was glad to hear me say that, so that he did not have to feel under pressure to organise any research into PK at all.

Now if somebody with my IQ, who has done enough relevant research of a respectable kind, has a lot of information and ideas about the possible psychology of PK, this would appear to be an opportunity for a scientific breakthrough potentially of such magnitude as to constitute a fairly irrefutable claim on funding. Especially considering the billions that are annually poured into totally futile ‘research’ guaranteed to lead to no outcome of any importance whatever.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

A friend in need

Text of a recent letter to a potential associate, whom I had known as a child, and with whom I had corresponded some months ago.

Dear ...

I was disappointed that you did not come to visit me here after you had apparently said that you would. You seemed to want to reminisce about an earlier stage of my life, and I could hardly think of doing that without correcting the misinterpretations that have always been placed upon me (and, of course, on my father as well). And when I talk about my past, I really want to get more of my past history into writing, which means dictating and editing.

Maybe you, or any other visitor, would be willing and/or able to help with the secretarial work that will go with doing this, when I am able to do it, but in any case it would be a break for me to have a visitor. Until people have made some contact with me here, there is certainly no possibility of their passing on any information about me, my need for new people, and my need for money, to other people, and this information is what I need to get spread around.

Anyway, could you not come and visit as a favour to me. Any new people might make a tremendous difference to me, and even a very temporary visitor who might pass something on would give me a boost.

Follow-up letter by me, in response to his reply.

Dear ...

It is interesting that you make it explicit that you will not visit me if I make the condition that I talk to you about my situation.

It has often seemed to me that this must be the reason for visitors rushing away soon after turning up, but you are the first person to make it explicit that you do not want to hear anything about my situation.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Serviam (‘I will serve’)

Further to the previous post, the following is another extract from The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

This episode occurs soon after The Rat starts to live with Stefan Loristan (the exiled king), his son Marco and his servant Lazarus. The Rat goes to Lazarus’s room to talk to him, and to ask what he can do to serve Loristan.

“I want to find out everything he [Loristan] likes and everything he doesn’t like,” The Rat said. “I want—isn’t there anything—anything you’d let me do for him? It wouldn’t matter what it was. And he needn’t know you are not doing it. I know you wouldn’t be willing to give up anything particular. But you wait on him night and day. Couldn’t you give up something to me?”
Lazarus pierced him with keen eyes. He did not answer for several seconds.
“Now and then,” he said gruffly at last, “I'll let you brush his boots. But not every day—perhaps once a week.”
“When will you let me have my first turn?” The Rat asked.
Lazarus reflected. His shaggy eyebrows drew themselves down over his eyes as if this were a question of state.
“Next Saturday,” he conceded. “Not before. I’ll tell him when you brush them.”
“You needn’t,” said The Rat. “It’s not that I want him to know. I want to know myself that I’m doing something for him. I’ll find out things that I can do without interfering with you. I’ll think them out.”
“Anything any one else did for him would be interfering with me,” said Lazarus.

The attitude of wanting to serve an admired person by doing useful things for them is very much at variance with the attitude of employees nowadays. The richest and most famous are left to eat cold food alone on Christmas Day, or after a late-night performance, so that their assistants, however highly paid, can give priority to their own interests.

Frances Hodgson Burnett
(1849-1924)

Frances Hodgson Burnett had spent decades of her life in social environments where attitudes like that of The Rat and Lazarus were much easier to observe and imagine. The attitudes ascribed to Loristan’s associates seem to go beyond what might arise from wishing to curry favour with someone who could confer advantages upon you.

The average modern employee seems to reject considerations, such as currying favour with his employer, or doing something for idealistic reasons, as being beneath him or her.

* Serviam is the motto of the Ursuline convent schools, one of which I attended for four years after coming top of the Essex Grammar School Scholarship exam.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.