When the Society for Psychical Research reached its centenary in February 1982, the anniversary was marked by a number of events. Heinemann published a series of books, edited by Brian Inglis; Renée Haynes wrote a history of the Society; and Ivor Grattan-Guinness edited a collection of introductory essays on various aspects of psychical research. Michael Thalbourne carried out an SPR Centenary Census to which half the membership responded, and the results of which were reported in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1984 and the SPR’s Journal in 1994.
The regular lecture series held at the
Kensington Central library was titled the ‘Centenary Year 1982 Lecture Programme’
(as was the custom in grander days, the Presidential Address was given at the
Royal Society, as was the Myers Memorial Lecture that year). In August, a ‘Centenary Jubilee Conference’ took
place in Cambridge in conjunction with the Parapsychological Association,
including a formal banquet, and the following
year an issue of Research in Parapsychology appeared containing
conference abstracts and papers.
The BBC broadcast a 45-minute radio
programme, Beyond the Threshold, on
Radio 4, and thanks to ‘evpman’ it has been uploaded to YouTube. Presenter June Knox-Mawer traces the history
of the Society, setting its origins in the context of loss of faith in
Christian dogma, the growth of Spiritualism, and an interest in abilities that
exceeded the limits of human senses such as thought transference. She emphasises its elite membership in the
early years, and the investigations of telepathy and survival resulting in such
pioneering works as Phantasms of the
Living (1886), the ‘Census of Hallucinations’ (1894), and extensive Proceedings.
Knox-Mawer highlights various notable
points in the SPR’s history, and there are interviews with senior SPR
members. Historian of the early SPR Alan
Gauld, the only participant still with us, talks about the early interest in
survival and mentions the sceptical approach exemplified by Frank Podmore, a
co-author of Phantasms of the Living. He draws attention to the tremendous energy
expended in the first decades, and particularly the importance of the seminal
work on hypnosis.
Arthur Ellison was the president at the
time of the broadcast and he discusses the change from mediums as an object of scrutiny
to a more collaborative approach (the consequences of which were seen later in
the study of the Scole phenomena he undertook with Montague Keen and David Fontana,
when the three were criticised for lack of rigour in excluding fraud). He refers to the Toronto Philip experiment,
but curiously neither he nor the other interviewees mentions the Enfield
poltergeist case, though both Haynes and Grattan-Guinness include references to
it in their books.
Renée Haynes, who joined in the 1940s,
talks about the composition of the Society in those days, members sharing a
similar outlook grounded in membership of institutions such as the older
universities, the Civil Service and the military. She recounts that when a fellow member said
she did not want a person to join because he wasn’t a ‘gentleman’, she meant
there was no guarantee he would meet the requisite standards. In other words, he wasn’t one of us. When I joined in the late 1980s I found a
similar condescending attitude on the part of the Council Old Guard.* Having known Renée, I’m sure she brought a
breezy informality with her from the start.
Brian Inglis notes a divide between those
who pursue scientific programmes and those with a more general interest who
find articles in the Journal to be too technical and difficult to
understand (hence a newsletter was instituted in 1981, to appeal to a broader audience,
and this evolved into the current glossy magazine). He refers to the split which created ASSAP,
the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (also created
in 1981, still thriving, and still with an anti-SPR animus among some members
after 40 years), alluding vaguely to ‘internal rows’ as a cause of the schism. Unfortunately, he is unable to remember what
the acronym stands for.
The Hon. Secretary, Anita Gregory, sadly
speaking only a couple of years before her untimely death, discusses
spontaneous cases and the kinds of approaches the Society receives from the
public, not all of them from individuals of sound mind, she claims. Such requests, she continues, give rise to a
conflict between wanting to help and wanting to observe for the sake of
research, never an easy issue to resolve (today’s ethical standards would
disagree).
Discussing why investigators so often find
phenomena have died down, she responds that it can be difficult to know whether
there was nothing there in the first place, or whether some subtle effect created
by the investigator’s presence inhibits it.
There is evidence the most violent phenomena occur in the early stages
of a case, and later on people help things along. It had been the general rule to stop taking
an interest once people were caught cheating, but Gregory believes this is a
mistake, as cases are often a mix of genuine and fake. Gregory was depicted in The Conjuring 2, which was – very loosely – based on the Enfield
case.
In answer to the key question of how the
SPR would measure its achievements and influence, Haynes claims there is now more
knowledge of the subject and acceptance of telepathy. Gauld argues there is a wider understanding
that looking into these matters is not the province of cranks or the
credulous. He makes the bold assertion
that if there had been no SPR then there would have been no American SPR, and
consequently no Duke University laboratory (where J B Rhine had established an
influential parapsychology unit).
Ellison thinks the present moment is a
watershed, with greater appreciation among scientists that there is something meriting
study. In particular, he sees an
increasing awareness that psychical research has important implications for an
understanding of personality.
Optimistically he considers scientific acceptance to be close, with more
rapid progress likely as the SPR enters its second century. There is no sense nearly forty years on that
his upbeat assessment has been borne out.
Inglis, who seems to have had an
ambivalent attitude towards the SPR, pointing out he had ‘many harsh things to
say’ about it, thinks it will cope with new developments, maintaining its high
standards and integrity. The influence
of Uri Geller at this time can be gleaned from Inglis’s prediction of
psychokinesis as the coming thing because with metal bending one can observe
the metal bend, even though, he continues, many in the Society consider Geller
to be a fraud. Like Ellison, Inglis forecasts
science and psychical research coming closer together, but with the latter
prone to the ‘inkfish effect’ (a term apparently from Arthur Koestler which has
not caught on): things go wrong or the desired result fails to occur, thwarting
the investigator’s endeavours
Haynes and Gauld both bemoan an increasing
focus on technique and the drive to create perfect experiments in the
artificial circumstances of the laboratory, with a loss of psychological
richness, rather than on what happens in real-life situations: pursuit of the
experimental method has for some become an end in itself. Gauld suspects the founders might feel we had
lost the larger question: the experience of people in ordinary situations,
rather than in the restricted lab context.
On the other hand, he sees a swing back to an interest in spontaneous
phenomena, tackling puzzles that we find in everyday life. Forty years on, the tension between the
experimental and spontaneous is still with us.
The programme can currently be found on
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikP388G8Seg
*As an example of how little in some
respects the SPR’s ‘not one of us’ attitude had changed since its foundation,
even beyond its centenary, the January 1997 issue of Uri Geller’s Encounters (subtitled ‘The World’s Most Paranormal
Magazine’) carried an article devoted to the SPR. This contained a reference to an
investigation the Anglia Paranormal Research Group, of which I was a member,
had conducted at St Botolph’s, a redundant church at Skidbrooke, Lincolnshire,
and about which I had written in the SPR’s magazine The Psi Researcher the
previous year.
The article also included an interview
with Arthur Ellison. Arthur was very
excited about this and brandished a copy at an SPR Council meeting. He informed the gathering we had kindly been
offered a full-page advertisement for the SPR in the magazine gratis.
As the SPR article formed the basis of Uri Geller’s editorial (calling
it ‘our major feature on the Society for Psychical Research’) it is entirely
possible this gesture came from the man himself.
I thought it a generous offer, and would enable
us to reach a large number of potential members, yet there was reluctance by
some present to take it up, and after discussion it was decided to decline on
the grounds it could attract the ‘wrong’ kind of person, one who failed to
conform to our standards (i.e. the typical reader of Uri Geller’s Encounters). When I had joined a decade earlier it was
still a requirement to have two members vouch for an applicant. Fortunately, such ossified attitudes have
faded with the passing of that generation.
References
Blackmore, Susan J. Beyond the Body: An
Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences, London: Heinemann, 1982.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival: A
Century of Investigations, London: Heinemann, 1982.
Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, ed. Psychical
Research, A Guide to its History, Principles and Practices: In Celebration of
100 Years of the Society for Psychical Research, Wellingborough: Aquarian
Press, 1982.
Haynes, Renée. The Society for
Psychical Research, 1882-1982: A History, London: Macdonald, 1982.
MacKenzie, Andrew. Hauntings and
Apparitions, London: Heinemann, 1982.
Richards, Mel. ‘Society for Psychical
Research’, Uri Geller’s Encounters,
Issue 3, January 1997, pp. 30-33.
Roll, William G, John Beloff & Rhea A.
White, eds. Research in Parapsychology 1982: Jubilee Centenary Issue.
Abstracts and Papers from the Combined Twenty-Fifth Annual Convention of the
Parapsychological Association and the Centenary Conference of the Society for
Psychical Research. Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1983.
Ruffles, Tom. ‘Field Investigation – St
Botolph, Skidbrooke: A Follow-Up’, The
Psi Researcher, No. 20, February 1996, pp. 7-8.
Thalbourne, Michael A. A Glossary of
Terms Used in Parapsychology, London: Heinemann, 1982.
Thalbourne, Michael A. ‘The SPR Centenary
Census. I. The ESP Test’, Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 48, 1984, pp. 238-239.
Thalbourne, Michael A. ‘The SPR Centenary
Census. II. The Survey of Beliefs and Experiences’, Journal of the Society
for Psychical Research, Vol. 59, 1994, pp. 420-431.
Zohar, Dana. Through the Time Barrier, London: Heinemann, 1982.
