Recently I was asked to provide an appreciation of Alan Gauld for the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, which has now been published – ‘In Memoriam: Alan Gauld (1932-2024)’:
https://journals.lub.lu.se/jaex/article/view/28220
Unfortunately, I was limited to about
1,000 words, and was requested to focus on his publications. Space and structure precluded the inclusion
of more personal snippets that perhaps help to round out a little the portrait
of Alan as an individual. So here are
some bits and pieces that didn’t make the cut.
I was told by a third party that Alan’s
dedication to psychical research prevented him from achieving a professorship
at Nottingham. I don’t know if this is
true, but it sounds plausible. He
certainly had the ability and the credentials.
In his Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research obituary (April 2025, pp. 114-115), Cal Cooper notes
that the university awarded Alan a DLitt, and Alan said they had made a fuss of
him, so perhaps this was a belated attempt to make amends, rather like the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving a general honorary Oscar
after failing to do the right thing at the right time.
We corresponded over the years on various
aspects of psychical research, as he did with many colleagues, and he was
always ready to help with requests for information, particularly after I
started looking after the SPR website’s general enquiries inbox in 2011. When he was unable to attend meetings he
would ask me for reports of anything noteworthy that had occurred. In later years he became somewhat
disillusioned, as evidenced for example in this plea:
“Tell me, tell me (if you can do it
without your fingers crossed behind your back) that there is something really
interesting going on in psychical research!” (Personal communication, 21 March
2012)
Unsurprisingly, many of my memories of
Alan involve books. He was famous for
his bibliophilia, though his passion undermined his general amiability on at
least one occasion. Tony Cornell recounted how he and Alan were in a
bookshop one day and Tony asked Alan’s opinion about a particular book. Alan dismissively said it wasn’t very good so
Tony put it back, whereupon, Tony ruefully told me, Alan immediately picked it
up and bought it.
With Tony, in 1961 he investigated G W
Lambert’s geophysical theory, which posited that poltergeists could be
attributed to vibrations caused by the action of underground water. Their “house shaking experiments,” using
electric motors (recounted in their 1979 book Poltergeists), resulted in a film featuring the entertaining
spectacle of Tony leaning out of an upstairs window while a house scheduled for
demolition was being hammered. They
found the theory inadequate to account for the scale of reported poltergeist
activity.
There are not many who can say, as Alan
was able to, that they had read the complete run of both the SPR’s Proceedings and Journal, amounting to many thousands of pages, as well as the bulk
of the American SPR’s publications.
Added to his familiarity with numerous archives and the psychical
research literature generally, he put this knowledge to good use in his books
and articles, and all who knew him can testify to his erudition.
It was fitting that when the SPR’s paper
archive and rare books were transferred to Cambridge University Library (CUL)
in 1989, it was Alan, as President, who signed the agreement on behalf of the
SPR. When CUL had a number of rare
volumes belonging to the SPR stolen, they offered to replace them with similar
volumes from their own collection. Alan
was the person in the SPR best qualified to advise, and he was able to
discourse on the merits of different editions of antiquarian books, and whether
what was offered was as good as what had been lost.
After Alan Wesencraft, the long-serving
custodian of the Harry Price Library at Senate House, University of London,
finally retired in 1998 at the age of 86, Alan Gauld told me that when he was
writing A History of Hypnotism
(1992), Wesey (as Wesencraft was affectionately known) had allowed him to take
items home, including rare pamphlets on mesmerism. This privilege was, I think, a mark of the
esteem in which Alan was held and the trust he engendered. I cannot imagine it would happen now,
whatever a scholar’s merits; different days.
In more recent years he invariably signed off emails to me “KBO” – keep buggering on – which I took to mean he thought I was doing OK. Coming from Alan it meant a lot.