The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war), Germany 1937

It is easy to assume that all films made in Nazi Germany were overtly propagandistic.  In fact, apart from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia, even avid filmgoers outside Germany will be hard put to think of other films made under the regime, so effectively have they been airbrushed from world cinema (in marked contrast to those of the Weimer era).  Yet propaganda films constituted a small proportion of production during the Third Reich.  On the contrary, as Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel say in their 1971 book The German Cinema, in general ‘German films became escapist and politically harmless’, so a bit like most films made anywhere.  Manvell and Fraenkel add that they were ‘technically impeccable,’ and ‘notable for the absence, rather than the presence, of a swastika.’  This was a policy that Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, was keen to pursue in order to fill cinemas; it was generally the newsreels and documentaries supporting the main features which carried overtly ideological messages.

The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (also known as Zwei Lustige Abenteurer, Two Merry Adventurers), directed by Karl Hartl, was released in 1937, the year the studio that made it, Ufa, fell under state control.  It completely conforms to Goebbels’ template of escapism and political harmlessness.  What is more intriguing than the complete absence of Nazi references is the affectionate take on the British figure of Sherlock Holmes, a familiar presence in German culture, as Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) notes.  The project was designed to show ‘that Germany can produce a detective comedy that can hold its own with the best American films of this kind,’ as a contemporary newspaper had it (quoted in The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, by Klaus Kreimeier, 1999).

However, despite the title, this is not a Sherlock Holmes film.  It is the story of two apparent chancers, Morris Flint (played by Hans Albers, whom Kracauer called ‘the embodiment of popular daydreams’) and Macky McPherson (Heinz Rühmann).  The film opens with them flagging down a passenger train at night in the rain.  Showing considerable authority, Flint immediately starts to interrogate the staff.  Word goes round that Holmes is on board, a rumour the penniless newcomers do nothing to dispel, though as Flint later points out, they are careful never to refer to themselves as Holmes and Watson.  Instead they call each other ‘Master’ and ‘Doctor.’  It is other people who make the assumption that they are the famous consulting detective and his assistant, an assumption aided by their clothing, manner and accessories, notably a violin case.  By telling people not to say who they are, they reinforce the impression that they really are Holmes and Watson working under cover.

Having met two attractive sisters on the train, a commission to recover some rare stamps that have been stolen leads them to a nasty gang of forgers, and it transpires that the castle the sisters have just inherited from their uncle is significantly involved in the case.   The fast-paced action is punctuated by an incredibly catchy song composed by Hans Sommer, Jawohl, meine Herr'n (Yes Indeed, Gentlemen), which Morris and Macky sing in the bath – not the same bath of course, but separate ones flanking the enormous suite they have occupied in a smart hotel.

At the end of the film Flint and McPherson find themselves on trial charged with impersonating Holmes and Watson.  As the police had requested the pair to work on their behalf, assuming natürlich that they were asking Mr Holmes, this leads to some red faces.  A large man in an extremely loud checked overcoat who was at the hotel and found the idea of Holmes and Watson staying there uproarious is also present, still laughing like a drain, and he reveals himself to be none other than … Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  The reason for his amusement, he tells the court, is that Holmes and Watson are not real people at all, but are his creations!  It is hard to see how you can illegally impersonate somebody who does not exist, so the case is dismissed.  Things are brought to a satisfying conclusion as Flint wraps up the mystery of the stolen stamps and demonstrates that he and Macky are not actually confidence tricksters, but real detectives who had been trying to drum up business.  Still amused at the duo’s audacity, ‘Conan Doyle’ offers to write their story with a 50:50 split, to be called The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the very film we have been watching.

Labelling a film as having been made during the Nazi period might not be considered a sound marketing strategy, and the packaging of the film for the 2012 Cornerstone Media DVD release nowhere alludes to its context; in fact the information on the back gives the release date as 1957, perhaps a clerical error, perhaps an attempt to distract attention from its background.  True, one might feel guilty watching a film produced under such a barbarous regime, as if it is somehow a tacit endorsement of totalitarianism, while Manvell and Fraenkel were sniffy about German films made when the Nazis were in power, considering the results ‘empty’ of human values.  Those made during the Thousand-Year Reich are not unique in that regard, and on its own terms The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes has a warmth and energy that belie its origins.

George Albert Smith at 150

George Albert Smith

Today marks the 150^th anniversary of the birth at Cripplegate in London of George Albert Smith on 4 January 1864.  His name is often mentioned in connection with the development of film language as a member of the “Brighton School,” film pioneers living on the south coast who flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, and also as the inventor of Kinemacolor, the first commercially successful film ‘natural’ (though it wasn’t quite) colour system.  The producer Sir Michael Balcon called him “the father of the British film industry.”  That may seem hyperbolic, however, Smith clearly had a profound influence on the formulation of film language as it developed from its single-shot origins.  Even so, this recognition, while merited, fails to acknowledge the breadth of his achievements, and it is that breadth that I think makes him such an absorbing figure.

As well as on film, Smith’s impact was also felt in psychical research, where he participated in telepathy experiments with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in its very early days, beginning while he was still a teenager.  These experiments contributed to the foundations of the Society’s theoretical edifice.  In addition, he investigated paranormal phenomena for the SPR (including spending thirteen months living in a haunted house with his wife Laura Bayley), and performed significant secretarial duties for one of its key figures, Edmund Gurney.  Trevor H. Hall, whose books were marked by hostility to the early figures in the SPR, and who span a yarn which involved Smith triggering events that led Gurney to commit suicide, called Smith “one of the most interesting and bizarre characters in the history of psychical research.”  “Interesting” is certainly accurate.  In addition for a period Smith ran a pleasure garden, St Ann’s Well, at Hove with great energy, and was a lantern-slide lecturer.  What tied all these seemingly disparate activities together was a vigorous entrepreneurialism.  He ended by investing in property and enjoying a long retirement until his death at the age of 95 in 1959.

Unfortunately the heterogeneous nature of his accomplishments has meant that he has remained an elusive figure, with the exception of his filmmaking years at St Ann’s Well.  Worse, the fact that he is better known in some areas than others has led to distortions in past discussions of his career, as specialists focus on those aspects of direct relevance to their own work and rely on a narrow range of secondary sources for the parts with which they are less concerned.  As attention has mostly been directed to Smith’s contribution to film language, his psychical research efforts have often been presented in a bastardised form, partly because the minutiae of the theoretical discussions can be difficult to unravel, and partly because experiments with which he was associated have been dogged by accusations of fraud.  There is much to be done to provide an integrated account of all these strands.

Smith’s life has long been an interest of mine, to the extent of producing a PhD thesis on him.  I am continuing my study, and would be pleased to hear from anyone with unpublished material (letters, documents, photographs etc.) relating to Smith, or information on surviving relatives.  In the meantime, let’s toast a fascinating man who deserves to be even better known.

Vehicle 19: Paul Walker Gets to Drive

[This contains spoilers, but it doesn’t really matter as the plot is so basic]

If you ever thought that all you needed to make a film was a girl and a gun, a specific demographic if ever there was one, Vehicle 19, which has both, may disabuse you of the notion.  It is essential to have a decent story as well.  Vehicle 19 (2013) is the sort of film that shortly afterwards will have you asking yourself, ‘now was that Vehicle 19 or 17 I watched the other day?’  The makers presumably chose a number above ten in case filmgoers assumed it was a sequel, rather like the production-line Fast & Furious films with which the late Paul Walker was largely associated.

Vehicle 19 was written and directed by South African Mukunda Michael Dewil, an inexperienced filmmaker.  The concept must have seemed an interesting one on the drawing board: a thriller filmed entirely within the confines of a car, showing the character arc of a flawed individual caught up in an increasingly fraught situation who moves from frustrated confusion, anger and fear, to determination to come through against the odds and redeem himself.  The claustrophobia engendered by filming in a confined space is reminiscent of Phone Booth (2002), though in formal terms, but not much else, Vehicle 19 has more in common with Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (also 2002).

Walker plays Michael Woods, an ex-prisoner who breaks his parole in the United States to fly to Johannesburg in order to see his estranged wife, now working at the city’s American consulate.  Having spoken to her on the phone he knows that if he messes up once more it will be the end of their relationship, her move to the other side of the Atlantic having given him a hint.  Unfortunately he has been allocated the wrong hire vehicle by Hertz, a minivan rather than the saloon car he requested, and as he tries to navigate the city’s traffic jams and tricky youngsters he learns that he has collected much more than he bargained for.

The first question you ask yourself after you and he realise that the van comes complete with bound woman in the boot, then discover that she has been abducted on behalf of corrupt police, is why would they leave a car with a gun and a kidnap victim in a rental lot where a clerical error could assign it to the wrong person.  There must be simpler ways of disposing of government officials who have stumbled on to their misdeeds.

The second is, when later on we find Michael has no money, how he managed to rent the car in the first place, or why he needed to when there must have been less expensive public transport options available from the airport to the city centre; it can’t be far, given that Michael tells his wife that he will be there in twenty minutes, despite not having a clue where he is going or what road conditions are like.  It is certainly a relief that when he hides from police in a car wash it doesn’t require him to pay, as that could have been tricky.

In an effort to ramp up the tension there is a pointless bit of business with his mobile phone when, after some drama with his battery running out while making an important call to the single trustworthy individual in the South African judiciary, he gets out his charger and plugs it into the dashboard.  The only problem caused by the crisis was an interrupted call to the judge, which he is able to resume once he has got some power in the phone.  Why didn’t he just plug the thing in earlier?  It only takes a moment.

Walker, the star in the affordably-priced minivan, has a strikingly chiselled face reminiscent of a young Henry Fonda, circa The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  He carries the film almost single-handed (apart from the section where he first spars with and then teams up with – once he realises they are in the same boat – his unexpected passenger, ably played by Naim MacLean) and he makes a good job of portraying the rising tension as Michael wonders how he can explain the bizarre state of affairs in which he finds himself to a sceptical spouse all too ready to believe the worst of him, while trying to work out what to do for the best.  Unfortunately Walker is let down by the underdeveloped script.

 Of course seeing Paul Walker drive will always now put the viewer in mind of the manner of his death.  If he is best known for the Fast & Furious films, Vehicle 19 might be included as a more sedate entry in the franchise as Michael spends most of his time lost in the streets of Johannesburg, depicted as a kind of enormous South Los Angeles that does the South African Tourist Board no favours, interspersed with bursts of action.  The strapline ‘He picked the wrong car.  They picked the wrong guy’ and advertising showing Michael holding a gun mis-sells the tone of the film.  This is not some kind of Man-on-Fire revenge thriller, it is a fish-out-of-water tale of someone who realises he can’t just walk away from the obligations that have been thrust upon him.

Despite the happy ending to the adventure Michael must know that he has to face up to his parole violation (sadly for him the United States and the Republic of South Africa have an extradition treaty).  However, the film does not conclude with Michael, but with the titular van.  After all that mayhem, we discover that Vehicle 19 was not written off even though it must have been a hell of a mess.  We see it back in the rental car park waiting to be hired out again, with just a seat cover pulled on to hide a bullet hole and unsightly blood stains.  The implausibility of the van being put back in the pool after all it has been through seems to sum up the plot’s weaknesses.  You wonder what a director with a more developed script might have done with the concept of Michael on the run in a strange land, and what Paul Walker would have achieved if he had been stretched by better, uh, vehicles for his talent.

Preserving the Archives of Psychical Research

Cambridge University Library

Introduction

Shirley Hitchings and James Clark’s book The Poltergeist Prince of London: The Remarkable True Story of the Battersea Poltergeist (The History Press, 2013) begins with a sad but familiar tale.  The case, concerning alleged poltergeist activity in the 1950s of which the teenage Shirley Hitchings had been the focus, was investigated by a researcher named Harold Chibbett.  He died in 1978, and his wife about sixteen years later.  Their relatives, with no interest in the subject, threw away almost all of his papers.  The ones relating to the Battersea poltergeist only survived because Chibbett had promised Hitchings that she could have them, and the relatives contacted her to say that she should retrieve them before the rest went to the tip:

‘Shirley and her husband Derek raced from the south coast of England to Chibbett’s house in north London.  There they discovered an Aladdin’s Cave of paranormal papers, the repository of Chibbett’s decades of investigation into esoteric subjects.  It was clear, though, that the process of discarding material had already begun and that there would be no time for a return trip.  As tempting as it was simply to grab the entire collection there was far too much to take with them, so with Derek’s help Shirley set about looking for material relating specifically to her and rescuing as much as she could.’

The rest, the years of painstaking investigation (and this book is testament to the pains Harold Chibbett took), was simply thrown away by relatives who were more interested in clearing the house than in preserving papers.  They can’t be blamed for that, but Chibbett I think can for not making adequate provision.*

Relatives faced with clearing out the notes, typescripts, newspaper clippings, cassette tapes, photographs, and all the other bits and pieces accumulated during a case, or at least accumulated before digitisation became commonplace, will not know, because they don’t have the expertise to judge, whether what they have is worth saving.  If the records are concerned with paranormal investigations they may consider the subject embarrassing, or distasteful.  There is the possibility that confidential notes may contain frank opinions about others which could be construed as distressing and/or defamatory to them or their families, or the investigator may be open to charges of credulity that would reflect badly on the relatives.  Better not to take the risk, but to dispose quietly of the lot.  A safe strategy, but the result is the potential loss of invaluable information.

Successes and failures

I have had some first-hand experiences of retrieving collections, and a couple of experiences of trying to track down files only to discover that they have probably been thrown out by heirs for whom they held no interest.  These experiences are I’m sure fairly representative and indicate some of the issues involved.  The first I was instrumental in securing was that of Jim Jameson, who had a large number of automatic writing scripts produced by his mediumistic wife.  They lived at Wymondham, just outside Norwich, and as I was living in Norfolk I went to see them several times to discuss possible donation to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).  Dr Jameson said that he wanted to ensure that the scripts, which held enormous personal significance for him and his wife, were going to the best place, and he quizzed me carefully before agreeing to consign them to me for transport to the SPR’s office.  A second, much more extensive, collection was that of the late Mostyn Gilbert.  After some correspondence I and my wife made a couple of visits to Bexhill to discuss its acquisition, conveyed the boxes to the SPR, and then returned a few items that were not relevant to Gilbert’s psychical research pursuits.

In both cases the individuals had expressed a wish that their files should be preserved.  In the first Jameson assigned the papers before death, in the second Gilbert’s wishes were carried out by his family.  A third instance involved the photographic albums of Cyril Permutt which were ‘on loan’ to the SPR, and I negotiated their purchase with his son, the money kindly coming from the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene at Freiburg.  These were success stories, and the SPR has acquired similar collections over the years, mainly from members who had had a long association with the Society and left express instructions in their wills.

Less successful were experiences trying to track down papers produced by two other researchers.  While examining the role of George Albert Smith in the early SPR, I tried to ascertain what had happened to the notes that Trevor Hall must have made while working on his book The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney.  Hall had died in 1991 and I could find nobody who knew where his papers had gone, though I learned that Hall had sold some to Stephen Gray who was writing a book on Smith’s early collaborator Douglas Blackburn (unfortunately Gray’s book deals mainly with Blackburn’s South African novels, not his involvement in psychical research).

Having obtained a copy of Hall’s will, I wrote to his last address in 2007, hoping against hope that his wife or another relative was still there.  The letter was passed on, and I made contact with one of his sons.  Although we had some correspondence he did not seem particularly interested, merely stating baldly that after his father death the papers had been removed by ‘the beneficiary’, but not naming the individual.  Hall had married twice and had families with both wives, and there was little contact between the branches.  I assumed that the beneficiary was a particular name referred to in the will, who I suspected was a step-sister.  When I wrote back asking if the son had an address for her he did not reply, and the trail was effectively dead.  Hall must have made a large number of notes when writing his books on Edmund Gurney and William Crookes.  For example, he conducted interviews with Gurney’s daughter Helen in her old age, and with Smith’s niece Mrs Ford.  Very little of these interviews made it into his book on Gurney, and as Hall tended to include only what would support his thesis and suppress contrary evidence, the files could have contained valuable information he chose not to use.  The files are currently missing, presumed lost.

Also depressing is the example of the files compiled by Fraser Nicol when fighting a libel claim launched against him and the Parapsychology Foundation (PF) by Hall.  In these Nicol in the US and Mostyn Gilbert in England recorded numerous inaccuracies in The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney.  As Gilbert described it in his appreciation of Nicol’s career in the January 1990 issue of the SPR Journal, this was a formidable assemblage of information:

‘By the summer of 1967, if not before, Fraser had provided [his legal] Counsel with a mass of new material to support the defence, voluminous evidence supplemental to much of what he had already written in his review. Following a meeting in the south of France, with Eileen Garrett [of the PF] and Fraser, I spent some months undertaking an in depth study of the early history of the SPR, with particular reference to the events surrounding Smith's relationship with Blackburn and the early telepathic experiments. Forgotten material was unearthed from the SPR archives. The Myers and Sidgwick papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, were examined, foreign publications translated, family correspondence borrowed and assessed for additional evidence, runs of newspapers at Brighton and Tonbridge (where Blackburn worked as a journalist) studied and extracts copied, and finally, perhaps the most exciting of the discoveries, meetings with journalists who as young men had worked with Blackburn.

‘Fraser fitted together, both in draft manuscript and reports for study by Counsel, a scholarly study of events and experiments almost unparalleled in the literature dealing with the early history of the SPR. However, these major and newly-discovered footnotes to history were to be unexpectedly suppressed.’

Gilbert kept flimsies of his letters, but he did not retain copies of documents.   Nicol continued to work on the manuscript even after the legal action was settled, but it was never published.  John Beloff, when editor of the SPR’s Journal, expressed an interest in publishing it, but for some reason that never happened.  Nicol died in 1989, Gilbert in 1992, and Nicol’s wife Betty Humphrey in 1993. In 2004 I wrote to Fraser’s daughter, who told me that after Betty died all the files were thrown out.  Nor had Beloff kept a copy, and an enquiry to the PF yielded nothing.  All that work had simply vanished.  Some of it can be recreated, though often with difficulty, but some cannot because the sources no longer exist.

This problem is not confined to psychical research, but affects it more than archives in other fields because of its marginal nature and a possible feeling by those not in the field that the data are not worth the paper they are written on.  It therefore behoves researchers to ensure that the fruits of their labours are properly organised and the preferred destination specified, because they cannot rely on those arranging for the disposal of their effects to do it for them if they themselves fail to make clear provision.  That means that their wishes are included when they are writing their wills, the executors are clear about it, and preferably the eventual recipients as well.

Current options

So what are the options for ensuring a safe destination for papers and libraries?  The SPR has a still-growing archive, though people might assume that since it went to Cambridge (it is looked after by the University Library, but is still the property of the SPR) it is closed to new acquisitions.  This is not so, but donations have to be negotiated with the archivists there.  That sets the threshold for inclusion higher than it need be if the archives were housed in independent premises because the university has its own space concerns.  Still largely on the drawing board, the Charles Fort Institute (CFI) is an ambitious initiative set up by Bob Rickard, Fortean Times’s Editor Emeritus, which it is hoped will raise money for a study centre that will attract donations.**  However, progress has been slow.  The motivation for the formation of the CFI was the destruction of a collection by uninterested relatives, that of Arthur Constance.

Much further advanced is the Swedish Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), which has been very active.  Among the numerous material that has been donated, much with a ufological slant, it holds the extensive library of Hilary Evans, who had been a Council member of the SPR.  More recently AFU received Rickard’s collection for which he had to find a new home because it was housed in a damp cellar.  As AFU’s website indicates, the organisation has an international reach and it is likely that more loads of books and papers will go there; in October this year its blog stated that ‘Between September 23 and October 5, AFU’s heroic gang has been touring the southern parts of Britain (and Denmark) for new pickups of excellent archives and libraries to be preserved by AFU,’ and these forays are made on a regular basis.

Sending things to Sweden has to be better than throwing them out, but it seems a shame that we are unable to preserve them in England.  I am told by CFI member Gordon Rutter that Rickard’s material is effectively on loan and can be returned on request when suitable facilities are available; in the meantime it is being scanned.  It is highly likely though that much that is shipped off will not return, and there is no reason why organisations here should not be able to organise a similar operation to AFU’s.  A living, growing archive is essential for a subject to thrive.  Without access to previous research and thinking the field is the poorer.

Future possibilities

The obvious organisation to oversee such an operation in this country, because it has the necessary structure already, is the SPR.  The Society has a narrower remit than an organisation like AFU or the CFI, and over the years the SPR has actually given items considered outside its core activities to other organisations: its UFO books went to the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, for example.  But there is no reason in principle why it should not, space and other resources permitting, enlarge its already substantial holdings to cover the entire range of fortean phenomena, fulfilling in essence, if not in name, Bob Rickard’s vision.  That would however entail a radical alteration to the Society’s current arrangements.

One could become somewhat utopian and speculate on the possibility of the SPR purchasing premises large enough to contain the archives and rare books currently housed in Cambridge.  These could be combined with its London administration and library, currently in cramped rented premises in Kensington, plus facilities for conducting research.  It would be a bold step and it would require money, not least to fund a full-time archivist.  The last is imperative because it was due to the lack of security for the rare ‘Z’ books that these and the archives were transferred to Cambridge.

So where would the money come from?  Buying larger premises, not necessarily in Kensington, would require extra funds, but a start could be made by utilising the windfall of the Buckmaster bequest.  Nigel Buckmaster left the SPR more than £600,000 (a figure stated by the Hon. Treasurer Dr David Rousseau in his statement of the Society’s financial position in the SPR’s 2011-12 Accounts).  The provisions of the will fall into three parts.  The first two relate to publications, but the third states:

‘If there is a balance of funds available my preference would be to contribute to the purchase of a freehold headquarters building for the Society where a more extensive library could be housed.’

That would seem to be a sound proposal, using the bulk of the money to help pay for bigger accommodation.  With such a start, and using some of its invested assets, additional funds could be raised by appeal, allowing the SPR to become an even more important centre for researchers than it is at present, and acting as a beacon for donations.  One may have reservations about the methods of Harold Chibbett when investigating the Battersea poltergeist, but without the files that Shirley Hitchings and her husband salvaged it would not have been possible to write The Poltergeist Prince of London.  What other fascinating cases were lost when Mr Chibbett’s relatives threw out the rest of his files after his wife’s death?

Digitisation – will it solve the space problem?

Perhaps in future there will be fewer such scenarios with piles of lever arch files and manila folders, full of yellowing sheets held together by rusty staples, taken to the municipal recycling centre.  It is a fair assumption that such collections will be far less prevalent because much material never sees paper these days.  Inputting records on computer that would once have been typed has its own advantages and disadvantages.  While storage is less of a problem it is even easier to delete electronic files, not to mention email exchanges, than it is to dump the contents of a filing cabinet, and their value is more easily overlooked.  It is imperative that researchers ensure that such files are flagged so that they can be transferred to new owners when the time comes.

Evolving formats is an issue (my personal example being all those WordStar files that are unreadable by the word processing packages I currently own).  Eventually it would be beneficial to see all paper-based archives digitised where possible for ease of access and preservation, but not at the expense of disposing of the originals – not only because digital reproduction standards continually improve but because the history resides in the object as a whole, not just the text on it.  So while digitisation can improve access, if properly managed, it should not be a solution to the space problem, even if readers are relieved of the effort of travelling to the place where the originals are stored.  These, and not digital copies, are the subject’s heritage, and we should ensure that they are maintained, and added to, for the benefit of future generations.

*Update, 26 May 2014:

I heard a rumour earlier this month that more of Harold Chibbett’s papers had survived, and this has now been confirmed.  Fortean Times, issue 315, June 2014, p.71, carries a letter by James Clark which has a surprising, but extremely welcome, announcement about their fate.  Chibbett, it turns out, did make provision for the safekeeping of his papers, so my original assessment of him was somewhat harsh.

Last month Clark received an email from a Mr John Edens who told him that Chibbett had issued instructions for certain of his papers to be destroyed, which presumably was what Shirley Hitchings saw in progress when she arrived to retrieve those relating to her own case.  However, the remaining papers were not thrown out but passed to Mr Edens, who still possesses them.

Why he was made the beneficiary is not clear, though Clark says that Edens told him that his family was involved in the case of ‘Charlie the Basingstoke Poltergeist’, which was also investigated by Chibbett.  It is not clear either what criteria were used for preservation, how much Edens holds, or its condition.  Despite these uncertainties this is marvellous news, and one can only hope that Edens in turn has made adequate provision for the safekeeping of the files.  It would be useful if Clark could elicit further details from him.  Presumably this information only came to light after Edens read The Poltergeist Prince of London.  But for that, Chibbett’s papers would still be in the ‘lost’ category.

Ironically, if I myself had not read the erroneous description in The Poltergeist Prince of London I might not have written this post, but the points in it are still valid, and such success stories are rare.  We need to ensure that provision is made for the preservation of archives, and access ensured for scholars.  When I thought that the papers were lost forever I asked: ‘What other fascinating cases were lost when Mr Chibbett’s relatives threw out the rest of his files after his wife’s death?’  Now we may have the opportunity to find out.

Unfortunately it is clear that my ‘utopian speculation’ that the Society for Psychical Research might utilise the money left it by Mr Nigel Buckmaster to purchase a property that would allow it to accommodate a research centre and be a magnet for future donations cannot now come to pass.  The Buckmaster funds stood at £729,000 in September 2013 (SPR Annual Report 2012-13, p.12), but they have now been allocated elsewhere and my utopian dream will have to remain – for now – just that.

**Update, 25 July 2015

The August 2015 issue of Fortean Times, issue 330, August 2015, pp.46-49, carries an article by Bob Rickard, ‘Saving Private Forteana’.  He begins with a familiar story, the loss of archives after a death.  In this example the files of Flying Saucer Review’s early years were disposed of by the widow of its first editor, Waveney Girvan.  Rickard rightly says that ‘Too many unique collections have been sold off or otherwise dissipated on a researcher’s death, either because they’d had no one to leave them to or had left no instructions or provisions in a will.’

The issue was important for Rickard because as one of the late Steve Moore’s executors he carried the responsibility for locating an appropriate home for Moore’s ‘huge and unique library’.  They had discussed what should happen to such collections generally, not just Moore’s.  Their conclusion echoes my own feelings precisely:

‘We dreamed of a physical repository where books, periodicals, recording media, ephemera and objects can be safely stored, properly catalogued and even digitised, with space enough for future expansion as we gathered more or received bequests.’

Rickard’s efforts had been channelled through the Charles Fort Institute (CFI), comprising items gathered by FT’ over the years plus other acquisitions and donations.  That nucleus acted as an attractor, crucially with promises written into wills rather than being just vaguely expressed intentions.  The plan was that such an institute would not only offer a home to individuals’ collections but also to holdings from large institutions whose acquisition policies changed, plus small organisations without a permanent base whose archives often move between members’ garages.

Unfortunately Rickard had come to the reluctant conclusion that it is unlikely a CFI research centre in the UK would be economically feasible, and he was housing a vast quantity of material in his damp basement.  That is where the Archives for the Unexplained (AFU) at Norrköping, Sweden, came in and in 2013 members travelled over to collect several hundred boxes from Rickard’s house.  AFU is well established, and over the past 35 years it has accumulated enough material to make it a key player internationally.  In addition to Rickard’s collection, AFU has hoovered up a number of others across Europe.

To give an idea of its achievement, the roll-call of donors from this country is astonishing: Hilary Evans, Gordon Creighton, Lionel Beer, Peter Rogerson, Mike Hutchinson, Janet and Colin Bord, Jenny Randles, John Rimmer, Timothy Good, and many others.  Steve Moore’s library will follow shortly.  AFU’s reference collection already contains 30,000 titles, it has 50,000 periodicals and over half a million news clippings on 2.2 km (over one and a third miles) of shelving.  The organisation was originally called Archives for Ufology, hence the current UFO slant in the donors, though as it has expanded the scope to more general fortean subjects that bias will become less prominent.  Funding comes mainly from grants and donations.

Despite the export of a large part of our heritage, Rickard still dreams of a centre that would combine a library, archive, museum, digitisation, publishing, a lecture programme, educational outreach, in short a one-stop shop for scholarly research and dissemination.  How that could happen with so much having been sent abroad is unclear, and in the meantime CFI, which would have fulfilled this vision, is on hold, perhaps to be resurrected eventually ‘as a fortean “think-tank” under the aegis of AFU’, in Rickard’s words.

Gordon Rutter had told me that sending material to AFU was effectively a loan, but the way Rickard writes, and judging by what the AFU website says, it sounds as though it is a gift, though neither provides details of the legal agreement donors presumably sign to transfer custody.  Richard’s article states that AFU have a service whereby, if a donor needs to consult something they had sent, the text will be scanned as priority, with no mention of the item itself being returned on request.  In any case, given his enthusiasm for AFU, it doesn’t sound as though Rickard will be asking for his boxes back any time soon.

He is very upbeat about AFU, exhorting forteans to show support either with their collections or financially, and concludes with this plea: ‘Don’t let our fortean treasures slip away through neglect or leaving it too late.’  My view is that by sending it to Norrköping we are already letting slip away a good chunk of Britain’s heritage in this field.  I understand why Rickard wanted a safe home for his and Moore’s collections, but it strikes me as scandalous that we have reached the position of being happy to send the history of British forteana abroad because there is no viable alternative here.

[Update, and minor revisions throughout, 25 July 2015]

Life and Death in Gravity

Warning: Major spoilers ahead.

The plot of Gravity (2013) is apparently a simple one (literally a high concept).  A space shuttle orbits Earth.  Veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) does a spacewalk in a prototype propulsion pack while first-timer (mission specialist rather than professional astronaut) Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) attempts to repair a faulty communications card on the Hubble Space Telescope.  All is peaceful until they are warned by Mission Control that a Russian satellite has exploded and the debris is heading towards them at very high speed.  In the resulting collision the shuttle is destroyed and contact with the ground lost.  The rest of the film is about the efforts of the two surviving astronauts – the other members of the shuttle crew having died in the catastrophe – to reach safety.  The film looks wonderful, the 3D is superb, and the feeling of jeopardy is palpable.

Stone finds herself drifting after being flung away, but Kowalski retrieves her using his propulsion pack and they set out for the International Space Station.  Trying to get her to calm down he learns that she had a daughter who died in a freak accident at the age of four.  Unfortunately Stone’s oxygen supply is low, as is the power in the propulsion pack, and by the time they approach the station Stone’s tank is empty, leaving her reliant on the oxygen in her suit.  They see that one of the Soyuz reentry modules is missing, indicating that the station has been abandoned, and the other has had its parachute deployed, leaving it incapable of descending to Earth safely.

As they reach the station, they overshoot, with Stone held only by a trailing parachute cable caught around her leg.  Kowalski can see that his inertia will pull her free, leading to their deaths, but without him she can reach the shuttle.  He decides to uncouple himself, and drifts away, telling her that she will not have time to go after him.  Stone is able to enter the station and once there she strips off her suit and floats, curled, in the womblike space of the airlock.

The space station is destroyed in its turn by the debris as it orbits the earth, leaving Stone in the remaining descent module.  Her one hope is to use it to reach a Chinese station a hundred kilometres away, but she finds that it is out of fuel.  All hope seemingly lost, with the debris on its way towards her, she decides to speed up her death by turning off the oxygen while listening to a father with a baby transmitting from the planet’s surface in a foreign language.  There is a knock on the hatch and she sees that Kowalski has managed to get back.  He enters even though she is not wearing a space suit, and they have a conversation during which he reminds her that the module has retro rockets for landing, and these will enable it to reach the Chinese station.  Stone then realises that she is still alone and that Kowalski was an hallucination.

Using the rockets, she heads to the station but it is clear that she is going to bypass it on her trajectory.  She has a fire extinguisher with her so she exits the module and uses the extinguisher as a thruster to reach her target, just as the speeding debris reappears.  While the station is being demolished, she climbs into the Chinese station’s capsule and tries to make sense of the instruments, pressing buttons semi-randomly until she obtains the correct sequence.  As she falls towards the planet she manages to deploy the parachute, and lands in a body of water.  Mission Control makes contact for a few moments as the inside of the module begins to burn, choking Stone with the smoke.  She has to escape, but as she opens the hatch the capsule floods, and even though she gets out she is dragged down by the weight of her space suit.  Fortunately the water is fairly shallow and she is able to remove her suit and swim to the land close by.

After Kowalski uncouples himself Stone reports to Houston, not knowing if they can hear her, that she is the only surviving crew member.   But has she survived?  We are aware that this is not an unproblematic narrative, a sort of Apollo 13-style drama, because of the scene where Kowalski reappears and knocks on the window.  We assume initially that he has somehow managed to return, and there is a tease when he opens the hatch and Stone is shown with her arm over her face, presumably dead after being exposed to space.  We are thrown into uncertainty when she is shown to be still alive, and our hesitation lasts until we are shown that Kowalski was never there.  But was he a ghost, or hallucination?  If the latter, her subconscious was telling her that she could use the retro rockets, but there is still the possibility that Kowalski’s spirit was giving her information.  Whichever is correct, we understand that we cannot trust what we see.

Acknowledging then that this is not documentary realism, Stone’s survival seems astonishing given how many obstacles she has to overcome.   They hint that she too may have died, and that perhaps part of the film shows her fantasy of reaching Earth.  There are a number of points during her frantic attempts to save herself when this might have happened.  She may have died in one of the fierce debris storms which have the power to annihilate space craft, and a piece of which goes straight through the head of the unfortunate colleague sharing their space walk.  Or it is possible that while we see her restore the oxygen supply to the Soyuz module after Kowalski’s sudden appearance and disappearance, she had not in fact turned the oxygen back on, and the remainder of the film is a fantasy, and that she dies there.  We have no way of interpreting whether the Asian father with the transmitter, or Mission Control, which crackles through briefly at the end, are veridical.

Right at the beginning of the film Mission Control notes her physical discomfort while working on the communications card.  What if her medical condition were more serious than that suggests, indeed a fatal condition?  This leads to the unsettling implication that if she died at the outset, then the entire film from that point might be her hallucination, everything we see from then unreliable (a parallel would be with Carnival of Souls).  The Russian satellite might not even have exploded, except in the fantasy of her end of life experience.  There is a moment when we are on the outside of Stone’s helmet, watching her through the visor, then the camera tracks in and suddenly we are inside her helmet with her, very close to her face.  It is possible that this is a clue that we are being taken from a third-person perspective to hers, that from here we are sharing her subjectivity.

There are improbabilities which do not seem to arise merely from sloppy plotting by the filmmakers that do make sense following from these speculations.  Remember that Stone is not a seasoned astronaut but is present on the mission because she has technical expertise in medical instrumentation.  She is not familiar with how space works from personal knowledge, so her dying brain would not necessarily construct a scenario that adhered to scientific principles.  Thus when she is spinning wildly through space after the shuttle is ripped apart it is astonishing that Kowalski is able to locate her, reach her, and stop her.  When he is towing her to the International Space Station she runs out of oxygen, leaving her only what she has in her suit, and it seems remarkable that she is able to reach and enter the space station still conscious.  Using the low-tech fire extinguisher to propel herself backwards in the correct direction while spinning wildly stretches credibility.  While one may concede that the debris from the Russian satellite might circle the planet and catch the space International Space Station, it seems most unlikely that its path could then blast through the Chinese station, which would be in a different orbit.  Stone is extremely lucky to be able to operate a module with instructions in Chinese under enormous stress, and to survive such a steep reentry, with bits flying off the outside and the instruments on fire.  She is even luckier that she lands safely in such shallow water only a few yards from land, rather than the middle of the ocean, and can escape when the capsule fills and sinks, struggle out of her suit, and swim to the shore.  A living Stone might not be able to do these things, but in fantasy they would be possible.

Alive, dying or dead, the arduous journey has been transformative.  Now through her immersion she is reborn, the earlier pessimism about her life after her daughter’s death discarded as she feels the sand between her fingers in her relief.  Stone’s figure in the final shot, walking away from the camera, has a slightly glossy CGI quality, as if the character is no longer part of our world.  What from the publicity sounds like Open Water in space turns possibly into an insight into one person’s vision of the Afterlife.  We don’t know if Stone is dead by the end or has survived, and the film can be read either way, but for her to survive we are asked to believe in an incredible amount of luck.  Our uncertainty is reminiscent of Jacob’s Ladder, in which Jacob may have or may not have died in Vietnam.  He even had a young child who had predeceased him, as Stone has.  Jacob was beset by demons as he struggled to make sense of his reality and learn to let go of life.  Stone struggles in a different way (Gravity’s strapline ‘Don’t let go’ is full of ambiguity) but eventually, one way or another, she overcomes the vacuum that threatened to destroy her.  She reaches a place of peace that feels real to her if not quite to us, one in which she can expect to find her daughter, and possibly Kowalski, waiting for her.