In this episode we’re heading back half a century. In 1967, the year the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper and Ariel-3, the first British made satellite, was launched into orbit, at the Fleet Street offices of the Evening Standard, an experiment of a different nature began. Meet John Barker and the Premonitions Bureau.

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On 3 January 1967 the racing driver Donald Campbell showed up early to the nightly game of cards at his hotel besides Coniston Water in the Lake District. While he waited for his companions Campbell began a game of solitaire. In the course of this put down an unsettling sequence of cards. First the Queen of Spades. Then the Ace of Spades. This was the hand that Mary Queen of Scots was said to have played on the night before her death. The story was later told that the cards had filled Campbell with a sense of disquiet.

Campbell was in the Lake District in January 1967 to improve on his water speed record in his hydroplane, Bluebird. The next morning, mid-way through his record attempt, Bluebird collided with a wave and somersaulted into the air. Campbell died in the crash.

As today’s guest, Sam Knight explains, at almost the same time that Campbell flipped in the Lake District, a peculiar experiment was beginning at the offices of the Evening Standard in London. An idea had been formed to scientifically study the exact sensation Campbell had so recently experienced. What exactly was pre-cognition? As the announcement in the paper explained, ‘The Premonitions Bureau’ had been established to find out.

Pre-cognition is an idea that has always enticed people. Do strange dreams carry any real meaning? What about visions? A feeling in your gut? Over the centuries some people have been credited with the gift of foresight – like those from the highlands or islands of Scotland. But is there anything in this?

This was a question that nagged at a psychiatrist called John Barker in the 1960s. Barker was a Cambridge educated academic, who had grown up during the spiritual craze in the early years of the twentieth-century. Thereafter he had gone on ghost hunting expeditions during the Second World War and maintained an interest in the uncanny and the supernatural. The notion of pre-cognition – the ability of seeing things before they happened – particularly appealed to him.

In 1967 Barker was given the opportunity to begin an unusual social experiment. In January of that year he set up a bureau in the offices of the London Evening Standard where members of the public could phone in and make personal reports of their premonitions.

A strange dream. A headache and an overwhelming feeling of dread. A vision with no clear meaning. Over the courses of its two year existence the Premonitions Bureau collected countless sinking feelings and strange suspicions. They were categorised, logged and when a disaster occurred, they were cross-referenced to see how accurate they had been.

The premonitions bureau was so much more than a curious oddity. As our guest today, Sam Knight, shows in his new book, the bureau not only gives us insight into this moment in British social history, but also into the human condition.

Sam Knight is the author of The Premonitions Bureau, which is newly published in hardback.

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Show Notes

Scene One: January 4, 8:50am in the newsroom of the Evening Standard newspaper, just off Fleet Street. The first edition of the newspaper is just going to press -- the printing presses rumbling through the building - announcing the launch of the Premonitions Bureau at the same minute as Donald Campbell, the speed record breaker, is attempting to break his own water speed record on Lake Coniston. Campbell had a premonition of his own death while playing cards the night before.

Scene Two: April 21, 10am in the office of John Barker on the first floor of Shelton Hospital, outside Shrewsbury. Barker is dictating a memo, "Some Interesting Predictions and a Possible Death Sentence" after receiving a telephone call at one o'clock in the morning at his home from Alan Hencher, a "percipient" in his project, warning him that his life is in danger.

Scene Three: November 5, 9.16pm, Hither Green railway station, south London: the 19.43 express train from Hastings to Charing Cross hits a cracked rail and four carriages are flipped on their side. 49 people die in the crash, at first the death toll seems much higher. Emergency crews swarm to the accident in a light rain. Fireworks fill the sky. The bureau's two most gifted seers, Hencher and a music teacher called Kathleen Middleton had both given eerily accurate apparent premonitions of a train crash involving Charing Cross. Barker is amazed. The bureau feels more important than ever.

Memento: The files containing all the premonitions recorded at the bureau.

People/Social

Presenter: Artemis Irvine

Guest: Sam Knight

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

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About Sam Knight

Sam Knight is a British journalist who has covered subjects such the plans for the death of the Queen, sandwiches and late capitalism, art fraud; plus profiles of Ronnie O’Sullivan, Jeremy Corbyn, and Theresa May. His work for the Long Read section of the Guardian and for The New Yorker has become influential and widely shared. 'London Bridge is Down', published in 2017, was viewed 4 million times and remains the most popular Guardian long read ever published. Knight, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2018, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing.

Featured images

Bluebird’s final run, 4 January 1967.

Visions

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