The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight

The story of a strange experiment – a journey into the oddest corners of 60s Britain and the outer edges of science and reason.

Premonitions are impossible. But they come true all the time.

You think of a forgotten friend. Out of the blue, they call.

But what if you knew that something terrible was going to happen? A sudden flash, the words CHARING CROSS. Four days later, a packed express train comes off the rails outside the station.

What if you could share your vision, and stop that train? Could these forebodings help the world to prevent disasters?

In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate these questions. He would find a network of hundreds of correspondents, from bank clerks to ballet teachers. Among them were two unnervingly gifted “percipients”. Together, the pair predicted plane crashes, assassinations and international incidents, with uncanny accuracy. And then, they informed Barker of their most disturbing premonition: that he was about to die.

The Premonitions Bureau is an enthralling true story, of madness and wonder, science and the supernatural – a journey to the most powerful and unsettling reaches of the human mind.

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The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight is my latest foray into the world of non-fiction.  It was published earlier this year and immediately piqued my interest, not because I have any particular belief in premonitions or foresight – I don’t – but because I was instantly drawn to the fact that such a thing as a Premonitions Bureau once existed.  I had to know more and tried to approach it with an open mind despite my default position of scepticism. 

Barker believed that there was a ‘new dimension’ to psychiatry, waiting to be incorporated into mainstream science, if doctors could be persuaded to study problems and conditions that were mostly regard as fringe or psychic.

John Barker was a psychiatrist with an interest in unusual psychiatric conditions – he wrote his doctoral thesis on Munchausen’s syndrome – but also a member of Britain’s Society of Psychical Research which was founded to investigate the paranormal, including the problem of precognition.  Barker’s idea for the Premonitions Bureau came about after an incident in Aberfan, Wales, which claimed the lives of 144 people (116 of them children) when coal waste from the mines – piled high in the hills above the village – avalanched down, burying houses and the local school.  Interviewing survivors, he was struck by reports of those who seem to have foreseen the disaster.  What if such premonitions could be gathered, interpreted, and used to prevent future incidents?  It’s a fascinating idea (hello, Minority Report!) but could it ever be made to work?

Following the Aberfan disaster, the public were asked to write in with any premonitions they had.  These contributions varied significantly – some claimed to have picked the winner in a horse race after dreaming of the winner’s colours the night before (which sounds more like coincidence to me, particularly if it’s a single occurrence).  There were two regular contributors who seemed to have the ability to foresee disaster with eerie accuracy, however, even down to the number of casualties involved in a plane crash.  Sadly, there was insufficient information to prevent these disasters, yet these two individuals were able to produce multiple premonitions with uncanny accuracy.  Of course, a part of me wonders how much of this is fitting a “premonition” to the event after the fact, although knowing the number of casualties involved suggests not. 

In The Premonitions Bureau, Knight also gives a biographical account of John Barker, and we see his work in his chosen field of psychiatry. While he was dedicated to his work, it’s clear that his passion lay in the more extra-curricular pursuits that he undertook on the side.  It’s an interesting and unbiased account, and we see his successes as well as his failures.  It also provides something of an insight into the treatment of psychiatric patients in the 1960s when electric shock therapy was widely used as well as surgical procedures such as lobotomies. It seems to have been a field about to undergo major change as Barker and his colleagues – and doubtless others – strove for changes to the relatively poor conditions and treatments available at the time.

What makes the idea in The Premonitions Bureau so fascinating is that I think that we’ve all had those moments when we just know – unerringly – that something will happen.  I think of this as gut instinct or intuition.  Whatever you want to call it, I think that this is often our minds interpreting the world around us and the data available subconsciously, leading us to a conclusion that seems to come from nowhere.  While this may be true for most of us, it seems that Barker did come across at least two individuals whose premonitions went beyond this, even to the point of warning Barker about his own death.  It’s a fascinating read – whatever your stance on such things – and a brilliantly written account of a rather unusual experiment into the capabilities of the human mind.  Highly recommended.