After Aberfan, clairvoyants had a field day

In the wake of catastrophe, however random or unpredictable, one of the first things people can be relied upon to do is look around for somebody to blame. There isn’t always an obvious candidate, of course, but disaster makes us resourceful, and often the casting process is simply a matter of laying hands on someone who happens to be fairly near by and looks like a good enough fit for the role. Assigning responsibility is an extremely effective therapy, after all, restoring a feeling of control over the capricious environment. Someone should have known, we insist. Someone ought to have seen this coming.

John Barker, the central figure of The Premonitions Bureau, took this final claim rather literally. A psychiatrist with fringe interests within his specialism, he believed that a modest proportion of the population had clairvoyant knowledge of future events. The mining disaster at Aberfan in October 1966 moved Barker to test his theory. The tragedy had achieved ‘total penetration of the national consciousness’ and he resolved to ‘gather as many premonitions as possible of the event and to investigate the people who had them’.

Barker collaborated with Peter Fairley, the science correspondent at the Evening Standard, to establish a ‘Premonitions Bureau’ at the newspaper in 1967. They invited readers to write in with accounts of vivid dreams or ‘waking impressions’ that appeared to foretell disasters. Barker was especially interested in those whose ‘premonitions were accompanied by physical as well as mental symptoms’, as this corroborated his hypothesis that ‘pre-disaster syndrome’ might be akin to the ‘sympathetic projection of pain’. He speculated that certain people were sensitive to ‘some sort of telepathic “shock wave” induced by a disaster’. This wasn’t a majority condition, he conceded, and ‘might only be as common as left-handedness’. Assuming Barker’s speculations were supported, the two men hoped to present the Bureau’s findings to ‘parliament and to the Medical Research Council, to see if they justified an official national early warning system’.