by Donald West
Further Experiences in Parapsychology
In the years following my reinstatement as Hon. Research Officer to the SPR, while still occupying the flat at their headquarters, I continued trying to capture signs of ESP in various guessing experiments. An influential figure was G.W.Fisk. He had originally joined the SPR in 1913, while working in China, first as a teacher for the China Inland Mission and later in mining administration. He had become fascinated by the stories of mischievous ‘spirits’ and other paranormal happenings that were part of Chinese culture. Returning to England in the thirties he worked on the invention of a spring, now in regular use in anglepoise lamps. In retirement he devoted much of his time to unpaid work for the SPR, including editing their Journal for nine years. He had a scientific turn of mind and organised over the years an extensive series of ESP experiments.
Fisk had a sensibly critical approach, always looking for ‘normal’ explanations and making no great claims for his positive findings. Indeed, he had ruffled some feathers when he pointed out a flaw in some experiments by G.N.M.Tyrrell, another SPR member. Tyrrell had been using a machine with five boxes, each containing a light bulb connected to a row of five push buttons. The experimenter would press one of the buttons and the subject had to guess which light was on before the box lids were opened to reveal whether her guess was correct. Tyrrell had made the mistake of not using random number tables to select the target sequence, but simply pushing the buttons haphazardly in an apparently random fashion. Unfortunately, most people trying to create a random sequence out of their head tend to produce too few repetitions of the same number. Consequently, if Tyrrell’s subject were to change her guess every time she scored a hit she would be able to capitalise on the lessened probability of a repetition and so, without any ESP ability, score higher than the one in five hits expected if the target sequence were truly random.
Fisk organised a large number of “home testing” telepathy experiments in which pairs of volunteers were sent packs of ESP cards and instructed how to carry out ESP tests. Separated by a screen, one member of the pair was to shuffle the cards and look at them one by one, tapping each time to indicate when the other member should make a guess. Score sheets were provided on which to register targets and calls. There was no knowing how closely the volunteers followed the instructions and an excess of correct guesses could easily be explained by motivated recording errors or deliberate falsification. In fact the scores were well within chance expectation, except for one subject Mr B, who produced high scores and continued to do so for a time when tested independently with witnesses present. With Mr B excluded the scores on the target were close to chance, but when the guesses were matched against the targets one before or one ahead they were found to be in both cases very significantly less than chance expectation. The trends were consistently present over the whole of four series of experiments and were not due to an anomalous performance by just a few of the volunteers.
The volunteers were not supposed to indicate a hit or a miss after each guess, but some may have done so, deliberately or otherwise, in which case, if the guessers tended to change their call after making a hit, this would produce a negative score on the target one behind. The deviant score on the card one ahead was more difficult to explain. The counting of one behind and one ahead ‘displacement’ scores was done because Soal had found such an effect in the guesses of his star telepathic subject, Basil Shackleton. These Fisk results, which look like an anomaly caused by ESP, like many others reported before or since, were more curious than meaningful and have not proved to be a repeatable finding. If this was a genuine paranormal effect, then Fisk himself, as the experimenter, may have been the influence behind it. The possibility of experimenter influence was (and still is) a live issue. That Fisk might be a catalyst for ESP seemed even more likely when he obtained further positive results using a different set of target cards bearing a clock face with the hour hand pointing to one or other of the twelve hour positions. The clock cards could be scored for direct hits, i.e. naming the correct hour, or displaced hits, i.e. naming an adjacent hour.
We decided to test the experimenter effect. Fisk dispatched packs of 12 clock cards in securely sealed packets to his subjects, who were required, in their own time, to try to guess the order of the cards “down through” the packs. When they had done so they posted the packets back to Fisk unopened. Unknown to the subjects half of the packets had been made up independently by me, and when they were returned to Fisk he sent them back to me still unopened. One of the subjects, SM (a close friend of Fisk’s who had scored highly in his previous experiment) produced significant scores on the Fisk targets and even better scores on mine. The remaining subjects in aggregate scored highly on the Fisk targets but not on mine. There was a clear difference according to which experimenter made up the targets. These results, published in 1953, have been frequently cited in debates on experimenter effects.
Looking back after more than half a century, I cannot explain away these results. The packets of cards were ridiculously securely sealed and Fisk had a subtle method for detecting attempts to open them. The subjects’ identities were not published and it would have required several of them to indulge in seemingly pointless cheating to produce the effects. I can hardly conceive that Fisk, whom I knew as a meticulous experimenter with an engineering background, modest opinions about his own research, and far from uncritical views about claims for the paranormal, should have systematically cheated. The episode remains about the most impressive example of the apparently paranormal that I have ever personally experienced.
It seems strange that we did not pursue this research further. The experiment has often been cited, but the methods used were comparatively crude by modern standards and not proof against experimenter fraud. Fisk did some further trials with SM using his clock cards, but she ceased producing positive scores. That some experimenters report positive results and others never succeed in obtaining any is about the most consistent finding parapsychologists can claim. At the present time, Dr Rupert Sheldrake appears to be the only British researcher to obtain consistently positive and substantial above chance scores in ESP experimentation.
Some years later I collaborated with Fisk in a PK experiment (Journ. SPR (1958) 39, 277–287). He was in correspondence with a lady, Dr J Blundun, who was producing positive scores in dice throwing. He asked her to aim at each of the targets 1 to 6, but without telling her until after the counts which was the target. Dr Blundun would record the result of her dice throws while in her home 200 miles away. In one experiment, the targets, presented in a random sequence, were produced separately by Fisk and me, and displayed, one by one, on successive days in our respective homes. Reminiscent of what happened in our joint experiment in card guessing, Dr Blundun scored positively on his targets but at a chance level on mine. This could be regarded as further evidence of the influence of the experimenter, but the set up did not exclude the possibility of collusion between Fisk and Blundun, which I still find hard to credit.
It was during this period of the early fifties that a member of the SPR, Lord Mervyn Horder (son of the late King’s physician) who was then managing director of the publishers Duckworth & Co., encouraged me to write an introductory book on Psychical Research Today (1954), which was reproduced in a Penguin paper back. He praised my youthful effort as gifted vulgarisation, which I hope meant a talent for explaining things simply. At any rate he went on to publish more books of mine later.
Thoughts on what has happened in parapsychology since these far off times appear later under “Reflections on the paranormal”.
LOOKING FOR LOVE
Sex and the City
Coming to live alone in London meant a gradual discovery of gay meeting places. The SPR flat was a safe place to invite people back for sex and, before long, I was enjoying an unattached, promiscuous life style. Discretion was needed, especially before the tenants introduced by Mollie Goldney had departed and I was able to replace them with others of my
own choosing. An early choice had a successful outcome, but not as anticipated. A handsome young medical student came to the SPR offices asking about research and I was called upon to talk to him. In the course of conversation he mentioned he was looking for a room and I readily agreed to rent one. A few weeks into his occupation he produced a charming and beautiful fiancée. We became friends and homosexuality was never mentioned. We even holidayed together in the Lake District. One Christmas Eve we were together at a performance of the play A Street Car named Desire, when the wife went into labour. A girl was born, appropriately christened Carol. This couple both went on to have distinguished medical careers. Over forty years later, a middle-aged woman I did not recognise approached me after a committee meeting, introducing herself as Carol and declaring that she had been conceived in my home! Her mother, now retired and long widowed, remains a good friend and we can now talk freely about sex life.
My first glimpse of London’s gay-friendly places was being taken by a woman journalist member of the SPR to visit some nearby Bloomsbury pubs, frequented by artists and bohemian characters. From these I gravitated to the then notorious Fitzroy Tavern. In the post-war period it was much patronised by soldiers and sailors on leave who were pleased to accept a free bed and a little sex play. The bar was festooned with pictures of the beneficiaries of a police charity supported by the establishment. Rumour had it the contributions were protection money. I took a young doctor friend who was visiting from Liverpool to see this place. Although there were hardly any women around, and there was some improper touching going on in the corner, he noticed nothing odd. In those days many ‘normal’ people, especially from the provinces, imagined homosexual resorts to be peopled by music-hall effeminates. All-male dancing and kissing was confined to membership clubs, such as the A & B (Arts and Battledress) unobtrusively sited in side streets and mostly known about through word of mouth. Due to lack of dancing ability and social shyness I was never at ease in these places.
A public bar that I did find interesting was the White Bear, off the underground circular area at Piccadilly Circus. It had a busy and mixed clientele that included a smattering of rent ‘boys’ looking for older gentlemen willing to pay. Some of them would spend time outside leaning on a particular stretch of railing (or ‘meat rack’) hoping to catch the eye of a prospective client. Having done so, they would follow him until sufficiently far away to make contact unobserved. A stout, loud-voiced, bosomy lady in black presided at the bar, chatting with her favourite regulars. She knew well what was going on and would exclude characters known to have stolen from clients. The rent boys liked her because it was not in their interest for the place to become a nest of robbers.
Dotted about London at the time, much used by men, were the often dimly lit and sometimes underground public toilets.. Glancing at a neighbouring penis was a prelude to quick masturbatory release, or sometimes to a pairing off inside a cubicle. When they became too busy these toilets were a target for police surveillance and entrapment by plain clothes decoys. Certain Turkish steam baths were known as venues for homosexual activity. At the long defunct establishment in Harrow Road, clients could stay overnight and make contact with each other between dormitory beds divided by flimsy curtains. Bolder characters could move surreptitiously along the corridor nipping into bed spaces where sex was happening. The nightly activities on Hampstead Heath, which still persist, I did not discover until later. My favourite hunting ground was Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner, where in the late evening, under cover of darkness, much groping went on in the close-knit crowd of men. This was often a preliminary to the whispered question “Do you have somewhere to go?”
Inviting strangers home risked theft, violence or blackmail. I felt it unwise to display much property or indications of professional status, so strangers were ushered quietly to a primitively furnished attic bedroom. The precautions worked, and although some of the contacts could be described as ‘rough trade’, money was never demanded, but favours were accepted. Although I was hoping for a settled love mate, these occasions were nearly all ‘one-night-stands’ with no follow-up. Once, I tracked down and sent a post card to a particularly attractive visitor who had not made use of the telephone number I pressed upon him. He responded with fury, doubtless assuming, being the son of a diplomat, that I was out to blackmail him, such was the paranoia prevailing when homosexual acts were criminal.
At that time the general public had minimal awareness of these underworld activities, but things changed under the glare of subsequent public controversy about decriminalising homosexuality, and later about gay rights. The old venues were doomed to disappear as gay venues were openly advertised and gay socialising became more visible. Not everyone liked the change. Some still look back with nostalgia to a comfortable, closeted, private life when people turned a blind eye to hints of deviancy.
One of my visitors from Speakers’ Corner turned out to be a congenial individual working nearby as a research biochemist. I was happy for him to take up residence in the flat and hoped for a permanent relationship, but he soon imported a male partner. Eventually they left to set up home together. Notwithstanding their continued enjoyment of sex with others from time to time, their partnership proved life-long. When my biochemist friend had to give up his profession for health reasons, he and his partner set up a small business together and his partner changed his name to make them appear brothers. Both are now dead, but we remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
Some years later I met a recently graduated Oxford student who came to live with me. At the time he was depressed about not having been offered a fellowship and was at a loss what to do with himself. We were both promiscuous and not averse to sharing ‘pick-ups’. We entertained to a formal tea the author Angus Wilson, who was working at the nearby British Museum. He had told Dr Dingwall of the SPR, who was then the museum’s honorary curator of rare books (actually their pornography collection!) that he knew I had written on homosexuality and would like to meet me. During our conversation Angus offered to introduce me to a homosexual household (presumably his), assuming that I had no direct experience of one. My Oxford companion, who was present, worried about being ‘outed’, would not let me explain why this was unnecessary. Such were the farcical situations that could arise in those closeted days.
Soon after this my Oxford friend acquired a settled partner, and they set up a home separately in part of the flat. The two of them moved with me when I had to vacate the flat at the termination of the SPR’s lease, staying until they found a house of their own a year or two later. The couple secured employments in which their superior education paid off and their sexual orientation was not a handicap. They were able to indulge their interest in buying and selling art, eventually becoming well known as collectors and friendly with leading figures in the art world. I never lost contact with them and their partnership lasted well into retirement, until one of them died recently. Life-long partnerships between gay men, notwithstanding some open sexual infidelity that would likely ruin a conventional heterosexual marriage, were more common that many people suppose, especially if their circumstances shielded them from a generally hostile social climate.
Casual promiscuous sex with little expectation of a lasting commitment was encouraged by the necessity for concealment of criminal and socially despised sexual behaviour, and the difficulties in the way of living openly together as a couple. Although enjoying the circumstances that gave me sexual freedom, I was sad about not securing a steady partner. I had something of an inferiority complex about my shyness at gay parties and supposed unattractive physique, although looking back on old photos it seems I was not really lacking in the usual advantages of youth. Sex continued to be largely a matter of brief animal satisfaction at steam baths and clandestine night-time visitors; secret indulgences entirely separate from ordinary professional life. I felt no shyness or guilt in these situations and believed, much as did the gay liberationists of the seventies, that restrictions on gay s
ex, based on heterosexual morality, were inapplicable. Of course, this was many years before the advent of AIDS.
There was one relationship, initially sexual, that proved lasting and significant. He is my age and sadly dying of cancer. I shall call him John. At the time I was more or less in love with him, but he was not looking for emotional commitment. He was introduced by one of my lodgers, who had picked him up at a bus stop. He had recently been caught by a policeman while engaged in some sex act behind a hedge with a man in air force uniform with whom he had been drinking in a pub nearby. Convicted of indecency, his promising public career in the local community was terminated. Apart from his physical attractions, he came from a middle-class background and was a well-spoken, country gentleman type, which impressed me. He was unemployed and wandering around London, somewhat at a loss what to do with himself and glad of the accommodation I could offer. We became close friends and my ever-generous father was able to secure him employment on the Cunard liners. We were sharing the same bed on the occasion when I went out one evening and finally found the love I had been looking for.
A NEW PROFESSION
The Maudsley Hospital
After returning from visiting Rhine, though still living above the SPR office and still much involved with activities there, I was obliged to think seriously about earning a living. Commencing a career in psychiatry and later, in 1960, moving to work in Cambridge, inevitably meant gradually relinquishing hands-on participation in parapsychological experimentation. I have never given up active concern with the subject and have been able to keep abreast of developments, maintaining membership of the SPR Council and serving three stints as their President. In addition, acting as assessor for applications to the small SPR research funds, being for many years one of the managers of the Perrott-Warrick Fund for psychical research administered by Trinity College, reviewing parapsychological books and occasionally acting as an external examiner for PhD theses have kept me in touch with on-going research. Thoughts on the changes that have come about in the last fifty years, and on the current state of research on the paranormal, will come later.