Soul on the Street

by William Roache

  I had the opportunity to speak on this when Douglas Baker, an esoteric philosopher, wrote to me asking me to open a lecture he was giving at the Festival of Mind, Body and Spirit in London. That would be in the late ’80s. After that, he asked me to do some joint talks with him.

  At first I wasn’t very good. I was just reiterating what I’d read, rather than putting it across in my own way. And Dr Baker was very domineering. In a way we were like good cop/bad cop. He would do his talk and at the end people would ask questions and say, ‘I don’t understand,’ and he’d tell them, ‘Well, that’s because you’re not spiritual enough, you’re not aware enough!’ Sometimes he’d really have a go at them. Some people do need that, of course. And then I’d come along and try rather tentatively to say, ‘Well, we’re all trying to feel our way…’ I don’t know what people made of it!

  Nevertheless, Dr Baker and I did several talks together. He was intellectually brilliant. He’d written hundreds of books, which he’d published himself, and he had an esoteric school at Essendon in Hertfordshire. He could talk about chakras and the technical side of spirituality, and working with him taught me a lot. It was through doing those talks that I realized how inadequate I was. I didn’t really have the confidence to speak on such matters and I didn’t have a rigorous enough approach; I didn’t have enough of what he had. And that was my lesson.

  After that it was quite a while before I did any more talks. But all the time I was reading, meditating and learning. It was only after I had done all those things that I had the great fortune to have my understanding moved forward by Peggy Kennard. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, she saw me on the Heaven & Earth show and wrote me a letter. It was interesting and informative and I could tell she was someone with great understanding and great wisdom. I wrote back and we started a correspondence which grew and grew.

  Peggy had a huge influence on me. At the time she was an elderly lady and had a muscular degenerative disorder. She could hardly get around and she knew she was going to go fairly soon, so she sent me a lot of her books as well as messages from spirit and lots of wonderful letters. That correspondence was a quantum leap for me; it improved me no end.

  Peggy had had a tough life. Her husband had died young. At one time she had been quite a mover in the Spiritualist Church, but then she had become disillusioned with that and left. But she understood the great truths and taught me a great deal. She helped others, too. She was a very strong lady. By the time she died, in 2005, she had vastly helped me to increase my understanding.

  By then I was giving talks again. Suddenly, out of the blue – but I know it would have been planned at a higher level – Congleton Spiritualist Church had written asking if I’d give a talk. I’ve no idea how they knew I was interested in spiritual matters. Perhaps it was through one of the Douglas Baker talks. Probably it was for all the wrong reasons. But I accepted and it went on from there.

  Now I nearly always feel really good when I’m giving a talk. I know there’s help coming in. It’s a lovely feeling. I’ve never felt the help of specific guides, but I do feel a love and warmth and light. If I am in a Spiritualist church, sometimes at the end a medium will say, ‘Oh, I saw someone standing by you,’ or ‘I saw a great light around you,’ but I just feel the love and the affection and the warmth. That’s fine.

  Before giving talks I always like a cup of tea and half an hour on my own to prepare. I just sit quietly and feel calm and relaxed and hope I am becoming open to higher influences. Usually I can feel the warmth around me then. It doesn’t always work that way, but some days it can feel wonderful and the talk can go really well.

  When I talk at Spiritualist churches, most of the people there have a spiritual understanding, so you’re preaching to the converted pretty well, although there are differences of opinion. Initially I used to be quite nervous about speaking elsewhere and being challenged. But that was down to my ego and I know I have to overcome that. I’m not here to preach or tell you how clever and wonderful I am with all my great knowledge – that’s not what it’s about. I’m here to learn. And being challenged in question-and-answer sessions can be so revealing. It can make me focus on a particular aspect of something I’ve said and really think it through.

  I’ve found that if somebody asks a question, it’s best to send love to that person. If the question is critical, which it often is, if you still love that person, instead of getting defensive and confrontational you are able to answer their question correctly, because through the love you discharge whatever caused their critical attitude, and you both learn something from it. It isn’t actually done in a rational way, it’s something that just happens if you’re in the right frame of mind and caring about everyone you’re talking to. If you want everyone – including yourself – to learn and move forward, then the right thing will happen.

  ‘In life you get back what you give out.’

  One group of people I talked to had all suffered the loss of a young child. Of course I was able to understand exactly what they were going through because of Edwina. Although they had grief in common, they had a wide range of views. There were all religions, and none, in that room. After I had finished speaking, a silence descended. I was thankful when someone broke it to say, ‘That is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.’ Wonderful. Someone had been helped. Admittedly, a number of people remained silent and perhaps I had offended their reason, but later on they might have started to think. I might have planted a seed. You never know what’s going on, really. All you can do is hope, love and try to help.

  A lot of people do have fixed views and aren’t ready to accept anything else. That’s fine. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t go around shaking them and saying, ‘Now, look, you know, these things do happen!’ It is an individual journey and you can’t pass that on. Everyone has to do it for themselves. It’s no good talking to someone who isn’t ready – you’ll meet hostility. They’re just not ready. But life is such that sooner or later they will be presented with something that will make them think. That’s how it works. You will always get whatever you need to move forward. You can choose to ignore it, of course, but then it will be presented in a more severe form, and so on and so on, until at some point you do think, OK, there is something more going on here. I’d better have a look at it. What does all this mean?

  So instead of trying to ‘convert’ people, you just have to wait for them to come to you. It’s a wonderful feeling when someone does, but it’s also a tremendous responsibility. I’ve had quite a few people come up to me with questions and sometimes you get a tingle and you just know that they’re really ready for answers. The danger is, you immediately want to quack out everything you think you understand in the hope that they’ll get it. That’s not the way. If somebody comes to you, what you have to do is to love them – I mean love in the spiritual sense. If someone comes and asks for help, you have to forget yourself, love them, listen to what they are saying and hope that you can drop the right words in or recommend the right book or point them in the right direction. The lower self will intrude; you’ll think, I know about all this, I can do this for them, I can teach them. But wanting to be a teacher, all that ego stuff, just stops everything, really. It gets in everybody’s way. So forget all that. If someone comes to you because they want to know something to take them forward, you have a responsibility to try to find what that is and give it to them. That’s all.

  Every time I go on Heaven & Earth or similar shows, I get letters. I got one the other day from a woman saying her husband had just died, she’d got an inflamed eye, she’d got an inflamed kidney, she had to go into hospital, she’d broken her toe and she’d lost all her money. It was a tale of woe from beginning to end. She had no one to turn to and just felt I was a sympathetic person. You have a responsibility when you get a letter like that and I try to do the best I can. It’s very hard to start painting rosy spiritual pictures when someone’s in the middle of physical and emotional pain. So I just
tried to explain that her husband was close to her and would be sending her love and that if she could find some quiet time she would feel the love coming through and would find the strength to be brave and face her physical problems. Now, whether I rose to the occasion or not and whether that letter helped or not, I don’t know, but I hope that somewhere in there there was something that gave her comfort.

  You have to be careful when you do this, though, because a dependence can build up which isn’t helpful to anyone. All of us have to stand on our own two feet. I never understood the phrase, ‘The pupil dictates to the teacher’ until I met Dr Maugham, but he would look at a pupil and see what they needed and then point them in their own direction. That was all the help he gave. The rest was up to them.

  You can say all this, of course, and feel absolutely certain that you’re making great spiritual progress and then something can come out of nowhere and smack you right in the face and you realize how far you really have to go. I’m afraid I experienced this is in a highly public and dramatic way.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Laws of Life

  ‘Natural law is an immutable sequence of cause and effect. There are no chances, no coincidences, and the question of unfairness can never arise.’

  There are no accidents in life, no coincidences. Everything that happens to us is something we’ve brought about or we’re ready for or we need. If we are ready for something, we will get it. But our perception of ourselves is not the true one. We often think we need more, or less, or that something’s not right for us, or not fair. But everything that is happening to us is happening for a reason and that reason is always good. However awful something is, it is something we need to go through and if we handle it correctly we’ll come out wiser and stronger. It’s very hard at times to accept this. But there is a reason, there’s always a reason.

  Probably our biggest battle here on Earth is facing and overcoming fear. All fear really stems from trying to hang on – to a set of circumstances, or your body, or your reputation, or to material things. It’s pointless, really. If you know you are an eternal, immortal, spiritual being, who cannot be destroyed and who is loved and looked after, why are you frightened? But we all are. Basically we’re frightened of losing our security and our comfort. And we’re frightened of losing our life, because we’ve grown accustomed to it. Even when we have the understanding that we are immortal beings, it’s very hard to contemplate giving up this life. You’re attached to your body – with all its faults, you’d rather have it than not!

  Fear is really only an emotion, but you can let it totally control you. I mean, look at all the funny irrational fears people have. I myself have claustrophobia. Even with all my understanding, I still don’t like being confined. My body doesn’t like it. Meditating has helped me to understand that it’s just an emotion, an irrational fear that I know I should overcome, but it’s still there. I know I’ve got to work on that.

  Another fear I obviously also had to work on, though I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, was a fear of losing my reputation.

  I was shown this in dramatic fashion in November 1990 when Ken Irwin, a Sun newspaper journalist who styled himself as ‘the friend of the Street’, wrote a series of articles ‘celebrating’ Coronation Street. This was somewhat ironic given that after the very first episode in 1960 he had predicted the show wouldn’t last. More alarming was the fact that the first article, on Julie Goodyear, was full of unsubstantiated rumour and quite nasty in tone. It certainly wasn’t a celebration. The next article was due to be about me.

  ‘Within yourself lies the cause of whatever enters into your life.’

  I had not given Mr Irwin an interview; in fact, I had been quite wary of the Sun ever since they had fabricated a nasty story about Jean Alexander and me three years before. I had complained to them at the time and asked for an apology to be printed. They had suggested we write a correction ourselves, which we did, but it was never printed, although we asked them several times, and in the end we just gave up.

  Now I wondered what they were going to write about me. I don’t normally buy the Sun, but that day I did. What I read was absolutely devastating. Without quoting any sources, Ken Irwin had written that I was hated by the cast, was a joke for the writers, was incompetent, had to be carried by other actors, for example in the famous Ken/Deirdre/Mike storyline, and had been nearly sacked more often than anyone else. He claimed this information came from unnamed ‘insiders’. He also went back over all the stories about my life in the ’60s, which was highly embarrassing, but at least there was some foundation for those, unlike his main allegation, which was that I was as boring and smug as Ken himself.

  The ‘Boring Barlow’ tag had come from a dramatic scene where Ken had said to Deirdre, ‘You think I’m boring, don’t you?’ It had stuck to Ken and I didn’t much like it. In fact it was a pretty unpleasant thing to say even on a television programme, but at least it hadn’t been applied to me personally. Until now, that is.

  At the time the Sun had the largest readership in the country and I was horrified to think that millions of people were reading that article and perhaps believing every word. And it wasn’t as if they wouldn’t notice it – it was a massive centre-page spread.

  When I got to work that day I headed straight for my dressing room. Although I knew for a fact that the cast didn’t hate me and would actually have been very sympathetic, I just couldn’t face seeing anyone.

  I went to see Granada’s company secretary, Alistair Mutch, who recommended that their lawyers, Goodman & Co., take a look at the article. Later they rang me to discuss it. They agreed that it was very defamatory and that I could probably sue for libel and win, but they didn’t recommend that I should do so.

  Granada’s policy was never to back anyone in a libel case. Their view was that it could result in even more adverse publicity and with a trial by jury the outcome would always be uncertain. That was quite right, of course, but it still didn’t seem fair to me.

  ‘So what you’re saying,’ I said to the lawyer, ‘is that the papers can libel anyone they like and be almost certain of getting away with it?’

  He explained that most cases never came to court anyway because the costs were too high or the plaintiff was too frightened to go through the ordeal.

  I was determined not to back down for either of these reasons. I engaged the services of the UK’s leading libel lawyer, Peter Carter-Ruck.

  Now I know this was totally the wrong approach. If someone’s getting at you, you shouldn’t be confrontational, you shouldn’t try and justify yourself. You should try to forgive instead, or at least to move away from the situation. Otherwise, you’re just acting out of pride or for financial reasons.

  At the time I felt I was making a point. If I was successful, perhaps other people wouldn’t have to suffer in the same way. But now I know it was just pride. I think I knew it then, though I didn’t want to admit it, not even to myself. I was very hurt by the article, very hurt indeed. That was my ego being hit. You have to learn to disregard what happens to your ego, but instead I defended it and retaliated. If I had just let it all ride, people would have forgotten about it in a few days. As it was, I was in for a very bad time.

  Initially, everything seemed promising. Peter Carter-Ruck gave my case an 80 per cent chance of success, which was the highest he ever gave to a libel case. I was very encouraged by that.

  I went to meet him at his offices in Holborn and an extraordinary thing happened on my way back to Manchester. I was taking the train from Euston, but when I got there the train was in but the gates leading down to the platform were closed, so I joined the queue. I was reading a newspaper when I heard someone come up behind me and say, ‘Hello.’ It was Ken Irwin.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Was this strange meeting the universe throwing me a last chance to take a magnanimous view and shrug it all off? If so, I didn’t take it.

  I said, ‘I was absolutely horrified by that artic
le you wrote.’

  ‘What article?’

  ‘You know full well what article. I think it’s the worst thing that’s ever been written about me and I’m taking action.’

  ‘Not against me, I hope.’

  The effrontery of the man!

  He muttered something like, ‘Well, you know the sort of thing the papers want.’

  That was the point. It was pure sensationalism.

  ‘My solicitors will be dealing with that,’ I said, and turned my back on him.

  My solicitors were dealing with it, but there was a lot to do. We got some witness statements from the cast refuting the allegations that had been made. Amanda Barrie, Betty Driver, Johnny Briggs, Bill Waddington and Michael Levell were all prepared to testify on my behalf and I was really heartened by their support.

  We wrote to the editor of the Sun, Kelvin McKenzie, offering him the chance to apologize and pay our costs, but he didn’t reply.

  The date for the court hearing was set for 29 October 1991, almost a year after the publication of the article, and all this time the lawyers’ fees were mounting up. I now realize that when you resort to the law all you are doing is paying people to argue for you. Really, you’re just paying someone to do your dirty work for you. You just sit there while it all goes on around you and vast debts build up…

  In September the Sun paid £25,000 into court. What this meant was that if I took that money, the defence would make an apology, the case wouldn’t proceed and the Sun would pay my costs.