My need for a hotel environment

(copy of a letter)

Reviewing what I have written about the stresses that resulted from the retardation of my education, or more to the point, my acquisition of qualifications, so that in the end I was thrown out with no qualification at all, I think I have still underemphasised the importance of my need for a hotel environment. This is such an unacceptable thing to mention that one starts by mentioning other factors first, such as the relative desirability of research in physics rather than maths, and the relative undesirability of a Fellowship or Professorship in maths rather than physics, even if one could get those things.

In fact, the greatest deterrent to feeling motivated to do a degree at the age of 21 for the purpose of spending at least another three years doing a DPhil for the purpose of moving towards a very belated residential Fellowship or Professorship as soon as possible, was that although the Fellowship or Professorship should have provided a hotel environment, the years of doing a DPhil to work towards that outcome would not have done, and this made it very difficult to generate any motivation to work towards another three arduous and unrewarding years, living in circumstances that would rule out any possibility of getting anything out of life, the positive outcome at the end of which was highly dubious, seeing that my past life had been so distorted.

As a DPhil student I would have been living in lodgings, not in college, and with very little access to dining facilities in college. So that was the first horror that I would face on getting a research scholarship to do a DPhil, which of course in the end I did not, being condemned by that failure to the even worse horror of living without a hotel environment and with no academic career track at all along which I could consider myself to be working, however hypothetically, for an appointment accompanied by the hotel environment which was the minimum necessity for a tolerable (not intolerable) life.

If the years since I was prevented from taking the School Certificate at 13 had been less bad I might have found the prospect of continuing to struggle with bad circumstances less daunting. But there came first the additional shock of finding out that I would not even be free to do research (reconstruct physics ad lib) but would have to spend another year taking some ‘qualifying’ exams, solving some other types of problems based on the very dubious theoretical structures of quantum theory as it was. And even then, the additional shock was, that I would not be free to do free-floating research, but that the specific thesis topic I proposed was considered ‘too theoretical’ and I would be faced instead with writing a thesis considered suitable for a mathematician rather than a physicist.

It was very difficult to feel motivated about working for a ‘reward’ so dubious as doing yet another exam in problem-solving followed by a thesis of a tedious nature, in effect much the same kind of thing as solving problems for the sake of proving to other people that one could, all in order to work towards an uncertain and hypothetical reward which might not, even if one could get it, provide the conditions of a hotel environment.

Of course, the alternative was still more horrific, since in total exile from an academic career I would certainly not have the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment, nor any tolerable way of earning any money at all, nor any way, tolerable or intolerable, of working towards re-entry to an academic career which was capable, at least potentially, of leading towards what I needed to have.

It was not surprising that I had come to this pass since my education had always been run by people who wanted me not to be able to get anything out of life that I wanted and desperately needed to have. They had not been motivated to let me establish my claim on the sort of career that I needed to have when I was still at an age when doing so could have been a positive rather than a negative experience, and I had had no say in the matter, so it was not really at all surprising that they had succeeded in placing me in this horrifying situation.

However much they liked to ignore the fact, if I was confronted by a situation in which I did not have a hotel environment, the lights of my life went out, and getting an adequate environment became the primary consideration. I did not suppose that the lights could come on again until I had, as a minimum necessity, the minimum requirements of a life that I could get something out of.

I am sorry to have to spell this out at such length, but people have always maintained a blind spot in this, the most crucial area of my life. At least, a blind spot in any positive sense, but great sensitivity in the sense that any move that I might have made to alleviate my position was violently and ingeniously opposed.

Further light on ancient history

My supervised period of ‘education’ or of acquisition of qualifications had been ruined, and left me with no usable qualifications at all, which I could easily have acquired for myself at an early age without interference.

So I had been cheated out of everything that could make my life worth living and thrown out without a Professorship or an institutional (hotel) environment, with no tolerable way of earning money, nor with any claim on ‘social security’ when I had no money.

I know you have heard it all before, but I have to keep repeating it because no one ever registers it.

So my four years at the SPR were pretty terrible even though I divided my time between London and Oxford and wrote a postgraduate thesis which I hoped would get me back into an academic career, or at least on a track that could lead to a Professorship and a residential college (hotel) environment. I had not counted on that, in view of the great hostility to me which there evidently was, and in view of the uncertainty inherent in all affairs.

So I had been making plans for the setting up of a research institute in Oxford to work on some of the areas which I had come to know about and perceived as areas of potential research. I appeared to have support from Sir George Joy and W.H. Salter in these plans. What was of the greatest importance to me was that it should be set up on a large enough scale to provide the hotel environment from the lack of which I was, after four barren years, suffering severely.

Then, I thought, I would be able to return to life and be able to experience some sense of wellbeing again, even if I did not have a Professorship – yet. I was going to need a Domestic Bursar and a porter-handyman to keep the hotel environment running, as a residential college has. I had discussed this with Sir George and Salter, ostensibly without arousing opposition. After all, they had both spent their lives in adequate hotel environments which ran autonomously, Sir George as a colonial Governor and Salter as an independent gentleman.

This, however, was the crucial goal, not to do nominal ‘research’ while continuing to live in circumstances of painful constriction which would make it impossible for anything to be done except as a chore which drained my energy still further.

The opposition aroused by Rosalind Heywood was, however, aimed at depriving me of precisely what I needed to have. I had made use of the fact that the fields of research were so uncharted that experimental work needed to be done on a certain scale, to show that an institution with considerable laboratory facilities was needed to tackle the problem, not mentioning to anyone but Sir George and Salter my desperate need for a hotel (college) environment.

Rosalind Heywood, however, having aroused universal opposition to me and my plans, forced me into the most painful position possible. I was to have no hotel environment but to be expected to ‘do research’ while struggling to support myself and associates without a salary and without eligibility for income support.

Experimental work is nominally ‘research’ and I was to be forced, not only to live without a salary or any means of career progression, but to do the very smallest and crudest type of experimental work. Even a single multi-channel EEG would be too expensive, a stroboscope provided a crude correlation with one factor that could have been measured with an EEG, so to get a tiny income supplement out of the SPR research committee I would be forced to test one single hypothesis about success at ESP and examine whether, at this level of crude approximation, this hypothesis (of little interest in itself except as justifying work on a much larger scale with as many channels of information as possible) could or could not be confirmed.

Such a type of ‘research’ could only be of interest if done for career progression, and none of our academic consultants attempted to get it accepted as a way of working towards re-entry to an academic career, either for myself or for the one of my associates who actually did the work of taking the readings.

I could not, in such circumstances, and probably not in any circumstances, do that sort of thing myself. (Nor could Professor Eysenck who, however, was in a position to rationalise his aversion to touching experimental equipment, but willingness to supervise the work of several people who were using it to extract information, by saying, ‘I don’t use the equipment myself. I think one should leave that to the experts, and stick to doing what one is good at.’ — I.e. writing the papers drawing conclusions from the experimental information.)

Anyway, I am sure Rosalind Heywood knew very well how cruel she was being. She did not make any attempt to get even the one of my associates who did the work back onto a career track as a psychologist. So in effect this associate was doing pointless and tedious work for a very bad rate of pay from the SPR Research Committee for the sake of being slandered as a person who had deliberately chosen a life of poverty and degradation for the sake of an enthusiastic ‘interest’ in some particular field of research. This also prevented her (the associate) from having any time available to help me with doing anything that might have been a bit less excoriating and futile, such as writing books, or even fragments of writing that could one day be incorporated into a book.

So we were not only deprived of the institutional environment which my research institute had been set up to provide, but forced to spend time doing work of the most futile and wearing kind as if we were ‘free to follow our interests.’

It was in these circumstances that I put as much pressure as possible on Sir George and Salter by spending money on fundraising, and contre toute attente, as the French might say, I did manage to land a small amount of funding from Cecil Harmsworth King.

This was a case of snatching a partial and temporary alleviation of my position from the jaws of defeat.

The prospects had seemed really bad but I had known that I had no option but to go on with this line of approach, even if for the rest of my life. When the King money was signed, sealed and delivered, a post-graduate ‘friend’ said, sado-sympathetically (I mean with a kind of retrospective relish), ‘You were looking really bad, you know, before this turned up.’

The money was not enough to provide for much of a hotel environment, but I spent as much of it as I could on part-time cooks, cleaners, etc., and began to gain experience of the difficulties of getting anyone to do anything useful in the modern world.

Meanwhile the wolves prowled and howled outside my incipient Research Institute cum Residential College, waiting for the money to run out.

Have some apparatus

Copy of a letter to a philosopher

When I met you I referred to my constant altercations with Rosalind Heywood about the expensiveness of apparatus. People (including journalists before they stopped interviewing us) have always liked to talk about our need for apparatus, as if it was the only thing we were short of, and as if it could be of any use without salaries, a hotel environment and ancillary staff. They apparently liked to think of me being even worse off than I was, actually spending my own impoverished, statusless time taking readings on a piece of experimental equipment! Which is an exceedingly slow way of getting information to process, and I never thought I would be able to do it.

Apparatus was what we were most often offered, either as a gift of other people’s cast-offs or (less often) bought, very cheaply, especially for us, without any offer of even a partial contribution to our running-costs while we used it. I used to call this ‘the treadmill syndrome’.

To go back to the beginning; when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education, I needed an academic career with professorial status and a hotel environment; I did not want to do experimental work of any kind (i.e. doing work on one piece of equipment myself, in person), although I saw that I might have to do so in working my way back into a university career and, if I had, I would have had to be paid enough (as a minimum) to employ a research assistant.

Being head of a department with several people working with a large number of pieces of apparatus producing several streams of information, in the way Professor Eysenck was, would have been (and still would be) a different matter altogether; that would have been a tolerable possibility, although to make it more than just tolerable, it would need to be on a large enough scale to include residential college (hotel) facilities. That was what I was trying to set up when Rosalind destroyed my hopes of support from Sir George, Salter et al.

Rather than continuing to work as a secretary to Professors nominated by Rosalind, whether in a new organisation under her auspices or at the Society for Psychical Research, I withdrew from the plans for the new organisation, which had now become her organisation with Sir George and Salter dancing to her tune, and resigned from the SPR so that I was clearly dependent on what I could get by appealing for money.

So far as I was concerned, I was not in a position to do anything, but Rosalind put me under pressure to ‘do work’ of a pointless kind, even in such bad circumstances.

I could not point out anything realistic, such as that before I had a hotel environment doing anything would be negative, in no way positive, and my life was bad enough as it was. I knew that whenever I had said anything realistic about what I needed, Rosalind had used it to arouse a storm of hatred and disgust against me. So I confined myself to pointing out that even one of the type of EEG I might use would cost a good deal of money, and that I had nowhere to put it. (I did not say, which was more to the point, that I could not afford a research assistant to work it.) This led to many painful and unrealistic conversations in which Rosalind suggested, for example, that I might put it in my parents’ house in Kidlington (they had moved to Oxford by that time). ‘There is no room large enough’, I said, ‘There is only a box-room’. ‘You could have a smaller model with fewer channels’, she said. ‘It wouldn’t be possible to get it up the stairs’, I said. ‘You could hoist it through a window’, she said. ‘The window isn’t large enough’, I said. ‘You could have an even smaller EEG with fewer channels’, she said. And so on.

I should like to point out that when I was thrown out at the end of the ruined education I had no plans to do research in any field connected with psychical research. I had read Myers’s Human Personality in Somerville Library but at that stage I thought that even if there was anything in any of the supposed phenomena, it was not obvious to me how research on it could be done. I did not feel tempted to repeat the sort of statistical experiment which I had read about, in which some controversial ‘evidence’ for ESP was produced. This did not seem to me to advance matters at all, and doing it would be very labour-intensive.

When I arrived at the SPR I started a plan to set up a research institute of my own, but that was because I needed an institutional and hotel environment. I started doing this before I had any definite views about the likelihood of any of the phenomena being genuine or, if they were, what the best ways of getting to grips with them would be.

My ideas about these things evolved gradually. I was in contact with people who reported various experiences and also had available the past research records of the SPR. Also I had to think how to make the best of the various opportunities which came my way. I would never have thought, myself, of doing a mass ESP experiment, but Cecil King required it and offered access to his publications to do it in. Therefore, to improve the shining hour and make it a bit less futile, I tried to think of a prediction simple enough to be tested in such circumstances and, as it happened, it worked at the level of significance normally required.

Accidental associations

copy of a letter

The last time I met you, you asked why I went to the Society for Psychical Research if I was not interested in what they did. As I have explained, a contributory factor in the ruin of my ‘education’ was that I knew no one accepted that I would find life without a hotel environment intolerable.

When I was thrown out it was no more tolerable than I had expected, and it was therefore absolutely out of the question that I would be able to find anything ‘interesting’ until I had got myself back into decent living circumstances which would permit of being intellectually productive in a way that I got something out of. ‘Interest’ in doing anything, without a hotel environment to work in, was out of the question.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ without a usable qualification, I needed to find a job to finance my taking an unofficial DPhil at my own expense in Oxford. I was under pressure from my parents, acting on behalf of society at large, to find a job anyway, so I went to Mary Adams of the BBC, the mother of one of my college friends, to ask her to find me one. She sent me to see Denys Parsons, the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, no doubt in the hope that I would end up doing some very boring job taking measurements for white goods makers, or something like that, and never be seen in Oxford again.

Denys Parsons was also an Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (as was W.H. Salter at that time). Somehow the subject of research into extrasensory perception came up, and after discussing this for a bit, Denys Parsons mentioned that the secretary at the SPR was in hospital, the post was piling up, and they were desperate. I said that I would take the job of secretary, so Denys Parsons got in touch with Salter immediately, and I went off to Saffron Walden to see Salter. So that is how I got the job as secretary at the SPR.

All I was thinking about at the SPR was how I could find a way of restoring myself to a liveable life, such as might be enjoyed by a Fellow of a residential college with dining facilities. My life was very grim, even with the temporary support of Sir George Joy, which broke down as soon as I got too near to anything that might have provided a realistic alleviation of my position.

I believe that agents of the collective are trained to ignore any statements made by victims which are at variance with the socially approved misinterpretations of the situation, and to reinforce only any statements that might seem to be compatible with the socially approved model.

When I say that I was pleased about the success of my prediction in an ESP experiment, people may hope that I had found it ‘interesting’. Actually my prediction was very much a sighting shot (in a mass experiment that I was doing only because Cecil King wished it done) and I was pleased that it seemed to come off because I was still naive enough to suppose that indications that one might be able to make progress would encourage others, as it encouraged oneself, to envisage developing and elaborating the original ideas on a much larger scale, and that would get me nearer to the hotel environment which I so badly needed.

Soon I learnt that indications that one might be able to make more progress than other people were certain to make people want to keep one even more tightly constricted and inactive.

Mary Adams certainly had no intention of my getting a job at the Society for Psychical Research instead of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. She seemed taken aback and possibly even shocked when told that this had happened. Rationalising as best she could, on normal terms, she said, ‘So you are going to use your typing skills to do a secretarial job.’
I had, of course, told them that I could type quite proficiently. You could see it as ironic that this was the only usable qualification with which an oppressive education had left me, and one for which the system itself could claim no credit. (You could say it was the only advantage of precocity that the system had not been able to prevent from arising.)

When I was about eight my father had bought himself a second-hand typewriter and a typing manual so that he would be able to type letters and notices for his school. When he had finished learning I had taken advantage of the machine and the manual to learn to type as well, and soon I was typing out things for his school. I particularly remember the extracts from educationalists, several copies of which had to be typed to hand round to my father’s teachers. I remember the names of Dewey and Nunn and a few of the dicta, e.g. ‘Children are little workmen waiting for jobs to do,’ and, most ironically, ‘Fit the education to the child, and not the child to the education.’

Reflections on being a philosopher

It is true that few of the best known philosophers had university appointments, but that does not mean that a philosopher (or any other sort of intellectual) can do without one in the modern world. The great revolution has happened, which has virtually destroyed intellectual and cultural activity outside of state-funded universities. All the philosophers I can think of had private incomes of some sort and also had, in effect, a hotel or at least boarding-house environment, which it was then much easier for middle class or upper class people to have regardless of social recognition. (Working class or poor people could be, of course, and occasionally were, supported by the aristocracy.) And, of course, there was not at that time the same social stigma which now leads to the oppression and censorship of those who are having to function outside of socially-recognised academic institutions.

The idea that scientific research and other intellectual activities should be carried out under the auspices of collectivist institutions has arisen along with the idea that what is done in socially-recognised universities should only be done in them. The suppression of scientific and intellectual activities outside of universities has been much more successful than the encouragement of such things within them.

I have been and still am at a great and almost prohibitive disadvantage to those with university appointments in having to finance my own hotel environment from scratch with no means of livelihood. Of course being a woman has made it even harder. Modern ‘feminism’ has not eliminated the advantage which men have of being able to provide themselves with at least a minimal hotel environment by getting a female partner.

* * * * *

Regarding the idea that I am a 'sceptic'. I don’t actually want to advocate philosophical scepticism. If you have been forced into the position of an outsider, as I have, people are always trying to ascribe to you belief systems, whereas in fact you are primarily critical of their belief systems.

Any belief system is occlusive (I mean, it reduces awareness of hard-edged reality). But, of course, if you are trying to get a philosophy DPhil at all you cannot say anything you mean very directly. I would much have preferred to write my thesis as an attack on, say, modern moral philosophy, which is very pernicious and depends on unexamined assumptions that are never questioned. But it would not have got me a DPhil, and even what I did write was too near the bone as an implicit attack on modern philosophy of mind, so that I could very easily not have got the DPhil at all.

So it has got around that I ‘advocate’ philosophical scepticism. It is a bit better than being accused of believing in spiritualism, but not really what I would want to be supposed to be trying to put across.

Anyone working here and having contact with us would become aware of references to the 'existential uncertainty'. Actually this is very integral to my ideas about realism in psychology, but is a little more complicated than simply having a blanket scepticism.

What I would do with £10 billion

As I said in a previous piece of writing, 10 billion pounds has been spent, effectively to lower the average IQ of the undergraduate population. I would accept £10 billion without any qualms and would be sure of being able to make good use of it in applying my abilities and those of my associates to contributing to the advancement of science and contributing to the intellectual debates of the present time.

People have often asked me ‘What would I do?’ in a certain field of work and ‘How much would I need for it?’ Well, actually, I would do the best and most progressive things within the resources available, which is what I did when I went to the Society for Psychical Research, within the very restricted resources available and living in appalling circumstances (without a hotel environment). What I did was the best I could do to open up large-scale fields of research. Working on them on an adequate scale would, incidentally, have provided a hotel environment to make my life tolerable rather than intolerable, and permitted me not only to be intellectually productive but to get some sense of wellbeing out of being so.

Working within resources of £10 billion would enable adequate institutional (including hotel) facilities to be set up.

If £10 billion were given to me it would be increasing access to university life for some of those who have been deprived of it by their underprivileged early lives (exposed to the hostility of state education) and subsequent inactivity caused by poverty.

Would it not be making a better use of £10 billion to provide access to opportunity and status for people with high IQs who have been artificially deprived of them, rather than on reducing the proportion of higher IQs in the undergraduate population — and hence subsequently in the academically statusful graduate population? What is the point of spending money on that — one might ask, if one did not already know that the point of the state-financed school and university system is to disadvantage higher IQs, and to disadvantage those with the highest IQs the most.

The irony of being "free"

Comments on being ‘free’ to do what ‘interests’ me

(copy of a letter)

Let us consider the amazing assertion by a philosopher at Somerville College that if I got a proper full-time salaried academic appointment I would be less free than as an unsalaried, statusless outcast.

What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.

If, when I was thrown out 50 years ago, I had had the choice between (a) a Professorship, even with less than ideal residential hotel facilities, and (b) an equivalent salary, perfect hotel environment, and freedom to do whatever I liked within these conditions, but with no hope that what I did could ever secure for me any academic advancement, I would have settled for the Professorship.

Only if there was real hope of my ‘free’ but statusless environment leading to an ever-increasing scale of operations might I have considered it worth sacrificing the social identity of a Professor — which would have made (and still would make) one’s relations with society so much more ‘interesting’, to use that much-abused word. Even an expanding scale of operations as an identity-less freelance individual would have seemed sterile, in a certain way.

The model of the situation in which the ‘freedom’ of being unsalaried and statusless could appear preferable to a salaried Professorial position does not hold water, because if progressive and expanding work were ever possible, it would lead to social recognition and hence to academic reinstatement. So the idea of choosing a permanently exiled life in order to be ‘more free’ is an artificial one, and certainly never occurred to me, even when I hoped to be able to get a decent level of financial support from parapsychological sources.

I never actually considered the work I did manage to do as an outcast as sterile, in the sense of useless for making a return to an academic career, although it turned out to be so. The nostalgic pull towards a social identity was very strong. In practice, any possibility of opportunity for expansion appears to have been ruled out by my lack of identity.

The idea that I could prefer the ‘freedom’ provided by the bad, constricted and hopeless circumstances of the academic outcast to the much better circumstances of even imperfect Professorships is ludicrous and cruel.

I might have felt that the hotel-equivalent circumstances left something to be desired, but the salary would have provided me with enough to pay for at least a parttime housekeeper cum p.a., so I would have had at least the minimum conditions for getting something out of life.

Physiological correlates

copy of a letter to a Professor of Philosophy

When I see you I always worry about things I say which you seem to agree with, because I am afraid you see it as supporting some socially acceptable interpretation which I need to reject.

I said that getting a grant from Trinity College, Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree (meant to be a DPhil) at Oxford was not a solution to my problems (my appalling situation) and you appeared to agree. But I cannot think what you could have been agreeing with, as it seems unlikely that you accept, any more than anyone else did, or does, that I was in absolute and urgent need of (i) an institutional (hotel) environment and (ii) a Professorship, and was suffering severely without either.

Until I had the first of these, and probably also the second, there could be no question of my getting anything out of life or getting any positive feedback (‘interest’) out of anything I did, whatever it was. It was (and still is) just a question of endurance in crossing a desert, and trying not to let my energy level decline too fast. Over the decades things have improved slightly, at least to the extent that I can now beat my head against the wall of hostility by expressing my complaints openly.

I was not in a hotel environment while doing the D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt, and travelling a lot, and in such circumstances it was easier to do something rather dull. Of course people like to imagine that I found anything connected with psychical research ‘interesting’, but although the thesis topic had to be associated with that area, I saw it only as a way of working back towards a university career.

Even if I had succeeded in getting into one, I would still have gone ahead with the plan to set up a research institute, financed by the Coombe-Tennants and other SPR* connections, as a way of amplifying my activities. Organising experimental research on a large scale is something that would make me feel more functional and alive, because it uses more of my channel capacity, as is the giving of seminars and broadcasting.

* * * * *

The academic subjects most closely associated with ‘parapsychology’ seemed to be physiology and psychology. People at the SPR wanted me to do the thesis on ‘spontaneous cases’, discussing them on the same terms as they all did (evidential value, alternative explanations, etc.), but I did not see how that could lead back into an academic career; so I had to aim at psychology and physiology, bitterly regretting that I did not have degrees in either, since my time at school and at Queen Mary College had been, although through no wish of mine, so uselessly misspent.

Neither physiology nor psychology appealed to me as subjects in which to take degrees as they had relatively little informational content, and I would only have taken degrees in them after acquiring degrees in physics and chemistry. However, now I had to scrape the barrel of possibilities and the barrel was bare, although if I had taken degrees in physics and chemistry first, it would probably not have mattered whether or not I had followed that by taking degrees in physiology and psychology as well. But I might have done, as I had basically intended to acquire as many qualifications as possible and then see what were the best career opportunities arising.

Philosophy, of course, would also have been a possibility, but especially by the end of the three years, Professor Price was as much against the idea of my returning to an academic career as everyone else.

So in fact I wrote the thesis on physiological and psychological conditions of states in which ESP was reported to occur, although at the interview at Trinity I had to pretend that I was also going to be analysing spontaneous case material, and only as a side issue considering physiological correlates. There was clearly a great resistance to the idea of anything being done in that area, and the interviewers boggled in the usual way. ‘What could you possibly do about that? What physiological correlates could there be? What do you mean by that?’

* Society for Psychical Research

Purely for the money

Letter to a philosophy professor

Dear ...

From what I have told you by now about how I found myself at the Society for Psychical Research when I was thrown out into the wilderness, you may be able to see that no belief system entered into it. I went there purely for money, as I remember saying to an undergraduate two or three years later, when I had returned to Oxford to do my would-be D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt (on account of the hostility, actually, because it would have been quite easy to work out what would have constituted an acceptable D.Phil thesis — if anyone had wanted my thesis to be accepted).

The undergraduate to whom I was talking had asked why I had gone to the SPR, and I said, truthfully, ‘Only for money.’ Like many other people in the modern world, he prided himself on never doing anything that was not ‘interesting’ or pretentious, and he said, a bit shocked and contemptuous, ‘I hope I shall never do a job that I am only doing for money.’ Nevertheless, he also prided himself on the money which he expected soon to be paid for doing something pretentious, saying (when I lent him some money, which I never got back, to ease his financial problems) that his problems would soon be over, and in a year’s time he expected to have a four-figure bank balance (which would be the equivalent of a five or six-figure one nowadays).

However, money was my only motive when I went to the SPR, and as I came to know about them, I considered the potential fields of research which might be subsumed under the heading of psychical research in exactly the same way as any other potential field of scientific research. Provided it had any realistic content it would be as good as any other field of science for making a return to an academic career, social status and the circumstances of an adequate life.

It was, however, extremely underdeveloped and would require large scale work with several streams of information coming in from the work of at least one research department before I could hope to establish any intellectual structures that could lead to real progress.

This fitted quite well with the fact that I needed a full-scale academic institution anyway, large and complex enough to incorporate a residential college with full hotel facilities. The best Oxbridge colleges still have these facilities, although the benefit of them is reduced by their residents being more burdened than they used to be with administrative chores and the need to keep producing publishable ‘research’ which sounds as if it is based on, and takes seriously, other ‘research’ which has been published by socially appointed ‘academics’.

When I first went to the SPR I did at first find some motivation to support me on the part of a few people, so I planned to set up a research institute with the all-important associated residential (hotel) college.

However, the hostility that had gone into depriving me of opportunity throughout my supervised ‘education’ soon re-asserted itself. Thereafter I was slandered for decades as a person who was so extremely enthusiastic about this particular field of research that I had freely chosen to ‘do’ it — although I was doing it only in whatever sense it was possible to do anything at all, living in extreme poverty and social degradation.

Yours
Celia

A cruel pretence

There is a cruel pretence that the outcast professor (me) is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (i.e. hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, that is to say as a person with a salaried and prestigious professorship.

When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help in the form of money and people, or needing support for my attempts to get such help.

How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville College that, if I got back onto a salaried career track which could lead to a professorship, I would be ‘less free’! It feels like the most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The worst insult possible, to add to grievous injury. And she (the philosopher), and many others at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.

There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. Suitable redress would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university, doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably helping with the domestic and menial necessities which arise from the lack of staff from which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit her assets to contribute towards the funding that I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything.

In fact, of course, the negative consequences to her and the other dons at Somerville from slandering and libelling me in this way are nil. Instead, they are able to go on enjoying their advantages, and no doubt talk about helping the ‘underprivileged’ – while doing nothing to alleviate the bad condition of someone for whose downfall they were in part responsible.

This is an edited version of the text of a letter to an academic, first posted in 2007.

’People of any age are invited to come to Cuddesdon, near Oxford, initially as voluntary workers. They are expected to have enough money of their own to pay for accommodation near here, but would be able to use our canteen facilities. While here, they could gain information about topics and points of view suppressed in the modern world, as well as giving badly needed help to our organisation. From this initial association a permanent, full- or part-time career could develop.’ Celia Green, DPhil

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

A cruel pretence

(copy of a letter)

There is a very cruel pretence that the outcast professor is not suffering from being deprived of an institutional (hotel) environment and social recognition as a leading intellectual, i.e. as a person with a salaried and prestigious Professorship.

When I was thrown out fifty years ago I accepted that there was a brick wall in front of me and that all I could do was scrape at it, trying to make a tunnel through it. Everyone promoted the cruel fiction that I was being ‘free to follow my interests’. This was the worst possible slander of someone in my terrible position, because it represented me as not needing help (and I don’t mean ‘help’ in the form of counselling) in the form of money and people and support in getting money and people.

How do you suppose it feels, after fifty years of totally unrewarding toil in bad circumstances, trying to work towards an institutional (hotel) environment and an Oxbridge Professorship, to be told by a philosopher at Somerville that if I got back onto a salaried career track that could lead to a Professorship, I would be ‘less free’! The most violent possible rejection of all that constitutes one’s individuality. The most violent insult possible to add to grievous injury. And she, and all at Somerville, have slandered and even libelled me in this terrible way.

There should be recognition of this as a criminal act with a legal penalty. A suitable penalty would be that she should be condemned to come and work in my incipient and downtrodden independent university doing whatever she can most usefully do, probably filling in with the domestic and menial tasks, from the lack of staff to do which I am always suffering grievously. Also she should forfeit all her assets to contribute towards the funding which I need to build up the capital endowment of my university, which is still too painfully squeezed for me to be able to make use of my ability to do anything, let alone to function at an adequate energy level.

The hypothetical

It is obviously very difficult to define the sort of rejection of society as a source of significance that goes into becoming centralised. You don’t give up on wanting or needing things that society can provide, or on trying to get them, but you do give up on thinking that you ought to be able to prevent anyone from opposing you, or that it is some sort of reflection on you if you can’t.

The hypothetical is very important; you don’t give up on your drive to get things, but you do have to ask yourself whether you would give up on it, or nor act on it, if there should happen to be some consideration of a higher order of significance (that appeared to you to be of a higher order of significance). This is quite independent of a belief in such a thing or even expectation that there might be.

However, the hypothetical precedes anything presenting itself as highly significant, and has more psychodynamic force than might appear; I mean it has an effect on what actually happens.

As I approached the final degree exam at Somerville I found it very difficult to be motivated. Of course this was comprehensible in view of the unappetising vistas of doing pointless things without a hotel environment, but it was very alarming because the idea of being an outcast in the non-academic wasteland outside of a career as a Professor in a university, without a hotel environment, was simply appalling and unthinkable.

So also was the idea of ending my period of supervised education without even one first class degree. I knew that getting a second class degree would entirely destroy my social identity and my relationship to society. I would no longer be able to identify in any way with myself as a member of society. I would never again meet anyone as myself.

But however much I wanted to retain at least the tiny toehold of respectability that a First would provide, the horror of the cancellation of my life that would result from failure made it no easier to be motivated. I could work only mechanically, with deliberate conscious effort, to do something in which I had no subconscious cooperation.

Of course I was on a higher level so there was no doubt that there was an urgency of overriding significance and that I wanted to proceed in whatever would be the best way in terms of it.

That should not be taken to imply that I found myself wanting to do anything different in life from what I had always wanted, which was the best sort of academic career, expansive research projects and so forth. It appeared even more urgent than pre-higher level to get on with this, and even more certain that I would be able to make significant progress in any field in which I was able to work.

On the face of it, the best way of proceeding was by having the most successful sort of academic career, but by now I had fallen foul of the system; years of tedious work in bad circumstances at other people’s behest still lay ahead, with no guarantee that they would lead to the sort of life I needed to have.

But if I did not get a research scholarship, what then? Exile into the non-academic wasteland outside of Oxford University, into a place with which I had nothing to do, which might perhaps contain an opportunity somewhere, but of which I knew nothing good.

The university was at least supposed to be about things that were meaningful to me, even if they were not doing them very well and there was no sympathy or motivation of any kind to which I could appeal.

All ways appeared barred against me, and my sense of urgency produced extreme desperation. I was on a higher level, and that implies that all information was, at least potentially, accessible. I tried, therefore, to find out something useful. Surely there must somewhere be someone who was willing and able to help me. If I could, I thought, get a name and address in Australia I would walk out of the college and catch a plane like a shot.

But nothing came. It seemed I could not get any specific information on this point. I would have to go on with what I was doing; it did not seem right to stop trying to work as hard as I could for the degree, equally it was impossible to have any positive motivation. It remained an uphill struggle to do something rather disgusting, in a rather disgusting situation.

Might it not be better to do badly and get a Second? It might be better to be thrown out and find something in the uncharted wasteland. Of course it seemed preferable to get a First and simply abandon the research scholarship, even if I got it,, but somehow I felt it could not work like that. Obviously one would be very strongly inclined to stick with what seemed like a more secure and obvious way ahead.

So I thought that I had better consider as hard as possible that it might actually be better to get a Second and to go out into the wilderness, if there were anything out there. This seemed wildly improbable, but one always had to be openminded to the improbable. If something improbable was the case, it was a fact.

So I considered this possibility very hard because I did not want my preferences to get in the way of what might, in reality, be the best thing.

After a short time of doing this, and quite suddenly, I stopped being stressed. It was all right, it was all worked out. I hadn’t been able to get information consciously, but my subconscious had all the information that was necessary. Whether I got a First or a Second, all I had to do was to follow my nose, or do whatever seemed obvious.

There would be a way ahead.

And one must admit, in retrospect, that my subconscious did quite well.

Within a couple of months I was being interviewed for a job at the SPR, by two of those who had been most concerned with the Cross-Correspondence scripts. A fortnight later I was meeting Sir George Joy at the SPR office, and before the next academic year started in October I had found out about the Perrott Studentship of Trinity College, Cambridge, and decided not to return to Oxford, as I had intended, but to stay at the SPR to try to get the grant.

The need to repeat the factors of my position

(copy of a letter)

I am afraid I am likely to repeat myself in writing to you, but this is because I know that believers in society are unlikely to remember anything which a victim of society says to them except what is compatible with the approved social way of looking at their situation. (This is the way counsellors are recommended to proceed.)

So I may have said before, but will say again, that the educational and academic system cannot but be geared against ability if those who have the power to make decisions about other people are motivated to demonstrate that innate ability does not naturally correspond to a much higher level of achievement, in terms of both quality and quantity, than less remarkable ability. In order to bring about equality of outcome it is necessary to restrict the opportunities of the able, by deprivation of opportunity to take exams so long as they are supposed to be being educated, and by deprivation of money to keep them as inactive as possible in adult life (i.e. when they have been thrown out).

In fact everyone in my life has always behaved as if they understood this and the greatest storms have arisen whenever I was on the verge of getting an opportunity to take a public exam in a favourable way, or acquiring a financial advantage or a new associate who might relieve the constriction of my position.

I should also repeat that as soon as I was thrown out (50 years ago), I knew that my life could not become tolerable again until I was rich enough to provide myself with an institutional (hotel) environment, and also had the status of an Oxbridge professor.

Everything I have done ever since has been aimed at working towards one or both of these objectives. Most of my efforts have been made as abortive as possible, but my position now is just marginally less painful than 50 years ago, although still not the equivalent of that of a Professor with a research department to run and a residential college environment to provide hotel facilities.

The idea of anything I can do in my present circumstances being ‘interesting’ or rewarding to me in any way is ludicrous. I do not regard writing as a positive activity; it is chore which is dependent on one’s energy level, the energy level having to be raised by other activities. I regard it as a form of output rather than input.

"The over-60s are not worth treating"

Recently the Daily Mail reported that 1 in every 2 GPs said that patients (victims) over the age of 60 were not worth diagnosing or treating. Well, of course, what they say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But in fact we can be pretty sure that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.

Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.

When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).

This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.

Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.

It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.

Correction: re physics department

When I said that one residential college might do for several departments of my independent university, I was thinking that it might do if only the most senior people lived in the residential college, and there might be some people from outside who evidently accept for themselves that they should be able to live without domestic and other ancillary staff, and apparently expect us to pretend that we can do so as well.

But really all personnel, however junior, should be able to live in a hotel/residential-college/stately-home environment so as to apply its energies as efficiently as possible to the work of the organisation.

I should like to correct what I said before. If we started with one research department, say theoretical physics or neurophysiology, and then added another, we would need to add to or enlarge the residential facilities, fully to cover the needs of all personal.

Some notes about pain

Copy of a letter

Since I was talking to you about your latest experience at the dentist I thought I should write it down so there is a record of it. I have said it a lot before but not written about it much.

You have to aim through the experience as a reaction against finiteness, so that in effect you are putting your drive into making it happen rather than trying to minimise your awareness of it. Any recoil, trying to get away from it, is actually your worst enemy as the conflict caused by that is what makes a sensation painful, in the sense of hurting.

Doing it is actually, I think, centralising and I think this is why a technique so potentially useful remains unknown. Centralisation provides a point of psychological ricochet; if you perceive that finiteness is intolerable, you get the drive of the animal that turns at bay and fights for its life against hopeless odds. This is an exceedingly strong drive; by the time I did the thing with the teeth, I called it the drive to infinity because clearly no conceivable goal could satisfy it. I did not yet have any idea that there might be an inconceivable goal at which it might arrive.

Anyway, what preceded my getting the thing about pain right was that I had been having a long series of dental appointments doing fillings, the result of my having had so bad a time at Somerville that quarrelling and arguing with my parents, and them shouting me down and asserting the social line, had prevented my mother paying any attention to making appointments for me, and she tended to give me very bad sweets which she liked herself (she had had false teeth for a long time herself).

I had a fairly highly evolved sort of centralisation and I experimented with ways of viewing the pain as abstract sensation, which worked moderately well but clearly had a breakdown point so that I knew I would not be able to apply them to the impending extractions.

I had a solution to most things by then and I found it quite intolerable that my consciousness could be invaded by things to which I could not be reconciled. So I set about trying to make my subconscious forthcome, which led to the despair of finiteness, as I call it, which was really breaking through the final resistance to getting a higher level. But I was not on a higher level yet, and I thought I had failed in getting a solution to pain.

There was a final session of fillings before the extractions and I was using my fairly adequate methods when the dentist suddenly stuck his drill on a nerve. Quite likely he had left the worst filling to last. This presented itself as absolutely intolerable, my system broke down completely, this was just impossible. But quite unpremeditatedly I reacted with a spurt of absolute anger at this intolerable sensation, a sort of, ‘Go on, damn you’, and the sensation became quite neutral.

I realised at once that I had got the solution to pain after all, and that the impending extractions would be a great opportunity to try it out.

Probably the despair of finiteness had provided me with a more absolute sort of centralisation which made the ricochet from intolerable sensation to a head-on drive against it possible.

Even if you are not centralised enough for that to happen, anger is a much better attitude to cultivate than fear or emotional recoil from the situation. Anger and drive are on your side, timidity and apprehension are not, although apprehension may precede anger.

As you know, the extractions worked perfectly and there was no sense of a breakdown point in the system. It seemed as if the pain automatically set up an adequately strong feedback reaction to neutralise it.

One should not lose sight of the fact that although this all seems, and was, very dramatic, the sort of centralisation that made it possible did not arise until I had, in the operative sense, rejected society or other people as a source of significance (which I had done when I was 19, about eighteen months earlier). This, as should always be emphasised, has nothing to do with giving up on having a drive to get out of society all that it should provide in the way of status and opportunity (Professorship, hotel environment, research departments to run, recognition and saleability for one’s books). However difficult society makes it to get any of these things out of it.

All shall have nurses

David Cameron suggests a home nurse for every mother producing a baby, paid for by confiscation of freedom from taxpayers, of course, even those who have been ruined by exposure to social hostility during their ‘education’ and left (as I have been) with no qualification with which to earn money or eligibility for the so-called ‘social support’ when unable to derive an income from society.

How about, ‘Cameron wants a hotel environment for every intellectual’? That would be a lot more original than ‘Cameron wants a home nurse for every mum’ (Daily Mail, 4 February 2008).

Cameron, I gather, is what is called a ‘conservative’, and the proposal is supposed to help ‘middle-class’ parents. But parents with above-average IQs are (as I plausibly surmise) under-represented among those who can tolerate having families in the captivity of modern society.

And of course, getting a nurse into every new mum’s household will enable the nurses to report to the social workers (also paid out of taxation) about which mothers should be regarded as “unfit” and have their babies taken away to be brought up at the taxpayer’s expense. How many mothers will have the sense to realise how dangerous this is and say “No, thank you” to the nurses?

The Conservative leader will today publish a blueprint for changing attitudes to childhood, which calls for a ‘profound cultural change’ in the way Britain treats its children. ... Success in raising rounded children [whatever they are] is not just about intensive supervision, it’s about enabling children to discover the world for themselves. (Ibid.)

Well, you could say that, i.e. children might be allowed to make their own decisions about arrangements for themselves. Abolishing compulsory ‘education’ and incarceration in state schools would be a good start.

The morality of Professor C D Broad

text of a letter to an academic

Throughout my life my problems have all arisen from the same cause: the hostility of the increasingly dominant socialist ideology to exceptional ability, in fact to anything that may be regarded as ‘superiority’.

Dame Janet Vaughan, the Principal of Somerville College, was a rabid atheist egalitarian socialist and very hostile to me. Practically the first thing you were told about her on arriving at Somerville was that she was an atheist. At that time (in the early 1950s) this was slightly shocking, and it was certainly unusual for a person in a position of responsibility to assert it so ostentatiously. I remember a mature middle-class lady, not an undergraduate, sounding as if it was regrettable, saying that she thought it was nicer to know that the Principals of colleges were Christians, presumably because she thought this might guarantee their benevolence towards their students.

Dame Janet was very avant-garde. To that extent that you can say that my problems in life were made worse by my being a woman, because probably at that time the Masters of most men’s colleges were officially Christian and more old-fashioned in outlook. The head of a men’s college would probably have been a bit more tolerant towards someone arriving at their college with a need to do things in a way that could alleviate, rather than exacerbate, the problems which arose from their previous maltreatment by the educational system.

C.D. Broad

The attitudes of society in this country have been getting worse all the time throughout my life, both before and after I arrived at Somerville. One of the influential academics on the circuit of the Society for Psychical Research was Professor C.D. Broad, who managed to prevent any financial relief getting to me through the siege blockade.

Of course, you may say, as no doubt they all hoped that I would say: I have no hope at all, since all these people are part of the same monolithic academic system, so I should give up and do something else.

But in fact my internal determinants were and are too strong, and I could only go on aiming at the same sort of life doing the same sort of things, because what had made me aware of my need for that in the first place had been my internal determinants, rather than the fact that there seemed to be a straightforward and effortless way of getting it. So if it now appeared that the way to it was not open, but firmly blocked, I still could not give up trying to get it.

I am still working towards the life I need, one in which I have a socially statusful and well-salaried academic position, which would provide me with the hotel environment and intellectual activity which I need for my well-being.

When Sally Adams and Margaret Eastman (both Oxford graduates) joined my research organisation, I was hopeful that one or other of them would be eligible for the Perrott Studentship associated with Trinity College Cambridge, which I had held some time earlier. It seemed likely such an application would be successful since there appeared to be no other possible candidates wanting to do research in this area. We could certainly have done with the money.

I was shocked when the Electors decided to award the studentship to Professor Broad (himself one of the Electors), apparently without even advertising it, for the purpose of writing and delivering some lectures on the subject – later published in book form as Lectures on Psychical Research. As far as I am aware, the conditions of the Studentship stipulated that the money should be applied to original research likely to further knowledge about putative paranormal phenomena, but Broad’s lectures were in the nature of philosophical musings.

Although I never saw the Trust Deed myself, I was certainly under the impression that the Perrott Studentship was intended to support people who could not support themselves, thereby making it possible for them to do research.

Although this cannot be proved, I would not be surprised if the award to Broad was made to ensure that the only official British source of finance for the subject would not be available to me. Professor Broad certainly did not need the (relatively meagre) amount of money doled out, being already well set-up and provided with a college environment.

Broad was a ‘moral philosopher’. Perhaps that means that, like other moral philosophers, his work was really aimed at destroying capitalism (and with it any possibility of individual freedom) and at promoting some version of global communism.

‘The philosophy department of my unrecognised university would, if financed to do so, be publishing criticisms of current work in moral philosophy, pointing out its unexamined assumptions and implications.’ Celia Green, DPhil

‘We hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed research department. We make this appeal to all universities, corporations and individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

Modern ideology and A Little Princess

The system of interpretations and evaluations that forms the modern anti-individualistic ideology is now apparently universally understood and applied, so it may be difficult to realise that it is a quite recent development.

I was shocked by it when I first started to encounter it at 13 or 14. There was really no hint of it in what I had read up to that time. ‘Socialist’ writers such as H G Wells and Bernard Shaw took a pretty detached view of the goings-on of human society and suggestions that it might be nice if all people lived in larger, cleaner houses, or lived in a cleaner, healthier and more aesthetic way, did not draw attention to the erosion of liberty that would be necessary even to attempt to bring this about.

My ideas of human society were based primarily on books written in Victorian or Edwardian times, with a bit of influence from such things as cynical Aesop’s Fables. I always took note of ideas about motivation and reflected upon them.

Consider, for example, A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The message of this book, to me at any rate, was that no one will do anything for anyone unless they are paid with money for doing so. In the story, Sara is left by her father at a select boarding-school. She is a parlour boarder and treated as a show pupil by the headmistress, who nevertheless resents her cleverness and self-possession, until her father dies and she is left penniless. Then she is made to sleep in an attic, where a scullery-maid also sleeps, and to work for her keep as a drudge and errand runner in all weathers, and assistant teacher of elementary French.

It is only if you have a parent who will pay for things for you that you have them, and what you have will be in accordance with how much the parent has to spend. Otherwise you will be reduced to the state of the servant girls and beggars in the streets.

Of course, people other than parents may give other people things; when Sara was well off she used to buy items of food for one of the scullery maids, and when she is poor she gives some buns to a starving beggar girl. This attracts the attention of the lady who runs the bun-shop, and she (the lady) takes in the beggar girl and feeds and clothes her from then on — in effect, adopts her, but without having to account for what she is doing to any agents of the collective.

In those days there was no compulsory education and adoption was a matter for individuals to undertake if they chose with no need to seek permission.

That was the way the world was; the way people treated you depended entirely on whether you could pay for what you wanted, or needed.

Eventually Sara is found and rescued by a wealthy friend of her father’s, who has been looking for her. While he is looking for her he is made aware of how many children are living in poverty. He is sorry for them, and harrowed to think that Sara may be in a similar state, but his friend tells him that his resources are limited. He could not provide for all the destitute children, but must concentrate on finding and helping Sara, whose father was his friend.

In the world as depicted in the books that I read there was no disapproval of ambition. The respectable bourgeois worked hard and rose in the world if he could; his children lived in well-built houses with a few servants and might have Mary Poppins as a nanny.

My father had been a very poor boy, and the great efforts he had made to rise in the world had not got him very far; he was headmaster of a primary school at the London docks. My parents were respectable but still very far from rich. Nevertheless, their efforts had resulted in their being able to give their child a better start in life than they had had themselves; they had delayed having me until they had saved enough money to be sure that they would be able to pay for a professional training for me.

When I came top of the grammar school scholarship exam at the age of ten, very soon after the 1945 Labour landslide election, egalitarian ideas were bubbling invisibly below the surface, but nothing I had read had prepared me for the idea that I should not want to take exams as fast and as hard as possible, and that I should be prevented from doing so because not everyone could. To take more exams than other people and at an earlier age was apparently viewed as reprehensible; it was an attempt to score off other people. Having social interactions with other people should be one’s sole aim in life. One should not want to do scientific research just because it was what one wanted to do and what would enable one to feel most alive. One should, apparently, only want to spend one’s life doing good to other people, in some shape or form, and interacting with them socially.

These ideas may not seem strange or surprising to a modern reader, but it was the first time I had encountered them and I found that they were being used to obstruct and hinder me.

By the time I was 13 my worldview was essentially formed; none of the books I had read had depicted, or appeared to advocate, an egalitarian society in the modern sense. Practically all societies of the past, as described, had contained some large households which provided a hotel environment for those living in them (sometimes even called ‘hotels’, at least in France and Italy), and it had never been regarded as reprehensible to attempt to rise in the world by any activities regarded as legal.

In retrospect, as a recipient of a grammar school scholarship, I was in the position of Sara in A Little Princess. With my fees not being paid by my father but by the state, I was exposed to the tender mercies of the local education authority and community generally, as Sara was exposed to those of Miss Minchin — who could no longer be bothered to provide her with a formal education, but allowed her to read the schoolbooks in the empty schoolroom when she had run her errands for the day. And she did this, not because she felt any concern for Sara’s need to rise in the world to a position that might suit her, but so that Sara might become useful to Miss Minchin as an inexpensive teacher when she was a few years older.

Similarly, my tormentors did not mind how seriously they blocked my attempts to establish my claim on the sort of university career I needed to have; my acquisition of skills and qualifications was reduced to a snail’s pace, but I was allowed to proceed with heavily handicapped supervised ‘courses’ which might eventually lead to my being useful, not to myself, but to society, in a lowly capacity as a teacher of maths.

Then I was thrown out into a society where all my efforts to recover from a bad position and regain an academic career of a suitable kind were blocked by the continued advance of the modern ideology, according to which, as I found, it is criminal to go on trying to get a career that society has shown it does not want one to have.

Giving money to beggars

When I say that I could never draw social security however hard up I was, because I had been left without any usable qualifications, I mean not merely hard up relative to the cost of remaining physically alive, but hard up relative to the cost of providing myself with the equivalent of a residential college (hotel) environment and the secretarial and other facilities that might have been provided by the sort of academic career which I should have been having, as well as a Professorial salary.

I felt very hard up indeed, and saved money very hard out of my miserable pittance of a salary at the Society for Psychical Research, although it looked as though it would take thousands of years to reach a level of capital at which I could provide myself with the circumstances I needed to have; unless something completely improbable and unpredictable happened in my favour.
I certainly found it very grim to be in such a situation; I could never have believed that anything so terrible could happen to me, nor that if it did, there would be absolutely nobody who would give me any help in remedying my position. Nevertheless I went on giving money to beggars, in order to remember the higher level perspective and not feel totally shut in to an ostensibly hopeless imprisonment in the ‘normal’ world.

I remember one time when Sir George was visiting me in Oxford where I was doing a post-graduate degree which I hoped would provide me with a way of re-accessing an academic career. In the event it did not, because there was nobody who did not want me to be kept down and out, including my own supervisor, Professor Price, who was under the influence of two sources of hostility against me, the Principal of Somerville and Rosalind Heywood at the SPR.
However, while doing this thesis I was in lodgings near Somerville and Sir George and two other Somervillians were in the room with me. A beggar knocked at the door and asked for money. I got everyone to turn out their loose cash and see what they felt able to contribute. Sir George produced a note, but rather disapprovingly. Admittedly he was having to survive on a totally inadequate pension, so he might just have said he was needing it too badly himself, but what he said was, ‘You shouldn’t give him so much. He will only get drunk on it.’

‘That is entirely beside the point,’ I said. I might have added, but didn’t, ‘Money is what he asked for, so that is what he shall have, and what he does with it is nobody’s business but his own.’

Then I went back to the front door to give him the collection.