Ever had a premonition? That feeling where you’re absolutely sure something is going to happen, and then it does? You’re not alone. It’s a much more common occurrence than you’d think. But how do we explain it? How do we explain that in 1966 when a slag heap near the village of Aberfan in Wales collapsed and buried a primary school, killing 116 children, several people from all around the UK had sensed that it was going to happen? Or how one of the children killed had told her mother that morning about a dream she had where the school had disappeared and was covered in a strange, black shape?
This is the basis around which John Barker and Peter Fairley set up the Premonitions Bureau, a psychic research unit that attempted to collect the premonitions of people around the UK in hopes of predicting and preventing, major disasters. Over the eighteen months that the Bureau was open, they collected over 1,000 premonitions that allegedly foretold great tragedies – including several that predicted the death of John Barker himself. New Yorker writer Sam Knight became fascinated with the story and, in 2022, wrote The Premonitions Bureau, a novel attempting to unravel the stranger than fiction story of Barker, Fairley, and the people who could predict the future.

Barry Pierce: When did you first become interested in researching premonitions?
Sam Knight: Strangely, I don’t have a long-standing interest in premonitions. I haven’t had supernatural experiences. But I got interested in the idea of what it would feel like if you just knew something was going to happen. What would you do with that knowledge? It would be an uncomfortable, horrible feeling. I do a lot of my work in the British Library and, one day, I went there and ordered up a huge stack of books all about premonitions and prophecies. Most of these were from the late 19th and early 20th century, when it was the peak of spiritualism and mediums and telepathy. But there was this later collection of 20th century weird experiments and, in that, there was a paragraph about this thing called the Premonitions Bureau. Straight away, the name and the time (it was in the 1960s) caught my imagination. But at first glance, I assumed it would be a stunt – something designed to catch attention and not have anything serious behind it. But I looked up the names of the two main people involved with it, John Barker and Peter Fairley, and was taken aback to discover that Barker was publishing in The Lancet and the American Journal of Medicine. He was the number two at a large mental hospital and a serious, practising psychiatrist. Peter Fairley presented the moon landings on ITN. He’s not really known now, but he was an important scientific populariser in the 60s. So, suddenly, I was like, oh wait, this had more gravitas, intent and serious thinking behind it than I imagined. At that point I became determined to pull the thread and see how much I could find out.

“I came across a scrap mentioned in a book published in the 1970s that Barker, in the course of running the Premonitions Bureau, had been warned that his life was in danger by one of the seers”

BP: You write a lot of long pieces for The New Yorker, but this is your first book. At what point did you realise that this project was going to end up as a book?
SK: Early on, I came across a scrap mentioned in a book published in the 1970s that Barker, in the course of running the Premonitions Bureau, had been warned that his life was in danger by one of the seers, one of the “percipients” as he called them. And that was very captivating to me. The idea that it was not just this fascinating experiment, it also kind of turned in on itself. That made the story much more interesting. The key turning point for me, and the question in my mind, was how did Barker feel about this? Like, if you’re doing an experiment and someone says you’re going to die, you can react in a number of different ways. Barker worked in a mental hospital, he’s got 250 patients, many of whom are untreated psychotics, he listens to crazy shit every day. He could have just batted away this thing or he could have been a very uptight, mid-century British doctor about it and been ultra- rational about everything. I didn’t know what his inner life was and what he thought about it until I came across this memo in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, which is kept at the University of Cambridge library. It’s this four page memo that he dictates the morning after he gets this warning about his life saying, basically, holy shit, I’m terrified. And then I was like, OK, now I know that the experiment goes weird, but also the guy who is at the centre of the story has an emotional engagement, a sense of fear and a sense of dread. I sensed his inner life, and then I knew I could write a book about it. But I did write it as an article first for The New Yorker and it was on reading that article that Barker’s kids decided to cooperate with me, share everything they had and talk about their memories. They weren’t hostile but they just let me do my own thing, but then they read the article and were like, “Oh wait, we actually didn’t know a lot of this stuff.” That began a really important relationship with the family.

BP: Oh, so not even Barker’s kids knew the full story of the Bureau and the warning about his death?
SK: Yeah, I mean, slight spoiler alert but he died when they were really young and it was a very traumatic episode that changed their family’s life completely. They just didn’t talk about it. The story in the family was that he worked himself to death, he worked too hard and had an aneurysm. They literally didn’t know about the Premonitions Bureau, they didn’t know about any of this stuff.

BP: So, how known was the Bureau at the time? It was in the national papers and they received a lot of correspondence but if I asked someone who lived during that time, would they have a recollection of it?
SK: It was pretty marginal. It hovered just outside of going mainstream. There are some funny moments in the story where they’re about to go on The David Frost Show but they’re bumped at the last minute. Barker was in correspondence with all these movers and shakers and it could have been something but it wasn’t. My editor at The New Yorker told me something really useful when I was writing the article version of this story, he said that this is the story of a path not taken.

BP: But, presumably, if it had gone mainstream it would have been open to a lot more scrutiny. Would the public not have just dismissed it as complete hokum? I’m reminded of Most Haunted and Derek Acorah and all that. That isn’t treated seriously at all. Would people in the 60s not have had the same reaction or were they more open to stuff like that?
SK: It’s difficult to recreate the mindset of 60 years ago, but Britain in the mid-20th century had a different relationship with the supernatural and the occult. It was much closer to the intellectual mainstream. Barker was a senior NHS psychiatrist, he wasn’t a fringe character, but nonetheless he was a creature of a discernible mid-century British intellectual tradition where it just wasn’t weird for a doctor to have these two parts of their brain rubbing up alongside each other, figuring out do they connect in some way? I think that the Bureau would not have existed and been entertained by the BBC, the Evening Standard, doctors, etc unless a more expansive view of the impossible and the supernatural were not just part of social thinking.

“Britain in the mid-20th century had a different relationship with the supernatural and the occult. It was much closer to the intellectual mainstream.”

BP: That’s what’s so interesting about this story, that it is happening in the 60s. It’s a time where there is mass broadcasting and I had assumed that these ideas of the occult and paranormal events had died off with the Victorian era.
SK: Well my tuppence on that is if you look at that period, the 1890s through to after the First World War, there is this incredible technological and social change. We might look back at the technological developments at the time as quite quaint, but the reason why telepathy is called telepathy is because of the telegram and the telephone. Now you can send messages instantly, you can speak instantly, someone’s going to figure out how to read people’s minds. It just made sense. I think there’s something arguably similar taking place in the 60s. Barker is going between his correspondence and phone calls for the Premonitions Bureau, then onto the wards of his psychiatric hospital where some people have been literally locked up for twenty years and are just now being medicated by new pharmaceuticals for the first time. Anti-psychotic medicine started getting prescribed in the UK in 1955. You’ve got people with these illnesses that have been around for centuries, in an untreated form, and now are speaking and are able to leave hospital. Fairley is doing his bit for the Bureau and then literally going to Florida to watch the rocket being put together to take people to the moon. I think there is this sense that, “Hey, shit, if we feed enough of this stuff into a computer, maybe we will discover a shared human consciousness.”

BP: The thing I found so interesting about the book, and I don’t know how much you’ve thought about it, but how do we actually explain all of these premonitions that ended up being absolutely correct? And a lot of them were quite accurate as well. What do we think actually happened there? Because if we’re suggesting that this stuff is real, then that completely changes everything we know about the human mind and the universe, essentially.
SK: I don’t really see that as being at the heart of it all. I won’t try to dodge your question, but the pre-dodge is to say these experiences are really common. My anecdotal experience is that a large number of families, particularly, will hold a story a bit like some of the ones in the book. There is a sense of an inexplicable anguish, and then you discover that, like, your sibling died that afternoon. They are very common. And then that experience is quite swiftly knitted into the story of a family or a life or a death or a falling in love. So a lot of people live with some inexplicable experience like that, but nonetheless carry on their ultra-rational lives. I really did try and write the book not to deliberately avoid those questions, but to write what I just described. Seeing things before they happen is clearly impossible, but what does it feel like to think that you are seeing things before they happen? One of the things I really like thinking about is the idea of someone seeing what happens to me before it happens to me, and vice versa. It suggests there is something very social going on. I feel like the idea of prophecy and things like that hints at this yearning for some kind of shared consciousness. One of the reasons I love the Premonitions Bureau is because it’s this mad, doomed experiment and yet, what are they ultimately trying to do? Their vision is like a big computer that everyone pours all their thoughts and feelings and dreams and hopes into, and then the computer will sort that information for peaks and patterns, and then come out with some kind of reading of what people are thinking about. Which, to me, totally prefigures social networks and how we share our feelings constantly on the internet. I do feel one way of thinking about the internet and social networks is an attempt to make a mechanical, global consciousness.

BP: When you started researching the Premonitions Bureau would you have considered yourself a logically minded person and now, do you find yourself maybe more open to believing in the idea of premonitions?
SK: No, no, I’m sorry to disappoint you. When I was doing my research for the book, a lot of the writing about the supernatural and the occult has a very naked agenda, you know what I mean? It either wants to make you believe in something or it wants to freak you out or it wants to titillate you. Or it wants to show you how absurd all that stuff is, right? There didn’t seem to be many books that wrote about this stuff soberly as a cultural happening. There was this fun survey that I mentioned in the book that during the Second World War, about the same amount of the British population believed in the afterlife as believed in the supernatural. I don’t really see a huge distinction between believing in ghosts or premonitions and religious thinking. I just don’t see a difference of category between them. And yet one is treated as central to our culture and very dignified and the other is mad ladies at the end of a pier in Margate. I think that treatment is not really intellectually sound. I just wanted to write about this in a somewhat measured way.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight is available in paperback now. 

Feature originally published in HERO 31.