The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.