NUMBERWANG
The Mind Readers: Some Recent Experiments in Telepathy – SG Soal and HT Bowden
I ‘came out’ as a magic enthusiast on Facebook a few years ago. This was met with much mirth and derision, as you’d expect of magic’s ‘sad, creepy uncle’ PR problem… not to mention the PR problems of eccentric, child-free, late-30s women not conforming to their boring prescribed roles and paths.
But an old school friend DM’d me to confess that he, too, was a secret magic enthusiast. And we’ve bonded ever since over our shared love of magic books.
For my birthday last week, he presented me with this obscurity – The Mind Readers: Some Recent Experiments in Telepathy by SG Soal and HT Bowden, published in 1959.
My friend was envisaging it would just be quirky bookcase fodder. But, as Patron Saint of unread and unreadable publishing relics, it was my duty to read it!
The Mind Readers is a ‘scientific study’ of two Welsh cousins, Glyn and Ieuan (pictured below left), who the author, SG Soal, has known since infancy – and who seem to possess telepathic powers.
Soal, a British parapsychologist and mathematician, happened across Glyn’s family years previously while visiting a remote corner of Wales for a work trip, deciding to lodge in a home rather than staying in a hotel.
The backstory brings to life a colourful, if somewhat patronising, scene of two rambunctious Welsh families linked by brother patriarchs, with Soal’s periodic visits to Glyn’s house a source of entertainment for his siblings and cousins.
The telepathic experiments detailed in this book were born of a simple game of card guessing one evening, where Glyn and Ieuan scored at matching five animal cards with “uncanny accuracy”.
Soal – who comes across as an endearing but credulous and biased soul – seems to have gotten rather carried away and thus embarked on ‘proving’ the boys’ telepathic powers.
And what a mad, miserable, flawed, pointless study it was! For TWO YEARS, Glyn and Ieuen, aged 15 at the start, were cajoled and bribed into endless card-guessing experiments by Soal, his fellow investigator, HT Bowden, and a changing cast of observers.
Soal confronts from the outset that the boys and the families were motivated by money, amusements and fame. The boys regularly scheme for swag and fishing trips, while the story of the meddling parents securing a fancy London jaunt makes for particularly amusing reading. Soal is constantly fretting about the expense of the whole caper and lamenting that the boys are losing interest in all of their school holidays being spent guessing cards.
At one point, the boys are caught cheating. This is a real blow for Soal – throwaway remarks suggest bouts of depression and despair for our psychic crusader.
But Soal defends in great detail that the signalling system the boys cooked up was too crude to be taken seriously. He consults a radio expert to ensure the boys aren’t cheating with audio devices. And Jack Salvin, conjurer and then chairman of The Magic Circle’s Occult Committee, is one of the ‘respectable observers’ who attests the boys aren’t cheating.
Despite the constant funk of cheating – by the boys, or by their ever-present families as well as experimenters and observers who may be in cahoots – Soal shares his findings and figures in tedious, tedious detail.
I hope to persuade Kev to crunch the numbers someday, but I assume they add up to chance plus cheating.
I didn’t expect this book to qualify for this blog; there is a fleeting mention of one of the boys being put into a light hypnotic trance at the start. But this is dismissed as making no difference and so hypnosis doesn’t feature for most of the book.
However, towards the end, Glyn, Ieuan and their families are utterly fed up with the lack of fame and fortune while Soal remains convinced he’s on the brink of telepathic proofs. Which leaves him sufficiently desperate to wheel the hypnosis back out.
He discovers quite by chance that Glyn is highly hypnotisable; Glyn’s sister is playing at being a hypnotist to pass the time and seems to put Glyn in a deep trance. Soal alights upon this as a new hope for cracking the case, but, alas, struggles to hypnotise Glyn himself.
The cause of the resistance is later attributed to a recent local newspaper story of a teenage boy who’d hypnotised a friend by having them stare at a bright tin. The friend then got ‘stuck’ in the trance for several hours, with the local doctor having to be called to rouse him – and the police paying a visit to the teenage hypnotist. This spooked Glyn and Ieuan, and sufficiently scared the parents to instruct Soal to quit hypnotising their sons.
The book concludes inconclusively. I see Soal was discredited in his twilight years for fraudulent production of data in parapsychology. So, there we go. Happy birthday to me!
