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Harry Price & Borley by Andrew Clarke |
Andrew Clarke is a historian with the Foxearth & District Local History
Society who lives locally to Borley and has spent a huge amount of time
researching into the history of the village & its surrounding area.
He has written several studies on the events at Borley Rectory and here
gives his thoughts on Harry Price's involvement & attitude to the Borley
case.
Price's early work was first-rate. He was a childhood
hero of mine and I read his works avidly.
Without him, the abuses and con-tricks of some of the
mediums would have lasted a great deal longer. His library is a
staggering achievement. Even with the Borley
Rectory saga, his journalism and writing style
was superb.
Just looking at the primary evidence and the text of the two Price books
on Borley, I get the impression of a cynical and
sceptical man sliding slowly into a more
doubtful frame of mind, where he began to believe that there
might be something behind Dr Phythian-Adams' all-encompassing
theory of Marie Lairre. He told his taxi-driver,
in a phrase that passed into local legend 'I
used to think it was 100% bunkum, but now I think it is only 97%
bunkum'. I suspect that a lot of what subsequently has looked like
faking and deception, such as the flying brick
episodes, the pebbles, the black hand (that his
chauffeur saw), the wine-into-water pranks and so on were
just high-spirits, light-hearted pranks and deadpan humour. It
seems inconceivable that he could have believed
them himself. He seemed to think that if he
reported what someone else had said, he had no need to put his
hand up to own up to a prank. Maybe he assumed that his readers
would see the joke!
I personally have great difficulty with the Well-tank episode, and the
finding of the bones of 'Marie Lairre'. The whole business looks
wrong. For example, Rev Henning was probably not
aware that Jackson and Palmer, the two labourers
who helped with the dig, were deeply suspicious, and their views
spread throughout the community. As they were both experienced
pig-men, they knew what Jackson had dug out of
the ground: old sows bones. (this was why 'Marie
Lairre' had to be interred in Liston).
I have long-ago given up trying to find a single explanation for the
Borley Rectory affair. Tony Cornell came up with
a rather good theory, which is, in essence, that
a single incident, or trigger, possibly a genuine haunting,
can crystallise a huge subsequent superstructure of legend, private
experience, prank, Chinese whispers, fabrication and so on. At
Borley I suspect that the essential phenomena,
the triggers that were witnessed by too many
people over too long a period of time to be dismissed easily are
the shuffling footsteps and the lights in the window.
Harry Price's early attitude to the Borley Rectory hauntings seems to have
been one of light-hearted disbelief. Nobody except the Bulls and
the Smiths took the early presss coverage
seriously. When he visited the Foysters, he was
far more interested in a days shopping in Cambridge with Mollie Goldney
than in the poltergeist phenomena. He knew it was faked, and not to
be taken seriously.
Price's difficulties came when he obtained the Foyster Diaries and
realised he had got hold of literary gold-dust.
He had to disguise his disbelief to produce a
best-seller. The huge wave of belief that met the publication of
the first book forced him reluctantly along a certain path. He had
also begun to believe the ghosts himself and the
inconsistencies and deceits that can be found in
the books are fault-lines caused by the rapid u-turns in his
attitude to the haunting.
I find it hard to be severe or condemning of the man. A lot of scientists,
when they come to be convinced of a theory, take short cuts with
the evidence rather than reject their theory in
the light of evidence. It is a very human
failing, particularly with the tired and ill toward the end of
their careers. The fact that they have tampered with the evidence
on these occasions should not, I think, lead one
to ignore their other contributions,
particularly when they have been as beneficial as Harry Price's early
work.
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