Harry Price: Author, Bibliophile, Spiritualist,
Conjurer, and most famously the author of the two books that made Borley
Rectory�s name well-known, too often operated in the grey area between spin
and fraud. In an extraordinary career, he often overstepped the mark into
deceit: He was, however, at his best as a Grand Conjuror, and Borley
Rectory was his greatest illusion. To argue that there really were spirits,
ghosts or poltergeists is as absurd as arguing that the lady really is sawn
in half on stage. Harry Price, like the best conjurers such as Davenport,
Meskeleyn, or Houdini performed their tricks deadpan, spouting �spin� or
�mumbo-jumbo�, and telling half-truths merely to distract the audience.
Harry Price had enormous energy and enthusiasm. For
part of the week, he was a travelling Salesman, a sales rep., for a
paper-bag manufacturer, without academic qualifications. For the rest of
the week, he was a gentleman of private means, a scientific expert psychic
researcher. The public, fantastic, image of Harry Price, which took as its
inspiration his hero, Sherlock Holmes, is the one that many people
desperately wanted to believe in. He even became the inspiration for some
of Dennis Wheatley's later 'Occult' novels.
Harry Price was driven by two passions, a yearning
for academic respectability, and the esteem of his peers. He always gave a
first impression of an extremely likeable and clubbable man, and
when the subsequent showed his more devious and ruthless side, it took
others off-guard. He was always a salesman. It was
something he had learned from his father and added to over his forty years
representing a firm that sold greaseproof paper. His self-esteem was
extremely brittle, and he was renowned as an abrasive, hostile and
vindictive man when he considered that he had been crossed. He was
suspicious and quick-tempered. By the end of his life he had few friends,
and his most loyal acolytes had hardly met him, and were familiar only with
the public persona
Spiritualism wasn't his first choice as a medium in
which to achieve fame. He had tried previously tried Archaeology.
Price had been fascinated by old coins from his schooldays. He
copied out sections on Shropshire and Kent from the standard work on Trade
Tokens� written by George C Williamson, and published the results under his
own name. Bizarrely, the secretary of the Ripon
Naturalists Club read the article and invited him to become their Curator
of Numismatics. The Club met in the evenings in rooms leant to them by the
Ripon Museum, and price accepted the appointment, but calling himself the
�Hon Curator of Numismatics, Ripon Museum. So, passing himself off as an
expert on coins, with a bogus qualification, and a published article
plagiarised from a textbook, he bought a collection of Roman and
Anglo-Saxon coins from a local farm worker called Mickelthwaite in
Pulborough, soon after he moved there in 1909. This coin collection had
apparently been the fruit of a lifetime�s amateur archaeology in the area
and Arundel. He then passed these off as his own and gave lectures on them.
He supplemented these coins with another collection of gold coins bought
from dealers, and wove a fantastic tale of how he had found them over the
course of several years diligent archaeology. As these went down so well,
he then obtained some clumsy forgeries of spectacular finds, such as silver
ingots and bronze figures and passed these off as his own archaeological
finds. All this went down well in the local papers and his fame spread. He
was soon heralded as the �Well-known Sussex Archaeologist�
In his lectures, and subsequently in his
autobiography, he claimed, falsely, to have helped with the excavation of a
Roman Villa at Greenwich Park in 1902. �Excavating Roman Villas is one of
the most exciting jobs imaginable�. The truth is more
prosaic: he had reviewed A.D.Webster�s book of the excavation in his School
magazine in 1902. He went on to claim that he had
supervised the archaeological work at Borough, 2 � miles from his home in
Pulborough. He hadn�t.; and the Royal Society of
Antiquaries had to issue a denial. He also claimed to
have been engaged, since 1903, on a major work �The Numismatistic History
of Sussex�.
After Price was exposed publicly in the local
newspapers in 1910, by the President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries,
one hears no more of Harry Price the �Well-known Sussex Archaeologist� .
This left him with certain difficulties, and a redundant coin
collection. In 1923, he leant the coins to the church for an exhibition.
The church was, at the time, in an almost ruinous state, the coins were
left in the empty unlocked church and were uninsured. Inevitably, there was
a theft, though there is some confusion as to what was taken. Harry Price
announced, as a direct consequence, the end to his work
as a Numismatist (coin expert) and the abandonment on his �Great work �The
Numismatistic History of Sussex�. No trace of this work has ever surfaced,
despite Price�s claims that it was �Nearly completed�, and �all the plates
had been engraved�. However, for Price, it brought down the curtain on
�Harry Price the Archaeologist�, just as �Harry Price, psychic
Investigator� was taking off well in the public eye.
There was a time, just within living memory, when
countless people were gripped by Spiritualism. It was comforting to think,
especially after the millions of deaths of the First World War, that the
dead walked in a new place and could come back to earth to see loved ones
for a quick chat, hug and a squeeze.
In the early 1920s, mediums that claimed they were
able to photograph auras, apparitions, s�ances, levitations and the spirits
of the dead were in great demand, helped in part by the fanatical advocacy
of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Although many of
the believed the photographs to be fakes, it was hard getting evidence to
prove it since the photographers were reluctant to sit for psychical
scientists. Then one man exposed the movement for what it was.
Harry Price, was, at that time, a
41-year old amateur photographer, paper bag salesman, freelance journalist,
former Spiritualist and conjurer, who had successfully won membership to
the Magic Circle, that exclusive body of magicians.
In early 1922, together with the
Society for Psychical Research (SPR) Price used his Spiritualist contacts
(blithely unaware of what he was up to) to lure the spirit photographer
William �Billy� Hope into a carefully crafted sting. Through this he was
able to show the world that Hope�s �celestial� photographs were nothing
more than pictures ripped from long forgotten periodicals, or family
albums, and pasted onto photographic plates before a photograph was taken
in the normal way.
It was enough to give him the status of a minor
celebrity. A position he had enjoyed some years earlier after a short
journey into archaeology ended when experts, amazed at his luck in
discovering rare artefacts, found he had forged a Roman silver ingot which
on closer inspection turned out to be a crude slab of lead.
Following the Hope success, he was invited to
accompany the SPR research officer Eric �Dirty Ding� Dingwall to witness
the astonishing feats of an Austrian medium named Willi Schneider, who
claimed to have the gift of communicating with the spirit world via his
guide Lola, the former mistress of Ludvig the First, the blind king of
Bavaria.
When Willi produced such remarkable phenomena as
invisible hands playing an accordion, discarnate lungs puffing chilly
breath through witnesses� hair and a crawling disembodied hand, Price set
himself the task of establishing a laboratory in Britain that would test
mediums and supply the world with unknown facts about the paranormal.
He got off to a remarkable start by being told about
a 21-year untried medium called Stella Cranshaw, a tractable young nurse
who claimed to possess supernatural powers. In a series of exhaustive
experiments with Price, she was reported to be able to summon a violent
force that broke tables, chairs levitated, and mysterious objects were seen
to crawl along the floor of s�ance rooms: and through her the dead
prophesised the future. The s�ances with Stella were reported as a world
first, but other psychical investigators, notably those from the Society
for Psychical Research distrusted Price�s experiments and as a result he
found himself marginalized, a situation he responded to with calculated
insults, attributing the Society�s attacks on his character to sectarian
jealously.
After falling foul of the SPR, Harry had several
attempts at trying to prise money from leading spiritualist organisations
with a view to establishing his own psychical organisation.
In 1925, he managed to form the National Laboratory
of Psychical Research (NLPR) a project backed by the London Spiritualist
Alliance.
With his celebrity rising, he made friendships with
well-known magicians, scientists and show people including Harry Houdini, a
relationship that petered out a few years later after accusations of fraud.
But that did not matter. At the NLPR, Price had the
ear of eminent men of letters and since he regarded life after death as now
proven, he became a friend of Conan Doyle. He was also investigating areas
of the occult others had only dreamt of doing.
This included attempting to contact the planet Mars,
a fascination that had begun with the late Victorians after the Italian
astronomer Schiaparelli had claimed to see canals on the planet through his
telescope, a claim supported by Camille Flammarion.
At first Price used clairvoyants who
claimed a familiarity with the solar system and stars, then he used an odd
invention made by a City of London solicitor to try to contact Martian
savages. When this proved inconclusive he travelled to the Jungfraujoch in
Switzerland where he considered making an attempt to contact the Red Planet
using a huge beam of light but the project was abandoned on account of the
cost.
Each experiment at the NLPR was too
preposterous, too remarkable for any sensible person to ignore. Every
strange incident or miserable plaything of the dead was publicised to keep
pace with the public�s appetite, which Price had whetted.
He was rapidly becoming the natural leader for a
nation in thrall of what happened to the soul after death.
No newspaper report or broadcast on a haunted house was complete
without Harry�s thoughts about the matter. He had a status and reputation
that no ghost hunter of today can hope to share.
He claimed that his findings were bolstered through
his training as a scientist and engineer but in reality, the man who had
left school at 15, was an academic failure. His scientific methods were
nothing more than an act using scientific apparatus and the trappings of a
chemical laboratory merely to convince people that he was a scientist.
He thought instinctively and impulsively and instead
of trying to disprove his theories, he sought only to prove them. At one
stage in his career, he believed he had discovered the very substance that
ghosts were made of and thought it might be possible to recreate them from
a piece of regurgitated cheesecloth, iron filings and albumen.
He sought out a talking mongoose on the Isle of Man
called Gef who it was said spoke several languages, could recite poetry,
travelled around the island on a bus to bring back gossip and was partial
to cream buns.
Price also set out to prove the uselessness of
transcendental magic by showing how turning a goat into a handsome man on
top of the Harz mountains in Germany was bound to fail. It did, but he got
to smear the chest of an attractive girl with a sticky black substance,
which he claimed was an alchemical ointment though The Times described it
as �looking and smelling exactly like boot polish.� The event did bring him
an appreciative audience largely made up of prominent Nazi�s.
Impatient for academic and financial success, which
had eluded him in Britain, Price was wooed by the Third Reich to establish
an institute for psychical research, a project Hitler took great personal
interest in. It was an idea he had promised Erik Jan Hanussen, his personal
seer, before he had him murdered.
When war looked inevitable, and warned off by MI5,
the idea was dropped. Following the failed airlift of his laboratory to
Bonn, Price�s offices in London were closed, the contents crated up and
transferred to the University of London after his friend the philosopher
Cyril Joad had successfully negotiated their safe berth.
Now on his own, Price, still selling paper bags began
to invent phenomena to supplement his earnings. Perhaps the best example of
this is the haunting of Borley Rectory in Essex. It was a period when he
would do anything for cash.
Since his death two biographies have been published.
Paul Tabori his literary executor paved the way with his Biography of a
Ghost Hunter, a book written under strict terms of engagement with Harry�s
widow so anything that deviated from her husband�s carefully crafted
autobiography was snuffed out and replaced with tall �facts.�
In 1978, Trevor H Hall, a successful businessman and
author on the esoteric, published a revised version of Harry�s life, Search
for Harry Price. Though he discovered a lot Price had written was invented,
Hall just skimmed the surface of who the real Harry Price was partly due to
the sheer quantity of documents his subject had bequeathed to the
University of London. Fifty-seven years after Price�s death, in 2005, his
vast archive was at last catalogued into two hefty bound indexes, each 6in
thick, a project undertaken by Lesley Price (no relation) and Stefan Dicker
at the university�s Special Collections Unit.