Trevor Hall’s forays into psychical research mixed careful archival research with a regrettably axe-grinding tendency to allow his arguments to outrun his sources, his books on Sir William Crookes and Edmund Gurney being the worst examples. He had difficulty achieving even-handedness in his analyses, meaning that perceived unfairness, and an awareness when his speculations were on shaky foundations, sometimes undermined his preferred interpretation by generating sympathy for his victim. His 1978 examination of Harry Price, however, presents a convincing case that anything Price wrote has to be treated with caution.
The genesis of Search for Harry Price was an article Hall was writing on Price for The Book Collector. Asked to add a couple of biographical paragraphs by the editor, he discovered that the accepted facts as given by Price were wrong. Through genealogical research he was able to strip away inaccuracies in the family tree and correct errors in Price’s autobiographical assertions. In so doing, Hall subjects to scathing criticism Price’s 1942 Search for Truth and Paul Tabori’s uncritical 1950 Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost-Hunter, which took Price’s statements at face value despite Tabori having access to Price’s papers, revealing how unreliable both are. Price’s alleged ‘search for truth’, ironically echoed by Hall in his own title, was anything but.
Hall was annoyed that Price was still highly regarded despite the savaging he had received in the 1956 Society for Psychical Research’s Proceedings’ ‘The Haunting of Borley Rectory’, co-written by Hall: ‘…it seemed at the time that the ghosts and poltergeists of Borley might have been laid forever.’ There was an element of disbelief at Price still being taken seriously when he was, in Hall’s view, a charlatan, with the 1969 ‘Hasting Report’ in the SPR’s Proceedings and Tabori and Peter Underwood’s 1973 The Ghosts of Borley attempting to rehabilitate his reputation. It was necessary in Hall’s opinion to take a broader view and show how Borley was merely one aspect of Price’s long-standing need to rewrite history for his own ends.
Search for Harry Price is not a biography, rather a series of essays examining aspects of Price’s life and career and tracing a common thread: the aim to promote himself in whatever activity he undertook, to which end truthfulness was a minor consideration even when the stories conflicted with each other. One of Hall’s themes is the carelessness of researchers, not just Tabori, who tended to accept and regurgitate Price’s claims without checking, when a little digging would have exposed them as fabrications. As he points out, if his predecessors had put in the effort, this book would not have been necessary.
Hall begins with an examination of Price’s background at what the casual reader might consider obsessively detailed length, but it forensically unravels the webs of untruths Price wove retrospectively about his family and his childhood, a habit he continued in all he did. Price airily described himself as coming from a moneyed old-established Shropshire family and the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer, whereas his father was a commercial traveller, he was born in Red Lion Square, London, and grew up in New Cross, naturally translated by Price into the more salubrious Brockley.
He romanticised his childhood, implying he went to boarding school, possessed a precocious intelligence, and was at ease in country houses, when he was a day pupil close to home in south London. When there was a kernel of truth in what he wrote he overemphasised his role (for example his foray into playwriting). His work record was patchy and he was not a director of a paper-making business owned by his father. His reinvention was actuated by snobbery, with social climbing as its aim and probably an inferiority complex at its heart. When he had bookplates printed he was not above inventing a superior background with a bogus coat of arms.
Although best known for his pursuits in psychical research, Price came surprisingly late to the field and was almost 40 by the time he took it up seriously. Hall does cover this latter period, but the focus is the family background and earlier interests, intent to prove that Price was actuated by a need to feed his ego. A chapter on Price’s career as a numismatist, contributed by Archdeacon Charles Ellison, demonstrates that Price was happy to plagiarise, and not very well, signifying a lack of expert knowledge. Similarly, he overstated his role as an archaeologist in Sussex, in this instance to his embarrassment being caught out by the experts, thereby abruptly terminating his involvement.
He did not learn his lesson though, and the untrustworthiness of his testimony is a common theme in the chapters on his dealings with Willi and Rudi Schneider (childishly sabotaging his own work with the latter), the ridiculous Brocken experiment, the opening of Joanna Southcott’s box, the formation and contents of his library, and the mystery of the Borley medallions. Each episode confirms how he was always ready to engineer a situation to his own advantage. Publicity and self-aggrandisement were more important than veracity.
Price was happy to repurpose stories depending on the topic, for example an account of small pattering feet in his bedroom being attributed at different times to a ghostly child and a ghostly retriever (bearing a name not now able to be said in polite company), depending on the publication. Hall amply demonstrates Price’s recklessness and dishonesty in his writings. Fortunately for Hall’s investigation, Price left enough evidence to determine how he had manipulated the facts to suit whichever point he was making, ignoring matters of consistency.
To answer the obvious question why Price would leave such ammunition for his critics, Hall suggests that Price, who only achieved literary success late in his career, wrote at a fast pace to capitalise on it. Further, while he was writing his books during the war at Pulborough, his archive was in the care of the University of London, and therefore inaccessible to him, and with restricted access for others. Hall theorises that Price probably thought he had plenty of time to smooth out the discrepancies later (presumably by judicious weeding), not realising his sudden death would rob him of the opportunity.
Considering Price’s many activities and his voluminous writings, Hall’s verdict on his entire career in his final sentence – ‘The assembly of his book collection was, in my opinion, Price’s most useful achievement during his life’ – is a damning one. It is ironic that his library became a millstone for him, as his repeated offers to give it to various institutions indicate. There had been a good chance of it going to Nazi Germany at one point, a prospect forestalled by the deteriorating political situation and the agreement of the University of London to take the collection; the ethical issue of dealing with fascist-controlled university authorities did not seem to trouble Price.
The debate around the value of Price’s body of work will continue, but while his own books are enjoyable reads, their unreliability has contaminated the psychical research record and made the job of disentangling fact from fiction harder than it would have been had he really searched for, and reported, the truth instead of bending it to his own ends. Nobody much cares whether he grew up in Shrewsbury or New Cross, discounting the social climbing aspect of his personality as not worth bothering about, but Hall amply demonstrates it was part of a wider pattern of deception, and that does matter.
In the event, just as with the 1956 ‘The Haunting of Borley Rectory’, Hall’s skewering was in vain. Harry lives on and, something which would probably make Hall grind his teeth with frustration, has become a touchstone for the paranormal community, and with spin-off novels and television programmes bringing further exposure. Borley in particular is more popular than ever. If Hall thought all you needed to do was tell people the truth and Price would sink into obscurity, he was sorely mistaken.
The Joy of Mere Words 