Enigma of Borley Rectory

by Harry Ludlum

  Ever since the fire of 1939, and the Rectory's subsequent demolition, the story has never been far from the public's heart. Innumerable people have experienced abnormal happenings in Borley; and that includes my brother and his own intrepid band of investigators.

  In July 1984, he and his friends from his university stayed at Borley for two days. They slept, rather courageously, in the church porch and were fascinated by the sibilant whisperings they heard.

  They arranged to visit again, this time going fully equipped with a professional studio-quality tape deck and multi-directional microphones. The microphone, on the first night, was placed through a broken window (vandals plague Borley) at the rear of the building.

  The microphone was bound to a long pole, and this extended reach enabled them to put the mike in close proximity to the altar.

  They monitored the recordings through headphones and kept a detailed log of events. Bangs, rustlings, clicks, buzzing and a strange build up of static almost as if an electrical field were forming - all added to the night's adventure.

  The following day they placed the microphone, on a stand, right on the altar itself. The church doors were then locked at dusk (the church being empty) and the recordings were monitored again, this time in the porch.

  In the early hours of the morning, my brother (who was taking his turn at the headphones) heard an incredible noise. A hissing, semi-audible incantation was being recited! The voice was loud enough to be heard, though not clear enough for the words to become distinct. It was certainly the most frightening event in two very weird nights' observation.

  Price, however, was not the only person to be maligned following events at the "Most Haunted House in England". Captain W. H. Gregson, the last owner of Borley Rectory was condemned by William Crocker and Colonel Cuthbert Buckle as a 'man of straw'.

  Crocker and Buckle were the lawyer and loss adjuster working for Gregson's insurance company. It is not difficult to see why these two men should be at pains to repudiate any claim for genuine loss.

  However, after months of investigative research, I managed to track down Captain Gregson's two living sons - who inhabited the Rectory cottage with him during his ownership. Alan Gregson, now living on the other side of the world, recalls in astonishing detail the period he spent at Borley. Of the night of the fire, he writes:

  "A great deal of furniture was stacked in the entrance hall and stairwell temporarily ... my father wanted a book or document from the Rectory - apparently he stood a lamp on a table or box while he rummaged about, and then a stack of books suddenly keeled over onto the lamp, overturning it, breaking the glass and spilling kerosene which then caught light and speedily ignited surrounding articles."

  In his letters to me, Alan Gregson comes across as a man of great integrity and also one with an immense memory capable of remembering minute details from over 50 years ago.

  He also recalled observing the iron-rimmed tracks of some form of, presumably, horse-drawn conveyance - in a part of the garden that was accessible by nothing larger than a wheelbarrow! The tracks stood out crisply in the freshly fallen snow - and certainly brings to mind the traditional coach and four, which come speeding across the Rectory's front lawn.

  Borley is now a village without the Rectory that has given it a world-famous reputation. But I and many others still come to the conclusion that it holds the title of the "Most Haunted House in England" ... and the story goes on.'

  Borley Parish Church. Disturbances have also been reported here.

  A particularly interesting feature of Richard Lee van den Daele's assessment of the Borley case likes in the experiences of his brother's investigation group, whose strange results reveal an apparent continuity in the extraordinary story, these days almost always reported in connection with the church, rather than what is left of the site of the Rectory across the road.

  The matter of Gregson and the fire is interesting, but as the reader will recall, it seems that in the very differences between the two sons' versions of what happened that night, there lies a clue as to the probable true course of events.

  I would broadly agree with Richard's assessment of the veracity of Alan Gregson, because if he was sent off the premises to call the fire brigade, he would probably have little reason to question his father's version of events. The doubts about the other son are covered in the chapter on the fire, but when one puts the two versions together, one gets an all-too-clear image of what almost certainly happened!

  CHAPTER 25

  A Resumé of Some 50 Years of Borley Chronicles

  Given all the controversy over Borley Rectory, readers might like to investigate further, so I propose to detail some of the various chronicles published about it over the years.

  Among early reports of the disturbances at Borley Rectory was that in the Daily Mirror on June10, 1929, by Mr V. C. Wall, which was indirectly the result of the Rev. Guy Smith's appeal for an investigation of the incidents. The article was, inevitably, embroidered, and it suggested among other things that the Smiths had moved into the Rectory in spite of warnings about its reputation.

  In 1936 came the publication of Harry Price's book, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, and in it were references to Borley. These reflected Price's then rather unfavourable views of some of the phenomena he had witnessed there during his visit in 1931, a stance which he altered after the work of his chief associate Sidney Glanville, and particularly after having learned of the experiences of Sir George and Lady Whitehouse during their visits at the time of the Foyster tenancy. The same book did, however, include a favourable opinion of earlier phenomena.

  It was the publication in 1940 of the first full volume about Borley, Harry Price's The Most Haunted House in England that turned the story of Borley Rectory into a classic among English mysteries. It does, as Mr A. H. Wesencraft explains in his notes about the case, have a ring of truth about it, in spite of all the ill-judged criticism and abuse that has been heaped on it since.

  Seeming to ignore wartime conditions, Price had hoped that a second edition of it would be published but this did not materialise for a long time. Furthermore, he was more than a little disappointed at the time with the relatively low number of copies that were printed, both in this country and in the United States.

  The publication in 1946 of the sequel, The End of Borley Rectory, made up for the lack of a second edition, but it was of a rather more technical nature. It did, however, enable Price to update the story of the Rectory after the fire of 1939, and it also contained the details of the Cambridge Commission's wartime investigations of the ruined Rectory, and also the excavations carried out mainly by a local man, Mr Jackson, on behalf of Price in 1943.

  It was on that occasion of course that they unearthed the jawbone and skull fragments that were to cause such a row in later years. The work also contained several previously unpublished photographs, which generally were of a better quality, and clearer detail.

  An interesting addition in The End of Borley Rectory was the scenario by Canon Pythian Adams concerning the supposed identity of the spectral nun that haunted the grounds of the Rectory almost from the time it was first occupied.

  Also in the book in the form of various footnotes were instructive remarks by a local historian, Mrs Georgina Dawson, about the one-time existence of a priory close by the River Stour with land that butted onto Borley's parish boundaries.

  At the time of his death in 1948, Harry Price had been planning to produce a third book on the subject of Borley Rectory.

  When a third book on Borley Rectory did appear, in 1956, it resulted in the unleashing of a tide of criticism on the work of Price. The Haunting of Borley Rectory, by Eric J. Dingwall, K. M. Goldney and T. H. Hall was published by Duckworth and also appeared in the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, under whose auspices the investigations were carried out.

  In their book, the whole fabric of the Borley story and Price's role in it was attacked, the whole thrust of it giving the impression th
at Price was a cheat and the Borley story an exaggerated concoction.

  The authors accused Price of duplicity in his relationship with Lionel and Marianne Foyster over his presentation of the Foyster phenomena; of fraud with respect to an incident alleged to have occurred in the presence of a national journalist; of having planted evidence, misled and exaggerated.

  The evidence on which these accusations were founded now shows itself to be invalid because, among other things, it relied on statements from people who were openly hostile to Harry Price, or whose memories on the subject were fallible to say the least.

  Among those whose views were quoted, or more often misquoted in The Haunting of Borley Rectory was the late Lord Charles Hope who, it was claimed, viewed Price as a rascal. His thoughts, however, carry somewhat less weight when one learns that at the time of the experiments with the young Austrian medium Rudi Schneider, whom Price had brought to London under his auspices, Lord Charles Hope took it on himself to arrange his own private session with Rudi without consulting Price.

  In the resulting row between him and Lord Charles Hope, it was a miracle that the two men did not come to blows. Bad feeling persisted between these two men from then on.

  Under those circumstances, for the authors of The Haunting of Borley Rectory to have accepted and repeated Lord Charles Hope's opinions of Price without a great deal of caution constituted, I believe, a grave disservice to the late Harry Price.

  The failings of memories of Borley, insofar as they were reflected in the presentation of The Haunting of Borley Rectory, were most graphically illustrated by the evidence of Mrs Mabel Smith, widow of the late Rev. Guy Smith, the Rector of Borley at the time when Price began his investigation.

  The three 1956 writers set great store by her post-war dismissals of the Borley saga as being 'superstition and nonsense', and her very unfavourable views then of Harry Price. Her evidence formed a considerable part of the 1956 allegations. However, when one comes to read Hastings on the subject, and also looks more closely at the background to the Smith period, one discovers something more akin to the truth of things.

  For Mabel Smith, their stay at Borley was a very unpleasant experience, the negative aspects of which were later exacerbated by the loss of her husband in 1940, which seems to have quite broken her spirit.

  The point here is that, as with the views of Lord Charles Hope, given Mabel Smith's general emotional state after the war, to have accepted her views at face value was as unwise as accepting at face value the views of Lord Charles Hope or somebody like Marianne Foyster.

  The authors of 1956 made other blunders. One of their assertions was that Dom Richard Whitehouse had got most of his evidence for what he reported of the events at Borley Rectory from Marianne Foyster. Peter Underwood tells us in his contribution to the Hastings' report that when interviewed at Ramsgate following publication of the 1956 allegations, Whitehouse dismissed this allegation as rubbish, stating emphatically that he had kept his own notes about what he had witnessed.

  Another example of the apparent carelessness in the 1956 allegations came surprisingly from Mrs K. M. Goldney, when it was stated that Dom Richard was suffering from the results of a nervous breakdown during his sojourn at Borley. Whitehouse replied to this by stating that Mrs Goldney obviously did not realise that his illness had occurred several years before he became involved in the Borley episode.

  The writer uses the word 'surprisingly' about this error because Mrs Goldney has long had a reputation for being very thorough and very meticulous in her work on paranormal matters.

  Dingwall and Goldney were for many years close colleagues of Harry Price, and Mrs Goldney had for some time served on his Council for Psychical Research. General opinion would seem to indicate that they had a fairly high regard for Price. Bearing this in mind, it is something of a puzzle as to why they should have been party to such an attack on him after his death.

  In my opinion, the answer lies in the contribution of the third member of the 1956 trio, Dr T. H. Hall, a former member of the Society for Psychical Research.

  According to his own version of events, as he related in his book New Light on Old Ghosts, Hall wrote four of the chapters of The Haunting of Borley Rectory. Consequently, and in the light of what I have been able to discover about his work, Hall must take a large share of the responsibility for the unjust damage to Price's reputation in connection with Borley Rectory.

  Trevor Hall, who had a lengthy entry in Who's Who and refers to himself as Dr Hall, was an estate agent who has produced numerous books over the years. However, it has to be revealed that, at least where Harry Price and Borley Rectory are concerned, his various attacks on Price rest on a very weak foundation. T. H. Hall was for a time a Perrot student at Cambridge but there have been doubts expressed as to his true academic background. Among other qualifications he applied for a Litt.D. from Leeds University, but was turned down.

  The Search for Harry Price was a solo work by Hall and it appeared in 1978 from Duckworth. It constituted an outright attack on Price and ultimately led to a break between Dr E. J. Dingwall and Hall and some have described its style as 'malicious'.

  Hall apparently came into contact with Dr E. J. Dingwall through a meeting of the Magic Circle but, so far as his involvement in the 1956 report is concerned, I strongly suspect that in what may have been some genuine misgivings about Borley on the part of Dr Dingwall and Mrs Goldney, Hall saw a shining opportunity for himself in the literary world.

  I did in fact contact Dr Dingwall, asking him for his current stance on Borley particularly in light of the Hastings' report. His response was that his views had not changed since that report and his colleagues' reply to it.

  In the case of T. H. Hall, the reader may feel I have been unduly hard in dealing with his role in the story, but when one considers the background to his literary work, one realises that his approach makes it difficult to produce an impartial judgement on Harry Price and Borley Rectory.

  The writer did write to Hall, giving him a chance to defend his views, but his reply showed him more interested in the fact that he couldn't find my name in Who's Who, and promoting his book The Search for Harry Price as the last word on the subject.

  The late Robert J. Hastings was given the brief of re-examining the 1956 report, and on behalf of the SPR a grant was made in aid of expenses. The result of his efforts was an extensive and thorough going dissection of most of the major accusations against Harry Price, but the tragedy of this work was that although it was published by the SPR in their own journals and proceedings, it was never released for wider public consumption.

  If ever there was a case for the commercial publication of a specialist report, then the 1969 reappraisal of Borley by Hastings would be just such a case. Even at this late stage I would suggest that some consideration could be given to the possible publication of the Hastings' report in book form, to balance the effects of the 1956 report.

  Supposedly one of the most damaging accusations against Harry Price at Borley Rectory concerns the claim made by a Daily Mirror reporter, Charles Sutton, that Price had been caught perpetrating fake phenomena at the Rectory, including throwing stones to produce 'poltergeist' effects.

  This was looked at earlier and the statement made some 20 years after the supposed event by Charles Sutton in the Inky Way Annual has also been quoted. As part of the work on the 1956 allegations, Sutton was asked to provide a resumé of his memories of the incident, and this he duly sent to the authors of The Haunting of Borley Rectory.

  Hastings tells us that Sutton's lengthy piece was omitted from The Haunting of Borley Rectory, though he did include the statement in his report, under Appendix A.

  Another interesting point revealed by Hastings is that in view of the shortcomings in Sutton's evidence it was decided to re-interview Sutton to see if it could be clarified. Sutton was duly interviewed by Dr Alan Gauld of the SPR, but the only thing that this clarified was that Sutton did not see Price throw any stones in Borley Rec
tory, nor did he or anyone else there at the time see stones at all, save for the one stone or brick that, as now seems certain, somebody tripped over and sent crashing down the Rectory stairs.

  So, as Hastings demonstrates in his report, Charles Sutton could not properly substantiate his claim that he had caught Price cheating on the occasion in question. Yet relations between Sutton and Price after the supposed incident continued to be good. Such would not have been the case if Sutton had accused Price of fraud, surely?

  Hastings also deals in his report with another of Sutton's allegations, that of hearing noises that he described as sounding like Price using a ventriloquist's technique to produce 'ghostly voices'. Dr Alan Gauld also tackled Sutton on this point, observing that the use of the ventriloquist's technique relies on the misdirection of attention.

  The upshot of the whole episode was that Sutton claimed to have seized hold of Price with the intention of making him turn out his pockets, but as the Hastings' report shows, from Gauld's interview of Sutton, the latter's evidence about even this was somewhat weak and contradictory.

  Also described by Hastings was the ability of the Rectory to act as an amplifier to voices from people in the stable cottage, that stood behind the Rectory, though I would reiterate my reservations about this, given the hefty and complicated structure of the Rectory.

  Price was unaware of such a phenomenon at the time of his early visits and it was apparently one of his team, Mr Burden, who later reported the Rectory's acoustic properties.

  Robert Hastings' report also revealed that both of Price's former secretaries, Miss Kaye and Miss Beenham, gave testimony that was very much at odds with Mr Sutton's allegations, and which was in fact a sound defence of Price's conduct. Miss Kaye's testimony on pages 82 and 83 of the Hastings' report is very interesting and could be considered as essential reading for students of the Borley story.