1950s Part 1 - Dennis Stephens

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1950s Part 1 - Dennis Stephens
Name Dennis Stephens
Period 50's
Location London
Year
Website http://antology.info
Email ant.phillips@post8.tele.dk

This Article and Series deals with early Scientology in England in the 50s, this first one from Dennis Stephens' viewpoint. Dennis Stephens died 15 December 1994.

There is a good deal of information, talk and disagreement about Scientology. There is also a datum that Scientology has changed vastly since it started. But saying "changed vastly" is a bit of a generality. Therefore (luckily) I had the following detailed description of life near the centre of Scientology in the U.K. in the 50s which I am happy to present here. It is almost certainly one-sided, one viewpoint, biased, so I am hoping to get others to contribute their experience of the 1950s in England (it would be nice if someone made a separate effort for the USA, where Scientology started). Series started by Antony Phillips. Do write to me if you have questions or comments (ant.phillips@post8.tele.dk)

The following is a transcription of cassette tapes made by Dennis Stephens of his experiences when he first met Scientology (possibly the first in England to get Dianetics Modern Science of Mental Health) and his work with Ron in the early Scientology organisation in London. At the time Dennis recounted these experiences, he had poor eyesight and communicated by cassette tape, which was fairly new then. Dennis died a few years ago, but he sent me a copy of this cassette about the time he made it. It has been made into an mp3 file together with others he made, and can be freely copied. An anonymous person has transcribed it." - Antony Phillips October 29th 2013 (second part added April 2014).

Introduction - 1930s - Slum life in North London[edit | edit source]

Hello Greg, this is Wednesday, the 10th of February 1993 and, as requested by you, I'd like to give you a resume of my Scientology reminiscences.

First off we'll start off with part one, this tape will be, this cassette will be part one and this will be named the early years. I realized at the outset that this whole project is quite meaningless without some... a listener to the tape... having some understanding or some knowledge of me as a person so I'm going to give a few personal details.

I was born on 3 February 1927 in London, England in the suburb of Tottenham, N 15 and I was the only son of two working-class parents. At that time, the suburb of Tottenham was a slum or semi-slum area on the northern part of inner London, you might say. It had been in its time, 30 or 40 years earlier, it had been quite an affluent suburb but had gone downhill rather badly and when I was born into it, it was definitely a slum, semi-slum area. My earliest memories as a child, as a young child, was of other children who always seemed hungry and always seemed badly clothed and badly housed. And they all seemed to come from enormously large families. Nobody owned their houses, the whole block, the whole area where we lived was owned by the local bedstead factory or the local laundry, they owned all the property and all the houses were out on rentals.

It's difficult for us to understand these days the grinding poverty which was rampant in that area at that time. It was the sort of area where the girl next door, every Monday morning would take her father's Sunday suit, which he wore all day Sunday and got out of it Sunday night, and she took his Sunday suit in a wheelbarrow down to the local pawnbroker shop before she went to school on Monday morning and hocked it for five shillings and there it would stay all week until father got paid on Friday, when he came home on Friday he would pay his wife the housekeeping money and on Saturday morning the girl would go down with a wheelbarrow with six shillings and hand them over to the pawnbroker and reclaim the suit and then her father could wear his Sunday best suit again. It was that sort of grinding poverty.

All the children I knew seemed to be parts of large families. I seemed to be the law that makes the exception, I was the only child. My father, both my parents were working-class, my father had a regular job in a factory. He didn't earn all that much money, he didn't earn any more money than the other men did, but what made him a cut above the other men financially was that he only had one child to support and also he didn't smoke and he didn't drink and he otherwise saved his money. So we were never grindingly short of money although we were never, never affluent. The landlord always made sure of that. I suppose the main thing I learned from those first 11 years of my life living in that slum area of Tottenham, was to give me a deep and abided hatred of capitalism because I only saw the evil, the evil face of capitalism. I saw the rich going past in their big cars and I saw the grinding poverty of the poor and I used to think when I got a little older, I used to think, "God, there's got to be a better way to do this". But evidently, here we are 60 years later, we still have our slums and we still have the rich going past in their cars and mankind still hasn't found a better way to do it. It's difficult for us today in the 90s to understand the world, in London, of the early, early 30s when I was a young child. There was no electricity for example, in the row where we lived, although you could buy radio sets. You had to have them run on a battery and dad used to have a battery operated radio set which had a massive... batteries... which had every two or three weeks... spent half a week in the local store being recharged up. So our radio was a rather chancy affair. Dad used to tinker with it and so on.

Most of the people didn't have a radio. I think it was only two or three other houses in the whole street that had a radio, it was quite rare. There was no electricity. We had gas. All the lighting was by gas. Motorcars... well nobody in the street, the whole street, nobody owned a motor car and one shopkeeper who, he didn't live there, he used to park his car outside his corner shop, on the corner of the row, and that was the only car we ever as children... we never had a chance really to examine. We used to go and walk around this car and have a look at this remarkable object, this car. You could go up to the main road and see plenty of them going past, but none of them ever seemed to stop in the slum area.

DenisStephens.jpg

Move to a better area - clarinet[edit | edit source]

It simply wasn't an area where people owned cars, they simply hadn't got the money. When I got to 11 years of age, we upped and left the area and dad bought a house in Edgeware which is 10 miles to the northwest of London. He'd saved up the 30 pounds deposit for the new house for mom and I and himself. 30 pounds doesn't sound very much these days but the average wage, the wage he was earning which was about the average wage for a factory worker, was about 2 pounds a week in 1938. So it was 15 weeks wages, the deposit was, on the house. Well today the average wage is about $500 a week in Australia, so 15 x 500, it's about $7500. It would be the equivalent of a man saving up $7500 these days for the deposit on a house while carrying a rental and raising one child family. Took them a few years to save it nevertheless. Most of the people in the row never managed it. Their families were too large, they drank too much beer. They simply never managed to get off the treadmill of the landlord. To that I say, dad did and we got the house in Edgeware.

I was always rather bright at school, I was usually somewhere near the top of the class. I was above average intelligence as a lad. I passed my 11+ examination and very soon I was alright (?) and was headed off towards the local grammar school, or the county school as they used to call it in those days where I resided until I was 17. And I was all set to go onto a career where I would get a degree in science and mathematics, they were my interests. At least the teachers told me that's where I would be going and it seemed all right by me, but a hiatus occurred when I was 15 years of age when I suddenly developed a great, a great yearning, a great love of playing jazz on the clarinet. And I wanted be an Artie Shaw and a Benny Goodman. Dad very generously forked out the money to buy me a clarinet and he paid for my lessons to learn to play the instrument.

Of course, all the time I spent learning to play the instrument... that was the end of my academic expectations. They went out the window in favor of... I simply didn't spend enough time on my studies, my school studies. I ended up at 17 1/2 as a better-than-average jazz clarinetist and saxophonist but rather poor academic prospect for a science degree.

Now, regarding my personality, I suppose I was being regarded as a rather backward, shy person. That was always the main characteristic... mom always said you are more shy than most boys, and I was rather shy and backward... and thoughtful, a great reader. But shyness, nervousness in public was my great thing. She always said, mom, that you'll grow out of it, but I never did. When I went through adolescence my shyness got worse and worse and worse and it gave me... I started to study psychotherapy and got read all the works of Freud. I knew there was something not quite right inside the mechanism of my mind somewhere and I was trying to figure out what it was. Since my interests, my own shyness gave me a tremendous interest in psychotherapy. So I left the county school at 17 1/2 - that would've been at the end of the war. We didn't, we weren't affected all that much in terms of bombing by the war in northwest London. It was too far, it was the far side of London, away from where the bombs were being dropped. We had less bombs dropped in the Edgeware region than almost any other part of London. If we had stayed in Tottenham, of course, we would have been blasted out of existence because soon after the war I cycled back to the row where I was born in and the whole estate simply didn't exist. It took me almost half an hour to even find where the row was. It was just a mass of weeds and overgrown bomb wreckage. There was absolutely no sign of the house where I had lived in. The whole thing had just been bombed into complete oblivion by the German Air Force.

So I left school and got myself a local job. I was never particularly interested in business. As I say, my hatred of capitalism I just didn't care for business, I didn't care for capitalism. My childhood influences there... I had seen too much of the bad side of it. I was simply, I was not interested in capitalism and the business that goes with capitalism. I was more interested in music and I wanted to go in and become a professional musician. Unfortunately I probably could've become a professional musician, but unfortunately when I was a baby, I'd had a mastoidectomy and it had left me...I was in... hospitalized when I was three months of age as a baby with a mastoidectomy. And the operation to both my ears had left me with only about 60% hearing. There was absolutely nothing could be done about that. That was the way it was, I mean, the whole of my life as far as I can remember I've never had more than 60% of normal hearing. So that put pay to my aspirations to being really a professional, a top flight professional musician because one thing a professional musician, instrumentalist, needs, he needs absolutely spot perfect hearing. He can get by with bad eyesight but he can't get by with bad hearing. So I was pretty well doomed to a semiprofessional role and that's exactly what I did from 1940s, in late 1940s I was working in a dead-end office job in the daytime, and in the evenings I was out two or three nights a week with my saxophone and clarinet playing in dance bands. I was earning a lot of money. I was earning money in the daytime, I was unmarried and I was saving a fair bit of money. It was after the war and there was nothing much to buy, there was nothing in the shops and I was just stacking the money away.

L. Ron Hubbard - Fiction - Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health[edit | edit source]

Cover of October, 1950 edition of Fantastic Adventures featuring "Masters of Sleep" by L. Ron Hubbard. Artist is Robert Gibson Jones. Copyright was either Jones, or more likely Ziff-Davis, who published the magazine.

It all came in very useful later, this money did, I'll explain... the other great love of my life at that time was science fiction. In fact, almost the only fiction I ever read as an adolescent was science fiction. I was introduced to it at school and it was a great rave amongst all us lads at school. Many of us were great science fiction fans and it stayed with me after I left the school. I loved the Astounding Science Fiction which later became Analog and all the science fiction magazines and all the books on science fiction. L Ron Hubbard was one of my favorite authors and Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon. All the boys who were writing good stuff, good stories of science fiction, they were really the Golden years of science fiction was round about the 1940s and 50s. And I used to just gobble this stuff up. I had at that time, I had an air mail subscription to the Astounding Science Fiction magazine in New York. So, in May 1950, when the article on Dianetics came out in the Astounding Science Fiction magazine, I got it a few days after it was released in America. The book was air freighted over to England and I read that article by L. Ron Hubbard avidly and I was hooked, unashamedly, hooked unashamedly from the word go. This, when I read the article, I thought, well this I've read a lot of psychotherapy, I've read a lot of psychology, but this looks different. This is written by an engineer and here is an engineering approach to the subject of the mind. My own studies in mathematics and science and so forth had given me an appreciation of the engineering approach and I thought that was the way to go about it. And so I instantly got in touch with my local bookseller and got him to arrange to... for a copy of the book to be, to be sent over to me pronto. To be in my room as quickly as possible, no expense spared. There were some delay on the subject of the book, I never got it as quickly as I was hoped I could get it. But it was round about September 1950 before I actually got the book after a few delays. None of which were my fault, it all had to do with the bookseller.

But it was September 1950 when I got the book... read the book. One weekend I got it... he phoned me up, the bookseller, on a Saturday morning and said the book's here, if you can collect it or I'll post it out to you. So I got on... it was right on the other side of London, I remember, got on my motorbike and went all the way across to Stoke Newington on a Saturday morning and got back in time for lunch with the book in my hot little hand and spent the whole weekend reading Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health and finished it late on Sunday night. There would be no exaggeration to say that I was in a whirl. My head was an absolute whirl when I read that. It was a milestone in my life. I could hardly wait to get started but before I could get started I needed a co-auditor.

Co-auditing - Contact with American groups[edit | edit source]

I needed somebody to audit me and I needed somebody to be able to audit. So looking around me to find a co-auditor. That meant somebody else who had to have read the book. And I had the only copy of the book. There was no way that anybody else would get the book quickly so it was a question of lending out my copy. So I went around to all my school friends, my old school friends who I had stayed in touch with, it was about half a dozen of them, we used to go out drinking in my spare time.

One by one I approached them on the subject of this book and lent them the book. I was absolutely amazed and disappointed at the cool reception that I got. There was only one fellow, Nobby, one of the half-dozen, who was interested. He read the book and was impressed by the book. And he had a few psychological problems of his own and he was willing to have a go. Of course, I was very young at the time, very inexperienced, and what I didn't know was that, something I have learned since, that the vast majority of the human race, have a built-in objection to anyone tampering with their mind, whether it's done by a qualified psychiatrist or whether it's done by a rank amateur. They simply will not have anybody tamper with their, tinker with their mind. This is a most peculiar state of affairs when you look at it objectively because the same person who will not have, under any circumstances, have anyone tamper, tinker with their mind will quite happily go to a doctor, to a surgeon and be put under an anesthetic and have their carcass opened up and all their innards spread out on an operating table and examined and some repair made to the heart or to an artery somewhere or some complex operation or to their intestines system and have it all put back in and it will all be sewn up and they'll come out of the anaesthetic and recover and say, well they don't think there's anything odd about this at all. In other words, they don't think there's anything odd about a surgeon going in and tinkering with the innards of their body but the idea of somebody asking them a few questions about their mind and about their memories and their past and so forth, no, they will not have that. Now that's a peculiar state of affairs when you look at it quite objectively. It's a peculiarity of the human species because objectively it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

There's very few people who can grasp this... but I can grasp it... I grasp it objectively. If you look at it objectively it's most peculiar this strange rejection so it was not unusual that a sample of six young men, there, who were introduced to Dianetics in 1950, only one of the six was interested to follow through on it. Even he wasn't wildly enthusiastic. He was much more cautious than I was. But anyway, Nobby and I got... he read the book thoroughly from cover to cover and we compared notes and so forth and decided on a co-auditing program. We got underway towards the end of September 1950, got our co-auditing under way. I didn't know it at the time, but we were almost certainly the second co-auditing team to start in the United Kingdom. There was nothing being done, the only earlier ones than us was George Wichelow who started auditing a preclear... his first preclear he put down into therapy was in early September and he knows of no one else that was auditing in September except himself. By October of course it was different.

There was many that were starting up, but almost certainly Nobby and I were the second co-auditing team in the whole of the British Isles. I've certainly... I've looked into this enough... I've never come up with anyone who was auditing earlier than that except George Wichelow who was auditing in early September. But more about George Wichelow later.

As soon as I got book 1 of course, there was a little card in there which you returned back to the publishers in America for further information on the subject of Dianetics. I filled that card in and air mailed that off to America. A few weeks later I got a letter from the Dianetics Research Foundation in Elizabeth, New Jersey. That was Ron's organization, giving me, you know, up to date data and so forth, and also giving me the names and addresses of half a dozen Dianetic groups that were already formed in the United States. It's almost impossible for us to realize at this time that the wild enthusiasm that there was in certain quarters, in America particularly, with Dianetics. It literally took that country by storm. And by October, September - October 1950, there was Dianetics groups springing up all over America. And two or three months afterwards, by October - November, they were springing up in London too. The book did go to the top, it was a bestseller and it was a wild... people were... those who were interested were wildly enthusiastic and there was no holds barred, no holds barred on the communication lines.

George Wichelow - London group[edit | edit source]

Nobody was withholding communication on the subject. Every communication was welcomed. And I got in touch with the American groups... every address I was sent, I wrote to and got replies back from. Some of them already had got newsletters starting up and I became a sort of a, you know, a communication terminal. They were writing... there was only George Wichelow at that time who also knew auditing. And now there was Dennis Stephens in Edgeware. And miles of stuff started turning up in my mail. The groups in America were telling other groups in America that there was a guy over there called Stephens who's interested in America, in England. And so miles of staff was turning up in the mail from the various groups and so I was spending a hell of a lot of time writing, writing off to these groups in America with my own experiences and enjoying reading their newsletters and so forth. And one of the other things I got back from the Elizabeth foundation was the address of George Wichelow in northwest London, and his phone number. And he had his address and phone number, and when I phoned him up, of course, there was already a group going in Wealdstone in northwest London, which was about halfway between Edgeware and central London. It was about 5 miles away from Edgeware going towards London so it wasn't difficult for me to get there. There was already a flourishing group under George Wichelow. And so by October, the middle of October, it would have been my first appearance at the Wichelow group one Sunday evening when they used to hold their Sunday evening group meetings. Well I turned up there and met George Wichelow and we were underway and things were moving. Nobby was never all that keen, he never did appear at the group meetings. He was quite happy to continue on with our co-auditing but he never took part in any of the public activities at all.

It must be realized from my rather sheltered background in my life, and I wasn't very old, that I was entering really a new world when I entered the Wichelow group because the first Sunday I went down there there was about 40 people there, and many of them were eminent psychologists, the medical profession was represented and there was a bit of the lunatic fringe and there was George Wichelow, who was quite a character was George, he was a man of about 45 to 50 and he was a professional magician, professional conjurer, professional strongman. He was a naturopath. He could do a few things with bones to, a bit of an osteopath. There wasn't much George Wichelow couldn't do... he could even audit as well. So I was quickly made very welcome as another book auditor. And I discovered that there was other groups in London starting out. There was a group in East London by, run by a fellow called Stanley Richards. I got the address of Stanley Richards and wrote to him. There was another group in Battersea run by Nan Walker, the Battersea group. And there was a central London group, I forget who was running that but I wrote to all of them. I was such a good communicator that George Wichelow immediately, well, within a couple of weeks, he elected me secretary of the group. I was the group secretary. I was the group communicator of the Wichelow northwest London Dianetics group. George also, great character that he was, George, there was one thing he was very bad at, and that was his tech. Tech used to go in one ear of George and out through the other. But that didn't stop him from being a great auditor. He had a natural flair for auditing even though he couldn't impart the skills of it, the tech of it, to other people. He simply was a very, very poor teacher. He couldn't hold the tech but he could do it himself. It was a peculiar state of affairs. And as there was always so many technical questions on the subject of Dianetics to be answered of the group, and George quickly found out that I was, even in those days was showing the characteristics of being an encyclopedia on the subject. I had no such limitations on my knowledge of the tech and understanding and grasp of the tech. And he quickly was fielding the technical questions over to me in the group meetings.

Meanwhile our auditing with Nobby was going on very, very well, I was making marvelous gains. My shyness was vanishing almost visibly yet there was no specific engram that we ever contacted that was to do with my nervousness or shyness, but the more prenatals I ran and the more late life secondaries I ran, the less shy and nervous I became. It was just lifting accumulated charge. Nobby too was making good, if slower gains. I realized, soon realized, that he was a much heavier case to audit than I was and he had much more deeper, deeper psychological problems than I had. He had some rather deep-seated sexual problems, did poor old Nobby.

He wasn't a sexual nut or anything. He wasn't any form of sexual monster. He wasn't a homosexual or anything like that. He just had a few very deep-seated sexual quirks, that was all. He was quite natural, his instincts were quite natural towards the opposite sex but he was almost totally inhibited from doing anything about it by his quirks. But to jump forward into the future, Nobby did finally... well, ...Sigmund Freud always used to say that when a person can't marry, can't get along with the opposite sex and can't get married and goes into therapy, that one thing that signals the success of their therapy is when the person ups and gets married, and that can be taken as a successful therapy. And Freud would be absolutely right when he made that remark. And Nobby, in the middle of 1951, about a year after we started auditing, he came in and announced to me one day that... I knew he was going around with this girl, he announced that he was engaged and would soon be getting married. And that of course really did terminate our auditing because at that point on we had no more time, once he got married, to engage this activity. So, we can say, that the auditing I gave Nobby was successful. It was a success but he didn't make anywhere near, in my own estimation, in his own estimation, he was quite happy with the results he got, but in my estimation I got much more out of it than he did.

Response of acquaintances - "black case"[edit | edit source]

The response of both our parents and our families was fascinating. Both my parents considered the whole thing was mumbo-jumbo, highly dangerous and if we weren't careful we'd drive each other mad. And his parents shared the same attitude, all of our parents, both parents and both families thought that we were quite insane to even attempt such a project of this and they, of course, were quite, you know, they took the conventional view, thou shalt not tamper with thy mind or thy will go insane. That was the view they held. But after a few months of therapy my parents had to admit that I was more alert, and more spark and far less withdrawn and nervous than I had been previously. Both of them did acknowledge it and admitted that it did seem to be doing me some good, although dad was rather doubtful whether it would do me any good in the long run. He was very pessimistic, was my dad on the subject. Another big case again I made in my Dianetic auditing with Nobby was that I had been a black case when I started my auditing, I was a black case and about two or three months after I started, roundabout Christmas 1950, I was in session with him one day and I remember it very, very clearly that I had this, I was in a road... and I knew the road very well near my childhood home, and there was a front door in front of me and I needed to know the number of the house. Well I knew the number was on the front door. Though I couldn't see the number on the door, I knew the number was there. See, case wise I had accurate impressions, accurate sonic mpressions and accurate visual impressions but I was black, I never saw anything. I was a black case. I had no actual visual field, or to put it another way, I had a black field.

Whichever way you like. I was what was known as a black case. But anyway, in that session there suddenly I said to myself, the hell with this, I want to see what that number is on that door and I started to mentally look at the number on the door and suddenly a chink appeared in the blackness and the blackness started to move away and there was the number. There was the door, there was the road, there was the pavement, there was everything just as I'd remembers it, just as I knew it was as a child. There was the street, there was the memory in complete technicolor. My blackness disappeared. By the end of the session I could move up and down my time track in full technicolor visio. The blackness had just gone instantly. It was just my... I realized many years afterwards it was simply my power, my intention to see the number on the door. In other words, it was just the power of the spirit. I was intended to see, to break the blackness and I broke it. It was my blackness and I intended to see through it and I saw through it and got rid of it. I didn't need it anymore.

Looking back in retrospect, I realized I've never had any need of pictures in my mind as a child and so I've never looked at my past properly. I could always recall what I wanted to recall and I've never actually had a need to look at things in great detail in my past and so, of course, I've never had the ability to do so. I'd never cultivated the ability. When I got into Dianetics, I needed that ability and so I created that ability to do it and I broke the blackness and started to see in full technicolor which I could have done at any time if I had really put my mind to it. I firmly believe that all black cases are of that nature. They simply have never learnt the ability, they've never needed the ability. If they really... could be guided to break the blackness any time they want to.

Anyway in later years when... I became quite an expert on black cases because of my subjective experience of being a black case when I started off in therapy and breaking my own occlusion gave me... I. was an authority on the subject, the black case. There was no other Scientologist I knew in London who had been a black case and had broken his blackness. I was the only one so I was quite justified in calling myself an authority on the subject of black cases. But one should not take away the good auditing I got from Nobby because without that auditing I would have never broken through that black field. So one cannot detract from the fine auditing I got from my co-auditor. He made it, he really did make it possible even though in the final instance, of course, it was the preclear that did it, so the acclaim must go to the co-auditor, to the auditor in the session who did it. So it was a positive mark for my auditor, Nobby, who broke through my blackness for me.

Another sign of my considerable case gain was that in group meetings I was able to actually... George would often just simply give me the floor, you know. He would call me over to the front table at once for a technical question and walk away and leave me there handing me all the technical questions for the whole group for half an hour at a time.

The ideal guinea-pig[edit | edit source]

Now, six months before... before my Dianetic auditing, I would've just run away from a crowd like that. I mean, there I was confronting a whole crowd of people. There answering rather involved technical questions on the subject of Dianetics and not batting an eyelid and not feeling a shred of nervousness. It was a signal success of my therapy, that was. Although I didn't know it at the time, what was happening was, I was simply becoming more causative as a being over my life and my environment. That was all that was happening to me so of course, the nervousness was falling away.... I took on another chore, I took on... well, not a chore, but another activity I took on at the group meetings was the subject of auditing demos. There was always a difficulty in a group meeting, newcomers always wanted to see a demonstration and it's a very difficult thing to select a subject for the demonstration. Although we had plenty of, plenty of group members who were in therapy, most of them had heavy cases and it was not easy to put them into session and be able to run something and get it all cleared up in 20 minutes or half an hour, which was the only time we had for the demonstration. We didn't like leaving group members stuck in heavy, heavy engramic material for shortage of time. Two or three group members got stuck on it or caught on this and eventually they settled on me.

They found out that I could, because of my nature as a person, because of the nature of my bank, it was quite okay to put me into session. I could go into session quite easily. I could go into a prenatal engram, even one I had never come across before and run it, and come out the other end of it and I could run it to the clock, you know. The auditor had 20 minutes to go, he could run me through it and when the time had come... at the end of the demonstration he could simply fish me out of it and get me into present time and I needed hardly negligible stabilization in present time and had no ill effects whatsoever. This was a peculiarity that I had. I had always had that. I had that right from the beginning of my therapy was that .... it was only many, many years later that I understood the mechanism that causes it. You see, the heavier a case is, the more he's... the bits of his bank get connected up to the other bits of his bank. It's the old A = A = A mechanism that Hubbard spoke about in Dianetics... the more his bank is reacting against him, the more, every part of his mind is connected to every other bit. So you put him into therapy and tackle and jangle one engram, tackle one engram, that engram jangles, and that jangle is connected to something else and the next thing you've got half a dozen engrams jangling.

You see what I'm getting at?

This sort of preclear is not suitable for a 15 minute, 20 minute demonstration. You need a preclear where you can go in like a surgeon, you know... you can make a quick incision... go in, run a quick engram, and get out. And you can only do that on a high level preclear. A pre-clear who was not carrying much charge on his bank. So, although I never realized it at the time, I was always a rather easy running preclear. I had very little charge on this lifetime. There was very little trauma in my childhood, you know. I was an only child that led a rather sheltered life. Nothing of any great horror had ever happened to me of any great significance. So I had very little charge there. So that allowed me to go into session very easily at these group demonstration meetings.

George pounced on this because he was very concerned about putting people into session for demonstration purposes and having them feeling a bit swiffy the following day but he found that he could do it with me... he found that he could do almost anything with me in therapy and it didn't mean a thing, you know. I could get the case gains and stabilize in present time almost instantly.

Early English Scientologists - e-meter[edit | edit source]

This had some rather peculiar effects on me as an auditor afterwards which I won't mention at the moment because it would be out of sequence. Various people at that group became quite well known in the early days of Scientology in the UK, Dennis O'Connell, he was a member of the group, and his girlfriend Olive, she never became particularly active in the HASI, but Dennis O'Connell was very active in HASI. George Wichelow himself became very active in HASI and I of course, became very active in the London HASI. So quite a number of members of that group became very active. Early in 1951 a fellow strolled into the group by the name of Ray Reeves and he was an electronic wizard. And we were all getting... I'd written over to America... Volney Mathison had dreamed up the first e-meter circuit and Ron was raving about e-meters. I'd written over to America and got the electronic circuit of an e-meter over from one of the groups and I handed it over to Ray Reeves in mid-1951, this was.

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He took it away and built a beautiful e-meter in a case, in an attaché case. It was a power meter. It was a beautiful little job with a light on it and everything and called it the Emodet. I fell in love with it right away and realized its immediate use, and he used it. So I immediately ordered one from him and he built an exact replica for me. At that time Ray and I, we had the only, really the only decent e-meter's in London. Eventually others started to come over from America, the Mathison meters started to come over and become more used, but they weren't as good as the Ray Reeves meters, the Emo... he called it the Emodet, emotion detector, the Emodet. He only made about three or four. I don't know what happened to them. They were still... I'd love to have gotten the circuit he used. I never did get the circuit he used. I never did bother to ask him for it. It wasn't quite the same as the Mathison circuit but it was a very, very fine circuit he built there.

And he was a bit of an expert on e-meter's, Ray Reeves was. He was a qualified electronics engineer. He was a first-class man in his field. He taught me an awful lot about meters and so forth and eventually I became quite an authority on the subject of a good e-meter. There never was... HASI never did build a... good e-meters. All the best e-meters ever built were built by people in the field. Ron was not a good judge of an e-meter. He was not a good judge. So he was unable to evaluate the meters that were being sold by HASI. There were far, far better meters... more cheaper than we used to make. They were available in the field. It always was that way in Scientology and it's still that way today.

Co-auditing with Ray Reeves - Jack Horner arrives[edit | edit source]

Towards the middle or end of 1951 I was a busy boy, a very busy boy. We had the group there and was still carrying on my auditing. Although, of course, Nobby was... we had finished... I'd finished with Nobby. He'd gone off and got married and Ray and I were co-auditing, Ray Reeves and myself, we were co-auditing now. I was progressing with my case gains and I was getting stuck into Ray Reeves' case. He lived in Southhall, in Middlesex and we used to have two sessions, a couple of sessions a week. I was still keeping my dance band work going, ...my daytime job. I was a very, very busy boy. But then in the late summer of 1951 a guy called Jack Horner turned up, an American auditor, turned up in London to give a Congress and he brought with him his clear and... dear Jack!... he was a great guy, Jack. He wasn't physically a big man, but he was a (?) psychologically. I liked Jack Horner but a lot of people didn't care for him very much. He had a number of weaknesses, Jack Horner. One was that he was a great one for the women. We found out later that this idea of him turning up... he had been turning up all over the world with clears. All these clears had two things in common. Every clear he ever turned up with was a beautiful girl, that was number one, and number two was that she was sleeping with Jack Horner. Well, this would have been quite all right except Jack Horner had a wife back in California. You could see that he was somewhat mixing business with pleasure, Jack Horner was. But nevertheless, he turned up with his beautiful clear at the Congress, but it was a memorable Congress for me, that one he held in 1951.

Congress - Anne Walker[edit | edit source]

That was the first Congress ever held in London.

All the group people turned up there. The people who I'd been in contact with who I'd met. Stanley Richards I'd phoned up and spoken to on the telephone, we'd written to each other but we never actually met. We met at that Congress in mid-1951. The first morning of the Congress I was sitting there in a chair and a startlingly beautiful auburn haired woman walked across the floor and I just went, my God, what a gem, what a beautiful woman. I made some discreet inquiries and found out that her name was Anne Walker. That was the head of the Battersea group. The funny thing is that we'd spoken over the telephone, Anne and I, and we'd written to each other on more than one occasion but we'd never met. So she was as surprised to meet me as I was to meet her. We got on absolutely famously together. We went out and had lunch that day and, boy, things went on from there and we subsequently got married and never looked back. It was love at first sight for me when I saw that startlingly beautiful auburn haired woman walk across the floor. The great thing about it was, our relationship was, that she had a family of children, a marvelous family of two young children who weren't all that young. There was a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, 13-year-old boy, a strapping young lad of 13 and a delightful 11-year-old daughter. I love children but I was never keen on young children, babies, and I think that's a lovely age to inherit a family... to go in and get a family of 13 and 11. We were great friends and always have been all down the years, with Anne's children.

I never came the heavy father on them and made it quite clear from the beginning that I was not their dad. And I was just Dennis and I've always been just Dennis to them. I've never imposed on them on any way whatsoever. I just took the relationship as it came and it's worked out very, very well. So it was a marvelous thing right from the word go, that was. The next thing of real import to happen was in August 19... late August 1952, when I got a phone call one evening from George saying that Ron Hubbard's in town, in London.

LRH-DMSMH.jpg

Hubbard in England[edit | edit source]

He'd arrived unexpectedly and that there was every chance that he would be at the Wichelow group meeting that following Sunday. Wow! Our spirits went through the roof. Here was the master himself who had turned up and he was going to visit the various groups. And the first one on his itinerary was our group, the Wichelow group. We were the first one he was going to visit on a Sunday, then he was going to visit the central London group and so forth if he had time. but he was certainly... George was very optimistic as he had spoken to Ron, he was very optimistic and Ron had given his word that he would be there and George had gotten everyone in sight to come. So, with bated breath we all went down there that Sunday evening to George's front room. He had a big front room there, a big Victorian house. It was a large front room but we were quite used to having 30 people in that room, even 35 or 40, but when I got there, there was already 60 people there, about 60 people and they were beginning to hang from the chandeliers. I thought, this is going to be quite an evening, this is. And there was the room there... we had run out of chairs. It was standing room only. They were sitting on the floors, they were sitting on the side boards... it was... no Ron had turned up yet. We were just beginning to wonder whether he was ever going to come and George had gotten the proceedings underway and about 8:30 in the evening, there was a knock at the door and the great man entered. That was my first sight of Ron Hubbard, a rather large man, imposing psychologically.

You could never miss Ron Hubbard's presence. When he walked into a room you turned, whether you were facing him or not you knew someone had come in. He was an impressive man. And impressive physically and impressive psychologically. He was a big man, about 200, 240 pounds of Ron and 6 foot, and big physically to match and big psychologically. And in those days, he had a massive, flaming red hair. In 1952 he was in his prime. He was 41 years old, Ron was. He was in his physical prime. Although, Mary Sue had arrived in London with him, he never brought her to the group meeting, he turned up by himself. He quickly took over the whole of the proceedings and started... gave us a talk. We just sat there rapt. He started talking about exteriorization. We'd heard about exteriorization from the groups in America but none of us knew very much about it. We just heard that there was such a thing as exteriorization and he started to talk about exteriorization and he kept us enthralled there for about an hour.

And then suddenly he stopped and said, I need a subject, he said, for a demonstration on the subject of exteriorization. He said, it's no good me talking about it anymore. I want to demonstrate it to you. You'll see it for yourself. And so he said, anyone like to care to come forward for a demonstration. And I thought to myself, well, I'm the pet guinea pig of the group. I thought, well, I'll let somebody else go on this one. They'll all want to go forward. And there was a dreadful silence. So I looked around. There wasn't a hand up in sight. Even George Wichelow wasn't game on this one. So my hand shot up. He looked at me, Ron did and grinned. What's your name? ... introduced myself... and he said, come and sit down over here... sat down at the table and he popped me into session and my life was never the same afterwards.

Guinea-pig for Hubard's demonstration - Exteriorisation[edit | edit source]

He just got me to communicate with my foot and give my foot a command. And then he asked me to contact the comm line between the... on the command going between me and my foot... and what color was it. I told them it was a bit murky. And he said, turn it white. And now get your foot to give you a command, and what color is it? A bit murky, or turn it white. And the next moment I was flying around the room. There was this great big table that George had in the room, a big circular oriental table. It was a masterpiece. It was very old, very, very valuable. And it had a very complex mosaic, oriental mosaic pattern in brilliant technicolor on the top of it. And you can imagine this situation, there's Ron sitting at one side of the... not at this table... the table was almost in the middle of the room. In the corner of the room there was a smaller table and Ron was sitting on one side of it and there was me sitting on the other side of it with my head slumped forward and Ron was auditing and I was sitting up on the ceiling. And in full Technicolor, much more brilliantly than I had ever seen before in my life was the technicolor of the mosaic on this table. And he asked me what I was looking at and I told him, and he moved me around the room and I was up in the ceiling looking down at all these people. And it was the wildest scene. There is me looking down on these people sitting there and they're all looking at my body sitting in the chair at the table and there is Ron there, sitting on there, and they're all looking at the body and I'm up on the ceiling looking down at them. And he moved me around... moved me out into the road, and he moved me... stabilized me in present time and got me around back behind my head and then he said, in his drawl, he said, well, where would you like me to... where would you like to be when we end the session? I said, well, I'm quite happy here Ron. He said, well, that's fine, he said and that's where you shall be when we end the session. So he ended the session off. And it was absolutely incredible. He answered a few more questions and I went back to my place. It was getting on towards 10:30 and I was already in danger of missing my last transport. The group pretty well quickly broke up and we all went away. And I walked home and I was about 19 foot tall! I was still exteriorized. I got the last bus up to Edgeware, up the Edgeware Road, got off at Edgeware, and I had about a mile and a half to walk. I'd missed my last bus to where we lived. I had to walk about a mile and a half and it was the most incredible... I was still exteriorized. When I closed my eyes I could see just as clearly, or if not more clearly with my eyes closed than I could with my eyes open in present time. Incredible perception I had, absolutely incredible. Clear detail. Never known anything like it through vision, through my eyes.

And I was walking along the road in the dark and there was street lights there and I was behind my head. And as the street lights would move along as I was walking, and as the streetlights passed they would come out of the shadow of my head, they'd shine on me.

Well I was exteriorized behind my head and I would be startled by the bright light of the streetlight appearing around the side of my head and I wondered what the hell it was. So I closed my eyes and I realized I could walk quite... just as comfortably along the road with my eyes closed so I walked nearly half a mile along that road with my eyes closed with the body walking in front of me. It was the most incredible experience I've ever had in my life. I got indoors, I got into bed and exteriorized around the room doing... giving myself the commands that Ron had been giving me. And went out into the garden and got off onto the roof and eventually sat out on the top of the lamp post there, on top of the electric light bulb and there was one solitary moth. I'll always remember it, it was very late in the year for a moth, there was one solitary moth fluttering around the electric light bulb.

And there was me watching this moth go around this electric light bulb. I'm sitting out there and I stayed out there and I must have drifted off to sleep because when I woke up in the morning I had come back into my body again. So I went to sleep sitting on top of the lamp post. But I felt absolutely incredible. I was absolutely a new person. What I didn't know at the time, what Ron, what Ron grasped in me, he seemed to sense this, that there was such a thing as a theta clear... that when you took a person and exteriorized them, that you could clear them. It was a clearing mechanism. I don't think it was... maybe Ron really understood it but, a lot of us never really grasped it. What was going on was that we didn't really know this about... all that much about clearing in those days, was that clearing isn't really a matter of how many engrams you run or how much charge you take off the bank, clearing is really an attitude of mind. It's getting the person, bringing the person up to a point where he realizes that he can handle his mind and handle his life and that's all clearing is there. It's not a question of engramic charge, it's a question of being able to handle things and position things in space and in time and so forth. As that ability, that confidence comes up that one can do this, one becomes more and more clear. One gets more and more case gains. And that's the inner secret of the inner secret.

That's why exteriorization is a clearing phenomenon. You can exteriorize a person, they immediately feel free because they can now move away from the center of their bank. They now can move, you see, where before they were trapped and now you've given them a freedom so you've now given them back an ability which they didn't have before and so now you've changed their state of case. So exteriorization is a clearing procedure and I didn't realize it. What I hadn't known up to then was that, the auditing I'd had, I was already a low level clear from the auditing I I'd had. That was demonstrated by the fact that I could do these group demonstrations... you know, it was almost impossible to throw me case wise in a group demonstration. They could throw me into session, run an Engram and take me out of session, bring me into present time and it was, you know, I was quite okay. There was no other member of the group they could do this on. I thought it was odd at the time. I thought it was just a natural ability I had. But then as the years passed, and looking back and in retrospect the reason I could do it was that I was clear.

And exteriorizing me had cleared me even further. And I was in pretty darn good case shape at that point in time. Incredible case shape. The exteriorization perception never maintained, it never held, it faded. Well, it couldn't have held... I mean, it was so brilliant that I would have had to put bandages over my eyes, you know. I couldn't have lived, couldn't have lived with it. I think I shut it off to stay human. It was so incredibly bright, the perception was. And it validated everything Ron said about exteriorization, about the thetan. There was no doubt of what he was talking about... I mean, Ron wasn't making this up... there was such a thing as a Thetan. People were just what he says they were, you know. I mean, this wasn't just a figment of his imagination. Here was me experiencing it exactly as he said it and there couldn't be any other explanation of what I was experiencing. It was exactly as he said it was. So that was a turning moment in my life, that was, was that group meeting... in late, late August 1952 with that demonstration session there. That's when I became clear.

A few years afterwards when some auditor put me on an e-meter and asked me when was the last time you went, when was the first time you know you went clear. It always ticks on that demonstration session that Ron gave me when he exteriorized me because that was the first time I was absolutely certain... although I'm now looking back further, I realize that even before that I was clear.... but that was the certainty came to me, that I was clear at that point when he exteriorized me. There was another incredible thing about it was when looked at it in retrospect too, that, of all the people in that room, I don't know whether there was any, there couldn't have been many he could have done that with.

He could have exteriorized quite a number of them with the techniques he had at his disposal, but I don't think there was any he could have done it with whose cases were in as good a condition as my case was. You see, the thing was, the better condition, case condition the person was in, the better they responded, and the more benefit they got from the exteriorization procedure. You see, the thing was cumulative. The worse off the case was, the less benefit they got from the exteriorization procedure. I was in good case shape, I was probably in better case shape than anybody else in the room. It just so happened that when he asked that I volunteered. But I gave everyone else in the room the chance to volunteer first to be the subject of the demonstration and nobody took it. I happened to be the best case shape in the room. I put my hand up last and got the benefit, got the case benefit. Now isn't that interesting? Did Ron know this? You know, one can speculate this thing backwards and forwards forever. He got the best result possible because he audited the case that was in the.... the person that was in the best case shape in the room. But the person in the best case shape in the room gave everyone else the chance to take part in the demonstration and none of them took the opportunity. Now isn't that interesting? It tells you something very interesting about the engram bank if you think about it.

Well, from this point on was things moved rather rapidly. I was at work a few days afterwards and I couldn't get down to the London group meeting where Ron turned up. He did turn up at the London group but I couldn't manage it because I had a dance band job. It was on a wednesday evening and I had a dance band job that evening and I couldn't break the appointment. So I had to turn up to do my dance band job so I didn't go down to the London group but apparently, he did an auditing demonstration there on exteriorization and it was a complete washout. He got absolutely nowhere with the person. He obviously, and I don't know who it was, but he picked someone whose case was in far worse shape than mine and he just didn't have any success. But anyway, I didn't attend that one but a week or so afterwards, I was at work one day and Dennis O'Connell... he was... I mentioned his name... he was already one of the group members, and he phoned up, he said, well, he said, Ron's starting the HPA course next Monday.

HPA Course in Dennis O'Connell's flat[edit | edit source]

Next Monday? This was a Thursday. He says, next Monday it starts. I said, where is it being held at? And he said, in my flat! I said, you're joking! He said, no, I'm not!, he said. And I've offered my flat to Ron. Ron's got no other place to run it. And I said, well, where the hell are you going to live? I said, you've only got that one room. You see, Dennis and Olive lived there in that one room flat. It was a big room there, but it was just the one big room with the kitchen attached and that was their living space and the toilet and bathroom was outside which they shared with other members of the... of the people who lived in the house.

They only had that one room. I said, hey, how long does the course go on for? He said, eight weeks. I says, you won't manage it mate. I says, you're going to have to go live in a hotel. Oh no, he said, we'll struggle on. So he said, well we start next Monday. He said, can we put your name down? Well, I said, how much is it? He said, well, hold your breath, he said, just hold your hat on, he says, 125 pounds. And he said, worst is to come, he says, batten your ears back, he says, its cash on the barrel. He says, you pay the money before you start. I said, what the hell is going on? He said, well, Ron needs the money. He wants to open up a HASI in London. He hasn't got any funds. All his funds are apparently tied up in America and he's got no ready cash and he's got to run this course and he wants the money to put the money down to start the organization in London so he can't give terms at this stage, he said. But he said, anyone who does this course, he said, will be assured of a future. And I said, well, I'll have to think about it. I mean, 125 pounds doesn't sound very much these days but the average wage in those days was 8 pounds a week. I was earning about 8 pounds a week and... well, you divide... it's about 16 weeks wages. In 1993 the average wage is about $500 a week and if you multiply $500 by 16 you end up with 8000. So I was virtually being asked on a Thursday afternoon, to get $8000 in my hot little hand and arrive with that amount of money on the following Monday morning at an address 10 miles down the road you know. It was quite a large sum of money to part with. I said to Dennis over the phone,

I says, it's a lot of money. He says, yup, he said, but there is a lot signing up. Richards is in, Stan Richards is signing up. He reckons he'll have to sell his shirt, Stan does, but he's going to be there next Monday morning. And he said, well Olive and I will be there naturally. But we're getting the course, getting a reduction, he said, because we're letting him have our flat. He said, we couldn't afford it otherwise. If we're letting him have our flat and he's giving us a good reduction, that's the only way we can get on the course. So that's why he let them have the... let Ron have his flat. It was the only way Dennis and Olive could get on the course. George will be on it, he said, George Wichelow will be on it. A lot of the old... all the old hands were going to be on it. Anne wouldn't be on it, she couldn't afford it. So I thought to myself, well I'll have to let you know Dennis, it's a lot of money. Although I had the money.... I had thought to myself, what am I going to do with it. So after he rang off I thought, well. what the hell, I might as well. I'm not getting anywhere with this day job. I might as well become a professional Dianeticist, a professional Scientologist and throw my hat into that area. I'm getting nowhere here fiddling about with my dance band work in the evening. I might as well, might as well take the plunge. So I phoned him up that evening, you can count me in. He said, oh marvelous, he said, I'll be there on Monday morning.

He said, don't forget to bring the money with you, he said. Ron's not joking. He said, if you don't, if you don't bring the money, he said, you won't start. So, over the weekend I went down to the post office and drew out 125... 125 smackers, put them in my pocket, told ...gave my notice in... instantly and... that cost me a weeks wages... and Monday morning told my parents that I was going to take this course and they thought I was mad. And anyway, Monday morning found me there on the HPA course. And Dennis was absolutely right, there was about 20 staffers at nine o'clock in the morning... no, about 24... I think I counted, about 24... and Ron gave a little introductory talk... no, it was about 10 o'clock we started, it wasn't nine, it was about 10 o'clock was the starting time. Ron gave an introductory course, answered a few questions and we had an early lunch. Mary Sue came around with her hat in her hand and she wanted the money. And I parted with my 125 smackers. After lunch there was only 16 of us left. There was eight would be hopefuls who had come down on the odd chance that they could start. They'd gone in the afternoon! It was cash on the barrel. No cash, no start.

So the 16... on the Monday afternoon, the 16 of us that were left were starting the first HPA course. There was a number of professional hypnotists, the odd psychotherapist, a guy called Oscar Collistrom and his wife. Both carried doctorates. I don't know whether they were doctors of science or whether they were doctors of... they weren't medical doctors, I think. I think Jean Collistrom was a Dr. of Science but the other guy, her husband, who looked just like a total rendition of Sigmund Freud complete with beard, he was in. He was a decent enough guy. He was a professional psychoanalyst. Been practicing in London for years, one of.... I found out later he was one of London's better-known psychoanalysts. He was Freudian enough up to his ears, up to his eyeballs, was Oscar. He was in. There was a lot of people from the London, central London group that were in. Stan Richards turned up, still got his shirt on, but he turned up. Georgie Wichelow was there. I don't know what George had to sell, to get rid of, it might be he sold his table. I never did see that table again. He must have sold that table. But anyway, George was there. I mean, this course we were doing was intensive. It was nine o'clock in the morning and it would drag on. We would have the classes and lectures with Ron. Then we would do some auditing in the afternoon. And then Ron would be back in the evening and we'd be lecturing again. And two evenings a week he used to let the public come in. And anyone could come in for the public lectures by Ron Hubbard. And poor Dennis and Olive, I remember once or twice I said, how the hell are you getting on in the middle of the course? How are you managing? He said, it's awful. He said, we can't even get into bed, we have to look under the bed before we get into it. There might be a couple of students under there doing a bit of auditing. He said, it's awful!

Dennis and future wife Ann

Premises for a Scientology Org - Anne Walker full time staff - Dennis Director of Processing[edit | edit source]

I don't know really how they managed but they survived it somehow, the two of them. Rarely was that place empty before midnight. They couldn't have gotten to bed till after midnight and they had to be out of bed again and get the place all ready for the course by nine o'clock the following morning. God knows how they lived during that period but they managed it. Anyways, Ron was as good as his word, while the course was going on he was investing the money that he got and the next thing we knew was that he got some premises, he rented some premises at 103 Holland Park Ave.... 163 Holland Park Ave. That was about 400 yards, a quarter of a mile from the Holland Park Ave. station on the Bayswater and Holland Park Ave. road, Bayswater, continuation of Bayswater road there, 163 Holland Park Ave. on the corner of one of the side turnings. And that was London's first HAS, Hubbard Association of Scientologists, and halfway through the course one evening Anne phoned me up, of course I hadn't seen much of Anne, I was so damn busy on the course. She phoned me up and said she'd thrown her job in. She'd been in touch with Ron and he needed someone to look after the office down there.

He picked on her right away because she had... she was a trained secretary and had excellent typing skills. She could do shorthand and what have you. And he said, just the person I need. You can look after the office. And so she chucked her job in and got a much higher, more highly paid job with Ron at 163 Holland Park Ave.. so while the course was finishing off, Anne was already working down at 163 Holland Park Ave.. She was the office staff. She was all of it! Keeping everything going down there. Keeping the place warm for when the rush would start after the course was finished. Ron... one had to admit that Ron Hubbard was a man of action, that once he got this mockup going he didn't hesitate. He wasn't a hesitator. He was a man of action. Things were moving. They were moving fast in October, November 1952. Of course, as soon as I got a bit of time and saw a bit of daylight, towards the end of the course and things began to ease off a bit, I was seeing more of Anne. She was avid for all the data. I was spending hours teaching her all the data I was learning on the course. So she really didn't miss anything. She got it all from me. She got to the whole can lot of it from me. She was a wonderful learner.... data, she only had to get it once and she had it. So she really didn't miss anything by not being on the course. She was still auditing in the evenings, but very little of it because she was so damn busy down at HASI. The course ended and I used to go down to, down to the HASI to... in the evening to pick up Anne and take her home. Or sometimes we used to go out for a meal and then go home.... there was the children, and so forth. One evening I was sitting there about 6:30 waiting for Anne to finish off a bit of typing, we usually hoped to get away about seven o'clock and suddenly the door burst open and in came Ron, breezed in, looked at me up and down and he said, you are the new London ...you're London's first Director of Processing, Dennis. I said, am I.? He says, yes, he says, I said, you've just been elected. I said, well, thanks very much Ron. What do I have to do? So, the first thing you can do, he says, is to give these damn new HPA students some auditing. I said, what HPA students? You don't mean us? He said, no, no. He says, you are ex-HPA students. You've finished, he said. But next Monday morning, he says, you've got an HPA course starting next door. Dennis O'Connell is going to be running it. He said, were going to use the tapes that I've been cutting with you people. He said, I've got some more tapes coming over by air mail from the states. O'Connell's going to be the instructor, he says, and those poor students are going to need some good auditing, he says. We're going to give them quality auditing. Every student who does that course is going to get at least five hours of top quality auditing, he said, and I can't think of a better person to give it to them than you. So he said, you are the new Director of Processing and your first job is to give each one of those students who starts next Monday five hours of auditing. I said, good on you Ron.

And I was London's first D. of P., first Director of Processing. And then I walked out with Anne that evening, down to the bus stop to get home and I said to Anne, I said, (?) marvelous, a director of Processing, I said, I'm a company director. I said, I'm only 25 years of age, I said, company director, I said, soon it'll be cigars and a Rolls-Royce car, cause I'd always imagined a company director, you know, you get a Rolls-Royce car and you got a seat on the board and you smoke cigars. I said, here, I'm only 25 and I'm a company director. And she laughed at me and she said, don't you believe it, she said, it doesn't mean the same in America as it does over here. She said, a director in America is just somebody who directs a Department, she said, which like we say, somebody who would direct the traffic. She said, you know, you're just a manager Dennis. She says, you are not a company director. Now I know I'm a company director, but it turned out that Anne was absolutely right. I wasn't going to be a company director, I wasn't going to be a director of HASI, the company, I was only going to be a manager. Ron used the American term, director. In America it means just what Anne had said it meant. So clearly, the time had come for me to leave home and so I said goodbye to mom and dad and got myself a flat in Notting Hill Gate. I had to have somewhere to audit these students. So I got a flat in Notting Hill Gate. Stan Richards started looking for a place in town too. He lived out in Ilford. He needed to get more central for his preclears. Most of them were in London so we teamed up together and got this flat in Notting Hill Gate. He used to use it during the daytime to audit his preclears. He was building up his practice. And I used to use it in the evening for auditing the students. They were on course during the day. I couldn't get to them during the day but every evening I'd have a couple of them come in and I used to give two sessions an evening between 6:30 and 8:30 and 8:45 and a 10:45.

George Whichelow - Hyde Park Corner[edit | edit source]

Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park

Fit two sessions in in an evening. So it went on, meanwhile George Wichelow who had been... he was on staff, he'd come in what was called Director of the V staff, the voluntary staff, V for voluntary, voluntary staff, Ron had this beautiful mockup of a voluntary staff. There was one staff member paid, that was George, whose job was to go out and enlist other people to come in and volunteer to do the work, do some work for nothing and they'd get paid by having some free auditing or free training. And George was just the man for this and George was going to handle the V staff. George was a superb promoter. That was his real strength. George was a superb promoter and he proved it. I mean, we always knew he was good but the man was brilliant. There have been some very brilliant promoters in Scientology over the years but I've never met anyone who was in George's class. Once he got the job, George was down to Hyde Park corner with his soap box, took it with him, on the bus down to Hyde Park corner, set it up at four o'clock in the afternoon and started talking to the passers by about Scientology and Dianetics until he got a little crowd around him. And then at seven o'clock in the evening, 6:45, he would say, right, come with me, we're going to take you down and give you a little talk and show you the premises and learn some more about this subject. And he would just take them out of Hyde Park, what he'd collected, pick up his soap box and the whole lot of them would get on the bus. He'd bring the whole lot of them back into 163 Holland Park Ave. and by eight o'clock that evening, he'd have a class there of newcomers into Scientology sitting there, listening to George Wichelow talking about Dianetics and Scientology and they'd be buying books, and getting pamphlets, and that was George! He was an absolute godsend to the organization that man was. I knew of no one else who could anywhere near do what he was doing. None of us were capable of doing it, but to George it was absolutely natural. And he did it absolutely perfectly. He could do it time after time after time. Night after night after night. The only nights he couldn't do it was when it was raining and there was nobody in Hyde Park corner. But any fine night, if the weather was fine, George could go down there, come back with somewhere between 10 and 20 newcomers. He could do it anytime he wanted to. He was an incredible promoter, was George Wichelow. And when he died in 1958, he died fishing off the rocks in Point Corbiere off the southwest coast of Jersey by the side of the lighthouse. A big wave came in and swept him away and his body was never even found.

La Corbière Lighthouse, Jersey

It's one of the most dan... I know the point well there, I know well that Point Corbiere and it's one of the most dangerous spots of... dangerous spots on the whole Jersey Coast for fishing, very, very dangerous spot. But George... even though George was a powerful swimmer, he was a physical culture expert, he was a powerful swimmer, he would have stood no chance if he got carried off on those rocks. And as I said, they never found the body. It was a great loss to Scientology in 1958, was the death of George Wichelow because he was the promoter. He was the greatest promoter I'd ever met in Scientology and I've never heard of anyone else who'd met a better promoter of Scientology. Even Ron Hubbard couldn't promote like George Wichelow could.

Things settled down to somewhat of an even keel. The premises at 163 Holland Park Ave. weren't very big. There was just the front office and there was the lecture room and there was one other room which was sort of an intermediate size you could use it for a bit of auditing or you could use it for a small class but it was one of those in between sized rooms. And then there was the toilet and the washroom and that was it. There wasn't anything else there. And it was very, very small premises for what was required. So it was no surprise that Ron was soon looking for more premises. He needed a place for a clinic. It was all very well me doing the auditing in my own flat there but he realized it was only a stopgap measure and that sooner or later that he would need a clinic. There was also of course, this matter of me being the Director of Processing of the organization and.... at that time it was an unpaid position. I was expected to audit these students, give them each one of them five hours of auditing and I wasn't getting any money from the org there, I wasn't a staff member of the org. There was just this tacit understanding that if any inquiries came into the organization for auditing, until such time that the clinic was properly set up, that I would actually do the auditing and I could charge the preclear the auditing fee. This was reasonable because it was my only means of earning a living.

Obviously I couldn't go on auditing the students for nothing forever and I had to have during the day, I had to have some means of earning some money and so it was tacitly agreed that this was what would happen. So we sort of went on along those lines but it was not a satisfactory arrangement. I would have far better preferred to have gone on to a salary basis like Dennis O'Connell was on and Anne was on and audited the.. and then the preclears who came in to HASI, paid their money to the HASI, and I would have audited them as a staff auditor, I would have much preferred that even though I probably would have been financially out of pocket. I was probably doing better financially on the existing arrangement. But anyway, Ron was quite happy with the arrangement as long as I audited, gave each student five hours of auditing and got their case rolling. Also he made it clear that if the preclear, if the student was in very bad case shape that they ought to be encouraged to have some more auditing. There was that understanding too.

Hubbard left for USA[edit | edit source]

But the whole thing was to get some new premises and get a clinic under way at the time. And there the matter was left in 1953, jogging through 1953 and Ron disappeared out of London. He took Mary Sue with him and the whole lot ... they all disappeared. There was some crisis in the American organizations, we lost Ron and we went immediately, went on an extended comm [communication] line to Ron which was never the best. While we had a close comm line to the old man, we could work with him, but on an extended comm line we began to get misunderstandings on the line and so forth and things got, started to get strange because he was getting wild reports of all sorts of the lunatic fringe about what was going on in HASI and all it was quite untrue. It was just business as usual in the HASI. Anne was doing a fine job. She was virtually the administrator. And technical was being looked after by O'Connell during the daytime and Stan Richards doing the evening courses, evenings and weekends and I was looking after the auditing side of things. And it was good roads and good weather. Everybody was getting a good service. The students were getting trained. The preclears were getting audited and the bills were getting paid and Anne was working herself into the ground as the administrator looking after everything else. And that was the way the org was running. Oh, and George was running the PE courses and doing his V. staff and so forth and giving us a supply of new people. The mockup was running, it was a stable going concern. It was, you know. But we knew that in the org...we knew that there was a fair bit of entheta going to Ron from various sections and some of the other auditors in London weren't happy with this arrangement. They knew that HASI was getting inquiries for auditing from the general public and they knew that these auditing inquiries were being farmed out to me. And they of course knew of the relationship between Anne and I ... even though I kept it no secret from anyone and the org never kept it a secret that I was the Director of Processing of HASI, and that I was a staff member that ... they didn't think it right that I should be doing the auditing up there and so on. Somehow they got to know, it got, the secret got out, the word got out that I was charging these... that the money was going to me and not going to the organization. Even though I was telling people that I'm not... my position with the organization is unpaid. I'm not drawing a salary but I do hold the position with the organization and as soon as we get a clinic I'll be taking up my full-time post as Director of Processing as a salaried staff member. Because that was as far as I knew what was going to happen. But it still wasn't good. There was a lot of ill feeling about it. There was one hell of a lot of auditors who were getting trained and were quite unwilling to get off their back sides and go out and get themselves some preclears. That was the simple truth of the matter and so they were casting greedy, envious eyes upon me who was doing a lot of auditing because the org was passing me preclears. And they didn't understand the position there... that there was... the org were putting their preclears out to the best auditor that they knew, that was me. That was Ron's instructions. They were putting them out to me because they could rely upon me as an auditor. You couldn't tell this to the other auditors you see so you... there was naturally a fair bit of entheta going backwards and forwards there and Ron was evidently believing some of it and there was a lot of other lies going on at the time too. As I say, while we had Ron local and handy, we could handle it and we could remain in communication but once we got on an extended commline when he was in the United States and it was all in air mail letters, then the lies startedto get to Ron and he being the man he was he started to believe the lies. At this time of course, the little group of Georgie Wichelow, Dennis O'Connell, Stan Richards, Anne and I, we'd been together working with HASI now for some months and we'd been developing a considerable amount of affinity for each other and a great understanding of each other's modes of working and so forth. We were developing into a very, very efficient team. Very, very efficient. And I think that, looking back in hindsight, I think that also contributed to the difficulties that occurred immediately afterwards... that Ron got wind that we were becoming a closely knit team and he, because of the personality, the type of person that he really was... that he couldn't tolerate that.

Hubbard in USA ordered changes in London[edit | edit source]

He felt that that was a danger to him, that his staff might one day gang up on him... the London staff might one day gang up on him and try to take the org away from him or deprive him in some way of his own organization. Remember, he always was slightly paranoiac, Ron, he had marked paranoiac tendencies, more over the years I knew him. And so we would expect such paranoiac behavior from such a man, and in no circumstances, it wouldn't be unusual for a person with paranoiac tendencies to experience some trepidation at his own staff members getting on so well together and working so well together as a team.

But anyway, the crash came around about some time in April, May 1953 there. An air mail letter came over from the old man. Anne was sacked. And my services were no longer required. And this threw the whole place into a pandemonium. I wasn't in the org when... Anne read the... she picked up the mail. She read it. She spoke with Dennis O'Connell. He was there during the day course and he immediately phoned me. Stan Richards was in on it and that very night there was a whole... George Wichelow came along too, and we had a sort of council of war. The rest of them were ready to throw in their resignations for Anne and I.. said that either, you know, if you sack Anne and I, you sacked the rest of us too. You've lost the lot if you sack those two. But Anne and I said, no, don't do that. There's a misunderstanding. It will come back right. And we didn't understand Ron at the time. We didn't know about his paranoia. And we thought it's simply a misunderstanding here. It'll all blow over. So we pacified Dennis O'Connell and George Wichelow and Anne and I pacified the other staff members down and we left it at that. But I do know that they all three of them wrote stiff letters to the old man saying that this was a gross injustice... that breaking the team up... and that neither Anne or I had done anything to deserve being fired. But nothing came back on the line from the old man.

Reg Gould[edit | edit source]

Nothing came back at all. But what did happen ... I think this happened on the Thursday or the Friday we got the letter, and what did happen was that, on the Monday morning... meanwhile Dennis O'Connell got a... he was a senior tech staff there person, he got a letter from, a personal letter from Ron, an air mail letter from Ron saying that the new administrator will be coming in on Monday morning and his name was Reg Gould and he will be taking over... I forget the post he... Ron granted him some grandiose title and he will be taking over Anne's old job plus lots of more responsibilities, will be looking for a new building and will be virtually in charge of the place and will be senior to O'Connell and senior to Stan Richards and senior to George Wichelow, which put their backs up immediately because they were all tech staff and they hated the idea of an administrator being put senior to them, particularly when they found out that nobody had ever heard of Reg Gould and that as far as we knew he had no training. He was a completely... he was a completely unskilled person in the subject of Dianetics and Scientology. Anyway, he turned up on the Monday morning and, by lunchtime Dennis O'Connell phoned.... meantime I'd left the flat, I'd let the flat go. I don't know whether Stanley kept that flat going in Notting Hill Gate for long. I think he let it go too after a while. He held it for a while but he couldn't hold the rent, the rental on it and he let it go. I don't know quite where Stan lived after that but I went and lived in Battersea and Anne and I got married soon afterwards. But anyway, that's all really beside the point. On the Monday lunchtime, Dennis O'Connell phoned me and said that the worst... this guy... he knows nothing of Scientology. He supposedly read the book but he's an absolute horror. I made a point of going in. I wasn't auditing that day. I made a point of going in that afternoon, strolling in and talking... into the org... and talking to Dennis and strolling into the office to meet Reg Gould. And of course, he'd heard of.........


[end of first cassette tape by Dennis Stephens, beginnning of second]


Early Scientology Reminiscences Part 2[edit | edit source]

by Dennis Stephens

I took a stroll into the general office to meet Reg Gould, and Dennis O'Connell's assessment was absolutely right...

I don't know what cesspool that character was dragged out of. He was a thickset, middle-aged man.

The thing about it... a couple of characteristics about him... that struck me immediately, that when he smiled, his eyes never smiled. The smile was on his lips and the eyes were cold and they remained cold. The smile was the smile of a sadist. It was the sort of smile that you would expect to find on a person who enjoyed pulling the wings off flies. Psychologically I was revulsed [repulsed] by his presence, that I was in the presence of something dreadfully evil and something very nasty. Ann, when she met him a couple of days later, she took time off to go up there, she was even more revulsed than me. She said she nearly threw up. She couldn't stand being in the presence of the man. He completely revulsed... complete revulsion was Ann's response to him. She was even more sensitive to it than I was. Anyway that was the is-ness of the situation one would say.

There was nothing really any of us could do about it. I do know that there were some very stiff letters written by Dennis O'Connell and Stan Richards and so forth to the old man securing their displeasure at this type of person that was being put in charge of them in the organization and pointing out to Ron that they felt no loyalty to Reg Gould. The only loyalty they felt was to Ron Hubbard.

Dennis and Ann leaving the org - private auditing practice[edit | edit source]

But again, they only got a halfhearted responses back from Ron thanking them for their loyalty and so on. There was no suggestion that Reg Gould was going to go. Reg Gould was obviously there to stay. Well that... that put Ann and I out of the org and put me out of the center of the proceedings for a while. Ann was really pleased actually to get away and have a break. The girl had been working herself into the ground and it was wonderful to see her come back up tone scale, see the tension slough off her. She relaxed at home and started to pick up her auditing practice. We weren't short of preclears. And many of the people I worked with had known Ann and known the Battersea [telephone] number. And anyway, any old preclear who I had audited through the org, they only had to phone the org and asked for Dennis Stephens' telephone number and they would have gotten the Battersea number. Many of them did. In those days we did have the open comm line system. Something that is unheard of these days, that you could phone up HASI and get the telephone number of a field auditor. In those days you could. You could phone up HASI and get the telephone number of any field auditor you could ask for.

So Ann and I settled down to a quiet domesticity of auditing, full-time field auditors. It was a beautiful life, quiet and plenty of work. As much work as we chose to do. And we would take time off in the summer and went down and had a holiday, and, oh, it was a beautiful period of time that was.

The children were amazed. It was lovely. They were overjoyed to have both of us around so much. It really did benefit both of them, both of us having that break.

"Back at the Org"[edit | edit source]

Meanwhile a clinic wasn't planned... but it was not gotten by... although Reg Gould was supposed to have gone out and got partly jobbed as a go-and-get-it clinic. He never did. The clinic was finally obtained by George Wichelow. I got that from Dennis O'Connell. It was the efforts of George Wichelow that finally got a clinic. We got premises at 83 Palace Gardens Terrace which was on the corner of Bayswater Road and Palace Gardens Terrace, only about a stone's throw from Notting Hill Gate station, right in the middle of Notting Hill Gate shopping center. It couldn't have been better placed. It was a beautiful spot right next door to the new Lindsey Theatre where Ron subsequently used for public lectures. It was a marvelous choice on George's part. It was quickly agreed by the old man in America and the deed was signed. And then his staff came in and started shifting furniture into the place. By the time Ann and I got up there and heard about it and got in there it was all ready, got chairs and so forth in there. It was looking forward to opening up business.

Jean Atkinson takes over - Nibs Hubbard arrives[edit | edit source]

The next thing we knew, summer of 1953, just as quickly as he'd appeared on the scene, Reg Gould disappeared off the scene. Just overnight. He vanished. This time there was no… nobody knew what had happened until one Monday morning, a lady named Jean Atkinson, walked in and said she was the new administrator and had a letter in her pocket from Ron Hubbard giving her full authority to take over the administration position of HASI. This set everything buzzing again. Reg Gould had disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. He must have said or done something that offended Ron and being summarily fired. And this new woman had come in... again we didn't know where she came from. Nobody knew her. She wasn't even a book auditor. She hadn't read anything. She knew nothing of Dianetics and Scientology. Oh, she'd heard of it, but she'd never studied it at all as far as we could gather. And there she was being put in charge of the administration of the place. And she was a woman of about 40, 45, not... I'm not a person to be critical but, she didn't look the best. She used to dress rather shabbily. Her fingers were nicotine stained. She was a chain smoker [lighting the next cigarette from the last, constantly smoking]. She wasn't... probably her biggest failing was that I always thought that she could have bathed more often. It wasn't exactly pleasant getting downwind from the lady, but that could have been some physiological difficulty she had. But anyway, it didn't help her at all socially. And anyway, she seemed efficient at her job, she spoke in a rather tyrannical manner and one felt that she was, no doubt, an administrator. She reminded me of something you might find... the matron of a Victorian hospital. You know, that was the first impression I had of the woman. But she seemed a better personality than Reg Gould. There was nothing slimy about her. There was nothing like that sliminess one felt while I was talking to Gould. It was just unfortunate that she knew nothing of the subject. Of course, it was now a few months since we'd left the organization and there had been quite a fair number of students had gone through and trained and the clinic was going to be opened up. A guy called Fred Welling was going to take charge of the clinic and he was a recent graduate, and HPA graduate. I didn't know him, I had never met him. He'd arrived on the scene, done the day course after I'd left the scene so I'd never audited him and knew nothing of him. He was to start off the clinic. I went off to Palace Gardens Terrace one day, and he had a couple of staff auditors there, there was no auditing going on there. Evidently him and the two staff auditors were on the payroll. The big lecture room there had been more or less furnished with plenty of chairs but there was no lecturing going on. The PE was still going down in 163 Holland Park Ave. He had the whole this clinic all to himself at that moment, at that time. There didn't seem to be any auditing going on and that seemed to be the situation in the summer of 1953.

Out of the blue, Nibs Hubbard turned up in London sent over by his overways father, sent over by Ron, to give a Bachelor of Scientology course to all those who were willing to take it. Nibs at that time was about 18 1/2 years of age. He was Ron's eldest son from his first marriage. He was a very, very big lad was Nibs. He would have turned the scales at about 230 pounds. He was built like a self armored tank, was Nibs. His features didn't resemble Ron's very much but, he had the flaming hair of the Hubbard family. It was no doubt he was Ron's son. He brought his new wife with him. I think she was about 19, she was about six months older than he was. But she was a roly-poly, jolly girl. The two of them together would have probably weighed the scales down at over 500 pounds, I would say the two of them together! But I liked his wife, she was a very nice jolly girl. I wasn't that much impressed by Nibs. He seemed very, very tense all the time. He seemed a young man who couldn't relax, and it wasn't until much later that I realized what was happening, why he was endlessly so tense. Anyway, Nibs started to organize the course, get the course under way. Ann and I decided not to have anything to do with it. We were, you know, far too busy and it didn't seem to be all that much point in it. Neither of us were particularly impressed by Nibs. We thought Ron will be back soon and we knew he had been giving courses in the USA, Ron had, and we thought, well, then Dennis O'Connell got on the phone one evening. He said, look don't start on that course, he said, I'm still looking after the training here, he says. Nibs has got his tapes over. He's came and brought his tapes and he's keeping all his tapes in the same drawer, same cupboard where we keep all the HPA tapes. As soon as he's finished here we'll all hear all those tapes so don't bother to come and take the course. Dennis was as good as his word. George Wichelow never bothered, Stan Richards never bothered. We simply spent a quiet time, when Nibs was finished with the tapes, in the evenings he wasn't using the tapes, we were over at Dennis O'Connell's place with the tapes listening to the tapes. Nibs never did find out, he never knew anything had happened. Dennis had to keep the cupboard, he simply finished with the tapes, put them in the cupboard, locked the cupboard up. Dennis had his own keys to the cupboard, took the tapes out of the cupboard, took them home and we were all turning up, George Wiichelow, Stan Richards, Ann and I, we all turned up for the tapes. We kept it in that select group, nobody else allowed. It was just us. We had all this beer seeing this material, the tapes so none of us lost anything on the deal. We all heard the tapes one way or the other.

Nibs, Nibs Hubbard, they call them Nibs, it meant L. Ron Hubbard Junior, he had the same Christian name as his dad, and apparently in America anyone with the same Christian name as their father, they call him a Nibs. Nibs Hubbard, he'd had a fair whack of auditing from Ron, and we found out later that his case, he was a good, theta clear. A very good theta exterior was Nibs Hubbard. But we did find out why this tenseness was there, that he was living under. What had happened was evidently that Ron had audited him very thoroughly and was then starting to shovel the responsibility on his shoulders and it was starting to pile up. Ron was expecting Nibs to be his successor so he was piling this responsibility on him and this was his fledgling flight, this was, to go to London and give a B.Scn course alone, solo. And Nibs didn't want to do it. He simply really hadn't got the ability. The people who were on the course, one or two of the old-timers went on the course and said that as an instructor he was a complete flop. Half the time he wasn't in the room and he couldn't really face up to an audience. And he didn't answer the questions properly. Half the time his attention seemed to be elsewhere. He simply wasn't interested to do the job. It was no surprise that the course was a complete flop, a complete washout. It was one of those courses that was best forgotten. All those who did the course eventually did get a B:Scn course out of it. As a course it was probably the worst course ever given in London of that type. This explained the tension. Nibs was building up more and more tension. And in later years, of course, Nibs name became very bad in Scientology because he blew the org and so forth and Ron said some very nasty things about his son. But really, it was the old man's fault. He was piling on too much responsibility on this lad, and all that was happening was that Nibs felt he was overting because he couldn't live up to his father's expectations of him, he was simply overting all the time against his father, overting against Scientology and this was making him tense and he was simply overting all the time because he couldn't live up to the expectations of his father...was expecting of him. That of course, was an overt act in his mind. This was the trouble with Nibs. Anyway, after the B.Scn course was over, Nibs gave a Congress, that was a part of his agreement with his dad, that he run this Congress, which he ran. Ann and I attended the congress and he ran that very badly. He did little else but turn the tape machines on and turn them off again and say hello and goodbye. And we hardly ever saw him at the Congress. The whole thing was sit and listen to a tape machine, tape recorder. There was little presentation, no work had been done much on the Congress. The staff, Dennis O'Connell, Stan Richards were doing their best to keep the public going, but the leader, Nibs, was not present. Of course the leader not being present, it was falling apart and it was a most unsatisfactory Congress. And it culminated with a dance at the end in the hotel. When Nibs got into the bar, and this is unbelievable, but there was a guy called Jack Parkhouse on the HPA course at the time, he was on the weekend course, one of the students on the course, and he got up talking to Nibs, they apparently struck a chord together, and they got drinking whiskey and they got into a ridiculous drinking competition. And Nibs was just in the frame of mind to let off steam and he just challenged Jack Parkhouse to see who could drink the most whiskey.

Well it was quite obvious who could drink the most whiskey, Nibs could because he was almost twice as big as Jack Parkhouse, so Jack Parkhouse ended up at 10:30 at night under the table passed out cold and Nibs Hubbard couldn't say, couldn't wind up and say goodnight to everyone at the end of the dance because he couldn't stand. Ann and I ended up helping him in a taxi and his wife was hovering nearby. We finally got this 230 pounds of drunken Nibs into a taxi and headed off to the hotel where he was living. It was there that we found out... we couldn't get him on the seat of the cab because he was too heavy. He was a dead weight, he couldn't stand. He was absolutely plastered. We finally... he was calling out... from the floor of the cab and he was exteriorized, he got his eyes closed, and he was calling out the colors of the traffic lights in front of us as we were going along in the cab... and he was correct. He never made one mistake. He said the next set of traffic lights is red, and this next set of traffic lights just around the corner, there's a set of traffic lights. We would go around the corner, there is the set of traffic lights. Next set of traffic lights is just going to green... now. And the set of traffic lights would go to green now. He had very good present time theta perception. So Ron had done a fine, first-class of exteriorizing his son. Case wise, he must have been in pretty good case, pretty good condition. There was nothing wrong with them case wise, Nibs Hubbard. Because he couldn't have had that acute theta perception that he had, but he just had too much responsibility on his shoulders. He was only 18 1/2 years of age. If he had only been five years older he could have held the responsibility and done a better job, or maybe if he had been five years a lot older, he simply would have refused his dad and said I'm not interested. He wouldn't have been there anyway. But a lot of people and the general public saw Nibs in that disgusting drunken state and saw him being helped into the cab and so forth and it didn't do Scientology a bit of good, it didn't. It didn't do the org a bit of good having Nibs Hubbard being carried into a cab blind drunk. And unable to perform these official functions .. at the Congress. Jack Parkhouse later on became quite a well known figure in Scientology about a year or two later. He was a brilliant student. He was one of the best students that ever came out of HASI London, HPA, off the HPA course. He was good, Jack Parkhouse, very good. He was a good administrator and a fine technical mind.

Anyway, that was the last we saw of Nibs. I never saw Nibs again after that. The following day or two days later, him and his wife got back in their airplane and went back to the USA. That was the end of Nibs. We did hear afterwards that, people had made quite sure that Ron knew of this drunken debacle at the Congress. Apparently he was absolutely furious with his son, absolutely furious. Understandably so.

More admin staff - no more tech staff[edit | edit source]

Things were jogging along there. We were of course still down in Battersea doing our auditing. All that seemed to be changing in the org was that... Jean Atkinson was getting more and more people on our staff. The admin staff was growing out of all bounds. The tech staff wasn't growing. There was no more preclears in the clinic. The clinic seemed to be doing atrocious business and we knew that there was trouble fermenting down there. We knew that there was no love lost between Dennis O'Connell and Jean Atkinson or between Fred Welling and Jean Atkinson, come to that, and eventually it came to a head and Dennis O'Connell and Fred Welling wrote to Ron and said that this woman has got to go. They can't work with her, she's a tyrant. So they said, either she goes or they go. Well, Ron of course, there was nothing else he could do but accept their resignations, so Dennis O'Connell and Fred Welling both left the organization. The loss of Fred Welling was no loss to the organization because he was, you know, he simply wasn't capable of doing the work he was put there to do in the clinic. He simply wasn't technically good enough, but both of them... Fred Welling in a moment... but the loss of Dennis O'Connell was a severe blow. He was, at that time, he was no doubt London's best, best trainer. He was good. He had been at the job the longest and he was the best trainer there. Although he wasn't really... he would much rather... he used to say I would much rather be auditing than teaching. But he was getting good and that was a blow. So Stan Richards had to move in. Stan Richards left the evening course, weekend course and he moved in on the day course which he didn't want to do because he was doing a fair bit of auditing during the day. It upset his scheduling and they got a new guy called Ron Jeffcott, came in, he was... he had graduated some time previously. He took over the weekend and evening HPA courses, what Stan Richards had been doing. He was pretty on the ball was Jeffcott, but he was moonlighting. He had a full-time day job outside Scientology which was always a little bit suspicious. God knows how the guy managed it. He was married, he had children and he was working a full time day job and every evening he was working at HASI, every weekend he was working at HASI. I don't know how he kept going but he did manage to keep going, for a while anyway.

It was also around about this time, I would not say exactly at this time, it was also around about this time that George Wichelow quit the org as well. I don't recall seeing him around the org after this time. I think he simply had enough. He couldn't get along with Atkinson but he didn't put his name to the, you know, with O'Connell and Fred Welling that he couldn't get along with the woman. He realized that the place was going to the dogs. I think that Dennis O'Connell going and Fred Welling going was too much for him. That was the last straw. Ann and I had gone and now O'Connell and Welling had gone. There was nothing left as far as he could see. There was no point in him straining himself anymore so he simply retired back to his magic and his conjuring and his preclears. And we never really saw much of George after that. But the org never really recovered. It never recovered from the blow of losing George on it's public comm lines. They tried various HPA graduates to look after the PE courses and the introductory courses but nobody could do it like George. The inflow of HASI London at that point suffered a marked fall in the inflow of new numbers which I believe it never really recovered for many years, it didn't recover the loss of inflow of material, of new blood.

Dennis Stephens gets auditing[edit | edit source]

Just before the blow up, and the cause, the leaving, the quitting of O'Connell and Fred Welling, just before this there was a most peculiar state of affairs happened, which I suspect the outcome of this peculiar state of affairs, partly led to the vanishment of Fred Welling, why Ron so quickly accepted Fred Welling's resignation. Anyway, it started off with a telephone call actually asking, saying that Ron had requested that some techniques be run on me, some special auditing be done on me, free of charge in the clinic there and it would be done by one of Fred's staff auditors and would I come in and discuss the matter. It was to be done as a favor to Ron. I said, well that's okay by me so I came in and spoke to Fred and I said, well show me, what have you got. What is it, what are you going to run? Why? And he explained, he said, I don't know. I just had this authorization. I mean, he was decent enough. He showed me the authorization there. He obviously knew no more than that. And I said, well, what techniques are you going to run? He said, well I can't tell you that, he said, til you actually agree to have the auditing. I said, well that's fair enough. Okay, I'll have the auditing. And then Fred said, well, he said as soon as you start in the auditing you'll soon find out what the techniques are. I said, well even that's okay. I'm in no hurry to find out what the techniques are. I made myself available. It was apparently.... it wasn't going to take more than a session or two the whole thing. I don't know what it was. I think it might have been some form of security check, but I never did find out as it turned out. Anyway, he introduced me to the staff auditor. We headed off to an auditing room. He was a decent enough young... he was a new staff auditor. I hadn't seen him before. He had two staff auditors at that time, Fred did. The other one was auditing a cash customer. I got the newest one which was okay by me. I didn't mind. But I pitied this poor lad because he was a recent graduate from the course and because, I had tremendous altitude at that time amongst the auditors in London. You know, I was an old-timer and I had audited more, I had done more hours of auditing than he had had hot dinners and he knew it. So he was a bit worried that he, but I might be critical of his auditing technique auditing such an old hand. But anyway, he did his best. There was nothing wrong with him technically. He was quite competent. He got the session started. He got his meter hooked up and so on, and off we went. We hardly got the session started and in walks Fred Welling, stands there. I look at Fred. We start to do some of objective processes. Fred stands there for a couple of minutes and he walks out of the room. And we finished doing a little bit of objective processes, and, "pickup the cans", about to start, the door opens and in walks Fred Welling. The auditor stops and looks at him, and says, "what's going on Fred?" He says, "I've got to supervise the auditing." I said, "well you can't supervise in here mate." I said, "you'll have to supervise it outside." I said, "I can't go into session with you hanging around." There he was hovering around like a bloody avenging angel, you know. I knew what Ron had told him. He had gotten a note from Ron saying, keep a close eye on the auditing, you know. And he was doing just that. But it was a simply ham-fisted way of doing it. I said, "well look, I can't go into session with you hovering around here." So anyway, he went out. So the guy started to ruffle some papers, and then he ran a little bit of ARC Straightwire to sort of get me moving on the track. "Well", I thought "that's fine." We'll all do a couple of commands and the door quietly opened. I only opened half an eye and, guess what, there's Fred Welling creeping back into the bloody room. I put the bloody cans down with a crash, "what the bloody hell is going on Fred?" I said, "look, either you, if you want to audit me, if you want to know what's going on in the session, you audit me. If you want this person to audit me, you'll have to go out the room. You can't both be in here while I'm being audited and that's final." Of course, it was a code breach. I mean, if Fred had been better technically trained, had a better grasp and understanding, he would have known that if the preclear objects to the presence of another person in the room, that the auditor has to eject the other person. And to try and audit the person in the presence of an unacceptable third person is a present time problem. You can't audit a preclear over a PTP. It's a code breach to even attempt it. So, you know, the whole situation was fraught with auditing flubs. If Ron had been there he would've cried. It was so full of flubs. So I made it quite clear, I said... of course, it's the auditors job to eject Fred Welling. But Fred wouldn't.... he obviously couldn't because Fred was his boss. I had no such constraints. I told him to get out. And eventually he said he was going to stay, I said, "well that's it. You fuck off or I go home. I'm not going to be audited with you hovering around in the bloody session." I lost my temper. And then he lost his temper with me. He said, "look, I've got to supervise this", he said. So I said, "well you're going to bloody well supervise it without the preclear." I said, "you won't be doing it with me," I said. "You'll have no preclear present. You can do your supervising on an empty bloody chair". So he turned around to the auditor and said one of the strangest things I've ever heard an auditing supervisor say to his staff auditor in all my years in Scientology. He turned around to the auditor... he'd lost his temper... he turned around to the auditor and said, "give this man 15 hours on the walls". And I just couldn't believe it. It was just like Capt. Bligh on the deck, on the quarter deck, saying to one of his officers give the sailor 15 lashes. You know, the mockup was there absolutely complete. The sadistic naval captain. And I just collapsed into helpless laughter. It was just too, too much. Fred stalked out of the room with my laughter ringing in his ears, I mean, there was nothing he could do about it. The session was obviously over. The young auditor tried to patch the session together and get us going again. I says, no way, there is no way I can do this auditing under the circumstances. So he realized that I was obviously in quite a good case, you know, I had been line charging. I was quite happy. So he ended the session off ...and took... started to take some responsibility by ending the session. That was the smartest thing he did, he ended the session off. I simply strolled about the building and I never heard anything more about it. Even to this day I don't know what Ron wanted run on me. But I do know that Fred would have had to make a report to the old man. And would have had to report that Stephens blew. And Ron would have been unkind about that because preclears who blow, it's an auditor's flub in Ron Hubbard's book. And it always was that way in Ron Hubbard's book. If the preclear blows it's the auditor's responsibility. If the preclear blows, it's an auditor's flub. So he would have had to eat a bit of crow there, in front of the old man. But anyway, I never heard anything more about it. So I don't know what it was to this day. And I never wrote to the old man about it, I was too furious, too insulted about it. I don't know what Ron wanted and I never found out.

Dennis on staff again[edit | edit source]

Soon afterwards that happened, this blowup occurred, and Fred Welling left. I've got a feeling he would have been pretty glad to see the last of him, Ron would. As to the Fred Welling meaning of "give this man 15 hours on the walls", I imagine that he meant, give this preclear 15 hours of SOP 8C. Run 15 hours of 8C on him to bring him under control. I imagine that's what he meant. I'm only guessing. Anyway, a few days after Fred Welling left the clinic, and took his staff auditors with him, I got a phone call from Jean Atkinson asking me to come in. I was asked to come in about a position in the clinic. I spoke to Ann. I said, "Looks as if the old man wants me back". Ann says, "Well you'd better go and find out what's going on." So I went in and spoke to Jean and she showed me the letter from Ron with an enclosure to me asking me to come back in, retake over the clinic. There was no apology from him for all the bloody upset. I mean, I should never have been fired off the bloody line in the first place. Anyway, he wanted me back. Jean said that we've got another staff auditor for you, a guy named Rex Kirby. So the following Monday morning I said okay, it's agreeable to me, might as well complete this cycle, after all, I did promise Ron I would look after his clinic for him. Now the following Monday morning found me back on post, this time, believe it or not, this time as a salaried staff member. Rex Kirby turned up, a very well dressed young graduate from the HPA course, complete with pinstriped trousers and black jacket looking at the almost perfect psychoanalyst. But he was a very nice lad. The only thing we lacked of course was preclears. But anyway, we did get the mockup underway. The word seemed to somehow soon get around that there was a competent person back in the clinic there and some preclears started to contact the org again. It's amazing how these things do get around. It's sheer telepathy, it is. And we did start to get some customers after about a week or a so. Rex and I, were pretty well fully, well I wouldn't say we were fully employed ever, but we did have enough to keep us amused. We were both auditing and I was D of P'ing his preclears for him. He wasn't a bad auditor, Rex wasn't, Rex Kirby. And so we jogged along there.

But the real difficulty was that, no doubt Fred Welling had had the same difficulty, was that out front was wrong, down there we had no reg with us in the clinic. In the front was the administrator, Jean Atkinson, in other words anyone approaching the org for auditing had to go to Jean Atkinson. And they wouldn't have been impressed. She simply did not impress as a person. You got a very, you know... if she was the first person you met when you walked into a Scientology organization you would think this is a pretty miserable sort of place. It was a very down tone sort of place. She didn't give an up tone scale impression you know. She was too sort of jaded, too sort of grubby you know. It was a grubby mockup she actually put over and it didn't go on the public lines. You don't want somebody like that as your registrar in a clinic. You want somebody who's bright and smiling and alert and right on the ball, preferably somebody who is very good with their tech. That's very important on the reg lines to have somebody who's good at tech. So that was the... that was the real cause of the trouble. But behind that cause of the trouble was, what the hell was this woman doing there in the first place. Ron, it took him many, many years to realize, if he ever did realize, that there is absolutely no future in putting an untrained personnel in charge of trained personnel. He did it time and time again in the organizations of Scientology, in the USA and in London. He'd pick some untrained person and put them in charge of his highly trained technical staff and they simply had no respect for this untrained person. I mean, this untrained person could have 1000 degrees in accountancy, in business administration and what have you, but these people, the technical staff, were looking, they were only interested in technical people you see. Actually this is a true datum in any business, in any organization. Your technical staff in any organization never have any respect for the non-technical staff. It works anywhere, it does. You know, you get organizations, you get a rubber company say, I worked in a rubber company once in Australia for a while and the chemist there and his assistant had absolutely no respect for the administration staff in the place... who was technically in charge of them because they knew that the administration staff knew absolutely nothing about rubber. It was a simple as that so they simply didn't respect them. It was the same in HASI. It's very difficult for technical staff who are experts at auditing and experts at training and so forth and experts in the technical field of Scientology to have any respect for an administrator who is put in charge of them. It's all right if the administrator is not put in charge of them and they are equal, equal rank in the organization. Then they'll work with the administrator. But the mistake is to put the un-Scientology trained administrator in charge of the technical personnel. It never did work and it took Ron, Ron made many, many mistakes upon that line there. It just caused a hell of a lot of friction in his organizations. He finally stopped doing it. But it was many years later before he finally stopped doing it. The great affinity we all had with our first administrator, Ann, was that we all knew that she was a competent Scientologist, she was a competent auditor. She was an old-timer, she'd done hundreds of hours of book auditing. She knew the subject as good as anyone did so we respected her. There was respect on the line you see. But we had no respect for Reg Gould. Nobody had any respect for Jean Atkinson simply because these people knew nothing of the subject they were working in.

Jack Horner[edit | edit source]

Well, the spring of 1954 was turning into the summer of 1954 and, lo and behold, the news arrived that Jack Horner was about to turn up, hot from an advanced clinical course where he had been a student in the USA and he was coming, hot footing it across to London and he was going to give the first doctorate course in HASI London. Ron was still away and wasn't due back, although everyone hoped to see him later on in the year but it was still uncertain whether he would come back. But Horner was coming over and this was the long-awaited news. We were all wonderfully excited at the idea of a doctorate course being given and we were all hoping to be able to get on this course as staff members, of course, we would get on the course anyway. But anyway, that's jumping a little bit ahead. Anyway, Horner arrived and guess what, guess what he brought with him, he had a new clear. At least he said she was clear. She was a beautiful girl, and, of course, she was sleeping with Jack Horner. I don't know why... he didn't find this girl in America. He must have picked this one up in the British Isles because she was a ward, happened to be a ward of an English court. We didn't know it at the time that she was a ward of the court. I don't know, I never did get the details of how she got mixed up with Jack Horner who she was very keen on. The girl's name was Pam, Pamela, and she arrived with Jack Horner. First day he arrived in the clinic we saw him, he had Pamela with him. Of course Jack and I knew each other from back in 1951 when he had given that congress before, so we were old pals. But he brought with him some really good news, he had a note from Ron authorizing Ann to come on the clinical course. Ron wanted Ann to do the doctorate course. Ron considered that Ann had done an awful lot of good work for the organization while she had been on post in the early days and he wanted to repay it by giving her a doctorate course. He knew that she was unable to do the HPA course because she was helping out on the lines there while the course was running and so he was now repaying Ann. So all was forgiven. He wanted obviously to get Ann back into the organization. That was his way of doing it. So,... broke the news to Ann, she was rather pleased. And Horner started to set up to get ready for the course. Well, this was a different proposition from Nibs. Horner was a skilled, highly skilled technician and a very, very competent instructor. Very competent. He had no problems at all handling, fielding technical questions. No problem at all in handling a class of students and running a course. He had done it before. We've seen him in action before. We knew the quality of the man. Another old-timer that turned up on the course was George Wichelow. Again, that was via Ron. Ron wanted him back on the course. He obviously wanted George back on the lines again so he'd given George a free place in recognition of his services. So George turned up to do the course as well which was a great addition. So it was a meeting of the old-timers and the only one who was missing was Dennis O'Connell. O'Connell never showed, whether Ron wrote to him and offered it to him and he refused, I don't know, but Dennis O'Connell never did reenter back on the org lines. In fact, as far as I know, he worked in the field for about six months as a field auditor after he left the organization and then, I think, he drifted out of Scientology. He went in and bought some property and became a... sold and buy out rentals... and became a property speculator. I believe that was what he eventually, him and Olive. They got into property speculation. He bought out a series of rental flats that he owned in a semi-slum area around Bayswater somewhere. Anyway, that's what I believe happened to Dennis O'Connell. He never did, he was a black case, Dennis, and I, unfortunately always had him down, noted in my book to get my paws on Dennis O'Connell's case but I never did. Never managed it, never got around to trying my luck at breaking his blackness. I reckon I could have done it. Maybe he knew I could and he always kept away from me. But anyway, we never did, we never did meet up case wise. I never did get my chance to get my paws on his blackness. Anyway, the course got underway. George Wichelow was looking bright and healthy in a brightly colored summer shirt. He turned up all rearing to go again and all seemed to be forgiven. Jack Horner was in mighty good spirits. We had a good turn up, a good run of old-timers turned up for the clinical course and we got underway. During the period of the course I had more than one opportunity to see Jack Horner auditing... actually getting other auditors out of tricky spots that they got themselves in with their preclear and I had a chance to realize what a good auditor he was. He was the second-best auditor, second to the old man who I had ever seen was Horner. He was good, very good, a very fine auditor was Jack Horner.

Pam Kemp - 1990's?

An amusing incident occurred about half way through the doctorate course, I don't remember the lead up to it, I know that one evening, very late one evening, it was after 11, I had occasion to go back into the clinic to pick up a book from my office and I don't know why I wasn't with Ann, I think Ann must have gone home earlier and I must have been out talking with someone or something, but I know that the earliest point I can recall is walking along the road, walking up the stairs into the HASI, which was the clinic, which of course was in complete darkness, it was 11 o'clock at night and I had a key of course and let myself in and was heading off to my office to get my book which I wanted to read on the bus on the way home and, suddenly, I heard a sound in the front office, in the main office there. Oh Christ, we got bloody burglars here. So I opened the door to the main office and flipped on the light... and another scuffle, and I looked across the room, there was Pam hiding behind the curtain without a stitch on, and there, peering round the side of the carpet, peering around the side of the desk, there was Jack Horner looking equally unclad, and there was a pile of cushions on the floor and I just said, sorry and switched the light out. Walked down the corridor, switched the hall light on, went into my office, picked my book up and went back out switching the lights out and closed the door behind me. The following morning I turned up for class and Jack was talking, giving an introductory talk before he put the tape on and he looked right at me and I looked right back at him and there wasn't a flicker on either of the expressions on our faces. It never was mentioned, not a word. But it was a very amusing incident! Obviously I'd interrupted a great love scene. Most of Horner's girlfriends that we knew of, had disappeared into oblivion with Horner in the past but this one didn't disappear into oblivion. She had a great Scientological future ahead of her did Pam. Anyways, to finish off the course, towards the end of the course, well at the end of the course, Horner gave the Congress, but just to finish off this bit with Pam, he eventually, he tried to get out of the country and take Pam with him. And of course, as soon as she got to the airport there was no way in the world that she could get out of the country, she was a ward of the court. It was stamped in her passport. And Horner was in trouble with immigration. There was a bit of a fracas apparently. He had to leave the country rather hurriedly. He got mentioned on the radio, the BBC. This American was trying to get a ward of the court out of the country without the court's permission. I'm sure Jack just didn't know. Of course the courts in England are very, very tough on that sort of thing. You know, you try to get a ward of the court out, you're in immediate trouble. And they suspected the worst. God knows what Horner's wife would have... was saying back in America. She no doubt heard about it because it went all over the media in England. It got on the radio... you'd be hearing it on the radio. That's when Jack disappeared out of the country. But we never saw Jack again. He never did turn up in England with any more... at least not before Ann and I left England, he never did turn up with any more clears. Pam went on... she was very upset when Jack had to leave and she couldn't go with him. She was very upset but she met up her future husband, a guy named Ray Kemp who'd done his training in California.

  • Antony: I heard of Jack Horner trying to take a Ward of Chancery out of the country, from either my mother or father, in about 1954/55. I knew of Ray's mother as Elizabetih Williams, and was at her funeral, which Ron took, and I think wrote, and it is part of the book of ceremonies of the "Church"]
LRH and Ray Kemp in Ireland, 1956

He Ray Kemp had an English mother, Elizabeth Kemp and an American father I believe and he'd been in the American Navy and he'd recently got his discharge from the American Navy and he'd done his training, his auditor training in California. He was over here in London. He was going to take up residency in London and him and Pam met up and they simply fell in love with each other at first sight. About a month after Horner left, whether she married him on the rebound, after Horner, I don't know. But Ray was devoted to Pam and Pam was devoted to Ray and a few months... they got married and a few months later a child was born. I remember Ann and I went to their flat in Golder's Green. We were great friends. He was a great guy, I liked Ray Kemp and Pam. They were great people. Went to their flat and Ray was out for the day. Don't know where he was but we went round and had a cup of tea with Pam and she had a baby, nursing a baby on her knee and on the other hand she was reading a book on contraception. Ann and I thought it was hilariously funny. But Ray and Pam Kemp became one of the great Scientology marriages and as far as I know, they are still together. It was a love match from the very beginning those two. Ray was a very good promoter of Scientology, that was his speciality. He was very good at PE, a very good promoter. He was a very valuable person to have around Ray Kemp. Come the end of the course, the inevitable Congress, which was fronted by Horner... but this was a far cry from the one that had been run by Nibs, this Congress was a good one. Horner was an old hand at this sort of thing. And everyone had a wonderful time. And the Congress dance we had... I told Jack that I could get a dance band down and would actually play in it. I contacted my old dance band that I used to play for... I had to give it up, of course, I was too busy... but they brought my tenor sax down from my home in Edgeware. Although I was a bit rusty, they'd replaced me with an electric guitarist but he didn't show up that evening... I'd gone back with just the three-piece rhythm section ... me on the tenor sax on the Congress dance. And everybody was quite amazed, they didn't, none of them or very few know, none of them knew that I was quite an accomplished musician. And everybody was quite amazed, and even Jack Horner had a bit of a slack jaw when he heard how well I played the saxophone. So it was a very successful dance that evening. And I've got some beautiful photographs of Horner and the whole crowd and me playing the saxophone in the photo album. As we'd predicted, as the course ended a note came over from the old man to Ann that he wanted her on the reg post in the clinic. That's what he had lined up for her and he was absolutely right of course, that was exactly, precisely the right place where she should be. And it couldn't have been any better if I had requested it myself. I needed someone there to look after that front office. And someone that... to stop this people wondering to see Jean Atkinson. Instead of meeting Jean Atkinson who was dowdy and so forth, they were meeting a Doctor of Scientology D.Scn., highly trained and right on the ball, and a very, very attractive woman. Ann moved into that mockup absolutely perfectly. And things went very, very well along that line there of course. I was still D of P'ing and Ann was looking after the reg lines and we got somebody else looking after the telephone in the front office there. And one of Jean Atkinson's minions would come up to help look after the telephone. The mockup... the clinic was now going very, very well indeed. We got a good front. Clearly it was almost 2 separate organizations going now, there was the administration going on down there, down at 163, and everything else seemed to be, eventually it was going to move up to the clinic. The HPA course was still going on down at 163 but it was obviously only a matter of time before it moved up into the clinic because we had plenty of room for it. All in all during this period of late 1954 through to early 1955 was quite a happy, stable period in the org. It was almost like old times. We had just myself and Ann and Stan Richards, and the only two that were missing was George and Dennis O'Connell of the old team. Three of the five were back on the tech lines and we were doing very, very well again.

Well, the next thing of importance that happened in early 55 was the sudden announcement by Stan Richards that he was emigrating to Australia. This was going to be a great loss, a great loss to us all. He dumped it on us rather suddenly Stan did. He'd married. His wife wasn't... we never saw his wife around the org... but he'd married over the years and he wanted to emigrate to Australia and so we lost our day instructor and this posed a considerable problem. George Wichelow stepped in for a while. He was there for two or three months looking after the HPA course in the daytime, but it wasn't in George's heart... never in teaching. He was never much good at it... in the early days... tech was never his strong point but he held the post down for a while.

Ron arrives - "stealing an Org"[edit | edit source]

Then suddenly out of the blue, while things were sort of going on still, Ron turned up. Ron just arrived back in England. This would've been around about the middle of 1955, just before the middle I would say of 1955 Ron turns up back in London. Well, long-awaited and welcomed. The first thing he did, one of the first things he did... well, let me get things in sequence... the very first thing he did, he wanted some money out of the org. There, of course, ... Jean Atkinson had the signatory on the check account at the bank. He went to Jean and said he needed some money, would she transfer some funds out for him. After all it was his organization and she flatly refused. She said, what do you want the money for Ron? And he said, well it has nothing to do with you. I never heard this altercation but it was reported to me. He said, well... you just hand the, you know, just let me have the checkbook. She said, sorry Ron. She said, no money goes out of this account without my signature. And he says, you can't do that. She says, I've done it. And she showed him the authorization. While he'd been in America, she'd bought the organization out from under him. She'd got it now from underneath him. He had no access to the funds of HASI London, Ron did at that time, in 1955. And he was absolutely furious. Apparently he stalked out of the office. They thought he'd break the bloody door down when he went out. He was absolutely furious. The true nature of Jean Atkinson suddenly showed itself. She was the first person that I knew of that actually stole the HASI. And the outcome was, Ron, he took legal advice on it but there was no way around it. It was sewn up. The only way that he could get rid of her was to buy her out and it cost him 8000 pounds. That was the fee that she settled on. It cost him 8000 pounds to buy her out and get his funds back and get his HASI back and get his hands on the funds. She owned the bloody lot. You'll always find that.... he was so furious, you'll find on the Johannesburg sec check, the Joburg sec check, which came into common use in Scientology in 1954 -55, you'll find that strange question, "have you ever stolen a HASI". It was put on there by Ron over the Atkinson incident. He was determined that that would never occur again and nobody would ever steal an organization out from underneath him, so he put that on the security check. And henceforth every student, every... well, not every preclear, but every student and everyone on the org lines had to pass that security check. And one of the questions was "have you ever stolen a HASI". So, of course, Jean went. He bought her out and out went Atkinson.

  • Antony: The story I heard (probably at home, from my mother or father) was that Jean Atkinson, had stolen money and so no longer was at the org. Of course the story Dennis gives here would never have been broadly released. I know that when Ron was at the other org (Washingoton or London) where he was not resident, bundles of papers and (in about 58 on) weekly cheques for each staff members wages, were sent to him for signing, and I presume he did not check the papers in detail, and amongst them was a legal paper signing the HASI bank accounts over to Jean Atkinson - that is just a guess. Antony Phillips, Dec 3rd 2009 58.39

Jack Parkhouse Association Secretary[edit | edit source]

And Atkinson was replaced by Jack Parkhouse. The whole administration moved up into.... Jack Parkhouse, by the way, had been on the clinical course. He'd done it with Jack Horner. He'd done the clinical course with Horner, he was one of the students and show himself a very, very capable Scientologists and very capable auditor. His early promise had been maintained.[59.07] He took over the administration role but again, nobody minded this at all because he was given the post of Association Secretary. He had an office in the clinic and he was nominally in charge of the whole show, Jack was. But nobody minded this in the slightest. He was a first-class technical person, a first-class auditor and quite capable of handling any aspect of the subject. He knew the subject so we were very, very happy to accept Jack on board. He quickly became one of the team there. And he organized the moving of the whole of the admin out of 163 Holland Park Ave.. He moved the whole lot out there and appointed an office manager. We had an office manager there and the empty offices down the corridor that had been empty, they were too big for auditing rooms, he utilized those, two of them, as office space. And the whole administration section moved, moved into there. And we had an office manager who worked under Jack Parkhouse and Jack was in charge of the whole show. He was running everything. There was other changes at this point too... because Stan Richards had left, George wasn't happy doing the course there and he told Ron so, so Ron approached me and said, look, he said, I'd like Ann to go and do the D of P'ing on the clinic. He said, I want you to take over the training. I want you to not only become London's Director of Training, London, but you'll also be responsible for all the examinations worldwide. I'm not... far from happy about the system of examinations. It's too patchy and too scratchy, he said, all over the world. We've got to standardize it and the first thing I want you to do is to compose an examination paper, a theory paper for HPA students and pass it over to me for my approval. And when we've got it squared around, he said, we'll use it henceforth all over the world. I said, right Ron, it will be done. So the HPA course moved up to Palace Gardens Terrace. Moved out of 163. By now the HPA had moved out of 163 in to Palace Gardens Terrace. The whole administration had moved out of 163 and was now in Palace Gardens Terrace. The only thing left down at 163 was the PE administration. The public courses were going on down there in the evening and weekends... that was still... we held those offices. Ron still held those offices and he also, he wanted to use the space for lecturing himself so he held onto the premises even though they were a little bit underutilized for a while. Most of the activity was now it 83 Palace Gardens Terrace. This was a wonderful opportunity for me because of now broadening my Scientology skills. I had become very, very competent at processing and at D of P'ing and now I was moving over to the training side which is the other technical, main technical aspect of Scientology. I was now going to be... to learn all the intricacies of training and examinations and so forth. So I was very, very pleased with this. I was certainly looking forward to the event. Ann was now, had collected herself three new staff auditors who had come on the comm lines. One was a guy named Herbie Parkhouse, that was Jack Parkhouse's younger brother who had just graduated from the HPA course. And another was a girl called Jo Davis... Jo Blythe, sorry, she later became Jo Davis when she married the third staff auditor, Bob Davis. So we had three staff auditors there and there was another girl staff auditor, Nan Beardsley, they were the four staff auditors. There was a few other ones who used to come and go but that was the main ones, we started with, those four... that Ann started with. And Ann was now going to get stuck into the D of P'ing and regging. She was reg and D of P. they do mix those two posts, those two posts do mix together although in later org boards Ron separated the posts again. I think it's a mistake. The two posts are very, very intimately connected. That's what I meant when I said earlier that the registrar should be a good technically trained person. And if the reg is a good technically trained person they can also be the D of P. they can D of P the cases and reg them as well. Ron Jeffcott, the weekend instructor, he moved his weekend and evening class into 83 Palace Gardens Ter. into the subsidiary room there we had. We had the big room that we used for main courses and clinical courses, B Scn courses and so forth. That was the big room, that big lecture room and we had a subsidiary, a slightly smaller lecture room which we could use for HPA courses. And as I say, the PE courses were still taking place down at 163. Mary Sue Hubbard had arrived over with Ron, with the family, and they set up residence in... it escapes me, I went there on more than one occasion but I've forgotten which suburb it is. It's around... it was a flat they had somewhere around, I believe it was around Bayswater way somewhere. It wasn't all that far from Palace Gardens Terrace. It was a very nice flat they had. And went over there on more than one occasion. We saw a lot of Ron during this period. Socially it was quite common for Ron and Jack Parkhouse and Ann and I to go out after, in the evening and have a meal and so forth. He was really socializing, much more than he'd ever socialized with us back in the early days in 1952, late 52 early 53. He was socializing much more with us. And it was quite.... I remember on more than one occasion Ron took us out, took Jack Parkhouse and I out to a nightclub where we sat and drank whiskey till about two o'clock in the morning. That's how sociable our executive director was getting. But the org was going well. One had to hand it to Jack, Jack was good. He was a very fine administrator and he was using his technical knowledge of Scientology in his administration. And we all respected Jack and the team worked. Ron knew it was working and that's why he was so pleased with it. It was a good choice. It was one of Ron's good choices that was when he chose Jack Parkhouse. I mean, that lad had come in on the HPA course and he shone right from the word go and then he'd pushed on and then paid for the clinical course himself, done the clinical course under Horner and again shone as an auditor and graduated and no doubt Horner recommended him because he was good. And Ron said, right, I need somebody to look after the place. And he made no mistake this time. He didn't choose an untrained person. He chose Jack Parkhouse and he did it right. I quickly became introduced to the intricacies of instructing, of giving impromptu lectures. I was a little bit adverse at first, you know, a little bit of trepidation there. I'd never done it before but it soon wore off. I soon became, within a few weeks, I was very, very accomplished at giving spontaneous talks and so forth. Eventually my lectures on the axioms, which I used to give to the class, became a standard part of all the HPA. I used to make a point, eventually of visiting the weekend course and the evening course and I used to give them all little talks on the axioms. They were all very very much appreciated. So things were going... things went very well and I was quickly going to the, into the training mode. Got out of the D of P mode and got into the D of T mode.

Meanwhile Ann was building up a considerable team there of staff auditors who were getting very, very loyal to Ann. This would cause a lot of trouble in the future, their loyalty to their reg and D of P. but you could understand it, I mean they had tremendous respect for Ann because of her natural ability as an auditor, they'd seen her work and they knew what she could do and they were all recent graduates from the course and they simply looked up with awe and admiration at this old timer and the way this old-timer could handle a preclear. And the sheer breadth of her understanding of auditing difficulties and how she could solve these difficulties and help them to solve their preclears difficulties. So they... you know... marvelous. Ron used to come along in the evenings at times, he used to come in and D of P the staff auditors and we all used to get in on the act because it was a rare, a rare pleasure to have Ron D of P'ing. He called the staff auditors in and Ann would be there and Jack Parkhouse if he was available, if he wasn't too busy, he used to drop in too, and for an hour Ron would talk to the staff auditors and we would get an impromptu lecture and it was all very, very good. And so Ron was taking a very, very personal interest in HASI London at this point. It was beginning to look good. It was a part of the golden years that, 1955 was a part of the golden years of HASI London there. Everything was swinging along. Almost needless to say that once the organization... once Ron was there and the organization was swinging along that preclears started to come in and the PE lines looked up and books started to sell. It was quite amazing! And we had no shortage of people coming in. And Ann had enough of preclears going to keep her four staff auditors permanently amused, in fact, at one time she had as many as six going, six staff auditors going. Four regular ones and two spares that she had. And we were beginning to look forward to where the hell we're going to find some more auditing rooms!

Because we only had four regular auditing rooms. So of the four main staff auditors, the one who probably became the most well known in Scientology was Herbie Parkhouse. In the later years he became one of the instructors on the St. Hill briefing course and became quite a well known Scientologist, Herbie. Bob Davis and Jo Davis eventually emigrated to Australia. We saw them in Australia because Ann and I went to Australia. We met up with them in Australia... well they met up with us. They emigrated after we did. But eventually we saw them in Australia. Nan Beardsley, she eventually married an American, an American Scientologist, an American auditor and went and lived in Hawaii. And we are still in touch with Nan, with Nan Beardsley in present time. He just died, her husband has, the American auditor but she is still going, she's still alive, Nan Beardsley. At this time a very amusing incident occurred. We used to have what we...Ann used to run a service with the public what was called the two hour assist. It was run in the evening. One of the staff auditors was assigned and the idea was that people could ring in during the day if they needed a quick assist or if they got some little problem or other and they could come in, as long as they came in before 6:30 at night and registrar before 6:30 at night they could get the assist done that evening. But they had to be there by 6:30 because after that the auditor would go home and Ann would go home. There would be nobody there and they couldn't do it. But one evening at about 6:45, we just finished... Ron I believe had been D of P'ing. We'd all just strolled out of Ron's office and the receptionist says, there's a guy turned up for a two hour assist and so Ann regged him and she said, just missed, the staff auditor is gone. The other... she scheduled one of them and he'd gone off down the stairs. She'd missed him. He was quite right it was well after past 6:30. He'd gone home. I think it was Herbie, he'd gone anyway and she'd missed him. So she looked at me. She said, will you handle it? I said, sure. So a few minutes later I trotted an elderly Jewish, Jew, Jewish chappie down to the auditing room and got him into session and found out what the problem was. He was in a terrible state he was. He was grief stricken. It turned out to be one of the more interesting auditing sessions I've ever given in my life. I thought, oh well this is fine. I found out that his best friend had died that day. That morning he'd heard the sad news his best friend... and he'd been grief stricken ever since. So I just ran this out as an ordinary loss engram. I was running it, running it, then running it and he kept crying and crying and crying and I thought to myself, we're not getting anywhere on this one Dennis. We're not getting anywhere. We're not getting anywhere. We're not getting to the heart of this and so I questioned him again how long had he known this man. Oh, he'd known him for years and years and years. Off he went into tears again. And what was their association? Oh well, he was.... they were in business together. Oh yes... what sort of business? Oh well, he says, I'm in the diamond market. Oh yeah? And this other chappie who died? Was he in the diamond market? Oh yes, yes, he was a diamond trader. We been in the market together for years and years and years. And he burst into tears again. I could see by my meter reactions I was getting warm. I said, well what is it about these diamonds? Well, he said, it's awful, he said. I mean, he said, I, I don't know what I'm going to do. I said, what do you mean what are you going to do? He says, well, I've been selling him diamonds all these years, he says. Making a little, you know, profit on the diamonds, he says, and now I won't be able to do it anymore. Well, I said, why won't you be able to sell the diamonds to someone else? Oh no, he said, nobody else would be able to give me that price that he would give me. And suddenly the penny dropped. What this guy was crying over, what was upsetting him, was the loss of profit. You wouldn't believe it! I thought the guy was running a loss of affinity. He'd lost a friend, you know. No, he was a Jew! It was loss of future profit. That was what was knocking him down tone scale. He'd been absolutely... you know, for years he'd been flogging these bloody diamonds to this other bloke and making a profit out of him and exploiting the other guy's lack of knowledge of the trade no doubt, making a huge profit out of it and now suddenly this other guy dies and all his profit was now gone. It knocked him into grief. Anyway, once we got to the cause of it, his tears rapidly packed up and he said, I don't know what I'm going to do? I said, well, you'll just have to go and find someone else to sell the diamonds to, won't you? And he said, well I suppose I will. And he said, thank you very much. How do you feel about it now? He said, well, you have helped me. And he went off very happily and saw Ann. And we finished the session off and so forth. I finished the session off and he went off and he went off home. And everyone was quite, quite happy about it. No, Ann wasn't there... no, that's right. He didn't see Ann. I saw Ann when I went home. Ann had left, she didn't stay. I reported the whole thing to her. She thought it was hilarious. She said, thank God you handled that one Dennis, she said. Not one of my staff auditors could have handled that. They would have made a bloody dogs breakfast out of that one, she said. They would have never spotted it in 1 million years. You needed an old hand to pick that one apart, to figure out why this guy was crying. Loss of profit, what next?

Well, things jogged along toward September, summer was passing going into autumn and Ron decided to run another clinical course. This time he was going to run it at 163 Holland Park Ave.. The premises had been changed somewhat down there. He'd got permission and do a bit of... took a wall down because the front office and the little office had been combined into one big area which... I hadn't been down there in a long while. I was amazed at what had taken place. I don't know how the hell they got permission to do that from the owner, but the owner had given them permission because there the work was done and there was a nice little stage set up there which took up most of, a good half of the little room, the stage. The main auditorium, which had been the main front office... the whole thing was a pretty darn big room now. It was quite big enough to run a course in. It had a proper, nice little stage there and everything, with lights and room for a microphone. Obviously some money had been invested in this by the old man for his clinical course. Fortunately, Ron had given us plenty of notice as staff members on this one. Ann and I were determined to get on this course. It was a rare treat to be personally lectured by the old man and we were absolutely determined, if humanly possible, to get on the course. I mean, obviously we were welcome on the course, it was just a question that we had to do our jobs while we were on the course. So I promptly stopped scheduling preclears, stopped scheduling students on the day course and timed it so that, when the course was on, there wouldn't be anybody on the day course. It was easily done as far as I was concerned, you just put them off for a later start and that left me free. Ann had a little more difficulty but she managed it too but she had to turn up at various times to do her D of P work. She couldn't drop the whole thing as easily as I could. But the course got underway. Again, it was an excellent turnout there. All that was missing, I was hoping that Dennis O'Connell would turn up for the course, but he never did. I'm sure he could have gotten the course if he had wanted it. He only had to turn up and speak to Ron. They'd left under... you know, broken the comm line under unpleasant circumstances. I'm sure Ron had offered the olive branch and Dennis had turned it down. That was the only sad thing, was missing, was Dennis O'Connell. George was back on the line again. He turned up to retread his doctorate. By this time, of course, we'd all got our doctorate degrees. Jack Horner had graduated us and the certificates had all been made out, all our doctorates had been made out and signed by Ron. He'd even thrown in a bachelor of Scientology degree. So we had.. I had an HPA degree and a bachelor of Scientology degree and a Dr. of Scientology degree and there was an HGA degree that I'd also collected along the line when the early days. It was when I did the HPA course. There were some course stipulations. You had to send in three case histories. I was one of the few that did it. I sent in my three case histories and that made me a graduate, so I'd got the HGA certificate as well. So I ended up with four certificates. HPA, HGA, BScn and Dscn.

Ann had the three certificates,....hmmm, no she never did get an HPA certificate. She had a BScn and a DScn. But we were all very, very happy. We were all very well certificated, we were. The course, the clinical course was an absolute joy. It was one where Ron introduced the Waterloo station processes, the "not know" processes. It was going out and spotting people and asking... well, I'll give you... there was an interesting point there was some difficulty with the command. Ron was using, "what don't you know about this person?" And I wrote a comm to him, I said that I tried it on a preclear. I said, a better auditing command would be, "what wouldn't you mind not knowing?" I said, I tested that out and found that it ran better than "what don't you know?" And Ron acknowledged back, said, "thank you very much Dennis, I think you're right". And the following day on the course he gave the alternate command. He wanted to test it. And all the auditors came back and said, yes, this command works much better. So, he said, "well we have Dennis Stephens to thank for that". He acknowledged the, he acknowledged where he got it from. So maybe, if you run the course... it was one of the things... of my contributions to Scientology was the command for the Waterloo station process, the "not know" process. The thing we'd added to the line, of course, was how indoctrination... of course, when Ron had come on the line there, he introduced the indoctrination course, the TR's, the training routines, one of the greatest additions to training that we... well, it just revolutionized training.

The first four TR's, 0,1,2,3 and 4.

We had an indoctrination instructor, Rosina Mann, who I hired and she was a recent HPA graduate and I thoroughly got her to understand what was expected. And the students when they came onto the HPA course would first of all do a week of indoctrination, to do their TR's and it worked out absolutely marvelously. An interesting sidelight on it, TR 1, now known in Scientology and known universally as dear Alice TR 1, I can tell you where the Alice in Wonderland came from in TR 1... I wandered into the indoc room one day to see how the course was going and there they all were sitting reading, trying to do TR 1, originate communications, reading out of a newspaper. It didn't sound a bit right to me reading the stock market reports and economic forecasts and so forth, it didn't sound a bit right to me. So I thought to myself, my God, they need something better than that to communicate. They need something up tone. Now, what's the most up tone book I know... Alice in Wonderland! So I went down to the local bookshop and nosed around and got some cheap copies of Alice. Sure Sir! I bought half a dozen copies on the spot, reclaimed the money out of petty cash and dumped them on Rosina's desk and said, for God sakes stop using those newspapers. Use the Alice in Wonderland. Use the words, delete the "he saids" and "she saids" and just use the phrases from Alice in Wonderland. There's some beautiful phrases in that book. And it took on like wildfire, Alice. The students perked up immediately. They loved Alice. They really would communicate those, those beautiful phrases from Alice in Wonderland," off with his head!" you know. Beautiful, beautiful up tone phrases in Alice! And that was my own contribution to TR 1, was the Alice in Wonderland. The training routine eventually became known as dear Alice. Meanwhile, I'd finally got my examination paper out and composed a decent theory exam paper and passed it over to the old man and he said, it's fine. It's an excellent one he thought. So we got that off to the printers and that was in standard use and it went out to various parts of America. It went to all the American orgs that were teaching HPA. It was used, as far as I know, it was used for quite a while the HPA theory paper that I prepared. Ron was getting to rely upon me. He used to call me his encyclopedia of Scientology. He realized that I did have an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and he used to rely upon it. But already the seeds, the seeds of the end of the line were coming because the more that Ann's staff auditors became loyal to Ann, the more it was upsetting Ron. And Ron could see that these auditors were absolutely devoted to Ann, their D of P. And it was upsetting the old man. It shouldn't have done, but it did. And the inevitable occurred one day, he simply fired Ann... on some excuse or other. And I realized, well, this is going to be the end. We won't take it anymore. We won't take this, Ann and I, we will not take this anymore. So I quit with Ann. I quit the org with Ann on the spot. And told Jack Parkhouse that this is the end, we've had enough. He'll have to find himself some more tech staff and off we went back to Battersea and went back to our private practice. So we were back off the lines again. It was an absolutely ridiculous thing for Ron to do. It was uncalled for. It was just sheer paranoia again. He had this feeling that these students, and that these staff auditors were more loyal to their, to Ann, their D of P than they were to him which was ridiculous. The staff auditors adored Ron. He was a god to them. But just because they used to trail around after Ann and showed so much affinity to Ann that they used to feel... that Ron felt that Ann was stealing their loyalty from him. And it was the old, the old paranoia that he had in his system, the old canker in his guts that was eating at him that eventually caused him to destroy his own subject. So he tossed out again... he lost a brilliant D of P and a brilliant reg when he tossed Ann out. And of course, I went and he lost another brilliant technical person when he lost me. He lost a brilliant D of T, Examiner and also a very, very competent D of P and auditor. He lost hands down you see. There is no way you can win with paranoia. It's a situation where the subject who's got the paranoia always loses. This happened early in 1956, about March or April I think it blew up and we walked out to. Ann got fired. And I went in... we did some auditing and decided to emigrate to Australia and we carried on with our auditing practice. And then I went and spoke with Jack Parkhouse and he was quite amenable. He got Ron's permission for me to have the rights to train in Australia, to teach HPA courses when we got to Australia. Ron, he had no ARC break with me. He was disappointed that I'd left but he understood why I'd left because Ann was my wife. I couldn't stay on in the org under those circumstances when my wife had been fired, in my eyes quite unnecessarily. After a while, Ann and I started collecting our things together, applied for emigration to Australia. And after all this, eventually clearing up and getting everything, our things in order, we set off in May 1957 to see what Australia had to offer for us and the family and the children.

_____

That is the end of Dennis' second cassette. The three audio (mp3) files, and the transcripts of all three can be found HERE

Best wishes, Antony Phillips 30th October 2013 + March 2014, My Website.

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