View source for 1950s Part 1 - Dennis Stephens

{{Anthology
|Name=1951,1952,1953, England
|Period=50's
|Location=London
|Year=1951
|Website=http://antology.info
|Email=ant.phillips@post8.tele.dk
}}
:''Antony "Ant" Phillips posted a great transcription of Dennis Stephens' cassette talk about the very early days of Scientology in England.''

:The following is a transcription of a cassette tape 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 spoke this, he had poor eyesight and communicated by cassette tape, which was relatively 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.
{{Tocright}}
== Introduction - 1930s - Slum life in North London ==
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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham Tottenham], N 15 and I was the only son of two working-class parents. At that time, the suburb of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham 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.
[[File:DenisStephens.jpg|thumb|250px|left]]
== Move to a better area - clarinet ==
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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgware 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 near 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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastoidectomy 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'' ==
[[File:MastersOfSleep.jpg|thumb|250px|right|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 ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Science_Fiction_and_Fact 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 [http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_home_page.html Isaac Asimov], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Sturgeon 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 ==

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 ==

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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturopathy 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" ==

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 ==

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 ==

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... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volney_Mathison 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.
[[[[File:Mathison.jpg|right]]
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 ==

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 ==

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.
[[File:LRH-DMSMH.jpg|right]]
== Hubbard in England ==

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 ==

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 ==

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!
[[File:DenisStephens Ann.jpg|thumb|250px|right|Dennis and future wife Ann]]
== Premises for a Scientology Org - Anne Walker full time staff - Dennis Director of Processing ==
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 ==
[[File:Speaker's Corner - geograph.org.uk - 240724.jpg|thumb|300px|right|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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner 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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Corbi%C3%A8re 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.
[[File:La Corbiére Lighthouse, 2011.jpg|thumb|300px|right|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 ==

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 ==

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 ==
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.........

******************************************************************

That is the end of Dennis' first cassette. The three audio (mp3) files, and the transcripts of all three can be found  [http://www.antology.info/index-8.html HERE]

Best wishes,   [[Antony Phillips]] 30th October 2013, [http://antology.info My Website].

== comments ==
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[[Category:Anthology]]
[[Category:Scientology - 1950's]]