1950s Part 1 - Dennis Stephens - Revision history

AntPhillips: /* Move to a better area - clarinet */ typo

2020-01-21T18:49:40Z

‎Move to a better area - clarinet: typo

AntPhillips: Beth Guest suggestions

2017-04-19T15:48:46Z

Beth Guest suggestions

AntPhillips: Added death date.

2017-01-16T17:55:04Z

Added death date.

AntPhillips: /* Jack Parkhouse Association Secretary */ replacing a bad divider

2017-01-06T17:22:11Z

‎Jack Parkhouse Association Secretary: replacing a bad divider

AntPhillips: /* Reg Gould */ improve demarcation line

2016-12-27T16:54:07Z

‎Reg Gould: improve demarcation line

Dl88008: Text replace - "History Of Scientology" to "History of Scientology"

2015-05-26T16:55:58Z

Text replace - "History Of Scientology" to "History of Scientology"

Dl88008: remove cat biography

2014-11-12T01:53:31Z

remove cat biography

Dl88008 at 21:39, September 6, 2014

2014-09-06T21:39:34Z

AntPhillips at 12:16, April 8, 2014

2014-04-08T12:16:25Z

Dl88008: /* Jack Parkhouse Association Secretary */ added links

2014-04-05T17:27:34Z

‎Jack Parkhouse Association Secretary: added links

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 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.
+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.

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 '''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 spoke this, 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).
+: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 ==
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 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.
+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.

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 |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.
+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)'''

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 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  [http://www.antology.info/index-8.html HERE]
 Best wishes,   [[Antony Phillips]] 30th October 2013 + March 2014, [http://antology.info My Website].
 == related articles ==
 * [[1950s Part 2 - Norman Phillips]]

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 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 ==

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 {{DISQUS}}
 [[Category:Anthology]]
-[[Category:History Of Scientology]]
+[[Category:History of Scientology]]
 [[Category:Scientology - 1950's]]
 [[ Category:Scientology - 1950's England]]