THE TATLER AND BYSTANDER

London, England

11 September 1957

(page 471)

Recently I recalled my only other brush with Fate in a B.B.C. broadcast which asked listeners to help me lay a ghost.

For three rather frightening weeks, as an undergraduate at Oxford, I had been increasingly perturbed by the (coincidental?) recurrence in conversation and in books of the name of that arch-diabolist and black magician, the late Aleister Crowley—whom I had never met and didn’t want to. The haunting culminated in my (accidentally?) discovering a piano with the name “Crowley” on the lid in an otherwise unfurnished lodging-house in Walton Street. A reputable Oxford piano shop told me that they knew of no such name.

I was aghast and remained so for a quarter of a century. But after the broadcast about forty listeners wrote and told me that in fact they still owned pianos made by a Mr. J. H. Crowley, who closed down his factory in the late 1920’s but who still (hale at the age of eighty) tunes a piano or two in Watford today.

At first I felt comforted. Then I began to wonder: what Power had “fixed” it that forty owners of such a little-known, rarely-found piano should all be simultaneously listening-in to the Light Programme that evening.

I felt the same twinge of unease which assailed me as a young reporter when I went down to Hove to interview that other great student of Black Magic, the late Dr. Montagu Summers—a bland,, benign little man with light blue eyes, quilt-pink face and silver ringlets curling over the nape of his collar like anchovies.

“At the end of the Black Mass,” he murmured equably, “the Devil himself appears.”

“The conventional sort of Devil?” I asked. “Two horns and a tail?”

He looked at me with the shy conviction of an eyewitness. “Dear me, no Mr. Dehn. No tail.”