Statement of Aleister Crowley Regarding Gerald Yorke

[Undated: circa 1936]

Gerald Joseph Yorke was born on December 10th 1901 as a seven months child. It is an almost universal characteristic of such premature birth that the native lacks moral stamina.

In 1927 I heard from a very old member of the Order, Mr. J. G. Bayley [James Gilbert Bayley], that Mr. Yorke had been studying the Equinox and other of our works and wished him to get into touch with me. I entered into correspondence with him, ultimately suggesting that he should call upon me. He, therefore, called on me at the Hotel Foyot, Paris on the 31st of December 1927. He was anxious to obtain certain unpublished Manuscripts, and I allowed him access to these.

He came over again to Paris in the Spring of 1928. By this time he was definitely anxious to join the Order, and to undergo a course of personal training. He also urged me to help him to break himself of the habit of masturbation. I agreed to help him, and we proposed to spend some weeks together in the summer in the South of France, so that I might test his progress in the course of training which I appointed for him, and give further instructions.

He further agreed to assist in the publication of Part III of Book 4 [Magick in Theory and Practice], my textbook on Magick.

With regard to the finances of the publication, Yorke represented to me that with my assets I ought to be making a much larger income than I was actually doing, and said that, if my affairs were handled by a good man of business, I should be making several thousand pounds a year. He pointed out that he was himself a Director of the Mexican Railway, of Pontifex & Sons Ltd., Alfred Emanuel Ltd., and other important firms. He spontaneously offered his services which I accepted. I executed in his favour a very wide Power of Attorney, so that he could handle the whole of my stock and undertake any business transaction on my behalf. I also executed a will, making him my sole residuary legatee with remainder to Karl Germer. I also made him a trustee of the E. A. Crowley settlement. The date of this last appointment is December 31, 1928.

It should be explained that my stock in hand was worth at the published prices approximately £20,000, while the actual prices in catalogues of second-hand booksellers were in almost every case listed at very much higher prices, in some cases as much as 1000% higher.

Some time during this year Mr. Karl Germer agreed to co-operate in this plan. His tangible assets were reckoned at about £15,000. Yorke's assets at about £5,000. These amounts being regarded as working capital, while my contribution was the stock as before said. (Some of the Germer assets only came in later.) Mr. Germer was at this time in America. Pending the realisation of the stock, the value of which must of course be existing copyrights, the copyrights of unpublished manuscripts, and the copyrights of any work written subsequently by myself, I was to be allowed £10 weekly from the pool. I was also given certain lump sums to pay off old debts, to renew my wardrobe, etc.

Kasimira Bass also promised to contribute a sum of approximately £3,000 as working capital on the realisation of some property alleged by her to be in California. £200 were advanced to her from the pool by Yorke against her note; but she simply went off, and the note was dishonoured. (The paragraphs concerning her were only inserted for the sake of completeness, and Yorke should not be too severely blamed for his failure to obtain proper security.)

He had also decided to employ a man name De Vidal Hunt [Carl de Vidal Hunt] as publicity agent at a salary of £20 a month, with a considerable expense allowance. This man turned out to be a common swindler and blackmailer, was accordingly dismissed, and revenged himself by raising trouble about my passport through some of his fellow rascals in the lower branches of the Surété in Paris. It seemed decidedly unfortunate that Yorke should have allowed himself to be humbugged by this person.

Early in 1929 matters had become very serious. Kasimira had gone off, and her position as housekeeper assumed by a Nicaraguan lady named Maria Theresa Ferrari de Miramar. Yorke visited us in my apartment in the Avenue de Suffren, and it was from a purely professional point of view reassuring to observe that he attempted to seduce her, thus indicating that his onanistic preoccupations were on the way to cure.

Early in the year 1929 de Vidal Hunt having failed to blackmail Yorke, took his revenge. The means he employed are still obscure, but the upshot was that only myself, but Marie and my secretary Regudy, or Regutny, sometimes called (through the error of a recruiting sergeant in the United States) Regardie [Israel Regardie], had the permits de séjour refused by the authorities in Paris. For the first time Yorke's almost unthinkable cowardice became apparent, though I did not realise for long afterwards that this was the motive of his action. He made all sorts of cunning excuses for not coming over and putting the matter right, which he could have done quite easily through his family connections. The police behaved with fantastic harshness to Marie and Regardie. They were obliged to leave abruptly. Yorke met them on arrival at Tilbury and his disloyalty and cowardice were even more amazingly manifest. He refused to fulfill the trifling formality necessary to permit them to land, though both were in a state of grave physical distress. They were shipped back and dumped in Belgium. Yorke had, of course, a very plausible account, which was, as is almost invariably the case with his statements, a tissue of falsehoods, and I did not fins out for a very long while afterwards, that he was solely responsible for this disaster as it turned out to be. I was thereby deprived of the services of these persons and compelled to support them. No more fatal blow could have been struck at the work on which we were engaged. But Yorke's fervent protestations of loyalty, together with my natural confidence in him, and the fact that in other ways he did appear to be doing his best, prevented me from suspecting the foully incredible vileness of his character.

As soon as I had an advance copy of 'Magick' I left Paris for Brussels, and began to take steps to induce the authorities to allow the two exiles to enter England. In the meantime Yorke had been approached by Colonel G. F. C. Carter [Lieutenant Colonel John Carter], head of the special branch of Scotland Yard, and as a result of these conversations Carter sent me my fare to London and invited me to dinner with him. This action put a complete stop to the nonsensical stories to my discredit, which had been circulated to the effect that I was wanted by the police for various crimes.

During the first few days of my stay in London I was approached by Mr. P. R. Stephensen of the Mandrake Press. In the course of several conferences it was arranged to publish a considerable number of my books during the next three years. The first two volumes of the 'Confessions' [The Confessions of Aleister Crowley], a small volume of Short Stories called 'The Stratagem' [The Stratagem and Other Stories], and 'Moonchild', were in fact issued. Internal dissensions, however, wrecked the Mandrake Press. Stephensen's partner, Goldston [Edward Goldston], withdrew from the firm, and as it was impossible for Stephensen to carry on without a business man to support him, efforts were made to find somebody. The firm was then turned into a limited company by a man named Robert Thomson Thynne [Major Robert Thynne], calling himself Major Robin Thynne, who turned out to be a share-pusher and swindler of the worst type. I severely blame Yorke for not having discovered the character and antecedents of this grafter, especially as he was in the habit of putting everyone through Stubbs before doing any business with him, even in the most trivial matters.

It was suggested that the pool should put up £1,500 towards the capital of the new company. Yorke was to supply £1,000 and Germer £500. I agreed to this plan on condition that Yorke was made a Director of the company, and took him myself to my own lawyers, Field Roscoe & Co., 36 Lincoln Inn Fields, where contracts were drawn up accordingly. I understood that the sole object of this investment was to secure the publication of my books according to the terms of my contract with the Mandrake Press. Thynne, however, had no other object than to steal the money, and in order to carry out this plan, he very cleverly pulled the wool over the eyes of my colleagues. Germer, however, was suspicious of Thynne from the start, and I must blame myself for having persuaded him to consent to the investment. My excuses is tat I had the utmost confidence in Yorke's business competence and there was the further safeguard that I had insisted on the employment of Regardie as bookkeeper. Thynne worked very cleverly upon Yorke to sow the seeds of distrust. From this moment Yorke was secretly and formidably disloyal. No money was paid to the printers to continue the third volume of the 'Confessions' and 'Golden Twigs' though these were already in type. From the time of Goldston's withdrawal to the end no single book was published by the firm. As soon as there was no more money for Thynne to steal the company went into liquidation. This was in the autumn of 1930. During the summer of that year I had gone to Berlin to visit Germer, and we made a motor tour through Central Europe with the object of securing books from various distinguished Continental authors for the Mandrake Press. I arrived in Berlin on the 2nd of August. On my return to England, towards the end of the month, I found that Marie, who had got into England on a British passport as my wife, (date of marriage August 16, 1929, Leipzig) had disappeared. Various friends informed me that she had gone off with Yorke to a Hotel of doubtful reputation in Knightsbridge, and that subsequently he had installed her in a flat somewhere in the neighbourhood of Belsize Park. I had no time to investigate these rumours at the moment, as I was obliged to leave immediately for Lisbon in order to establish there a headquarters for the Order under Don Fernando Pessoa [Fernando Pessoa].

I must explain Yorke's attitude. He was afflicted by the Oedipus complex. His father was a stern disciplinarian, and Yorke resented this bitterly. I, being in the Hierarchy of the Order in the position of a father to Yorke, the desire to kill was transferred from his natural father to myself. And, of course, the other half of the Oedipus complex explains his ambition to seduce my wife.

The fate of this unhappy lady is uncertain. According to one story she committed suicide by throwing herself into the Thames. According to another, she was killed by an earthquake in Managua, her native town, some little while later. A third story alleges that on Yorke's desertion of her she became insane, and was confined in an asylum. This last story, however, I have every reason to disbelieve, because the authorities at the asylum wrote to me on the subject with a questionnaire. I answered this, and the matter dropped. From this I conclude that they had decided that the woman purporting to be my wife, was in fact somebody else, as otherwise they would have certainly made some demand on me for her support. I need only add that should she at any time reappear, I shall divorce her, naming Yorke as co-respondent.

The Mandrake having broken down, and so much of the funds of the pool wasted through Yorke's neglect and treachery, there was for the time nothing for me to do in England, and I took advantage of Germer's kind offer of hospitality to stay with him in Berlin and work for the establishment of the Order in Germany and Austria. From time to time Yorke visited Berlin.

Relations with Germer were somewhat strained, as in 1929 Yorke had persuaded Germer's fiancée to invest in the pool, which she did on his personal guarantee to repay the money in 1944. Her security was to be an insurance policy taken out by Yorke for £1,500 to cover the principal and interest. In 1931, however, he stopped payment of the premium, and now callously denies his obligation altogether, although well aware that the lady is now in very reduced circumstances and well stricken in years.

Yorke's negligence, incapacity, and treachery were now manifest to all. Yet it was almost incredible that cowardice and falsehood would go so far under the mask of active friendship and devotion. In 1932, however, the slump in America had diminished Germer's resources so that to carry on the work at all it was necessary for Yorke to produce the money, and he agreed to furnish £500 for headquarters expenses for a year.

At this point there is some obscurity in his actions. He was very insistent that I should come to London to help him raise the money. My secretary-interpreter, Frau Busch [Bertha Busch], went over to London to see him at his urgent request. On arrival he deposited her in a Hotel in the most criminal street in London, where she was rapidly corrupted by drink and drugs, and went completely to the dogs within six months. Her presence, however, was not sufficient for Yorke; and they telephoned me in Berlin every night, assuring me that I could get back to Berlin with the money in not more than four days after my arrival in London. After nearly two weeks of this I agreed to come. But I had been reduced to such desperate straights that I was obliged to borrow my fare to London.

On arrival it was soon abundantly clear that he had no intention whatever to fulfill his promises. His hostility was hardly concealed, and he was triumphing openly that he had brought me down. He did me further harm by his system of issuing cheques without provision for debts incurred by him under the terms of our agreement. He was so slippery and evasive that I determined to bring him to book, and issued a writ against him to compel him to submit proper accounts, and asking for damages for his negligence and mismanagement of my affairs. Naturally enough he bolted and left London for China on September 15, 1932, where he remained for over three years.

On his return to England in 1936 he appeared to some extent sensible of his abominable conduct. He has admitted before witnesses his negligence, incompetence in business, and the fact that he is and has always been a liar and a coward.

[121]