J. T. Boulton, from Doubt. A jackpot Fortean.
Though one might think of something cozier, too: a snug bug in a rug.
His name was J. T. Boulton—no, not *that* J. T. Boulton. Not James T. Boulton the literary scholar, though perhaps they are related. The fact of the matter is I have very little biographical information on J. T. Boulton, not even what those initials stand for. And everything I do have comes from his own report.
Boulton was a teacher and headmaster in northwest England. He received an M.A. from Cambridge. During the late 1940s, at least, he was at Bamber Bridge Training School, in Lancashire. It was an emergency training school for teachers, with about 350 students taking a one year course, most of them soldiers, and older than the usual student, averaging around 30. He taught French and Spanish. Late in 1952, it seems, he became headmaster of Creighton School, in Carlisle, Cumbria County. Among his students was Hunter Davies, who would become a prolific writer and chronicler of the Beatles.
Though one might think of something cozier, too: a snug bug in a rug.
His name was J. T. Boulton—no, not *that* J. T. Boulton. Not James T. Boulton the literary scholar, though perhaps they are related. The fact of the matter is I have very little biographical information on J. T. Boulton, not even what those initials stand for. And everything I do have comes from his own report.
Boulton was a teacher and headmaster in northwest England. He received an M.A. from Cambridge. During the late 1940s, at least, he was at Bamber Bridge Training School, in Lancashire. It was an emergency training school for teachers, with about 350 students taking a one year course, most of them soldiers, and older than the usual student, averaging around 30. He taught French and Spanish. Late in 1952, it seems, he became headmaster of Creighton School, in Carlisle, Cumbria County. Among his students was Hunter Davies, who would become a prolific writer and chronicler of the Beatles.
Which is everything I know about Boulton biographically.
***********************
Fortunately, his Forteanism is pretty well documented—which is unusual, and stands in contrast to his slim biographical profile. According to a later letter he wrote to Eric Frank Russell, Boulton first read Fort in 1942, having come across “Lo!”; he finished it in an evening. “It opened a new world to men on the instant,” he said. “In general, it is clear to me that Fort is one of the big men.”
Reading between the lines, it seems that Boulton was prepared to accept attacks on science. “My scientific equipment being the slightest (and should I add, my tendency to iconoclasm being sufficient,” he admitted to Russell, “I naturally delight in Fort’s seemingly expert demolition of some scientific pretensions.” Years before, he’d looked through his brother-in-law’s 14-foot homemade telescope and aw swift, twitching shadows, which he interpreted as some kind of astronomical anomaly (but he cuts the story short before fully explaining). He read J. W. Dunne, Rupert Gould, and the New Age magazine “Tomorrow,” all overlapping with Fort, if developed along their own trajectories. After his experience with “Lo!,” he tracked down a copy of the omnibus edition of Fort’s books, and read it, too, though it was borrowed.
At the training college, Boulton had loaned “Lo!” to about 15 staff and students by the middle of 1948; he had just the one copy, so it was in constant circulation. As expected, the reactions were various. Some students, he told Russell, were stunned—they would have to come back to Fort again years later, when they were more prepared. One student followed the path of his teacher and immediately sought out the complete collection of Fort’s books. (Since it was hard to obtain in England, he found it through an American uncle.) A teacher at a nearby woman’s school could not make up her mind: on first read, it was bunk, on second it was amazing—before she could undertake a third reading, Boulton demands did back so it could be loaned to others. Some complained about the style. (This complaint was a common one against Fort.) One science teacher neutered it by deeming “Lo!” as “amusing.” (Boulton knew he had to approach this teacher gently, so had earlier given him Gould’s “Oddities.”) Another science teacher thought the data intriguing but the interpretations useless—another common reaction.
Boulton considered himself a pure Fortean—but which he meant “I personally find Fort fascinating, but I am too good a Fortean to fall on my knees. His philosophical disquisitions please me immensely.” He wrote essays that he thought thoroughly intermediatist but that “owes nothing to Fort!” He resisted the idea of formally teaching Fort on Fortean grounds: “I rather feel that Fort would not insist on anything further, and might even agree that once he was imprisoned in a curricula, that would be the beginning of the end!”
In September 1947, he came across an advertisement for the Fortean Society in “Tomorrow” magazine (cover date, August). He wrote to Russell, then in Liverpool—he would later move to the Isle of Man, in the same county as Carlisle—asking for information. That same month—probably prompted by the same advertisement—he wrote to King, Littlewood, and King, which was importing the omnibus edition of Fort’s books into England, and got on the waiting list for a copy. Russell sent him two copies of Doubt and a Fortean Society pamphlet (probably “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind.”) Boulton enjoyed the reading enough that he wrote to Russell asking how to get even more back issues. He also loaned out the pamphlet, which was nor returned, forcing him to ask for another, as well as help getting the complete works: by 20 January it had still not reached him. (As it happened, he received the book a few days later, without Russell’s intervention.)
By the middle of 1948, even as he taught and circulated “Lo!” (and sometimes the complete books) through the school as an underground legend, he also managed to obtain back issues of Doubt and read through them. He’d collected numbers 7, and 18-21, probably mostly through Russell, but also possibly through “Tomorrow.” He was interested enough to ask to continue to be on the mailing list, to continue to seek out the issues he’d missed, and to pony up one pound “just to be amiable,” but was resistant to becoming a member; and he had reservations about the Forteans he met in the pages of “Doubt”: “I tend to deplore the tendency of ^some Forteans—(But am I right here?!)—to treat classical ‘philosophy’ (which I should have thought was often sufficiently ‘intermediatist’ to satisfy even a Fortean orthodoxy!) as ‘bunk’: I should have thought for instance that Socrates and Fort were closely parallel forces.”
Russell reported his discovery to Thayer: a teacher spreading the word of Fort, getting to students before orthodoxy set in! Thayer had been hoping for just such a jackpot. Apparently, Russell shared some of Boulton’s letters with Thayer. (There seems to have been a more extensive correspondence between the two of them than is preserved in Russell’s papers at he University of Liverpool; perhaps Thayer did not return loaned copies, and so they were lost when Thayer’s Fortean archive was lost.) Late in 1948, Thayer told Russell, “Boulton slings a mean phrase. We’ll make him a member, and let him kick if he doesn’t like it.”
There seems to have been a gap in the correspondence of Boulton and the Fortean Society between 1948 and 1952. The lacuna does not indicate that Boulton had lost interest, though. He did become a member at some point. He continued to collect back issues of Doubt, buying issues 1-3, 6, 10-11, and 13 from Thayer in 1952 for $7.25 (or 2 pounds, 12 shillings), leaving him without only numbers 4 and 5. (The fourth issue of the magazine was incredibly rare, released only to the small number of members at the time.) He was still hunting down those two issues. He’d also read Russell’s Fortean story “Sinister Barrier,” which he called “smashing!” Again, there may have been some correspondence during this period, but there’s no mention of it in the letters Thayer wrote Russell or in “Doubt.”
For whatever reason, though, Russell mentioned something to Thayer about Boulton in the middle of 1952; Thayer was happy about whatever it was—and still happy they’d found a Fortean educator. “Boulton is supreme!,” he expostulated. “All good Forteans now bow three times in the direction of Carlisle at sun-rise every morning.” There was then a letter from Boulton to Russell in October, this on Creighton School letterhead, and what seems to be congratulations from Thayer a little later—as well as the suggestion that Boulton and Russell were carrying on their own correspondence: “Boulton is our nominee for King of the (remaining) Isles. On Dec. 12 he is lecturing the Prefects of Creighton School on FORT! I love him.”
The following year, 1953, was Boulton’s Fortean debutant ball. He was in correspondence with Thayer early in the year, asking for some copies of the Books of Charles Fort. Thayer seemed to be under the impression—but perhaps it was an affected confusion—that Fort would be taught at the school. He sent them along in April and wondered to Russell, “Only fancy, Fort to be used as a text in a school. Is this the beginning of the end?” It is clear that Boulton did not mean for the students to formally study Fort, but the request does imply that he was increasing the number of books he was loaning out, perhaps having stirred up interest with his December lecture.
In July’s Doubt (41), Thayer introduced him to the readership under the title “Our 99 Per Center,” playing as though he had not been excited about Boulton for a long time, perhaps forgetting his initial enthusiasm and collapsing time: “For some years the name of J. T. Boulton reposed in unassuming quietude upon the Fortean rolls—a sleeper!—a ‘possum!—a Tannhauser in Chips’ clothing! He fought no duels, he swam no Channels, he sent us no larvae picked up on a windless day, but—as suddenly as the Ides hit March—he burst his chrysalis and now stands at the had of the class, and the phrase is used advisedly. J. T. Boulton is the Head Master of the Creighton School, Carlisle, England.
“The first intimation we had of our member’s double life came from Russell who culled a page of what he called ‘Boultonisms’ from letters. Here they are, and you may well imagine our amazement.
“Genius: the highest human approach to common-sense”
“Duty: action not creditable in the commission but discreditable in the omission.
“How can one have the right to speak unless one is or has been mad? Unless there is a right to speak falsely, there is no right to speak. If there is a duty to speak truly, it is a duty to be dumb. To write these things I cannot but be naive, cannot but be sophisticated--yet true naïveté and true sophistication are one. There is no more than to say that Truth is One and contains All. Nevertheless, naïveté and sophistication remain different. For the matter of that, neither of them exist—that’s why there are names for them. Anything which has a name does not exist. That is why men have to give a name to it: to give it an existence for relative use.
“From the vantage point of love one best sees Hell. From the vantage-point of love one best bears Hell. From the vantage-point of Hell one best sees Love--but cannot bear it. The peculiar and distinctive feature of the denizens of Hell is their alternate rapt attention and rapt inattention to all heavenly matters; of the denizens of Heaven, their capacity to see Hell, and bearing it, and loving it.
“Either there is Truth and there you are, or there is no Truth. But if the second conclusion stands it must itself be an impregnable Truth. So that whether there is Truth or whether there is not Truth, there is still Truth.
“If spiritual problems are ever solved it is by the realization that they do not exist.
“I am one of the few Headmasters, I should imagine, who have read extracts from Fort at Morning Service!
“YS has not been the same man since.”
Thayer went on to recount how Boulton had lectured the prefects on Fort. He noted that Boulton wrote Fortean articles for the school paper and other publications, stirring up healthy debate. He told how Boulton imported a dozen copies of the complete books of Charles Fort, and Thayer asked if Fort was to be taught in the classes, and Boulton had answered that they were for the library and for top form reading during the last year—Fort would think anything more too confining. “Since that is exactly what Fort would have said, the pro-Boulton data keep piling up.” But Thayer was most happy with Boulton’s practice of culling Forteana from books—Thayer thought this a neglected resource for Forteans. Boulton had sent in a bit from Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man”,” criticizing anthropological reconstructions; many tidbits from “Commander Campbell’s Scrapbook,” which Thayer thought comparable to Gould’s books; the piece Thayer ran criticized science for being too reliant on authority, and too variable.
In the midst of this euphoria, Thayer said, “You will hear more of him, much more.” But that wasn’t true. Boulton’s Fortean coming-out party was also the high point of his Fortean career. There is a suggestion that the school’s politics may have been too blame, but it is also possible he just lost interest, or became overwhelmed with his duties. Already there had been what seem to be a four year gap between his original enthusiasm and his appearance in Doubt, which suggests that he perhaps liked to do his Forteanism in the relative quiet seclusion and small space of the school. It does seem that he remained interested in Fort and Forteana.
Boulton appeared only twice more in Doubt, the next time in the following issue, 42 (October 1953). The reference ran under the title “New Books” and continued listing the list started in 41 of Boulton’s recommended reading:
“Man or Matter” by Ernest Lehrs, which developed Goethe science with, according to Boulton, parallels to Fort. (Thayer noted as an aside that Fortean Faber Birren liked Goethe’s optics and recommended, as well, a pamphlet on Goethe’s color theory by the Fortean member Barthel.)
“Darwin is not for Children” which Boulton admitted was written from a religious perspective but was still readable by Forteans.
“Wisdom, Madness and Folly, The Philosophy of a Lunatic,” by John Custance.
“Birds as Individuals,” by Len Howard.
“King Solomon’s Rings,” by Konrad Lorenz.
“Mental Prodigies,” by Fred Barlow.
“Dead Cities and Forgotten Tribes,” by Gordon Cooper. It contained a chapter on the Nahanni Valley, which was the cite of the Fortean expedition, undertaken by C. Steven Bristol and others.
“My Occult Diary,” by Cornelius Tabori.
“In my Mind’s Eye,” by Frederick Marion.
“Yarns of the Seven Seas,” by A B. Campbell, which contained material on the Marie Celeste.
“Projection of the Astral Body,” by Sylvan J. Muldoon and Hereward Carrington.
Thayer said that the Society was selling the books for four dollars each, though there’s be a six-week wait. That the Society was selling these book may explain why this article, ostensibly extending Boulton’s list, got messy at the end and included two books that seem to have been the suggestion of Thayer alone. One was Martin Gardner’s “In the Name of Science”; the other was a biography of Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast,” by John Symonds.
In November of 1953, Thayer wrote to Russell, worried: “Have you heard from Boulton? I’ll bet he got the sack. Has not written to me since we ran his ad! But—guess what!—[Judith L.] Gee had him to tea!” Thayer was especially on tenterhooks because he’d written Boulton looking for the publishers of several of the books he’d recommended and needed if he wanted to sell them. Boulton did get back to him soon after that letter went out, though, with an answer to all but one of the publishers’s names. He also reported—as Thayer told Russell—“he was notbounqed, only fined and put in gaol (Reading) for a furtnt [sic: fortnight].” Probably a joke, then, referring a vacation, but Thayer made light of so many things it’s hard to know when he was serious.
The last mention of Boulton in the correspondence of the Fortean Society came in January 1954. Thayer was still looking for the publisher of “Yarns of the Seven Seas,” and berating himself for ever agreeing to sell the book. He begged Russell for the publisher, and clarified his earlier reference to Boulton’s mysterious whereabouts: “Boulton was not in gaol, only in Coventry (Patmore),” which again suggests he was only one vacation, but still leaves open the possibility, however remote, that it was a forced vacation. And more joking: Coventry is a city in England. Coventry Patmore was an English poet. (Coventry and Reading are about 80 miles apart, though, making it hard to gibe Thayer’s two reports.)
Boulton’s last mention in “Doubt” came a few months later, in April 1954. It was an acknowledgment in a long paragraph, presumably related to the column on fluoridation of water that preceded it. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is possible to speculate which clipping Boulton sent, since there was only one from England—and it suggests that Boulton may not have even been interested int he fluoridation controversy at all. The article told of an 11-week old baby that turned blue. Medical officials blamed the color change on nitrates in the water. Thayer—and perhaps Boulton—pointed out that the town’s name might also be a clue: Badwell Ash, in Suffolk. (For what it’s worth, etymological attempts to explain the name suggest, without reliable evidence, that the name does not refer to the town’s poor water source.)
Thus ended Boutlon’s public Fortean career. As I say, my inclination is to think of him as comfortably ensconced as headmaster, with little reason to continue his correspondence. The jackpot Thayer and Russell thought they had found did not pay out. Rather, Boulton continued, cozy, his own work. But if I am to think f him as a bug, it is because that reminds me one of Fort’s more striking images:
“But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
Boulton may have been a bug—but then he was also cheese, hole-y cheese.
And, indeed, what is most visible in his story is not what is solid, but the holes: what is missing. The damned parts. Including, after 1954, his participation in the Fortean mysteries.
***********************
Fortunately, his Forteanism is pretty well documented—which is unusual, and stands in contrast to his slim biographical profile. According to a later letter he wrote to Eric Frank Russell, Boulton first read Fort in 1942, having come across “Lo!”; he finished it in an evening. “It opened a new world to men on the instant,” he said. “In general, it is clear to me that Fort is one of the big men.”
Reading between the lines, it seems that Boulton was prepared to accept attacks on science. “My scientific equipment being the slightest (and should I add, my tendency to iconoclasm being sufficient,” he admitted to Russell, “I naturally delight in Fort’s seemingly expert demolition of some scientific pretensions.” Years before, he’d looked through his brother-in-law’s 14-foot homemade telescope and aw swift, twitching shadows, which he interpreted as some kind of astronomical anomaly (but he cuts the story short before fully explaining). He read J. W. Dunne, Rupert Gould, and the New Age magazine “Tomorrow,” all overlapping with Fort, if developed along their own trajectories. After his experience with “Lo!,” he tracked down a copy of the omnibus edition of Fort’s books, and read it, too, though it was borrowed.
At the training college, Boulton had loaned “Lo!” to about 15 staff and students by the middle of 1948; he had just the one copy, so it was in constant circulation. As expected, the reactions were various. Some students, he told Russell, were stunned—they would have to come back to Fort again years later, when they were more prepared. One student followed the path of his teacher and immediately sought out the complete collection of Fort’s books. (Since it was hard to obtain in England, he found it through an American uncle.) A teacher at a nearby woman’s school could not make up her mind: on first read, it was bunk, on second it was amazing—before she could undertake a third reading, Boulton demands did back so it could be loaned to others. Some complained about the style. (This complaint was a common one against Fort.) One science teacher neutered it by deeming “Lo!” as “amusing.” (Boulton knew he had to approach this teacher gently, so had earlier given him Gould’s “Oddities.”) Another science teacher thought the data intriguing but the interpretations useless—another common reaction.
Boulton considered himself a pure Fortean—but which he meant “I personally find Fort fascinating, but I am too good a Fortean to fall on my knees. His philosophical disquisitions please me immensely.” He wrote essays that he thought thoroughly intermediatist but that “owes nothing to Fort!” He resisted the idea of formally teaching Fort on Fortean grounds: “I rather feel that Fort would not insist on anything further, and might even agree that once he was imprisoned in a curricula, that would be the beginning of the end!”
In September 1947, he came across an advertisement for the Fortean Society in “Tomorrow” magazine (cover date, August). He wrote to Russell, then in Liverpool—he would later move to the Isle of Man, in the same county as Carlisle—asking for information. That same month—probably prompted by the same advertisement—he wrote to King, Littlewood, and King, which was importing the omnibus edition of Fort’s books into England, and got on the waiting list for a copy. Russell sent him two copies of Doubt and a Fortean Society pamphlet (probably “The Fortean Society is the Red Cross of the Human Mind.”) Boulton enjoyed the reading enough that he wrote to Russell asking how to get even more back issues. He also loaned out the pamphlet, which was nor returned, forcing him to ask for another, as well as help getting the complete works: by 20 January it had still not reached him. (As it happened, he received the book a few days later, without Russell’s intervention.)
By the middle of 1948, even as he taught and circulated “Lo!” (and sometimes the complete books) through the school as an underground legend, he also managed to obtain back issues of Doubt and read through them. He’d collected numbers 7, and 18-21, probably mostly through Russell, but also possibly through “Tomorrow.” He was interested enough to ask to continue to be on the mailing list, to continue to seek out the issues he’d missed, and to pony up one pound “just to be amiable,” but was resistant to becoming a member; and he had reservations about the Forteans he met in the pages of “Doubt”: “I tend to deplore the tendency of ^some Forteans—(But am I right here?!)—to treat classical ‘philosophy’ (which I should have thought was often sufficiently ‘intermediatist’ to satisfy even a Fortean orthodoxy!) as ‘bunk’: I should have thought for instance that Socrates and Fort were closely parallel forces.”
Russell reported his discovery to Thayer: a teacher spreading the word of Fort, getting to students before orthodoxy set in! Thayer had been hoping for just such a jackpot. Apparently, Russell shared some of Boulton’s letters with Thayer. (There seems to have been a more extensive correspondence between the two of them than is preserved in Russell’s papers at he University of Liverpool; perhaps Thayer did not return loaned copies, and so they were lost when Thayer’s Fortean archive was lost.) Late in 1948, Thayer told Russell, “Boulton slings a mean phrase. We’ll make him a member, and let him kick if he doesn’t like it.”
There seems to have been a gap in the correspondence of Boulton and the Fortean Society between 1948 and 1952. The lacuna does not indicate that Boulton had lost interest, though. He did become a member at some point. He continued to collect back issues of Doubt, buying issues 1-3, 6, 10-11, and 13 from Thayer in 1952 for $7.25 (or 2 pounds, 12 shillings), leaving him without only numbers 4 and 5. (The fourth issue of the magazine was incredibly rare, released only to the small number of members at the time.) He was still hunting down those two issues. He’d also read Russell’s Fortean story “Sinister Barrier,” which he called “smashing!” Again, there may have been some correspondence during this period, but there’s no mention of it in the letters Thayer wrote Russell or in “Doubt.”
For whatever reason, though, Russell mentioned something to Thayer about Boulton in the middle of 1952; Thayer was happy about whatever it was—and still happy they’d found a Fortean educator. “Boulton is supreme!,” he expostulated. “All good Forteans now bow three times in the direction of Carlisle at sun-rise every morning.” There was then a letter from Boulton to Russell in October, this on Creighton School letterhead, and what seems to be congratulations from Thayer a little later—as well as the suggestion that Boulton and Russell were carrying on their own correspondence: “Boulton is our nominee for King of the (remaining) Isles. On Dec. 12 he is lecturing the Prefects of Creighton School on FORT! I love him.”
The following year, 1953, was Boulton’s Fortean debutant ball. He was in correspondence with Thayer early in the year, asking for some copies of the Books of Charles Fort. Thayer seemed to be under the impression—but perhaps it was an affected confusion—that Fort would be taught at the school. He sent them along in April and wondered to Russell, “Only fancy, Fort to be used as a text in a school. Is this the beginning of the end?” It is clear that Boulton did not mean for the students to formally study Fort, but the request does imply that he was increasing the number of books he was loaning out, perhaps having stirred up interest with his December lecture.
In July’s Doubt (41), Thayer introduced him to the readership under the title “Our 99 Per Center,” playing as though he had not been excited about Boulton for a long time, perhaps forgetting his initial enthusiasm and collapsing time: “For some years the name of J. T. Boulton reposed in unassuming quietude upon the Fortean rolls—a sleeper!—a ‘possum!—a Tannhauser in Chips’ clothing! He fought no duels, he swam no Channels, he sent us no larvae picked up on a windless day, but—as suddenly as the Ides hit March—he burst his chrysalis and now stands at the had of the class, and the phrase is used advisedly. J. T. Boulton is the Head Master of the Creighton School, Carlisle, England.
“The first intimation we had of our member’s double life came from Russell who culled a page of what he called ‘Boultonisms’ from letters. Here they are, and you may well imagine our amazement.
“Genius: the highest human approach to common-sense”
“Duty: action not creditable in the commission but discreditable in the omission.
“How can one have the right to speak unless one is or has been mad? Unless there is a right to speak falsely, there is no right to speak. If there is a duty to speak truly, it is a duty to be dumb. To write these things I cannot but be naive, cannot but be sophisticated--yet true naïveté and true sophistication are one. There is no more than to say that Truth is One and contains All. Nevertheless, naïveté and sophistication remain different. For the matter of that, neither of them exist—that’s why there are names for them. Anything which has a name does not exist. That is why men have to give a name to it: to give it an existence for relative use.
“From the vantage point of love one best sees Hell. From the vantage-point of love one best bears Hell. From the vantage-point of Hell one best sees Love--but cannot bear it. The peculiar and distinctive feature of the denizens of Hell is their alternate rapt attention and rapt inattention to all heavenly matters; of the denizens of Heaven, their capacity to see Hell, and bearing it, and loving it.
“Either there is Truth and there you are, or there is no Truth. But if the second conclusion stands it must itself be an impregnable Truth. So that whether there is Truth or whether there is not Truth, there is still Truth.
“If spiritual problems are ever solved it is by the realization that they do not exist.
“I am one of the few Headmasters, I should imagine, who have read extracts from Fort at Morning Service!
“YS has not been the same man since.”
Thayer went on to recount how Boulton had lectured the prefects on Fort. He noted that Boulton wrote Fortean articles for the school paper and other publications, stirring up healthy debate. He told how Boulton imported a dozen copies of the complete books of Charles Fort, and Thayer asked if Fort was to be taught in the classes, and Boulton had answered that they were for the library and for top form reading during the last year—Fort would think anything more too confining. “Since that is exactly what Fort would have said, the pro-Boulton data keep piling up.” But Thayer was most happy with Boulton’s practice of culling Forteana from books—Thayer thought this a neglected resource for Forteans. Boulton had sent in a bit from Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man”,” criticizing anthropological reconstructions; many tidbits from “Commander Campbell’s Scrapbook,” which Thayer thought comparable to Gould’s books; the piece Thayer ran criticized science for being too reliant on authority, and too variable.
In the midst of this euphoria, Thayer said, “You will hear more of him, much more.” But that wasn’t true. Boulton’s Fortean coming-out party was also the high point of his Fortean career. There is a suggestion that the school’s politics may have been too blame, but it is also possible he just lost interest, or became overwhelmed with his duties. Already there had been what seem to be a four year gap between his original enthusiasm and his appearance in Doubt, which suggests that he perhaps liked to do his Forteanism in the relative quiet seclusion and small space of the school. It does seem that he remained interested in Fort and Forteana.
Boulton appeared only twice more in Doubt, the next time in the following issue, 42 (October 1953). The reference ran under the title “New Books” and continued listing the list started in 41 of Boulton’s recommended reading:
“Man or Matter” by Ernest Lehrs, which developed Goethe science with, according to Boulton, parallels to Fort. (Thayer noted as an aside that Fortean Faber Birren liked Goethe’s optics and recommended, as well, a pamphlet on Goethe’s color theory by the Fortean member Barthel.)
“Darwin is not for Children” which Boulton admitted was written from a religious perspective but was still readable by Forteans.
“Wisdom, Madness and Folly, The Philosophy of a Lunatic,” by John Custance.
“Birds as Individuals,” by Len Howard.
“King Solomon’s Rings,” by Konrad Lorenz.
“Mental Prodigies,” by Fred Barlow.
“Dead Cities and Forgotten Tribes,” by Gordon Cooper. It contained a chapter on the Nahanni Valley, which was the cite of the Fortean expedition, undertaken by C. Steven Bristol and others.
“My Occult Diary,” by Cornelius Tabori.
“In my Mind’s Eye,” by Frederick Marion.
“Yarns of the Seven Seas,” by A B. Campbell, which contained material on the Marie Celeste.
“Projection of the Astral Body,” by Sylvan J. Muldoon and Hereward Carrington.
Thayer said that the Society was selling the books for four dollars each, though there’s be a six-week wait. That the Society was selling these book may explain why this article, ostensibly extending Boulton’s list, got messy at the end and included two books that seem to have been the suggestion of Thayer alone. One was Martin Gardner’s “In the Name of Science”; the other was a biography of Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast,” by John Symonds.
In November of 1953, Thayer wrote to Russell, worried: “Have you heard from Boulton? I’ll bet he got the sack. Has not written to me since we ran his ad! But—guess what!—[Judith L.] Gee had him to tea!” Thayer was especially on tenterhooks because he’d written Boulton looking for the publishers of several of the books he’d recommended and needed if he wanted to sell them. Boulton did get back to him soon after that letter went out, though, with an answer to all but one of the publishers’s names. He also reported—as Thayer told Russell—“he was notbounqed, only fined and put in gaol (Reading) for a furtnt [sic: fortnight].” Probably a joke, then, referring a vacation, but Thayer made light of so many things it’s hard to know when he was serious.
The last mention of Boulton in the correspondence of the Fortean Society came in January 1954. Thayer was still looking for the publisher of “Yarns of the Seven Seas,” and berating himself for ever agreeing to sell the book. He begged Russell for the publisher, and clarified his earlier reference to Boulton’s mysterious whereabouts: “Boulton was not in gaol, only in Coventry (Patmore),” which again suggests he was only one vacation, but still leaves open the possibility, however remote, that it was a forced vacation. And more joking: Coventry is a city in England. Coventry Patmore was an English poet. (Coventry and Reading are about 80 miles apart, though, making it hard to gibe Thayer’s two reports.)
Boulton’s last mention in “Doubt” came a few months later, in April 1954. It was an acknowledgment in a long paragraph, presumably related to the column on fluoridation of water that preceded it. If this hypothesis is correct, then it is possible to speculate which clipping Boulton sent, since there was only one from England—and it suggests that Boulton may not have even been interested int he fluoridation controversy at all. The article told of an 11-week old baby that turned blue. Medical officials blamed the color change on nitrates in the water. Thayer—and perhaps Boulton—pointed out that the town’s name might also be a clue: Badwell Ash, in Suffolk. (For what it’s worth, etymological attempts to explain the name suggest, without reliable evidence, that the name does not refer to the town’s poor water source.)
Thus ended Boutlon’s public Fortean career. As I say, my inclination is to think of him as comfortably ensconced as headmaster, with little reason to continue his correspondence. The jackpot Thayer and Russell thought they had found did not pay out. Rather, Boulton continued, cozy, his own work. But if I am to think f him as a bug, it is because that reminds me one of Fort’s more striking images:
“But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unlike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both are then only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.”
Boulton may have been a bug—but then he was also cheese, hole-y cheese.
And, indeed, what is most visible in his story is not what is solid, but the holes: what is missing. The damned parts. Including, after 1954, his participation in the Fortean mysteries.
