A magpie Fortean.
Leslie Alan Shepard was born 21 June 1917 in West Ham, London—about two-and-a-half years before the publication of Fort’s first book. I do not know who his parents were, but according to obituaries he did not come from a privileged background—“genteel poor,” he said to one acquaintance, much later. He finished only an elementary education. As a youth, he was infatuated with Charles Kingsley’s collection of Greek myths. He left school at fourteen to become a library assistant but, finding no opening, studied shorthand, typing, and book-keeping, eventually taking a job as an office boy at an asbestos factory. By the time he was 20—so in 1937—he’d developed asbestosis.
Shepard had been interested in cinema since he was a child, and in 1941, he joined Paul Rotha Productions, where he worked in the cutting room. With the outbreak of World War II, he declared himself a conscientious objector, on general humanitarian grounds; he worked with the Civil Defence, carrying stretchers, instead. Also during the war, he worked with the Ministry of Information making regular newsreels. After the Axis powers were defeated, Shepard was a founder of Data Film Productions, serving on its board from 1945 to 1948. Around this time, he also went to work helping produce another regular news film, “Mining Review,” for the National Coal Board. Later, the Central Office of Information employed him to make documentaries.
Leslie Alan Shepard was born 21 June 1917 in West Ham, London—about two-and-a-half years before the publication of Fort’s first book. I do not know who his parents were, but according to obituaries he did not come from a privileged background—“genteel poor,” he said to one acquaintance, much later. He finished only an elementary education. As a youth, he was infatuated with Charles Kingsley’s collection of Greek myths. He left school at fourteen to become a library assistant but, finding no opening, studied shorthand, typing, and book-keeping, eventually taking a job as an office boy at an asbestos factory. By the time he was 20—so in 1937—he’d developed asbestosis.
Shepard had been interested in cinema since he was a child, and in 1941, he joined Paul Rotha Productions, where he worked in the cutting room. With the outbreak of World War II, he declared himself a conscientious objector, on general humanitarian grounds; he worked with the Civil Defence, carrying stretchers, instead. Also during the war, he worked with the Ministry of Information making regular newsreels. After the Axis powers were defeated, Shepard was a founder of Data Film Productions, serving on its board from 1945 to 1948. Around this time, he also went to work helping produce another regular news film, “Mining Review,” for the National Coal Board. Later, the Central Office of Information employed him to make documentaries.
While working for the coal industry, Shepard collected folk songs sung by the miners; he had long been interested in music and, like film, it would become the locus of one of his obsessions. He learned to play guitar. He collected musical instruments. He made documentaries on folk singers. And he collected folk songs, becoming something of an expert on the subject. Apparently related to this hobby was Shepard’s interest in so-called street literature—broadsides and the like—which also grew out of a childhood interest, in this case buying obscure books he found for sale while out wandering London. His first book was 1962’s “The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning.” Street Literature became another subject in which he was expert.
In 1953, his asbestosis was so bad that doctors supposedly thought he would die soon. He went to Switzerland to recover—and did so; there, he discovered yoga and Indian philosophy, He would spend a year—in 1958—at an Indian ashram on the Ganges, further studying yoga (it would become a lifelong practice). Yoga seems to have led him to the occult and esoteric subjects, which became another enthusiasm, which he followed even as he continued busy with his documentary film work, studies of ballads, practicing yoga, and making and collecting music. He joined the Fairy Investigation Society. He read and research Bram Stoker. He also had interested in clairvoyance, UFOs, reincarnation, telepathy, and teleportation. In 1959, he and some colleagues tried to follow the Viking route to North America aboard a 28-foot cutter, but failed.
By the mid-1960s, Shepard was also involved with publishing. He was London editor for the New York-based University Books, writing front matter for more than 70 tomes; he worked for the Gale Research Company, too, as an editor and researcher. These associations resulted in more popular publishing: “The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories,” which he edited in 1977, and which came out in various editions over the years; and a thorough revision of Lewis Spence’s “Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology,” published by Gale in 1978. (The Fortean Nandor Fodor also contributed to earlier versions.) By this time Shepard was living in ireland, having relocated there around 1969, apparently in part to deepen his research into Stoker. These avocations kept him busy into the early 1990s, when he was waylaid by poor health, though he recovered in time and got back to his interests.
Leslie Alan Shepard died 20 August 2004. He was 87.
*************************
Biographies of Shepard—such as they are—date his interest in the occult and esoteric knowledge to his time recuperating in Switzerland, and it does seem to be the case that he discovered Fort around that time, making him something of a late adopter, at least in terms of those who joined the original Fortean Society. Reading between the lines, it seems that he heard about Fort in 1953 or 1954, and was in correspondence with Tiffany Thayer before he made an acquaintance with Fort’s books; that acquaintance came in very early 1955. He bragged to Thayer, on 15 January, “Today I became the proud possessor of my own copy of ‘THE BOOKS OF CHARLES FORT,’ and I am writing immediately to thank you and the Society for making this magnificent omnibus edition possible. Naturally it is expensive on this side of the Atlantic, and somewhat difficult to obtain. Nevertheless I now hope to find you new customers.”
As excited as Shepard was about owning the Books—and it was both difficult and expensive to find them in Britain at the time, with post-war restrictions on importation of books in place—he looked side-eyed on the Society itself—it took Thayer a while to win him as a member—and seems to have continued to do so for many years. He continued in his letter to Thayer, “I am not yet sure that I want to do anything so conventional as joining a Fortean Society, nevertheless I can see you must have done noble work, and I am interested in your mention of a Magazine. If I get some International Reply Coupons and forward them you may like to send me a copy.”
Judging by the rest of the letter, Shepard was knee-deep in fringe science by this point, yoga having opened up a whole new world to him: “I have been doing some research on JOHN WORRELL KEELY, and have even found a shareholder in his defunct Keely Motor Company. (I am sure the late Mr. Fort would approve my conclusion that Keely was a charlatan after all, because he seems to have been a most unusual kind of charlatan . . .). I am also somewhat interested in Flying Saucers, Radiesthesia and Cloudbusting—so far as labels mean anything. I have developed a kind of Psychotherapy which is neither lay or professional—or indeed ‘psychotherapy’ for that matter. But no matter. I work (we are on safe ground here) as a documentary film writer, director and editor, and am therefore classed amongst the world’s eclectics. I have been more impressed and stimulated by Mr. Fort’s books than I can express in this letter.”
Thayer replied a couple weeks later. He continued to insist that the books should be easy to get in Britain—against all evidence, seemingly because he had set up the system and expected it to work. He did know, however, that joining the Society was easy because payment could be sent to Russell, obviating any need for exchanging currency. And, he reassured, becoming a member was not conventional in the least; most Fortean members had joined no other group in their lives, he said—which may or may not have been exactly accurate (the evidence is difficult to judge) but certainly undersold how many Forteans were, indeed, also members of other groups.
Shepard broke the next month. He joined, becoming member 2618, and paying through 1959. Back in January, Shepard noted he lived near Fort’s old London haunting grounds, at 39 Marchmont. He had gone out there since then and seen that the building was uninhabitable, destroyed by the war. Shepard also mentioned that he had material he wanted to contribute—as one would expect of someone who collected so diligently in such a wide array of areas—but wanted to sort it out first. There’s no reason to disbelieve him on this; most likely, it seems, that as he started to read “Doubt,” Shepard’s skepticism toward the Society increased: there was a vast gulf between Fort’s book’s and Thayer’s Society.
At any rate, he only ever appeared once in the pages of Doubt. It could be that Thayer just didn’t like Shepard’s other contributions enough to run with them, but that seems somewhat unlikely, given that his only contribution was Thayer’s second favorite of the magazine, behind only something given to Thayer by his own wife, and that it encapsulated so much of Thayer’s version of Forteanism. Doubt 49 (August 1955) carried a wire story Shepard had sent in about a woman in Copenhagen whose laugh made her phone stop working; technicians had invented a complex scientific explanation for the phenomena, but the phone company wanted her to stop laughing while on the phone. In a short compass, the tale spanned two of the Society’s obsessions: ridiculous scientific explanations, and the insistence that natural human impulses be cut to fit the needs of business and technology.
Shepard’s name appeared several times in the correspondence between Thayer and Russell, but it was all routine: Thayer announcing to Russell that Shepard had joined the Society, and that bookkeeping references so that Shepard was credited as having paid. The only letter I have found between Shepard and Russell came in 1961, when Shepard wrote asking what had happened to the Society? He hadn’t heard from it since leaving for India, and he wanted to know if he could get back on the mailing list, or if he had missed something. Indeed, he had: Thayer died in August 1959, and the Society with it.
Shepard’s enthusiasm for Fort, though, did not pass: his Forteanism was never fully captured by the Society, and looking at the pages of “Doubt,” one would underestimate his connection to Fort. Somehow, Damon Knight, the science fiction writer, got in contact with him while he was writing a biography of Charles Fort; this was in the late 1960s, and it is because of Knight keeping xeroxes of Shepard’s correspondence with Thayer that we know something of how Shepard discovered Fort and the Society. The exact causality is not clear, but it is either the case that Knight fond out about Shepard through a later iteration of a Fortean society, the International Fortean Organization—or Knight alerted Shepard to the existence of INFO. Either way, Shepard took his Forteanism there. I am reminded of Sid Birchby, another London Fortean, who dropped away for a time, but came roaring back in the 1970s. Shepard came back to INFO and would also substantially re-write that standard Fortean reference, Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occultism.
Admittedly, though, this last connection between Shepard and organized Forteanism is sketchy. I have not seen Shepard’s name in any of the early issues of the INFO Journal—doesn’t mean he didn’t contribute, just that I didn't notice. And the one bit of firm evidence I have has a provenance unknown to me. There’s an anonymous entry on the website Jot101 that has a photocopy of something that Shepard wrote, presumably for INFO Journal, in 1974. It is titled “Fort in the British Isles” and the piece posted on the website is incomplete:
“It gets about as difficult to say something fresh about Charles Fort as the annual Burns Night problem of finding a new angle on the great Scottish poet! (Incidentally I remember my joy at finding a book that vindicated Burns as an exciseman and quite incidentally a poet!)
“Fort was such a supreme innovator that his celebrated Books have been treasure-trove in many different areas of life and thought, but often the Books themselves are not as well known as the secondary works which they have stimulated, A whole school of science-action writers has used his material and adapted his colorful prose style, and as you all know, Fort launched Ufology—although I can imagine he would smile sardonically at some of its present day excesses.
“Outside the U.S.A, Fort is nil not known as widely as he deserved, although there is a flourishing UFO movement, and much of the fiction written on Fortean themes has been eagerly devoured. A pioneer of Forteana in Britain has been Eric Frank Russell. Most sci-fi fans in this part of the world know Russell’s stories, although not so many have studied the Books of Charles Fort. I found a greater ignorance when I moved to Southern Ireland, where I have yet to meet anyone who has even heard of Fort!
“Some years back, Tiffany Thayer and Eric Frank Russell secured a few members for the Fortean Society in Britain. I was one of them, and enjoyed those early numbers of Doubt until the latter period, when its skepticism became almost paranoid, to the extent of suggesting that reports of successful space travel might be an elaborate hoax. This sort of thing eventually became tedious, since true Fortean skepticism is reserved for scientific dogma, not true science, and there is a point at which extreme and invincible skepticism can be more dogmatic than dogmatic science. I must, however, congratulate Paul Willis for creating in INFO a worthy successor to Doubt, with all the latter’s merits and none of its faults.
“Many of Fort’s famous forty thousand notes owed much to the British Museum, London, where he accumulated so many of his ‘damned facts’ during . . .”
And there is trails off.
The essay shows some of the tricks of memory—this would have been written some two decades after Shepard joined the Society. Thayer’s extreme skepticism was on display throughout Doubt’s run and periodically caused other Forteans to make the same complain as Shepard: that his skepticism was as dogmatic as any scientists’s. He almost blew the whole Society up in 1942 when he accused bankers and governments in conspiring to put on World War II. In the late 1940s, he peeved off the San Francisco branch of the Society, prompting one member, Robert Barbour Johnson, to write an essay attacking Thayer that would later run in Paul Willis’s ‘zine “Anubis.” Thayer’s dismissal of Sputnik as yet another hoax came in 1957, only two years after Shepard joined, and two years before the Society would end; it provoked outrage from Eric Frank Russell.
Shepard did not see many issues of Doubt after that one, if any, at least not immediately. He told Russell that he had received nothing from the Society from 1958 on; and, anyway, he was in India during most of that time. There seems plenty of reason to think that Shepard was skeptical of the Society from the ver beginning—starting with his initial coy refusal to join—but he liked it enough that he wrote to Russell in 1961 looking to get the magazine delivered again: so Thayer’s hating on Sputnik wasn’t quite enough to drive Shepard from the old of the Fortean Society. And certainly, based on his praise of Willis, INFO, and Fort, not enough to drive him from Forteanism tout court.
Like many Forteans, he appreciated that Thayer provided a place to hear the views of other eccentrics and eclectics—but they often resented him nonetheless.
In 1953, his asbestosis was so bad that doctors supposedly thought he would die soon. He went to Switzerland to recover—and did so; there, he discovered yoga and Indian philosophy, He would spend a year—in 1958—at an Indian ashram on the Ganges, further studying yoga (it would become a lifelong practice). Yoga seems to have led him to the occult and esoteric subjects, which became another enthusiasm, which he followed even as he continued busy with his documentary film work, studies of ballads, practicing yoga, and making and collecting music. He joined the Fairy Investigation Society. He read and research Bram Stoker. He also had interested in clairvoyance, UFOs, reincarnation, telepathy, and teleportation. In 1959, he and some colleagues tried to follow the Viking route to North America aboard a 28-foot cutter, but failed.
By the mid-1960s, Shepard was also involved with publishing. He was London editor for the New York-based University Books, writing front matter for more than 70 tomes; he worked for the Gale Research Company, too, as an editor and researcher. These associations resulted in more popular publishing: “The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories,” which he edited in 1977, and which came out in various editions over the years; and a thorough revision of Lewis Spence’s “Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology,” published by Gale in 1978. (The Fortean Nandor Fodor also contributed to earlier versions.) By this time Shepard was living in ireland, having relocated there around 1969, apparently in part to deepen his research into Stoker. These avocations kept him busy into the early 1990s, when he was waylaid by poor health, though he recovered in time and got back to his interests.
Leslie Alan Shepard died 20 August 2004. He was 87.
*************************
Biographies of Shepard—such as they are—date his interest in the occult and esoteric knowledge to his time recuperating in Switzerland, and it does seem to be the case that he discovered Fort around that time, making him something of a late adopter, at least in terms of those who joined the original Fortean Society. Reading between the lines, it seems that he heard about Fort in 1953 or 1954, and was in correspondence with Tiffany Thayer before he made an acquaintance with Fort’s books; that acquaintance came in very early 1955. He bragged to Thayer, on 15 January, “Today I became the proud possessor of my own copy of ‘THE BOOKS OF CHARLES FORT,’ and I am writing immediately to thank you and the Society for making this magnificent omnibus edition possible. Naturally it is expensive on this side of the Atlantic, and somewhat difficult to obtain. Nevertheless I now hope to find you new customers.”
As excited as Shepard was about owning the Books—and it was both difficult and expensive to find them in Britain at the time, with post-war restrictions on importation of books in place—he looked side-eyed on the Society itself—it took Thayer a while to win him as a member—and seems to have continued to do so for many years. He continued in his letter to Thayer, “I am not yet sure that I want to do anything so conventional as joining a Fortean Society, nevertheless I can see you must have done noble work, and I am interested in your mention of a Magazine. If I get some International Reply Coupons and forward them you may like to send me a copy.”
Judging by the rest of the letter, Shepard was knee-deep in fringe science by this point, yoga having opened up a whole new world to him: “I have been doing some research on JOHN WORRELL KEELY, and have even found a shareholder in his defunct Keely Motor Company. (I am sure the late Mr. Fort would approve my conclusion that Keely was a charlatan after all, because he seems to have been a most unusual kind of charlatan . . .). I am also somewhat interested in Flying Saucers, Radiesthesia and Cloudbusting—so far as labels mean anything. I have developed a kind of Psychotherapy which is neither lay or professional—or indeed ‘psychotherapy’ for that matter. But no matter. I work (we are on safe ground here) as a documentary film writer, director and editor, and am therefore classed amongst the world’s eclectics. I have been more impressed and stimulated by Mr. Fort’s books than I can express in this letter.”
Thayer replied a couple weeks later. He continued to insist that the books should be easy to get in Britain—against all evidence, seemingly because he had set up the system and expected it to work. He did know, however, that joining the Society was easy because payment could be sent to Russell, obviating any need for exchanging currency. And, he reassured, becoming a member was not conventional in the least; most Fortean members had joined no other group in their lives, he said—which may or may not have been exactly accurate (the evidence is difficult to judge) but certainly undersold how many Forteans were, indeed, also members of other groups.
Shepard broke the next month. He joined, becoming member 2618, and paying through 1959. Back in January, Shepard noted he lived near Fort’s old London haunting grounds, at 39 Marchmont. He had gone out there since then and seen that the building was uninhabitable, destroyed by the war. Shepard also mentioned that he had material he wanted to contribute—as one would expect of someone who collected so diligently in such a wide array of areas—but wanted to sort it out first. There’s no reason to disbelieve him on this; most likely, it seems, that as he started to read “Doubt,” Shepard’s skepticism toward the Society increased: there was a vast gulf between Fort’s book’s and Thayer’s Society.
At any rate, he only ever appeared once in the pages of Doubt. It could be that Thayer just didn’t like Shepard’s other contributions enough to run with them, but that seems somewhat unlikely, given that his only contribution was Thayer’s second favorite of the magazine, behind only something given to Thayer by his own wife, and that it encapsulated so much of Thayer’s version of Forteanism. Doubt 49 (August 1955) carried a wire story Shepard had sent in about a woman in Copenhagen whose laugh made her phone stop working; technicians had invented a complex scientific explanation for the phenomena, but the phone company wanted her to stop laughing while on the phone. In a short compass, the tale spanned two of the Society’s obsessions: ridiculous scientific explanations, and the insistence that natural human impulses be cut to fit the needs of business and technology.
Shepard’s name appeared several times in the correspondence between Thayer and Russell, but it was all routine: Thayer announcing to Russell that Shepard had joined the Society, and that bookkeeping references so that Shepard was credited as having paid. The only letter I have found between Shepard and Russell came in 1961, when Shepard wrote asking what had happened to the Society? He hadn’t heard from it since leaving for India, and he wanted to know if he could get back on the mailing list, or if he had missed something. Indeed, he had: Thayer died in August 1959, and the Society with it.
Shepard’s enthusiasm for Fort, though, did not pass: his Forteanism was never fully captured by the Society, and looking at the pages of “Doubt,” one would underestimate his connection to Fort. Somehow, Damon Knight, the science fiction writer, got in contact with him while he was writing a biography of Charles Fort; this was in the late 1960s, and it is because of Knight keeping xeroxes of Shepard’s correspondence with Thayer that we know something of how Shepard discovered Fort and the Society. The exact causality is not clear, but it is either the case that Knight fond out about Shepard through a later iteration of a Fortean society, the International Fortean Organization—or Knight alerted Shepard to the existence of INFO. Either way, Shepard took his Forteanism there. I am reminded of Sid Birchby, another London Fortean, who dropped away for a time, but came roaring back in the 1970s. Shepard came back to INFO and would also substantially re-write that standard Fortean reference, Lewis Spence’s Encyclopedia of Occultism.
Admittedly, though, this last connection between Shepard and organized Forteanism is sketchy. I have not seen Shepard’s name in any of the early issues of the INFO Journal—doesn’t mean he didn’t contribute, just that I didn't notice. And the one bit of firm evidence I have has a provenance unknown to me. There’s an anonymous entry on the website Jot101 that has a photocopy of something that Shepard wrote, presumably for INFO Journal, in 1974. It is titled “Fort in the British Isles” and the piece posted on the website is incomplete:
“It gets about as difficult to say something fresh about Charles Fort as the annual Burns Night problem of finding a new angle on the great Scottish poet! (Incidentally I remember my joy at finding a book that vindicated Burns as an exciseman and quite incidentally a poet!)
“Fort was such a supreme innovator that his celebrated Books have been treasure-trove in many different areas of life and thought, but often the Books themselves are not as well known as the secondary works which they have stimulated, A whole school of science-action writers has used his material and adapted his colorful prose style, and as you all know, Fort launched Ufology—although I can imagine he would smile sardonically at some of its present day excesses.
“Outside the U.S.A, Fort is nil not known as widely as he deserved, although there is a flourishing UFO movement, and much of the fiction written on Fortean themes has been eagerly devoured. A pioneer of Forteana in Britain has been Eric Frank Russell. Most sci-fi fans in this part of the world know Russell’s stories, although not so many have studied the Books of Charles Fort. I found a greater ignorance when I moved to Southern Ireland, where I have yet to meet anyone who has even heard of Fort!
“Some years back, Tiffany Thayer and Eric Frank Russell secured a few members for the Fortean Society in Britain. I was one of them, and enjoyed those early numbers of Doubt until the latter period, when its skepticism became almost paranoid, to the extent of suggesting that reports of successful space travel might be an elaborate hoax. This sort of thing eventually became tedious, since true Fortean skepticism is reserved for scientific dogma, not true science, and there is a point at which extreme and invincible skepticism can be more dogmatic than dogmatic science. I must, however, congratulate Paul Willis for creating in INFO a worthy successor to Doubt, with all the latter’s merits and none of its faults.
“Many of Fort’s famous forty thousand notes owed much to the British Museum, London, where he accumulated so many of his ‘damned facts’ during . . .”
And there is trails off.
The essay shows some of the tricks of memory—this would have been written some two decades after Shepard joined the Society. Thayer’s extreme skepticism was on display throughout Doubt’s run and periodically caused other Forteans to make the same complain as Shepard: that his skepticism was as dogmatic as any scientists’s. He almost blew the whole Society up in 1942 when he accused bankers and governments in conspiring to put on World War II. In the late 1940s, he peeved off the San Francisco branch of the Society, prompting one member, Robert Barbour Johnson, to write an essay attacking Thayer that would later run in Paul Willis’s ‘zine “Anubis.” Thayer’s dismissal of Sputnik as yet another hoax came in 1957, only two years after Shepard joined, and two years before the Society would end; it provoked outrage from Eric Frank Russell.
Shepard did not see many issues of Doubt after that one, if any, at least not immediately. He told Russell that he had received nothing from the Society from 1958 on; and, anyway, he was in India during most of that time. There seems plenty of reason to think that Shepard was skeptical of the Society from the ver beginning—starting with his initial coy refusal to join—but he liked it enough that he wrote to Russell in 1961 looking to get the magazine delivered again: so Thayer’s hating on Sputnik wasn’t quite enough to drive Shepard from the old of the Fortean Society. And certainly, based on his praise of Willis, INFO, and Fort, not enough to drive him from Forteanism tout court.
Like many Forteans, he appreciated that Thayer provided a place to hear the views of other eccentrics and eclectics—but they often resented him nonetheless.
