Ron's Underpants: a visit to Saint Hill
by Chris Owen
| From | co@romeo-klive.nvg.unit.no (Chris Owen) |
|---|---|
| Subject | Ron's Underpants: a visit to Saint Hill [part 3] |
| Date | 1996/11/12 |
| Msg-ID | <56an70$qfc@due.unit.no> |
| Newsgroups | alt.religion.scientology |
[Links added and URLs activated. -k]
(in the previous 2 parts I described my tour around Saint Hill Castle. This concluding part covers my visit to the Manor.)
Saint Hill Manor is quite a bit older than the castle. It's a large-ish Georgian house, built in the mid-18th century. Hubbard had bought it for about GBP 80,000 in 1959. (The modern price would be nearer the million-pound mark, allowing for inflation — though of course it's not likely to be sold!) Until the castle was built in the mid-1960s, the building was the nerve centre of the worldwide operations of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists (the emphasis was more on the secular in those days).
The building is nowadays preserved as something of a shrine to Hubbard, who lived and worked there with his family and a few hundred loyal staff between 1959-67. It is occasionally used for conferences, but otherwise the serious stuff takes place in the Castle.
I arrived at the Manor just in time to catch a tour around the place — three Italians (a girl Scientologist who'd brought her boyfriend and his friend along with her) were being shown the Monkey Room by one of the "L. Ron Hubbard Public Relations Officers". (I hope I got her post title right; it took me long enough to digest it…) The Monkey Room was created in the 1940s by John Spencer Churchill, artist and nephew of the wartime PM. It's a fascinating frieze, painted on cloth which lines the four walls and the doors. It shows a variety of monkey and apes (over 20 species, apparently) wearing what looked like Renaissance clothing and doing various leisure activities (painting, playing games etc.) One of the monkeys is clearly Winston Churchill, who's portrayed, in monkey guise, painting, wearing a stetson and with the characteristic cloud of cigar smoke hanging around him. During Hubbard's tenancy, the room was used as a playroom for his children.
I have to say that the Church of Scientology has done an excellent job of preserving it (and indeed the whole house) — the painting was restored a few years ago and a lot of money has clearly been spent on the building's upkeep.
We were shown the other rooms on the ground floor. There's a rather swish conservatory with a fine mid-19th century French piano, a lounge with a carpet deep enough to hide a tribe of pygmies and a rather immodest library — it contains nothing but row upon row of hundreds of Hubbard books and course materials. (Wouldn't he have got a bit bored reading his own stuff all the time?) In a few places around the house were cabinets full of (non-Hubbard) books — intriguingly, there were a lot on South Africa, the Boer War, etc. Russell Miller claims in Bare-Faced Messiah that Hubbard thought he was a reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes; be that as it may, he was clearly fascinated by southern Africa.
The two highlights of the house were, of course, Hubbard's office and bedroom. The office is a spacious though somewhat cluttered room with a rather incongruous Islamic fireplace facing the desk (a legacy of the previous owner, the Maharajah of Jaipur). LRH's mighty organs — all three of them — are clustered in one corner, where apparently he would relax by playing them simultaneously, one hand for each. Music books are still piled on top of them, just as he left them. (They even have the original prices written in l.s.d. on their covers.)
At the other end of the office is Hubbard's desk, with in and out trays and a green-ink copy of an HCO Policy Letter on Suppression, dated 1963, sitting in front of the leather-bound chair. Various other knickknacks and a row of telephones adorn the desk and a cabinet on the left-hand side. I took a "Ron's-eye-view" photo; when I get it developed, I'll scan it in and upload it somewhere. A telex stands on a table against one wall, which I took some interest in — it was the first one I'd ever seen, and was the means by which Ron exercised his control over worldwide Scientology.
The upper floor is occupied by the housekeeper, but I was able to visit Ron's bedroom — another extraordinary place. The bed was one of the most striking features of it: a large four-poster, with the deepest mattress I've ever seen (the sheets were nearly four feet off the ground, which put me in mind of those fairy stories about princesses and peas). A full-length mirror in one corner had a pith helmet draped carelessly over it, whilst a curious wooden object sat on top of a crate next to the wardrobe. "Can you guess what it is?", my guide asked. I had to admit I couldn't — it looked a bit like a coolie's hat but that was obviously the wrong answer. "It's the bowl which LRH used to pan for gold on Puerto Rico!!!", she exclaimed enthusiastically. And indeed, there on its base was a tape bearing the words: "PROPERTY OF L. RON HUBBARD". I told her the story about Ron appearing in a newspaper article looking at what was said to be a gold-bearing boulder in his back garden. Somewhat surprisingly, she hadn't heard that one — I'll have to dig up that article and send it to Saint Hill.
The Italians had by now gone, and night was falling outside (it was about 4.30 in the afternoon). I stayed a while to have a chat with my guide and an OSA staffer, Liz Nyegaard. I won't go into any details — a private conversation is a private conversation — but we discussed a wide range of things, such as the German situation, LRH, whether Scientology could ever come to an accommodation with its critics, dissemination in libraries, and others. Admittedly, they were the public face of the Church (both were PR officers), but they gave a very good account of themselves: reasonable, open (even frank), undogmatic. I am well aware that there's a dichotomy between that and some of the Church's internal proclamations. All the same, they came across very well, I thought.
One topic of conversation that I will touch on is Scientology's PR — obviously something of great interest to my hosts. I gave my opinion of the Church's efforts in this field, particularly with reference to the recent spate of bad publicity when the Dianetics advertising campaign was launched on satellite TV. I got the impression that the Church had been surprised and somewhat dismayed by the deluge of criticism from the media. The Press Association's headline was spot on — "Scientology backed by critics but dogged by suspicion" — which, in the UK at least, is a residual effect of the 1968-80 immigration ban and the 1984 Latey judgement. (A thought occurred to me afterwards: as the media are clearly guilty of suppressive acts under the terms of "Introduction to Scientology Ethics", this means that the media are clearly suppressives. The readers of newspapers (which means the bulk of the population) are therefore Potential Trouble Sources, or PTS. Does this mean that the Church of Scientology must "disconnect" from society?)
I made the point that Scientology-based PR simply won't work if people don't understand the point that's been made. A case in point (which I cited) was Heber Jentzsch's role in the live BBC Newsnight discussion on 17th September. This quote comes directly from the transcript which I found at http://www.avalon.demon.co.uk/nnite2.htm — Ian Hayworth is a spokesman for the Cult Information Centre and Heber (here referred to as HJ) is the President of the Church of Scientology International:
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Ian Hayworth: "What I'm involved in is handling the calls, picking up the pieces associated with families that call us [HJ: "Who pays you?"] because of the problems created by scientology [HJ: "Who pays you?"] and other organisations [HJ: "Who pays you?"] and a disproportionate number of the calls come from people like um… that have been involved in scientology."
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Now, Heber's comments are entirely comprehensible if one puts them in a Hubbardian context — LRH clearly states that people attack Scientology because they have "withholds" (sins, loosely) which they fear will be found out by Scientologists. The Board of the now-defunct Cult Awareness Network (CAN), for instance, are claimed to have been covering up paedophile activities before these were found out by a Scientology investigation. Whether or not you accept the idea that, as someone once put it, "critics of Scientology always have dishonourable motives", the concept is a precisely-defined one and Heber is following it to the letter. What Heber is saying here is, "You're opposed to Scientology, so you must have grubby motives — who's paying you to do it?".
I understand that (even if I don't agree with it) because I have a fairly good working knowledge of Hubbard's ideas. If everyone who watched that interview had a similar grasp of the underlying concept, they'd see the reasoning behind it too. But what is the average Newsnight viewer going to think of this application of "LRH technology"? He's going to see an elderly American hurling abuse at an opponent and, as he doesn't have any inkling of what's going on, he'll ascribe it to the general nastiness of Scientology that's mentioned so much in the media. A point I made was that Scientology has been so extensively criticised that people no longer look for good in it, but the first bad thing they see is taken as proof positive of all the criticism that has been made of it. Mud sticks on rough edges!
In short, I basically said that Scientology PR at times seems to assume that the general public is entirely conversant with the concepts underlying the message. (It's an easy mistake to make in any profession — I made it often enough in my days as a historian.) In Scientology terms, there's a certain amount of Affinity, a lot of Communication but often not much Reality. And as Ron said, you only get effective communication if you have all three corners of the triangle in place. What the Church does with my opinions, I don't know and probably won't ever know; but if there's to be an honest debate on Scientology, the Church really does need to overcome the general grubbiness of its image in the UK, and this (IMHO) can only be done by its representatives coming over as wholly sympathetic.
As I left the Manor to get the train back to London, I was given a complimentary copy of a beautifully-bound book, "Ron: A Lifetime in Pictures", which has just come out. It made a very interesting read, particular as it's a forerunner of the forthcoming official biography of L. Ron Hubbard (to be released next year; I'll discuss this in another post). My sincere thanks go to my hosts at the Manor and the staff at the Castle, who made it a fascinating and very rewarding visit.
I would recommend that UK readers try to fit in a visit to Saint Hill — you'll be treated well, you'll have an interesting time and see interesting things and, if you make it clear that you don't want to sign up to something here and now, you won't be overly pressurised into handing over the readies. (Of course, this shouldn't be read as a discouragement from signing up to Scientology courses, but — given the effectiveness of Scientology salesmanship — be sure beforehand that you want to spend money.) I enjoyed the afternoon I spent there, at any rate, and I think others would have too.
Finally, what of my opinions of Scientology? Has a visit to the Manor changed them? I'll discuss this at a future date, but suffice to say that, although it has changed them to a minor extent, it has helped to confirm my fundamental opinions — quite a few of which are a long distance from the apparently prevailing opinion on this newsgroup (ooh, controversy!). I don't have the time or energy to go further into this for now (finger thetans acting up…), but I hope this three-part "travelogue" has been of interest to the folks out there.