To
many the name of Arthur Constance [born c.1891] will mean little if
anything. But the contribution he made to Ufology and other fields
should never be under estimated Albeit brief, I am hoping that this
article will rekindle an interest in this ‘lost’ researcher.
Born
c. 1891 to a poor Victoria, British Columbian family, Arthur’s
early life was fraught with many problems apart from what appears to
have been a rather unhappy childhood. To be poor in those days meant
real hardship. Following a number of bad educational experiences, at
the age of 11,Arthur began to educate himself. In the Winter of 1912,
aged 21 years and in deep despair, he contemplated suicide. But he
fought back with “youth and energy.”
Everything
from the natural world to science and technology fascinated him. In
1925 he began to collect data on all manner of unexplained things.
This made him a contemporary of Charles Hoy Fort, the so called
“Father of Fortean Research”.
In
the pre-war years of the 1930s Arthur set up and built a business in
London which provided him with a regular income between 1940-1949.
this meant he could devote all of his time to writing, having been a
freelance journalist since 1927,writing thousands of uncredited
articles, not unusual for that period. But his writing output in
that ten year period was staggering. He wrote 23 books totalling
nine million words –most still unpublished in 1959. The only thing
published from that period were four poems under the title A
Tetralogy, in 1951.
It
was also in 1951 that he began a career in broadcasting; starting
with a broadcast on BBC West Region Radio titled Poetry Without
Tears. This break came at a time when his financial situation had
become quite bad. Success on Radio led to more work and eventually
he had a show of his own on Radio Luxembourg,”Fantastically
Yours”.
The
semi biographical book, The
Glazier, was
published in 1956; a book many predicted would be a future minor
classic, though it seems to have sadly vanished completely. The next
book of Arthur’s to be published was The
Inexplicable Sky dealing
with flying saucers amongst other things, in 1957. This was
followed, in 1958, by The
Impenetrable Sea.
There were also a series of articles for The
Flying Saucer Review
under the title “This
Amazing Universe”.
Arthur
Constance was a famous, nationally recognised, expert on flying
saucers and in 1955, the British Flying Saucer Bureau’s Flying
Saucer News
[no.9,Summer,1955] wrote:
“Britain’s Number One
“Flying Saucer Detective”.
Many readers will have seen
the article in a recent
issue of The Sunday Dispatch featuring the
activities of
ARTHUR CONSTANCE
The well known journalist,
author and broadcaster, who has for
thirty years collected cuttings and books on “odd”
happenings and
“inexplicable” phenomena.
His library contains 16,000
reference books –and he has
two million press cuttings!
During May,Mr.Constance
visited the Air Ministry with his
18,000 word report on the “Meteor Incident” of March
24th
[reported in our
Stop Press last issue].
FLYING SAUCER NEWS has
secured, for next issue,an
EXCLUSIVE ARTICLE
with full documentation, maps,
sketches, etc.,by this veteran
researcher.”
On
page 16 of the same edition, is a reference to Arthur’s visit to
Bristol where he met and talked with the British Flying Saucer
Bureau/Flying Saucer Club Director of Research and Investigation, Mr
Graham F. N. Knewstub, and others. Mead Laynes “MAT/DEMAT”
theory was discussed and the BFSB/FSC offered to help as much as
possible with him on his new book.
The
“Ask Me Another”
radio show in which questions on every and any subject were fired at
contestants with only 10 seconds for an answer, was to go on tour.
As was his habit, Arthur crammed as much knowledge from books on all
subjects and in the evenings his wife became questioner; testing him
as far as possible. On Friday,9th
January,1959, at around Midnight, his wife was reading questions when
Arthur felt an “aching pain in my throat. At the same time a
beating began in my left ear –I could hear, quite loudly, the zzzz,
zzzz, zzzz of my heart.” Feeling exhausted he retired to bed but
next morning the condition was still there. It got worse and a visit
to his doctor led to a specialist. His health got worse, then better
as he struggled to type the stencils for his 28th
June, 1959 newsletter which eventually took months. All the time
financial worries grew worse though he hoped for a “miracle”.
Around
1959/60,David Jones and a friend had gone along to a meeting taking
place in Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire. The subject of the meeting was flying saucers and
the speaker Arthur Constance. David and his friend were quite
sceptical but by the end of the meeting they had “joined the fold”.
Jones helped to set up the Cheltenham Flying Saucer Group and edited
Saucer Forum, as well as assisting Constance on his “Fantastically
Yours” radio show.
David
Jones has help provide some information on the period and Arthur
–including photographs of the man himself.
Then,
in The Flying
Saucer Review
7/3,May-June,1961 [p.29],came a bombshell announcement:
“ARTHUR
CONSTANCE
We regret to announce the
death, in Cheltenham, on
March 15,of Arthur Constance, who used to
used to write regularly
for the Flying Saucer Review.
He
was a man of many parts and was well known
as author, broadcaster
and competition expert. Among his
published works was THE INEXPLICABLE SKY [1957],
which surveyed a whole range
of mysterious sky
phenomena and established him as an expert on flying
saucers on
both sides of the Atlantic. This was
followed by THE IMPENETRABLE
SEA, a companion volume
on the unsolved mysteries of the Oceans.
Perhaps
his greatest work,however,was THE GLAZIER
[1956],a study of his father’s
struggle against adversity.
Set
in Cheltenham, this biography revealed a great in-
tensity of feeling and
sympathy for his misunderstood
parent’s suffering;Arthur Constance explained
that he wrote
the work “in the white heat of remorse” in order
to vindicate the memory
of a man he felt he had
cruelly misjudged. THE GLAZIER was greeted with a
chorus of very high
literary acclaim,though it was admitted
that the book might have to be
rediscovered by a
subsequent generation before it could be fully
recognised
as a minor classic.”
At
the time of his death,Constance’s private library contained over
17,000 books on all subjects and a news cuttings archive of well
over 3,000,000 items. Just prior to his death,Arthur had asked
friends to disperse the items amongst themselves but even this meant
that an incredible amount was lost. Arthur had, since the age of 11
years,kept a diary –these were all lost. There were files and
notes, correspondence and so much more including, according to Graham
Knewstub, some “absolutely incredible flying saucer photographs”
–all gone.
When
I joined the British Flying Saucer Bureau in 1975,Arthur Constance
was still a legend. In 2006 it is my intention to try to find anyone
who knew or worked with Arthur and who might know where some of the
lost material has gone. The fear is that the majority of material
ended up in rubbish vans.
I
would like to thank David Jones for his invaluable help and,of
course, those photographic images.
