Foreword - By Colin Wilson
It was in Hastings, in the Summer of 1965, that I first made the acquaintance of the work of Michael Harrison. It was at the end of a heavy week of journalistic and lecture assignments, and I still had to give a lecture and seminar on existentialism to a class of foreign students.
I was beginning to feel tired and sorry for myself. Long periods away from home always produce this effect; I begin to suffer from 'people poisoning', and even places oppress me.
I long to be back home, sitting in front of the fire with a book. In this mood, I make straight for the nearest second-hand bookshop. In Hastings I was lucky;
I've found many long-sought volumes in the Howes Bookshop, near the seafront. It was there that I found a book with the promising title of London by Gaslight, a history of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, from 1861 to 1911.
I have the book by me now as I write, and it still falls open at page 133, an account of the strange series of occurrences known as 'the Vanishings' that occurred in 1881, seven years before the Jack the Ripper murders. This is the paragraph on which my eye lighted:
'The strange aspect of the disappearances, which were mostly centred about the London districts of East Ham and West Ham, was the absence of what we may call an "age pattern". Young girls, young boys, middle-aged men and elderly women - all appeared to be equally acceptable to whoever - or whatever - was whipping the victims away ..."
I can think of no paragraph better designed to make the casual browser read on. I did - throughout the weekend and my journey back to Cornwall.
Incidentally, I have never been able to find any more on the Vanishings, although I have looked and enquired fairly hard.
My old friend Harold Visiak, who was alive at the time of the Vanishings, told me that there was an account of them in Charles Fort; but I've never been able to find it. Apart from this, there is only (as far as I know), a chapter in a book by Elliott O'Donnell called, I think, Strange Disappearances,
There were nine vanishings in nine years; one might suspect Jack the Ripper, except that in the few cases where the victim's body was recovered (one in an empty house, one at the foot of cliffs at Ramsgate) there were certainly no characteristic Ripper mutilations; in fact, the body at the foot of the cliff bore no sign of injury, and the autopsy revealed no cause of death. Modern Flying Saucer enthusiasts will see all the signs of Aliens from outer space ...
