Tavistock - My Research

The Tavistock Agenda - how deep does it go? The UK Illuminati Coup - A personal perspective

It is fairly common knowledge that those perpetrating mind control experiments have been overheard to suggest that those affected would be left with the impression that they had been subjected to an ET abduction. (Martin Cannon). (I don't agree with everything Canon about says but I found his article food for thought - very informative.)

Also it's been documented that during early research on the brain they discovered they could (and did) produce a religious experience in the subject. 

And we don't have to look far to find out that massive experiments were carried out on the population.

UK experiments on population revealed  (The Observer)

Whilst it seems pretty clear that people do have spontaneous positive spiritual experiences and encounters with extra-planetary/multi-dimensional intelligent beings, this aspect does 'muddy the waters' somewhat.

When I read about Tavistock  and the dumbing down and distraction of the population that it aspired to I realised I hadn't got a clue about the biggest and closest  Psyop  to the UK - The Northern Ireland troubles  despite the fact that my father in law was the first head of RTE News during 'The Troubles' in the late 60's and early 70′s who decided how news would be presented on Irish Television.  

"The (1970s) situation in Northern Ireland - a guerilla war inside the UK - brought 'low intensity operations' (Frank Kitson's anodyne phrase) to the fore and a number of conferences were arranged at which British counter-insurgency experts spread the message: it might happen on the mainland UK, and what are we going to do about it when it does? " 

Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978"  

There was talk in the British media of unethical treatment referring to what in fact has all the hall marks of mind control experimentation.  The H block protesters were desperately trying to communicate the horrors they were being subjected to, and were so affected that they eventually smeared their own cell walls with excrement in a bid to attract attention and publicity.  When even this didn't lead to respect of their human rights they went on hunger strike  - some to the death. (The Guinea Pigs, John McGuffin) (other chapters available here)

"The Government must promote its own cause and undermine that of the enemy by.... a carefully planned and co-ordinated campaign of psychological operations. There is of course an element of truth in the idea that an effective domestic intelligence system could be used to jeopardise the freedom of the individual. Under an authoritarian regime, freedom of the individual is not particularly relevant." - Brigadier FRANK KITSON 

In the article "United States, Canada, Britain: Partners in Mind Control Operations" by Armen Victorian (1996) the author describes how Frank Kitson was one of the organisers of psyops courses that included the demonstration and use of sensory deprivation. He explains how these were kept secret until they were admitted to by Robert Brown, the UK Army Minister in 1976. These were held at Old Sarum, UK and according to British Government figures up to 1976 262 civilians and 1858 Army officers had taken these courses.

Research into sensory deprivation was taking place when I arrived in London in January 1974, I know this because London School of Economics students in the flat I stayed in were taking part as volunteers.

Meanwhile in Wales two scientists had been setting up an acid factory helped by the mysterious CIA Operative Ronald Hadley Stark who counted being a chemist and speaking 10 languages amongst his skills. They were also funding the free festivals.

"'In fact, LSD is a European export to America. The drug was discovered in Switzerland, the British pioneered LSD psychotherapy and military tests, and much of the counter-culture's underlying philosophy stems from British expatriates such as Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. On a more fundamental level, at certain times, the bulk of the world's LSD was manufactured in Britain.'" Albion Dreaming - Author Andy Roberts

The acid production and distribution was allowed to happen on a massive scale whilst Inspector ‘Leapy’ Lee was stalled and prevented from investigating the acid factory for two years despite mounting clear evidence that millions of doses of acid were being exported from the UK as well as flooding the UK itself . It would be two years before he was eventually given the go-ahead to lead Operation Julie, and bust the operation.

The CIA/Tavistock manipulators had been preparing to replace LSD with the Electro Magnetic brainwave influencing devices designed to control behaviour, however it may be that official tolerance for LSD was withdrawn both in the UK and US as it became apparent that the results were in fact leading to a consciousness awakening that was beyond their control.

The early CIA sanctioned distributors were brought to a halt and Timothy Leary was jailed, however Leary was eventually sprung from jail by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love which is a whole other aspect to this stranger-than-fiction narrative.

It becomes clear that the 1970′s Free Festival Movement itself may have been co-opted and contrived as a Psy-Op where CIA’s MKULTRA program was rolled out, extending the scope of their experimentation. Amongst other things the early free festivals offered the opportunity for experimenting with a larger social group in controllable situations.

Helicopter surveillance and data collection (crowd photos and car number plates) were a prominent feature of all the 1970's festivals, as were frequent disturbing ear-splitting flyovers by military jets. (Ask anyone who was there)

Pictured Me (right) at the Hyde Park free concert with Pink Floyd 1975

That the UK government allowed the festivals to continue for two years is no coincidence.The early free festivals appeared to have been tolerated if not contrived to initiate anti-subversion laws amongst other things. After extensive research I am now prepared to consider they may also have used to experiment with individuals. It appears no coincidence that for the first two years that government reports were commissioned the festivals were actually looked upon favourably, after which a sudden halt of these gatherings was called for and Operation Julie resulted in the arrest of the scientists and their network of distributors.

 "But the subsequent third and final report tells a different story in its title: “Pop festivals and their problems.” Here a much more critical official line is taken and the report draws from the Ministry of Defence and Thames Valley Police. The tenor of the argument moves towards legal administration, civil order and regulatory powers." Walking between the Raindrops - Denis Stevenson Pink Industry

Around this time Harold Wilson’s cabinet appears to have been infiltrated in some kind of operation probably designed to create the paranoia that it transpires was happening behind the scenes. It may have been a nervous breakdown that had the “Chancellor of the exchequer . .  lying naked on the floor . .  smoking” (Strange Days Indeed – Francis Wheen) or could it have been an surreptitious acid trip courtesy of an infiltrater in the style of the CIA?

I can personally attest that security was incredibly lax around Harold Wilson in 1974 because I got a job as a live in waitress at the Athenaeum Gentleman's Club, in Pall Mall where Harold Wilson dined. As a 15 year old teenage runaway at this time I had given a false age and name when applying to the agency that sent me to the job. The waitresses rooms were at the very top of the building.  My room had french doors opening onto the balcony at the front of the building.
The main dining room was on the ground floor and I had unlimited access to the huge table buffet that was layed out for the diners.  Upstairs I served tea and cakes to the members in the reading rooms where there the latest parliamentary bulletins arrived via a telex machine in the corner of each room. 

"In 1976, just before and just after his resignation as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson made a number of charges about South African activities in British politics, and, more interesting and more serious, expressed anxieties about MI5 in relation to the Labour Government of the day and to himself personally.  . . . . . we believe that Harold Wilson had every reason to be anxious about MI5; that as he and Marcia Williams, his personal secretary both claimed, there had indeed been a plot by MI5 and various other groups and individuals to undermine his government.  Putting together this plot and the context in which it took place is the bulk of this essay" Destabilising the Wilson Government 1974 - 1976 

One of these groups, the ultra right wing National Association For Freedom, hilariously shortened to NAFF, did not conceal it’s affiliation with MI5 British Intelligence

"NAFF attracted Brian Crozier to its Council, with his links to the CIA, MI6 and IRD and the Institute for the Study of Conflict (whose ‘anti-subversion’ briefings Astor published in the Times). The ISC produced a series of special studies on subversion. The first was written by Nigel Lawson in 1972, entitled Subversion in British Industry. Intelligence links to NAFF were made quite open by its base at one time in, and using notepaper headed by Kern House, the headquarters at the time of the CIA’s front Forum World Features, ran by Crozier.

In relation to these intelligence gathering roles we should observe that in the 1970s Lord Stevenson was the author of two linked HMSO reports for Walker’s DoE. The first was in 1972 on the role of ‘voluntary organisations and youth in the environment’ and the second in 1973 on “Pop Festivals”.  The former examined the financing of voluntary movements and “pressure group activities and the role of volunteers in environmental education,” with the working party’s recommendations “aimed at … Government in general” (Stevenson, 1972). The paper on Pop Festivals was initially reported to be ‘surprisingly favourable’ for a government-funded committee (Dearling, 2002). 

"If we take into consideration Stevenson’s . . .‘privately funded’ (Anai, 1998) intelligence gathering on West Indians (1970), monitoring of pressure group activities, voluntary groups, environmental organisations and the various groups represented around free festivals in the mid-70s, we have fair representation of what might be termed the ‘counter-culture.’ At the time these groups were the subject of covert surveillance, agent provocateurs and of immense interest to the secret state and the anti-subversive    factions . ." 

Walking between the Raindrops - Denis Stevenson Pink Industry

 Along with Lord Stevenson NAFF  boasted amongst its founders senior intelligence agents Robert Moss – MI5 (who is currently (2011) involved in Inception (the movie) – type dream research with the Esalen Institute), and  Brian Crozier, MI5, MI6 CIA, and Pinay Cercle

“Perhaps more sinister, and certainly more shadowy than the Bilderbergers, the “Pinay Cercle” is an “Atlanticist” right-wing organisation of serving and retired intelligence operatives, military officers and politicians that conspired to “affect” changes in government. Amongst other things they claim credit for engineering the election of Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and may have been behind the ousting of Australia’s Gough Whitlam” The Circle of Power by David Guyatt 

One of the most unlikely of the NAFF’s council members was Lady Morrison of Lambeth who also co-wrote the book published by this organisation “In Defence of Freedom”

Lady Morrison was originally Edith Meadowcroft and she went to school at the convent that my grandmother also attended. She was a close friend and frequent visitor to my maternal grandmother's lifelong friend and next door neighbour, who we called Auntie. My maternal grandfather was half Swiss. 

Edith Meadowcroft met Herbert Morrison who was at the time deputy Prime Minister, on a golf course in Davos, Switzerland whilst taking part in an amateur golf tournament. She had travelled there using a travel agency set up by Morrison to enable workers with limited funds to travel more widely.   He was 67 at the time and this was his second marriage which took place in 1955.  

In her autobiography "Memoirs of a Marriage Lady Morrison states

"I am addicted to Switzerland and all things Swiss" and goes on to describe how

"(At the age of) 10 or 11 I announced I wanted to play golf, I didn't even know what golf was and to this day cannot explain the compulsion" (See Biographical Research for my own inexplicable golf skills at the age of 5)

The whole town was thrilled when she married the Deputy Prime Minister of the Labour Party, generally described as one of the three most prominent and influential politicians at that time, and an enthusiastic socialist. After his marriage he famously made the controversial decision to release Oswald Mosely from prison.

His marriage to Edith was his second marriage, he was a widower and grandfather of  Peter Mandelson who played a prominent role in Britain's "New Labour" government 

NAFF has also been described as “the far right wing group that brought Mrs Thatcher into power”, and it has been observed that there is evidence that this was part of an international attempt by the far right to seize control. This attempt included covert infiltration and/or disruption of potentially troublesome and influential groups including the Labour Party.

NAFF pulled together all the elements of the previous networks; the spooks, the propagandists, the anti-union outfits; and - and this is the difference between NAFF and its predecessors - it brought in a group of Tory MPs with connections all the way to the top of the post-Thatcher Tory Party. Mrs Thatcher had connections to NAFF council members through Robert Moss (who wrote speeches for her), through Boyson, Ridley and Mitchell (who became Ministers under her) through Winston Churchill MP- a front bench spokesman - and through the National Federation of BuildingEmployers (who employed Norman Tebbit during 1975/6)  Destabilising the Wilson Government 1974 - 1976 

Lord Morrison was the first national film censor and I can’t overemphasise the significance of the media and film industry in the Tavistock agenda. Lord and Lady Morrison were wined and dined along side big movie moguls.

"BARABBAS had its world premiere on Monday, June 4, 1962, at the Odeon Haymarket in London. It was also the premiere of the theater itself. There was a glamorous, celebrity-studded dinner afterward at Quaglino's. Seated at my table were John Davis (chairman and managing director of the Rank Organization), Mike Frankovich (head of European production for Columbia Pictures), Sam Goldwyn, Dino, the Right Honorable Ernest Marples, M.P., Lord and Lady Morrison of Lambeth, and Tony Quinn. Scattered around the room were, among others, the Dunchess of Argyll, Lord Balfour, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Paul Getty, Nubar Gulbenkian, Harold Lloyd, Sir. Michael Redgrave, Peter Sellers, and David Susskind. "From: Just Tell Me When to Cry by Richard Fleischer

After marrying Morrison, they travelled extensively in the US and also visited Israel. Lady M was invited to Buckingham palace and received a rarely issued invitation to a one-to-one personal meeting with the queen mother. The ‘working class girl made good’ story would have appealed to Herbert Morrison who started life as a barrow boy but it does not match later facts. The Queen Mother and the Pinay Cercle elites (with whose members with whom she became involved) do not embrace and include people from her purported background, the story doesn't add up

                                                           She ain't no Candy Jones but . . . .

 The fact that after Lord Morrison’s death she openly joined those who were seeking to bring down the 'socialist left' influences in the Labour Party is in my opinion a smoking gun.

Could it be that Lady Morrison was an infiltrator for the above mentioned right wing movement (even if unwittingly, as part of an early mind control programme) ?

Or is it that Lord Morrison's reputed socialist position was not adhered to throughout the course of his career?  It is true that Morrison was outspoken against a proposed investigation of freemasonry, and   according to aangirfan  where Morrison fits into the picture is very much open to question to say the least. 

Morrison's association with Siegmund Warburg has been documented.

"Siegmund G Warburg had many interests outside finance and one of these was politics. Warburg discussed both British and international politics at length with his friends and acquaintances who just happened to include the likes of Herbert Morrison" Imogene Inge

So not only do we have a firm link between Lady Morrison and the UK Free Festivals in the 70's, via her association with NAFF, we also have a link between Lord Morrison and LSD as it is widely known that

 "LSD counter culture" originated when Sandoz A.G., a Swiss pharmaceutical house owned by S.G. Warburg & Co developed a new drug from lysergic acid, called LSD".  reference (my emphasis)

Incidentally, the head quarters of the Nazi party during WW2 was at Davos where the couple met.  "A surreal mix of Nazis, American pilots, refugees and Swiss crossed paths on Davos's snowy streets and in its sanatoriums in the 1930s and 1940s." (SwissInfo.ch)

Pictured right:  Local Nazi party leader Dr Hellmuth gives a lecture to the German expat community in Davos on Hitlers birthday in 1940

The Warburg family, LSD and the Nazis:

The CIA drug story begins in 1943, when the organization was still known as the OSS. A Dr. Albert Hoffmann was experimenting in the Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland (Sandoz was then controlled by the Warburg family). Although Sandoz has been manufacturing a substance known as LSD, or lysergic acid, since 1938, it had only been used in experiments with monkeys. 

At the time of the discovery of LSD, Allen Dulles was posted in Switzerland, as though by precognition. It was under his leadership that the CIA became transformed into the foremost operation of Dope, Inc. He was then engaged in various activities with officials of the Nazi regime. To this day, no one has been able to ascertain whether he was trying to preserve the Hitler regime, or to overthrow it. Eustace Mullins: Murder by Injection, The story of the medical conspiracy against Americans

DAVOS Swiss Soldiers on Parade 1944 and US service men at the windows

Swiss Internees Association Website

John Lennon and the Illuminati
Sid Rawle (co-founder Free Festival Movement) discusses how John Lennon was afraid for his life

Coming soon: Phsychiatry and the Free Festival movement, Ubi Dwyer, Syd Barrett and the Dublin connection, John Lennon and the 'Screamers' of Inishfree Island and much more. See 'my new blog' for updates

My presentation at the AMMACH conference 2012

Celia Imrie - MK ULTRA - UK

New website

I've created a new website HERE to post all my material in one place. Still in the process of transferring stuff - lots more in the pipeline.

Celia Imrie - MK ULTRA - UK

"Now, more than 20 years after his death, Sargant is notorious for his work for MI5 and the CIA, particularly its covert MK-ULTRA mind control programme." Celia Imrie


The following article is a significant milestone in the history of the disclosure of MK ULTRA in the UK. Not only does high profile actress Celia Imrie describe her psychiatric treatment at the hands of the notorious William Sargant, she also makes it clear she is aware of his involvement in MKULTRA and she mentions mind control experiments at Porton Down

I applaude her bravery in coming forward with her story of the horrific abuse she was subjected by this 'monster'


MY ELECTRIC SHOCK NIGHTMARE AT THE HANDS OF CIA'S EVIL DOCTOR
By Celia Imrie
UPDATED: 19:25, 4 April 2011

Famous friends: Celia Imrie, above left, with Helen Mirren and Julie Walters in the hit British film Calendar Girls

Living as an actor is rather like living life on the trapezes in a circus. Every time you jump on, you have to pray that when the time comes for you to jump off there is another trapeze swinging your way.

I have been very lucky. So far they have kept swinging by and over the years I have had more than my fair share of roles on stage and television, including Upstairs Downstairs, The Darling Buds Of May, Dinnerladies, Acorn Antiques and Cranford.
Then there are the films, parts that have, to my surprise, given me quite a saucy reputation. After Calendar Girls, people might well think of me as something of an exhibitionist. I am not.

In fact, the scene where we had to take off our clothes was a source of great concern. It was shot one actress at a time - and it was my bad luck to be called ahead of Helen Mirren, Julie Walters and the rest of that wonderful cast.

I arrived at the studio feeling quite ill. It was as though I was in some horrible dream, wading through treacle. With a thundering heart, clutching my dressing gown around me, I made my way down to the set. Even I couldn't put it off for ever. I tried to imagine that somehow I wasn't really taking my clothes off and that, anyway, no one would ever see the film. How wrong I was, even if some strategically placed cupcakes preserved my modesty.

There was nothing understated about my part in Nanny McPhee either. Before it was released, the film was shown to a sample audience of children and they were terrified by the sight of my non-surgically enhanced bosoms.
The studio decided that there was nothing else for it but to airbrush out a large percentage of my cleavage - a move that cost the production company £150,000.
It is hard to believe, then, that as a child I dreamed of being a sylph-like dancer. While other girls swooned over The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I worshipped Rudolf Nureyev and Isadora Duncan.

It was a yearning that was to lead me almost to the grave before I was 15 - not that I had any idea at the time. I pored over ballet books and magazines, and practised whenever I could. I was going to be a dancer.

My mother Diana was a trueblue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in Burke's Peerage. My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.

I pressed them to let me attend ballet classes, to which they agreed. Always stubborn and wilful, I had my career planned. I would go to White Lodge, the junior branch of the Royal Ballet School in Richmond, South-West London, and serve my time in the chorus before being discovered, finally dancing in the arms of Nureyev, who would worship and probably marry me.

I practised and went in for every exam, bounding through the grades until I was good enough for my teachers to send me, aged 11, to audition for a place at the Royal Ballet School.
Waiting anxiously at home for the results to arrive, I yearned for the day when I would be whisked away from our home in Surrey to start my new life as a ballet student. One week. Two weeks. A month. But the letter never came. I knew something was wrong, so went searching for it, breaking into my mother's bureau. There it was.

Trembling, I slid the already opened letter from its envelope and read the fatal words: 'Celia is very good and advanced for her age, but sadly she is going to be too big ever to become a dancer.'
Too big? I was shattered. Surely this could not possibly be true? All right, so I might be too large at this moment, but I had seen diet adverts in newspapers. Surely if I worked hard enough at not eating, I would get small enough for the whole judging panel at the Royal Ballet School to get fat themselves - eating their words.

Over 18 months I lost an astonishing amount of weight. It was noticed first at six months by our nanny, known as Pop, when we had to try on summer clothes for our annual family holiday near Bognor Regis, West Sussex. After that I realised I was being watched at mealtimes.
I would look at myself in the mirror and, even though I was something near a skeleton, I didn't think I had gone far enough. In despair and I am sure with some embarrassment - my father being an eminent doctor - my parents brought in a child psychologist.

I was 5ft 2in and weighed 4st. What was the problem? Why couldn't they make me eat?
In those days there was not the excess of food there is now. People ate three pretty meagre meals a day if they were lucky, with no snacking in between.
Many people in those days were malnourished, but not through personal choice. So it was a mystery to the experts to find someone who had decided not to eat, just as it might have been then to find someone who was obese.

I was sent for a brief spell in the local hospital, where, bewildered by a condition they had not seen before, staff simply offered me three meals a day, which I politely refused.
After a few weeks, I was released to spend Christmas with my family.
I was happy to come home, but, far from being cured, I now knew that in future I must find even better ways of avoiding eating. I became sly. I worked out every way to dispose of food. I was so successful at it that soon I was little more than a carcass with skin.

Brusque and cold: Psychologist William Sargant used electric shock therapy on his patients

Desperate now, my parents decided to send me away to St Thomas' Hospital in London, to enter one of the special wards belonging to the Department of Psychological Medicine. And once there I was placed under the care of world-famous psychiatrist William Sargant. I was 14.

Now, more than 20 years after his death, Sargant is notorious for his work for MI5 and the CIA, particularly its covert MK-ULTRA mind control programme.

Even then, Sargant was a world expert on brainwashing. Today his books are said to be studied by Al Qaeda. His work has links to the mysterious death of CIA biochemist Frank Olson after being given LSD; the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where 900 people killed themselves; and to the mind-bending and occasionally lethal drug experiments performed on unwitting human guinea pigs at the Porton Down research centre in Wiltshire.

Sargant's methods were simple: electric-shock treatment and insulin-induced comas leading to continuous narcosis, or deep-sleep therapy, complete with taperecorded 'brainwashing' orders being played at the patients from beneath their pillows. And to think that all this came free on the NHS!
The hospital building is still there and even today it sends a chill through me when I pass it on my way to Waterloo station, the Imax cinema or the National Theatre. It is a gloomy, dark red-brick edifice, the green and white ceramic tile lettering still declaring it to be the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women, although today it houses the Schiller International University, a private American college.

From outside the Imax, you can see the window where I would sit waiting for my mother to emerge from Waterloo station, hurrying across the road, looking frantic. She was the only one who came to see me and I often wonder whether anyone else in the family even knew about her rushed, desperate visits. After all, I was the black sheep of the family.

At 14, I was the youngest in the ward. Most of the other patients were middle-aged women suffering from depression. From my bed, I watched them howling, moaning and screaming, fighting with the nurses. I thought: 'I don't want to be mad. I must get out of here.'
The doctors and nurses did their daily rounds. Twice a week or so, we were treated to a bedside visit from the Great Man himself.

Sargant still features in my nightmares. He was brusque and cold, and he never talked directly to you. Instead he issued orders over your head, talking about 'this one' and 'that one'. But that was preferable to making eye contact with this proud, incorrigible man with his dark, hard, evil eyes. I have only seen eyes like that on a couple of other people in my life.

I've often been asked on whom I based my portrayal of Miss Babs in Acorn Antiques, the TV comedy I did with Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, and which later became a hit West End musical.
Many people cite the Prisoner Cell Block H governor, Erica Davidson. It is amazing to watch how similar our characters are, but in fact I didn't get to see Prisoner Cell Block H until after we had finished making the first series.

The hair is similar too, but that was a simple coincidence. Miss Babs came first. My main study was the marvellous Noele Gordon playing Meg Richardson in Crossroads.

After Sargant left the ward, the nurses would start preparing the horrors he had prescribed for the day - the electro-convulsive therapy. Friends have asked what it was like to have electrodes put either side of your skull before huge surges of power were fired through your brain, while you squirmed and wrestled and shrieked and moaned and dribbled into the pillow. But the truth is I don't remember.

I do, however, remember vividly watching the woman in the next bed when it was her turn to be assaulted in the name of health. I remember every sight, sound and smell. The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain; the shuddering contortions and jerky gyrations of the tormented body; the scent of burning hair and flesh.

I remember also the famous Narcosis Room, a ward where patients were forced into a drug-induced sleep for days while tapes played instructions to them from under the pillow.
Whenever I have been asked about Sargant's Narcosis Room, I can describe it perfectly. I used to sneak out of the ward to peer through the portholes in the swing doors, and gaze at dead-looking women lying on the floor on grey mattresses, silent in a kind of electrically induced twilight.

When people ask if ever I spent any time inside, I used to reply 'No', for I do not remember that ever happening.

But it recently occurred to me that everyone, in order to be put into the Narcosis Room, would first be drugged and that although I saw many women come back to the ward from there, I never saw any patient emerge from the place awake. You went in asleep and you came out asleep.

I don't think anyone who was treated by Sargant's sleep therapy was at any time aware of going in or coming out of that room. While inside, you were totally unconscious. So maybe I was in the Narcosis Room. I could not possibly know.

It is probable, I realise now, that I did go in. Like the electric shocks, I presume it definitely happened to me, though I can only recall it happening to others. I was certainly injected with huge doses of insulin. These injections are now understood to be one of the methods Sargant used to kick-start his sleeptherapy process.

I cannot know whether his mindcontrol methods worked on me as I do not know what the tape recordings under my pillow were telling me to do.
Some years back, I tried to find my hospital records, to see whether I could find out the limits of my treatment and if I had been in the Narcosis Room. I wanted to know the exact instructions on the tape constantly playing under my pillow, Sargant's wishes drummed relentlessly into my young, unconscious brain.

Unfortunately, my search was in vain. When Sargant left St Thomas', he illegally took away all his patients' records. By the time of his death in 1988, every single piece of paperwork about his inhumane treatment of us, the human guinea pigs, had been destroyed. So I will never know the absolute truth.

I do recall being given massive doses, three tumblers a day, of Largactil, an anti-psychotic drug. The effect of this drug was startling. My hands shook uncontrollably for most of the day and I'd wake up to find clumps of my hair on the pillow. But the worst consequence was that everything I saw was multiplied by four. When Sargant came into the room, I saw four of him. It was horrific and terrifying. Even simple tasks such as picking up a glass of water became impossible. The drugs had turned me into a victim.

As she increased the dosage one day, I overheard one nurse saying to her senior that I was exhibiting a 'dangerous resistance' to the drugs. Dangerous for whom, I wonder? Who could tell in that terrible place where, as far as I can see, the truly insane were the workers rather than the patients.
Sargant used to say that every dog has his breaking point - the eccentrics just took longer. I suppose my 'dangerous resistance' was what he was talking about. I like to think that I was one of those eccentric dogs he did not manage to break.

I adored filming Highlander, which was released in 1986.
On the night of my arrival on set, I was told there was a farewell party for one of the main stars, Sean Connery, who had finished his scenes earlier that day.
I rushed to the room and entered just as Connery, pictured above in the film, was leaving. We met in the doorway.

'Who are you?' he asked, his face breaking into one of those famous heart-melting smiles.
'I'm Celia,' I gushed. 'I think you're absolutely wonderful. I start filming tomorrow.'
He gave me a wink and said: 'Pity you didn't start two days ago.'
Have you ever nearly fainted with simultaneous delight and disappointment? I have.

Many years later, I went with friends to see a film called Coma. It was a secondrate thriller starring Michael Douglas and Genevieve Bujold, in which Bujold discovers a ward full of patients suspended in hammocks in druginduced comas. When we came out into Leicester Square in London, my friends were laughing at the silliness of the plot, but I had the shakes and it took me some days to recover.
They probably thought I was coming down with something. In fact it wasn't until years later that I saw the link and realised why that film had upset me so deeply.

Whatever Sargant might have thought, my eventual cure was nothing to do with him or his bizarre techniques. The events that saved me from my self-induced anorexia came about in a very simple way.
Two things happened in short succession. First, one of the nurses, quite improperly I am sure, said to me one morning: 'You do realise that your selfish act of starving yourself means you are stealing the bed of a truly sick, possibly dying child?' She described other stricken children she had treated - those with polio and cancer.

She had no idea but what she said was more powerful than any of Sargant's insulin injections and taperecordings. My conscience was well and truly pricked.

A few days later, my dance teacher came to visit me. I didn't know the true reason at first but when I did, it was to send a chill through my barely there flesh. Miss Hawkesworth had been told that medical opinion was agreed that my weight was way below that which could possibly sustain life for any length of time. I would not survive the few weeks until Christmas.
Unlike do-gooders who tiptoe around the subject of illness and death, Miss Hawkesworth said: 'I came to visit you because they told me you would die in two weeks and I thought I ought to say goodbye.'

I had spent three years with everybody telling me: 'You must eat. You will eat. If you don't eat you will fade away. Please eat. Eat. Eat. Eat.' And so I didn't. Now here was a new order - 'You will die!' Die? How dare anyone tell me what to do. I wasn't going to die just to please them.

Whenever I am issued with an absolute order, my instinct has always been the same: do the opposite. And thanks to Miss Hawkesworth, I decided there and then I would not oblige these horrible, self-appointed gods of psychiatry and die just to satisfy their theories. Slowly, I started to eat.
I reversed the action that had been my secret weapon against them, and in twisting it round, it became my new secret weapon against them. I decided I would show them that they knew nothing about me. Plus, I was not going to let anyone think that my selfishness was responsible for depriving a sick child of treatment.

I later returned to school, somewhat changed in appearance. During a consultation with my psychiatrist, I had said I would like to have a baby one day, and hoped that would still be possible since I had upset the usual order of puberty.

Specialists at St Thomas' decided to give me a massive dose of oestrogen to kickstart the process. The trouble was that practically overnight it sent me from being flatchested to a 38in doubleD cup.
So, resembling a teenage brunette version of Jayne Mansfield in a fright wig, I took my O-levels and got the same number as Princess Diana (you can look it up if you're so interested).
I left school the day I turned 16, the earliest day I legally could. Determined to follow a life on stage, preferably with some dance connection, I applied for and won a place at the local drama school. I was on my way.

Years later I was talking to actor Nicholas Lyndhurst's wife Lucy. She had trained and become a professional dancer, even appearing with the Royal Ballet.
'A lot of it was hell,' she told me. 'Not at all what I had thought it would be. It often made me very unhappy.'
She described the strife and tension, the painful muscles, bleeding toes, rivalry and starvation diets. For the first time in my life I wondered if I had been fortunate by being forced out of dance and into acting.
I felt a tremendous surge of relief. I started to wonder what had impelled me to chase a desire that had almost killed me at 14. Now, I finally knew that my life had gone the right way. I had taken the best possible path.

© The Happy Hoofer, by Celia Imrie, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on April 14 priced £20. To order your copy for £15.99 with free p&p, call the Review Bookstore on 08 5 155 0730 or visit
www.mailbookshop.co.uk.

From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1372700/My-electric-shock-nightmare-hands-CIAs-evil-doctor-Calendar-Girls-star-Celia-Imrie.html#ixzz1shiUe9ZM
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