The Earl of Clancarty

By Gordon Creighton

On May 18th, 1995, at the age of 83, my old friend and colleague, the Earl of Clancarty, departed from this life.

Exactly 40 years ago, in the Spring of 1955, and known then of course as the Honourable Brinsley le Poer Trench, he recruited me as one of the very first subscribers to the new journal, Flying Saucer Review, which, according to British press reports, he and some associates were about to launch. It was a bi-monthly in those days and the first eight issues were edited by a former RAF pilot, Derek Dempster, who is still around and, interestingly enough , only made contact with us again recently.

Thereafter, Brinsley ran the Journal for the next 20 issues (from Vol 2/4 in 1956 to Vol 5/5 in 1959), when he handed over to the third of our Editors, Waveny Girvan. (My own material, including translations from Chinese, Arabic, Russian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, potuguese and Croation, had begun to appear in FSR from issue No. 3 onwards).

There would be no point in attempting to deny that, despite his great zeal and energy for our "cause", Brinsley went on to espouse a number of wild and absurd ideas (such as the "Hollow Earth and the Holes at the Poles", and the exploits of the ridiculous bogus "Tibetan lama" Lobsang Rampa) which certainly did us no good, and played straight into the hands of the "Medacious Brigade". But de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, and trivial matters such as these are for discussion on another occasion.

In their obituaries on Earl Clancarty the Times and the Daily Telegraph naturally had their little bit of fun, and took a poke at us by mentioning that he had edited Flying Saucer Review, but needless to say, both papers were careful enough not to tell their readers that today, forty years on, this ridiculous journal still exists, and is still going strong. (We deal of course with something that "does not exist". But in forty years plenty of journals dealing with "respectable" things that do exist have gone out of business!)

One evening, when Brinsley knew he was about to become the eighth Earl, he phoned me and said he planned to talk "of our subject" in his maiden speech in the House of Lords. I told him that if he did so he would be a b.f. However, he did so, and in 1979 he introduced FSR into the libraries of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons and he set up the so-called House of Lords UFO Study Group, whose members I was myself invited to meet and address on two separate occasions. Whatever one may think about some of his particular theories, it remains a fact that the Earl of Clancarty was a brave man who throughout the years stuck to the highly unpopular opinion that we Earthlings are not alone.

© Flying Saucer Review Library of Congress copyright FSR Publications, Ltd. 1981.

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