The Man in the Battered Silk Hat – A Prophet in Bronte Country

The mid-20th century novels of Howard Spring are I suppose not much read now, but they were once very popular. Perhaps his greatest success, Fame is the Spur (1940), will still be recognised, but few of his score or so other titles may jog memories. The present neglect seems to under-value his work, which has sound story-telling qualities and picturesque characters, and draws on his own varied experiences. He was born in unpromising circumstances, had little schooling, and made his way in writing the hard way through provincial journalism, book reviewing and slowly crafting his own fiction.

In the third volume of his memoirs, And Another Thing (1946), Spring recalls his days as a journalist in Bradford, Yorkshire, in his early twenties. One day, when he was in the neighbouring Pennine town of Keighley, he relates, he came upon ‘a knot of people surrounding a speaker in an open place. He was a cadaverous person, wearing a battered silk hat, calling himself Dr Nikola, and he made a habit of going from town to town belittling the Bible by reciting a garbled version of its folk-lore . . .’ (p.185). What the Pennine prophet preached was not just atheism but also republicanism and other firebrand beliefs, and after a while the authorities became so perturbed by the crowds he was gathering that they decided he must be made to desist. But on what charge could they arrest him?

Dowager duchesses who refused to pay National Insurance stamps for their servants, as required by new Liberal welfare legislation, did not face charges, Spring notes, yet a way was soon found to silence this eccentric character: “he was arrested soon after under the Blasphemy Acts and sent to prison”. Spring, himself a man of pious faith, adds that he pities “this trivial half-wit.” But if he was just that, simply deluded, why was it deemed so important to put a stop to his activities?

Now this episode struck me as somewhat singular. Dr Nikola was the hypnotic occult mastermind created by Guy Boothby in several late-Victorian thrillers, a sort of forerunner of Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu. The adventures started in A Bid for Fortune (1895), which is sometimes entitled Enter, Dr Nikola!, and continued just a year later in the next book in the series, Dr Nikola (1896), also known as Dr Nikola Returns. There were three further books in the series, all separate adventures: The Lust of Hate (1898), Dr Nikola’s Experiment (1899) and “Farewell, Nikola” (1901). His adventures were enormously popular, though by the time of the itinerant speaker that Spring recalls, circa 1911-12, they may have faded from view a little. What made Spring’s visionary choose this name?

Well, there are frequent hints throughout the books that Dr Nikola has subtle occult powers. He is a mesmerist, certainly, and can cause his victims to see visions. He pitches his heightened mind into unknown realms and undertakes astral journeys that allow him to see scenes distant in space and time. He has a strong sense of his own destiny, which forces him on in his remorseless quest for hidden knowledge. None of these powers are used to excess, however, for they evidently require great concentration and will.

There may be more to the visionary vagrant's chosen name than was obvious to his chronicler. Keighley is a valley town, but there rises from it on almost all sides the bare hills that are known to literary fame as ‘Wuthering Heights’: the Bronte village of Haworth is four miles away over these moors. Despite some fine Arts & Crafts public buildings, it is not a town that presently seems suggestive of the mystic. But this was not always so. As Kai Roberts recounts in an excellent essay on ‘The Victorian Occult Revival in West Yorkshire’, the West Riding settlement was once a thriving centre of esoteric thought.

Indeed, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was specifically founded in London in antipathy to rumours of a similar order in Keighley which was regarded with disfavour by the metropolitan mages. Further, the great Austrian occult writer Gustav Meyrink, author of The Golem, corresponded with an ancient sage who lived near Keighley, and his Vienna circle the Order of the Blue Star drew upon this savant’s teachings. The Yorkshire town was also among the first where Spiritualism took hold in Britain, and later Anthroposophy. So the itinerant Dr Nikola that Howard Spring encountered, as a young Edwardian journalist, must be seen in a much wider and unusual context.

But thereafter this ‘Dr Nikola’ seems to have vanished and I have found no other record of him, or what became of him after prison. And though he may not have fully grasped what The Man in the Battered Silk Hat was about, and nor can we quite grasp it all now either, we must be grateful at least that Howard Spring preserved some memory of him.

MV