Brian Edward Hurst
Spiritualist Medium and Counselor

Please visit Brian's Home Page for more details.


An Excerpt from the Inrterview with Brian E. Hurst
by Tatiana Elmanovich:

T: When did you discover that you were a medium, in other words, that you were different from others?
B: Well, I think the first contacts occurred when I was a young child. My grandfather had died of cancer of the bones in 1947. And I had been quite close to him. And a week after he had died, he stood by my bed, and he still appeared to have only one leg, as one of his legs was amputated for the cancer in the knee. And I was very frightened. And he looked at me, and he was speaking, but I couldn’t understand the words he said. And it scared me because I knew that Grandfather was buried in the cemetery, or his ashes were supposedly buried in the cemetery. And apparently, he was not supposed to stay by my bed.  

My mother had visits sometimes from Gypsies at the front door selling the clothes-pegs and the lavender, and the things Gypsies sell. I and my younger brother, Peter, were at my grandmother’s house at the time. And the Gypsy said to my mother, "You have two sons. The older one will be very famous, and will do some very unusual work. The younger one will give you some problems." And that was exactly true. My younger brother had many health problems and was quite sickly and had difficult time. Then she predicted that my mother would have another baby, and my sister was then later born, etc., etc.

So, there were several people who predicted things. I was on a vacation at the age of 11 or 12, I think in Great Yarmouth—it was on the east coast of England. And I was digging in the sand with my bucket and spade, you know, making sand castles. And this little lady in a canvas chair called me over. She said, "Little boy, little boy, I would like to speak to you. When you grow up, you’re going to have some very strange things happen to you. You’re going to see things that other people don’t see, and hear things that other people don’t hear. You must’t think you’re mad. You may think you are mad, but you are not mad. I am telling you about this, and in the future you will think of my words, that I have told you of this," she said. And her husband was asleep in the chair with a newspaper over his face not listening to anything she was talking to me. And it seems like she was trying to tell me that I would have some psychic ability.

T: Who was that lady?
B: I don’t know who she was. She said she was a medium. I didn’t know what a "medium" was. She said, "You may not understand this, but I am a medium, and I have to tell you about this. You have lights floating around over your head." She told me I had spirit lights around me. And so, that’s what she could see.

When I was about 17, I was at grammar school in England. And my grandfather’s second wife died of cancer. I was very fond of her—her name was Mary. And I was very upset when she died, because my grandmother had died from tuberculosis just after I was born. And then my grandfather later married his housekeeper, who was a nice lady, and this nice lady also died in 1955 or '56, I think it was.

And I remember feeling very distressed about this, and going to the Spiritualist Church in Huntingdon in England. And it was in Huntingdon Spiritualist Church that I met quite a number of people, and they were kind to me and helped me to understand this whole subject. There I first met Mr. Robert Copley, whose wife, Anne Copley, was what is called a "trumpet medium." She could go into a deep trance, sitting in a chair. They had a shed in the garden, like a garden sanctuary. And they would turn out the lights, and Anne would sit in a small chair with curtains around her. When I first was invited to sit with Anne Copley, I could hear her actually snoring during the first fifteen minutes. She was breathing deeply and heavily in the dark. On the floor in front of us—I sat with my father’s sister, my Aunt Doreen with some other people in the dark—were luminous megaphones, painted with luminous paint. They were lying on their end, sticking up from the floor. And as we began to sing some hymns like "Jerusalem," "Abide with Me," and some of the Christian hymns we sang, and said a prayer, suddenly, the luminous trumpet flew up in the air and it turned on its side, and the voices began coming through the trumpet at us. There was a man named Johnny from London, and he was there. We also had a Red Indian, American Indian guide, who spoke with a heavy accent and gave the spiritual blessings. And at one point, my father's brother, Frank Hurst, came through and spoke to me. Frank had died at the age 19 in a motorcycle accident. His motorcycle hit a patch of ice on the road and it threw him off, and his head hit a telegraph pole and he was killed instantly. But he came through and he spoke to me, "It’s Frank," you know, and he gave me a message. At that time I was working in London. And that week I had not had any breakfast before going to work. And no one knew that. And he said, "Brian, you must eat breakfast in the morning. You didn’t eat breakfast every day last week." And he said, "This is Frank. I will help you, and I’m fine now." That was my first contact, with my dead uncle, you see, my Aunt Doreen’s brother. My Aunt Doreen sat next to me in the séance room.

T: I think your position of a mediator between the worlds takes some diplomacy, patience and communication skills. Do you have some background in communication skills?
B: I was a drama student in London, and I studied with the London Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. I actually performed parts in "The Three Sisters" by Chekhov, and I did Ibsen and Strindberg and Oscar Wilde, and all these—Noel Coward—and I played parts on the stage at the London Guild Hall School. I took part in some British movies. I did some bit parts in a movie with Spike Milligan escaping from a concentration camp, which was all filmed at Pinewood Studios in the north of London. And there I had to jump from a truck carrying a rifle, for which they paid me one pound danger money plus the daily fee for the film extra. And I also did some bit parts on the television for the BBC producers’ training school where we were just required as drama students to run through a simple script to train the cameramen and train the crew in the studio. And it was not very important, but it was an early experience. I needed this, though, to gain confidence, because I was a shy person, not able to communicate very well with people.

But through astrology, which I studied from the age of 16, I began to find—astrology gave me a tremendous enthusiasm and interest. My birth chart was first done by a Mr. Brown, who came to the local Huntingdon Spiritualist Church. And he told me that I had a very creative chart, that I should do creative work carried out behind the scenes, not in front of the public but behind the scenes. So, maybe trying to be an actor, I was going in a wrong direction. I think I really should have enrolled in an art college, and I probably should have had training at that early age, because I didn’t start painting until I was 50 years at age. I had never painted before, and now I’m producing these photo-realistic kind of paintings, which you see on the walls in my house here. I think that’s what I should have done.

But nevertheless, Spiritualism got me. I went to lectures at the College of Psychic Science, as it was then called, in South Kensington, London. And there I met a lady named April Day. She was, I think, born April the 18^th, and we became very good friends. And she arranged my first meeting at the village of Grays Thurrock in the country of Essex, which is east of London. And there I stood with knees knocking before an audience, or congregation of mostly senior citizens, hoping I would get a message that would make sense. Apparently, the messages did make sense, the people understood, and it gave me confidence to do some more public work. And then for a number of years after that, I served many of the London Spiritualist churches, and the southeast England—the Cambridge Spiritualist Church, the Windsor Spiritualist Church, where Windsor Castle is, and Canterbury in Kent and a number of…. I traveled weekends giving readings to people in these churches. 

In the meantime I was getting invitations from different people for sittings, they wanted to sit. I was living in London at the time. And I met several very important people involved with the Spiritualist movement. I met Mrs. Nora Blackwood, one of London’s top mediums. Nora Blackwood at a meeting told me, she said, "You will be doing the work that I am doing. You will travel widely and be well known, but you’ll never be wealthy." So I said, "OK, thank you." And that doesn’t matter, because I have always put integrity and the creation of goodwill before the making of money. To me, making money is secondary.

T: Only so much money as we need to survive.
B: Yes, yes, that’s right. Did you want to ask anything?

T. How old you were when you met Nora?
B: When I met Nora Blackwood I was still a student at the Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. So I was still only about 20—about 20, 19—I think 19, I was 19.

T: You really started early.
B: Yes, yes. And my first demonstration was when I was about 20, 21. And Nora Blackwood, of course, was one of the great mediums of London. And I also met the famous medium Mrs. Estelle Roberts. Estelle Roberts was the medium for the guide Red Cloud, who was a North American Indian guide. She gave large demonstrations at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Wigmore Hall, and she was one of the top mediums. She was responsible for the British government changing the law. Originally, mediums could be prosecuted under a 1735 Witchcraft Act for pretending to summon up the spirits of the dead, but in the 1951 it was substituted by Fraudulent Mediums Act. [Now a medium could be prosecuted, if charged with proven fraud, not solely for being "a witch"], Spiritualism was given legal recognition in the United Kingdom. And this was largely due to the work of Estelle Roberts, and other mediums also, who persuaded members of parliament that this was a genuine ability, that there was truly communication with the world beyond death, and that this could be demonstrated.

Mrs. Roberts was not only a mental medium like myself, but she was a physical medium. She could go into a deep trance, and there spirit—objects would move about in the room, voices would speak in the air, which is called "independent voice." And she was doing earlier what Leslie Flint later did so well, producing the voices of the dead right in the air in front of you. So there were several of these very talented mediums. Anne Copley also could produce voices through the trumpets as the trumpets flew about the air. (The early medium from Cambridge that I told you about.)...

Read the complete interview at the Tanika's Books web site.