Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

separate offices.
'I really loved working for Ron; I would have done anything for him. To me he was superhuman, a
very unusual, very great person who really wanted to help the world. I was less sure about Mary
Sue; I never quite knew where I stood with her. She could be very sweet and loving, but also very
cold. The first time I had any contact with her was on the first Sunday I was at Saint Hill.She came
into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner and did not say a word to me. I thought that was very
strange. She was fiercely protective of her children and I liked them a lot. Arthur had a few problems
because he was the youngest and the others wouldn't play with him. Diana was heavily into ballet
lessons. They were nice.'
Urquhart was a Scot who had been studying music at Trinity College in London when he was
introduced to Dianetics. 'It was as if someone had swept the cobwebs out of my mind,' he said. He
was working part-time as a waiter when Ron asked him if he would help out at Saint Hill as a
butler. 'I wouldn't have done it for anyone else. I used to cook all the meals, sweep the floors, make
the beds, rush around all day long, for £12 a week plus room and board. I was perfectly happy, but
things changed quite a bit early in 1965 when "ethics" came in. I was assigned a "condition of
emergency" because I served him salmon for dinner that was not quite fresh. I was shocked. You
had to go through a whole formula, write it up and submit it with an application to be up-graded.'[4]
'Conditions' were an essential part of the new 'ethics technology' devised by Hubbard in the midsixties,
effectively as a form of social control. It was his first, tentative step towards the creation of a
society within Scientology which would ultimately resemble the totalitarian state envisaged by
George Orwell in his novel 1984 . Anyone thought to be disloyal, or slacking, or breaking the rules
of Scientology, was reported to an 'ethics officer' and assigned a 'condition' according to the gravity
of the offence. Various penalties were attached to each condition. In a 'condition of liability' for
example, the offender was required to wear a dirty grey rag tied around his or her left arm. The
worst that could happen was to be declared an 'SP' (suppressive person), which was tantamount
to excommunication from the church. SPs were defined by Hubbard as 'fair game' to be pursued,
sued and harassed at every possible opportunity.
'What happened with the development of ethics,' said Cyril Vosper, who worked on the staff at Saint
Hill, 'was that zeal expanded at the expense of tolerance and sanity. My feeling was that Mary Sue
devised a lot of the really degrading aspects of ethics. I always had great warmth and admiration
for Ron - he was a remarkable individual, a constant source of new information and ideas - but I
thought Mary Sue was an exceedingly nasty person. She was a bitch.
'Hubbard had this incredible dynamism, a disarming, magnetic and overwhelming personality. I
remember being at Saint Hill one Sunday evening and running into him and as we started to talk
people gathered round. People had a wonderful feeling with him of being in the presence of a great
man.'[5]
In October 1965, the Australian Board of Inquiry into Scientology published its report. Conducted by
Kevin Anderson QC, the inquiry sat for 160 days, heard evidence from 151 witnesses and then
savagely condemned every aspect of Scientology. No one needed to progress beyond the first
paragraph to guess at what was to follow:
'There are some features of Scientology which are so ludicrous that there may be a tendency to
regard Scientology as silly and its practitioners as harmless cranks. To do so would be gravely to
misunderstand the tenor of the Board's conclusions. This Report should be read, it is submitted,
with these prefatory observations constantly in mind. Scientology is evil; its techniques evil; its