Well, here we are again back in evidence after the printing strike which brought you only mimeoed issues. For these we don’t apologize. Instead we say we’d better get busy making a world where people don’t have to scream and walk out just to get enough to live on.
Hubbard Communications Office Worldwide is now safely and securely established at Saint Hill Manor, East Grinstead, Sussex. Here, on half a hundred acres of lovely grounds in a mansion where we have not yet found all the bedrooms, we are handling the problems of administration and service for the world of Scientology. We are not very many here and as the sun never sets on Scientology we are very busy thetans. By means of airmail, cables, telegrams, and in particular a teletypewriter connected to London and many other points, we are able to get our work done between morning and midnight — most days — and by working weekends.
Saint Hill is badly understaffed, there being only nineteen persons in the whole place. Yet, in addition to administration lines twenty-five thousand miles long, we have ten vital projects running. The first and foremost of these is research and investigation. We are gathering all the files of Scientology research the world around and bringing it to Saint Hill to compile it. As Ron was never able to afford compiling all his works and results before, this project is of rather vast magnitude.
Included in the project list is the application of Scientology to the fifth dynamic. Ron has already created everbearing tomato plants and sweet corn plants sufficiently impressive to startle British Newspapers into front page stories about this new wizardry. The goal of the project is to reform the world food supply. But the project has already paid off to the extent of furnishing an entirely new theory of illness and a brand-new prevention of illness in human beings. Ron, helped by a full-time gardener, is doing this one in his spare time. As HCO Saint Hill personnel each wears several hats — which is to say does many jobs — they are drafted on occasion into the arduous work of recording growth and electrical experimental data.
Another project is the assembly of book stocks on Scientology throughout the world and making available to Scientologists and the public volumes that have never before been in plenty.
Saint Hill needs all manner of assistance whether culinary, electrical wiring, helping in the kitchen or the house, running mimeo machines, typing, almost anything. There will probably come a time when we have to build more buildings at Saint Hill — next year, most likely — but right now we’ve space for a lot of people. The whole staff has to vote to accept any new person and it’s a pretty good group.
But standing out on a lawn near a 250 year old towering cedar tree or walking through a pleasure garden, you’d never believe that all this activity could be going on. The apparency is that it’s so calm you could pack boxes of serenity out of it — but in actuality these are the most high voltage lines in the whole world of Scientology.
Right now at this moment of writing, the HCO Sec World is wrestling with rush despatches about a dying child in San Francisco, the HCO Communicator World is trying to set up a new HCO Office in Australia. The treasurer is handling some financial problems in Washington and Ron has been busy reviewing some research cases and is about to inspect an experimental installation — and it is 10:40 p.m. of a Saturday night.
Saint Hill is an exciting place, its Offices filled with the chatter of communication equipment, its terraces banked with flowers, its days crammed with new things. But a stranger could be guided through most of the lakes, grounds, courts and halls and never suspect that within a short distance of him some of the most dedicated people on earth were getting the show on the road.