MEMORY TWICE LOST

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 September 1927, Page 3

MEMORY TWICE LOST

CHILDHOOD DAYS RECOVERED. In a little workhouse infirmary only 20 miles from London is a well-dressed, well-educated man who states that he believes that Queen Victoria is on the throne, and who says he is puzzled by all the' talk about the “Great War. Yesterday to him is a day of 40 years ago when he was playing “duck on the rock” near his school. His schoolmate, Robert Blake, who lived near him in the neighbourhood of Minneapolis, United States, threw the rock toward him and struck his head. He was 14 years of age then, and everything that has happened since then is' a blank. At some time since he was 14 he has forgotten everything that happened before he was hit by the stone. .At that time, when memory failed him, he became “Mr. Albert Mayfield.” A few weeks dgo, when “Mr. Mayfield” was travelling in a steamer from Siam to London, his nose bled and then his ears. He fell to the floor. He was “Mr. Mayfield no longer. Events since he was 14 years old were forgotten. The forgotten happenings of his boyhood surged back. The grown man knew only that he was Master Albert Gurney, of Rose, near Minneapolis, that “yesterday” he had gone along the railway to school, that he had begun to play, and Robert Blake had thrown a stone. In one second he had forgotten the name that had served him since boyhood, his wife, his children, even the languages he had learned in the forgotten travels of the last few years. When an interviewer visited him and walked with him in the gardens of the workhouse, he found Mr. Gurney, as he must now be called, a well-read man, speaking faultless English with a full American accent. His face, calm and smiling, is that of a good-humour-ed professional man. His mind now, apart from the question of memory, seems quite normal, and he has, of course, been convinced that many years have elapsed since his boyhood. Two Americans who met him a fortnight ago calmed him when he saw an aeroplane. He said he did not know what ragtime is and had never heard of jazz. Of his family he said: “Father’s name is Henry Ebenezer Gurney. He was born at Brantvilie, Mass. He married Nellie Farnham, of Desplaines, Illinois. 'We moved to Wakegan, Illinois. Father then taught music at the Forest Hill Girls’ Seminary, Lake Forest. Then he went to Stuttgart to study music with Frank Richards, and when he came back we moved to Chicago. He was in Kimball’s Music House there. “Then we went on to Minneapolis, where father got a partner, Mr. Wells Hinsdale, and opened a music shop called Gurney and Hinsdale’s Music Shop. I went to the Old Washington School there. Mr. Moore was principal. That was 1880. That brings me to the time when my memory gets dim. We moved to Rose, six miles out from Minneapolis. It was there that I was hit by the stone. 1 remember no more.”

On the subject of how he lost one part of his memory to regain another, Mr. Gurney said: —“Before 1 collapsed on board the Fiona 1 had, according to officers and friends on board, talked as a mining engineer. I had booked in Siam. I had said I had a wife and two grown-up boys. Passengers told me afterwards that I spoke several languages. Now I cannot recall wife or boys, know nothing of any profession, cannot remember anything of the East, and cannot speak any language but my own. As to what has happened between boyhood and a few weeks ago, my mind is a blank. My passport is that of a Briton, in the name of Albert Mayfield, and I handed this and my letters to the captain, and I understand they are held in connection with Foreign Office inquiries.” Mr. Gurney walked with the reporter to a motor-car, where he said simply: “Wonderful things. I was astonished when I saw them for the first time on landing.”