It was during the nineteen-seventies that Mr Cullen began to develop his highly successful career as a ‘chest clairvoyant’ after years of operating as the ‘Palmist of Hastings Pier’.
He would tell female clients that the ancient Eastern art enabled him to predict the shape of things to come by ‘reading’ their breasts. They were a pointer to the future; a fact well appreciated in India where he claimed, Mammarism originated.
The technique was perfected in the brothels of Shanghai during a 26 year career in the army involving daubing the breasts in poster colours with a long camel hair brush. The breast was then pressed against a sheet of paper to achieve a life-size imprint.
Clients who expressed embarrassment could opt to take the reading themselves in the back room of his studio in Brighton, while the ‘Professor’ kept in touch by two-way radio.
After studying the prints, and sometimes the breasts themselves, Mr Cullen would predict the client’s future. In 1977 his fee was £3.
Mr Cullen came to Mammarism late in life. He was born in Dublin and after rising to the rank of Regimental Sergeant Major in the army travelled the world, reading palms. Weather forecasts were a speciality
More recently. he began to take prints of client’s bottoms and developed the ‘silhouette method’ of determining whether a woman was a virgin, another art he claimed to have learned in the Far East. This involved holding a sheet against a woman’s naked body while it was silhouetted against a bright light
Many of the articles can be read on this site:
London Walk – Camden – Goodge Street to Brecknock Road
London Walk – Hampstead – a circular walk from Belsize Park
London Walk – Highgate – from the top of Highgate Hill, to the East End
London Walk – Two Markets and the Monument
Hertford – a brief tour of the county town of Hertfordshire
Folly Island, an island in the middle of Hertford
A short history of brewing in Hertford – The origins of the Easter holiday
The eccentric clergy of Hertfordshire
Braughing – sausages, Old Mans Day and wheelbarrows
Katherine Ferrers – the Wicked Lady
The Old Bedford Music Hall – George Robey – Prime Minister of Mirth
Round the Horne – an iconic 1960’s BBC Radio show
Flanders & Swann – Sir Alec Guinness – Leslie Welch, the Memory Man
Henry Andrews and Old Moore’s Almanac
George Bradshaw and Bradshaw Railway Guides and Timetables
Thomas Clarkson and the abolition of slavery
Charles Macintosh and the invention of the waterproof mac
Jerome K Jerome author of Three men in a boat
St Bruno – Robert Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philantropists
Lt. Commander William ‘Bill’ Boaks – Screaming Lord Sutch
‘Professor’ Patrick Cullen – Joseph Pujol, Le Petomane