The Gurdjieff Journal—Fourth Way Perspectives

Lord John Pentland: In Tribute

T his year marks the 20th anniversary of the passing

of Lord John Pentland, the remarkable man Mr. Gurdjieff chose to lead
the work in America. Under his indefatigable leadership as president
of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, from its inception in 1953 to
his death 31 years later, the ancient teaching of The Fourth Way,
rediscovered, reassembled and reformulated for modern times by
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, grew significantly both in numbers of
students and the establishment of foundations in many of the major
cities of America. Gurdjieff had told Lord Pentland in the waning
months of his life: "You are like Paul; you must spread my ideas."

His Life's Mission

Gurdjieff's directive became his life's mission and responsibility,

one that he never shirked. He became an unwavering and
instrumental force in establishing the teaching and in doing so had to
bring together and reconcile many disparate elements. Always
diffident and respectful of others, he was open to new ideas and
approaches but his perspective was always clear: the need to
preserve the teaching and protect it from the introduction of
distortions. He had to employ all his considerable political skills and
organizational ability to guide the teaching through the many societal
and psychic innovations and disturbances of the 1960s and 70s. Not
everyone shared the same level of understanding, of course, and so
some viewed him as too doctrinaire and unbending.

In February 1976 he had a heart attack. It must have been severe

as a pacemaker was installed and he did not return to leading groups
until the fall. For months everyone had anticipated his return and so
one Sunday morning at the Foundation's estate at Armonk when the
tall, thin and erect figure occupied the speaker's seat to open the day
a breathless quality entered the room. What would he say after so
many months? He spoke in an even tone as always, never excessively
underscoring a point, but the theme of his remarks—the questioning
of whether or not the Work had any longer a purpose to serve—hit
like a bombshell for those who took it as a statement of fact rather
than a theme of inquiry. That the man who had been instrumental in
creating the Foundation could be questioning it's purpose was a red
hot pepper for those who misunderstood the point he was making—
that, just as a person, any spiritual or secular organization can
become too fixed if it does not continually strive to keep its highest
aim in view. It was a master stroke. The work he presented thereafter,
rather than energy work that can induce imagination if not properly
discriminated, was a reemphasis of core teachings and a probing of
self-limiting identifications and beliefs.

The Gift of a Sheik's Hat

In Lord Pentland's final years a student had traveled to Kars, the

ancient and remote village where Gurdjieff had grown up, and on his
return had stopped in the city of Konya, Turkey, a Naqshbandi and
Mevlevi dervish center. Seemingly by chance, he had met an old man
on the back street of a bazaar who handcrafted dervish hats. He was
the only one authorized to do so and the hats could only be sold with
the permission of a sheik. Permission was granted for the purchase of
a white sheik's hat. Upon the student's return, he presented it to Lord
Pentland. Lord Pentland, who always eschewed ostentation of any
type, was surprised and pleased. "He looked wonderful in it.
Perfect...," the student recounted.

Lord Pentland died in Houston from a heart attack on Valentine's

Day. It seemed fitting that the end came while he was on the road
visiting groups. The funeral was held at St. Vincent Ferrer Roman
Catholic Church in Manhattan only a few blocks from the New York
Foundation. Following the initial Catholic ceremony, Lord Pentland's
daughter, Mary Sinclair Rothenberg, walked to the pulpit and read
from the Bible and then from Sword of the North, a novel about Prince
Henry Sinclair, a thirteenth century warrior-chieftain and ancestor.
The passage she read was of Prince Henry's death. Her voice was
strong and clear and carried throughout the cavernous neo-gothic
church. When she delivered the last line, however, her voice escaped
her and the word dead shot into the high vaulting of the church and
echoed down on the mourners in the pews.

Following her, Frank Sinclair, a longtime pupil of Lord Pentland's

and a group leader but no relation, read from verses in Corinthians
speaking of the vanity of man, the two bodies of man, one natural,
the other spiritual. At the end of the reading, he noted that "Lord
Pentland believed in the mystery of Resurrection."

William Segal, a close friend of Lord Pentland's and a senior group

leader, spoke next. "Lord Pentland was the leader of the Gurdjieff
Work in America," he said, "and a man who never spared himself in
his role as a guide, as a teacher and as an administrator." He drew an
intimate and loving portrait of his friend, explaining that Lord
Pentland was much more carefree than many realized. "Lord Pentland
was not afraid to laugh at himself," he said. The Saturday before his
death, he said, he and some others had been with Lord Pentland
when "a wellknown philosopher was introduced to him and said, ‘So
you are the famous Lord Pentland!' and everyone laughed, especially
Lord Pentland." He ended with the observation that in directing the
work of the Gurdjieff Foundation, he had taken on "impossible
challenges." He then added with emphasis, "Lord Pentland was not
afraid to be misunderstood."

With the Ouspenskys

He was born Henry John Sinclair on June 6th in London and lived
from the ages of 5 to 12 in India where his father served as governor
general of the Indian state of Madras. On the death of his father in
1924, at age 18, he inherited the title of Lord Pentland. His family is
from Edinburgh, Scotland, and the land known as the Pentland Hills.
Not far away lies Rosslyn Chapel, dating from 1446 and built by his
ancestor William St. Clair (more commonly, Sinclair), the Prince of
Orkney.

Lord Pentland studied engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge,

and graduated in 1929. He traveled widely and entered the worlds of
business and politics. At 30 years of age in 1937 he attended a
lecture by P. D. Ouspensky. Joining the Work, he regularly attended
meetings and weekend work at Lyne Place outside of London. Of the
 thousand or so students Mr.
Ouspensky had at the time, Lord
Pentland became one of two
deputized by Ouspensky to
answer preliminary questions and
do readings; the other was J. G.
Bennett. With the war mounting,
the Ouspenskys left for America
in 1941.

Lord Pentland came to America to serve on the Combined

Production and Resources Board, a cooperative effort of the U.S.,
England and France, and so was able to resume his work with the
Ouspenskys. Besides meetings in New York City, a large farm/estate
had been purchased at Mendham, New Jersey, for weekend work. As
Mme Ouspensky's work was more practical than her husband's and
stemmed directly from Gurdjieff, Lord Pentland came to feel much
closer to her. She had become ill with Parkinson's disease and was
largely confined to her bed. Nevertheless, she directed the household
and the daily work. Of this time Lord Pentland wrote:

Madame, she was always called simply Madame, was constantly

arranging conditions, whether through physical labor on the farm,
through carefully formulated questions and messages to us, or
through talks as we sat on the floor in her bedroom, which had the
effect of miraculously renewing our energies and zest for living at the
expense of the ugly and sleepy associations inside us. When we felt
that renewal, she did not merely tell us to observe and record how it
appeared, but confronted us with the questions: "What do you
want?"... The meaning of Madame's question had to be felt inside. I
heard it outside. So the question did not penetrate. It bounced.... I
needed to free myself from a lot of unnecessary tensions and
emotions even to have glimpses of the truth of Gurdjieff's ideas. I was
facing my life as if it were a surface, oblivious of all the underside.
At Gurdjieff's Table

In late 1947 the shock of Ouspensky's death brought him to the

realization that despite all the work he had done on himself, "I hadn't
arrived at anything; I came to nothing." That is, like many others at
the time, he had come to the place in which he felt his nothingness.
Through Mme Ouspensky's introduction he went to Paris and met Mr.
Gurdjieff. He found, as he said, that "Gurdjieff had an extraordinary
quality of providing encouragement. People, he often used to say,
were like motorists who were stalled on a highway for lack of gas and
he would come and give them a fill-up." Eight years before, in 1941,
Lord Pentland had married Lucy Babington Smith, another student,
and a year later a daughter, Mary, was born.

The couple took seven-year-old Mary to meet Gurdjieff at his

apartment. Wrote Rina Hands of this time:

People are beginning to bring their children. They sit at the table with
us and participate like everyone else, often being able to choose their
idiots. There is a little English girl here at the moment, Lord
Pentland's daughter, Mary Sinclair. Today she sat at lunch beside her
mother and just in front of Mr. Gurdjieff. The meal was a long one and
she was bored. She had been eating an orange and began to tear up
the peel and scatter it on the table. Suddenly Mr. Gurdjieff spoke to
her. "You know something," he said, "in life it is never possible to do
everything." The child looked puzzled, as well she might. We all
wondered what was coming. "You see," he went on, "on my table you
cannot make this mess. Perhaps at home Mother permits. Then if you
want to do this thing, you must stay at home. But if you stay at home,
you will not be able to come here and see me. So you see, you can
never do everything. Now put all orange back on plate and remember
what I tell—never can we do everything in life." She did as she was
told with a very good grace.... At the end of dinner, Mr. Gurdjieff
asked her, "Who do you respect the most?" She did not understand
and her mother said, "Who do you think is the most important person
here?" Without a moment's hesitation, she replied, "My Daddy." I
thought I detected a faint look of consternation on her mother's face,
but she need not have had any qualms. Mr. Gurdjieff beamed at the
child and said, "I am not offended. God is not offended either." He
went on to explain that who loves his parents, loves God. If people
love their parents all the time that their parents are alive, then, when
their parents die, there is a space left in them for him to fill.
 Lord Pentland was with Gurdjieff for
about nine months before he died on
October 29, 1949. He returned to New
York and became a permanent
resident. The Work being a work in life
and not a withdrawal, in 1954 Lord
Pentland founded the American British
Electric Corporation which specialized
in marketing British engineering
services to American clients. He brought together a very loose
arrangement of Gurdjieff people and groups formerly aligned with
Orage, Ouspensky and others, a considerable task at the time, and
oversaw the purchase of a large carriage house on the Upper East
Side as the home of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York. He
understood the personal cost of taking on such enormous
responsibilities for himself and others, for years later, looking back, he
wrote: "...we are educated and tempted to seize the outer forms of
responsibility too soon, before we have understood what is meant by
them, to behave well, to keep one's chin up, to make up for one's
faults by trying harder rather than accepting and seeing them, all the
mannerisms that responsibility can take as a result of a formal
education. The lopsidedness of these deeply embedded habits has to
be seen again and again.... Otherwise, the assumption of outer
responsibility may hide from them the subtle movement of wishing to
work and not wishing."

As a teacher the qualities he emanated of integrity, resolution and

restraint, together with his penetrating psychological insight into the
origin of a student's foibles and pretences, made for a formidable
presence. He had a gift for speaking in a way that eluded the
jamming system of the formatory mind and went straight to essence.
In his lectures what differentiated him was his ability to ground a
subject and then probe it along its full scale before again returning to
earth, the everyday. He was ever mindful in all he said and did to
preserve intact those two separate lives in each person which
Gurdjieff symbolized in Meetings with Remarkable Men as the sheep
and the wolf. This is seen by all those who visit Lord Pentland's
gravesite at the riverside cemetery of Valhalla, Westchester County,
not far from his home in Riverdale. His gravestone stands on a gently
sloping hillside by a large tree, overlooking a pond. It is a rose-tinted
granite with a carved design, medieval in style, enclosed by a Celtic
border. Within the border are two entwined dragons, one with a
lamb's head, the other a wolf's. Between the lamb's and the wolf's
heads is a fish which looks as though it had just escaped from water.
Below lies the inscription:

Lord John Pentland 1907–1984

And his final message to all that would hear.

Commit thy work to God.

—William Patrick Patterson

Notes
1. You are like Paul. J.G. Bennett, Witness (Charles Town, W.Va.:
Claymont Communications, 1983), p. 262.

2. A bombshell. William Patrick Patterson, Eating The "I," p. 356.

3. White sheik's hat. Patterson, p. 348.

4. "I hadn't arrived at anything." Lord John Pentland, Interview, Telos

[since renamed The Gurdjieff Journal] Vol. II, No. 3, p. 1.

5. Madame, she was always called simply Madame. Lord Pentland,

private paper.

6. People are beginning to bring their children. Rina Hands, Diary of

Madame Egout Pour Sweet: With Mr. Gurdjieff in Paris 1948–49
(Aurora, Ore.: Two Rivers Press, 1991), pp. 53–54.

This article is from The Gurdjieff JournalIssue #34

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