Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2015 | Page 25

INTERVIEW
the bookshop.
“If I hear that little voice telling me
to do something, I always listen to it,”
he says.
The bookshop owners agreed to
match his police force pay, and off
he went down a new path. In fact,
less than two years later, when the
lease came up for renewal on the
shop, it was the 21 year-old Den who
approached the bank for a loan to
buy the freehold of the building.
“My own experience in the bank
meant I knew how to present a
business plan – and it got me the
loan” he says.
Then it was a case of using his
youthful enthusiasm again, to
help revive the shop, re-naming it
Ramsdens and adding gifts and
other products to the book offering.
Two years after that, the partners
in the business retired, and it was off to
the bank again for Den, for a further loan
to buy them out.
So by the tender age of 23, he owed the
bank a grand total of £100,000 (at an
eye-watering interest rate of 19% in the
mid-1960s).
Some years later, he borrowed again to buy another freehold shop just across
the way. This became Den’s Giftbox, a
sister business to Den’s Toybox.
The responsibility of running two shops
would be enough for most people – but
not Den, who all the time was continuing
his studies into hypnotherapy.

Mind over Matter
He traces his interest in the power of
the mind back to his teens, when his
mum, a long-time spiritualist, took him
to see a spiritual healer because he had
an eye problem.
“A week after seeing this woman, the
problem with my eye had gone, and from
that time, I became fascinated with trying
to discover how things like this worked”.
He met hypnotists of various kinds and
ended up studying during the 1960s with

Gil Boyne, an American widely regarded
as a pioneer in modern hypnotherapy.
From there, he began practicing
hypnotherapy one day a week whilst still
running the two shops.
He has no time for stage hypnotists –
mainly because he knows the power of
it, and how it can be misused, especially
with susceptible people.
“It’s well-known that a certain
percentage of people are much more
suggestible than others, and they’re the
ones who tend to be singled out in these
stage acts” he says.
Den prefers to use the power of
hypnotic suggestion in more positive
ways, to help people overcome fears
and phobias, quit destructive habits and
even deal with long-standing health
conditions.
Whilst he will never guarantee that
hypnotherapy will work for people, he
has seen some remarkable results, such
as the woman with a long-standing
and very severe case of eczema, which
cleared up within a week. Another client
with botched facial surgery that had led
to paralysis was back to normal within
months.
“Nobody really understands the mind,
but it has such power over the body”
says Den, “and if you believe that, there
are almost no limits to what you can
achieve”.
“Every time I say I’m going to pack up,
something a bit unusual comes along to
spark my interest again. I really do love
it when you can make a difference to
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