Association of Therapeutic Communities
PLANNED ENVIRONMENT THERAPY TRUST
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The Planned
Environment Therapy Trust
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TEN YEARS!
THE STORY SO FAR.
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Year Two of Tenterhooks.
Knock-on Effects.
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ARCHIVE FELLOWS
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LEADERLESS SEMINAR, 1999
A WEEKEND WITH MAURICE BRIDGELAND?
DAVID CLARK AND THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE A.T.C.
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Newsletter 3: December
1998
Newsletter 2: January
1997
In the established tradition of the past two annual Newsletters, which came out at eighteen month and two year intervals respectively, this quarterly comes a mere twelve months after Number 3. Presumably this completes Volume 1.
Apart from tradition and the temptation to work rather than stop long enough to write about it, this year has had an additional snag. Each time we sat down to put the Newsletter together it seemed that if we waited just a few more days, or perhaps a week, there would be firm and concrete news on the REALLY BIG story of the year: The onset of our long awaited construction!
The fuller story is on page two, but the brief news is that that day has not yet come; and as Christmas is approaching, and as in a very real sense the work that goes on here belongs to everyone who has or has had an involvement in the field, it really is time to report on what we have been doing. Thanks to many people's kindness and generosity it has, again, been an exciting and productive year (see inside). And, of course, it is also the Archive and Study Centre's tenth anniversary.
According to David Wills, one of the founder members of the Trust, the P.E.T.T. (which was founded over thirty years ago, in 1966) has always seen as part of its remit "the preservation of the archives of past experiments in Planned Environment Therapy". This in a letter to our current Trust Chairman John Cross in 1979, perhaps explaining something of the extraordinary drive and commitment he has put into the realisation of the project.
The inception of the Archive and Study Centre as such, however, goes back to 1986 when Elizabeth Wills, David's widow, was killed. All of David Will's personal archives then passed to his Literary Executor, Robert Laslett, who quickly discovered their depth and historical richness: David Wills was a British pioneer in the work with disturbed and delinquent children and young people, a tireless writer and correspondent who knew or worked with most of the key people in the field from the 1920s until his death in 1980. He had a keen sense of responsibility towards the history that his generation of workers was making, and he gathered and left behind a considerable body of letters, diaries, writing, photographs and even film; including the records of Hawkspur Camp for Men (1936-1940).
Robert Laslett, himself a practitioner turned academic, realised that these records needed professional sorting and housing. He also believed that it was important to make them available to students and researchers. During 1987-1988 he therefore looked for an archive or research library which would like to take them, and to his surprise did not find one. So, as a Trustee, he turned to the Trust, which decided in 1989 to establish an Archive and Study Centre devoted to the field.
Its parameters were elegantly outlined by the first three collections: Therapeutic Community work with children and young people - the David Wills Collection; Therapeutic Community work with adults - the Maxwell Jones Archives; and Progressive/ Alternative/ Democratic Education - the Jonathan Croall/A.S.Neill Collection: papers gathered during the course of research for Jonathan Croall's biography of the Summerhill School founder.
Readers of the previous Newsletter, which came out in December of last year, may recall the headlines: "CONSTRUCTION TO BEGIN IN FEBRUARY 1999" and "OCTOBER OPENING?" These referred to our expanded archive storage and working areas, a new 12 room accommodation block, new dining and kitchen facilities, and additional rooms for seminars and meetings. Having been waiting month by month since February of 1998 for work on the new archive and conference facilities to begin, we felt the assurances we received at this time last year were firm enough to assert that work was about to start.
This hasn't been the case. Work has not begun, and as of this writing there is no firm indication of when it will.
Construction of the new facilities is a part of the price agreed by Crosby Homes for a sizeable piece of adjacent land, upon which they proposed to build a number of high quality homes. Along with a cash payment, Crosby's, a respected and well-known property developer based in the English Midlands, agreed to build the new Trust facilities at their own cost. The extent of these new facilities was presented in detail in the last Newsletter
The agreement provided for the work on the new Trust facilities to take place alongside the construction of the homes next door, so that as soon as the latter began in February 1998 we had daily expectations of things happening here. February stretched into March, March into April, and so week by month into November.
Finally, just before we went to press last December, the Trust received a written undertaking that Crosby's would begin the construction in early 1999. Unfortunately, the person who made that commitment almost immediately left Crosby's, and the Chairman of the Trust, John Cross - having negotiated steadily throughout 1998 - found himself beginning 1999 with Crosby's uncertain what had been agreed on their behalf, and, with the best will in the world, therefore having to begin negotiations almost from square one.
This has been the story throughout 1999. As late as February we nearly cancelled the very successful Leaderless Group Seminar scheduled for March because we did not know what disrupted state the building and grounds might be in. Should we cancel the Therapeutic Communities Editorial Group away day scheduled for July? Can we say 'yes' to this researcher or visitor, or will we be inaccessible by the time the date of their visit comes around? When tenders went out in July and a bid was accepted, we began to make serious preparations for becoming a construction site. But the final step has still to be taken.
The cost to the Trust arising from ongoing delays in construction very nearly got in the way of hiring an Assistant Archivist; as it is, the appointment intended for March could not be made until the end of November, eight months later, and very nearly became a part-time rather than a full-time position. A six month sabbatical agreed for the archivist, originally related to the timing of construction, has been put on indefinite hold. And of course the Archive is now feeling the lack of space first envisioned becoming available almost eighteen months ago; or, at the very latest, this past summer.
But the least acceptable consequence has been on our capacity and ability to serve. Quite apart from the conference and residential facilities which are not yet available, there are the projects still on hold, or not started; the people not seen or recorded; the late transcriptions, and slow responses to mail; things not acknowledged, or, worse, not yet done. We have never been perfect, but the number of apologies made and owed during this year has multiplied greatly. And for that we apologise, again.
For four years the Trust has been working to be able to appoint a full-time Assistant Archivist, and it is very pleasant to announce that despite the disruption to finances and plans which have flowed from the delays in construction, it has finally been able to do so. Teresa Wilmshurst, a qualified archivist, graduated from the archives administration course at the University of Wales in Bangor this past summer. She joined the Archive team on November 29, and has already taken on a number of significant tasks, including cataloguing the exciting Kenneth Barnes Collection (see dedicated web page).
The appointment is a major step forward, and it is even better because Teresa brings a number of special qualities to the task, including a willingness to take on anything which is thrown at her. The benefits of an additional full-time member of the team should become obvious reasonably quickly: A developing and more informative web-site, a greater capacity to make materials available, a greater ability to return to and develop new projects, getting oral history transcripts back more quickly, the publication of our catalogues, and so on.
But this is by no means the end of the story. The appointment is for two years in the first instance, and there is a great deal of work to be done to ensure that we can make the position permanent. And there is so much to be done in the way of educational programmes, locating records, recording memories, supporting researchers, developing active archiving within current practice settings and so on that we could immediately incorporate another archivist and a full-time oral historian without touching the horizon. Partly because of neglect, partly because of the enormous wealth of the field itself, there is a tremendous amount to be done.
"My first encounter with archives was during a school visit to the Kent County Record Office whilst studying for my GCSEs. I then carried out research for various school and university projects, and became increasingly intrigued as to what it would be like on 'the other side of the fence'.
"I completed A levels (in Spanish, French and history) at a grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent and took a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in applied language studies (Spanish and Russian) in London. As part of the degree course I spent three months living and studying in Seville and another three months in Moscow.
"I then decided to pester (in the nicest possible way!) the County Archivist for Kent for some voluntary work experience at the Centre for Kentish Studies, and was there one day per week for several months in 1998. This led to paid employment at the Public Record Office and then at the Thomas Cook Archives, both in London, and I remained at Thomas Cook until the commencement of the Archive Administration course at the University of Wales, Bangor…"
"Outside of work, I enjoy hill-walking, places of historic interest, film and music. I have an active interest in football and am a member of several societies (the National Trust, English Heritage, the RSPB and the British Titanic Society). Additionally, I love travelling and in the summer of 1993 was selected to go on an expedition to Poland.
"I am very much looking forward to applying my experiences in my new post. I will also relish the opportunity to find ways to practise my Russian and Spanish, and becoming involved in oral history."- Teresa
Four years ago the Archive approached Albert Lamb and asked whether he would be willing to become our Specialist Curator for Progressive/ Alternative/ Democratic Education. Raised with American leaders in progressive education among close family friends, a graduate of Summerhill who home-schooled his four children, and editor of The New Summerhill (Penguin 1990) - writings by A.S. Neill -, Albert is a man with an intimate knowledge and passion for the field. For four years he has worked largely voluntarily to expand and deepen the collections. Having secured the Assistant Archivist position, the next step is to find funding to underpin the work he does.
Dr. Lesley Caldwell, whose two year Planned Environment Therapy Trust/ Archive Fellowship (1996-1998) enabled her to engage with the Cassel Hospital archives and to dive into the living memories of those who had worked there with and after Tom Main, has recently been appointed Director of the Squiggle Foundation from June 2000. She writes that "The Squiggle team would be interested in building links with groups interested in using Winnicott's work, or indeed, who are doing so immediately." She can be contacted by email at lesley@pyrland.demon.co.uk, or via the Archive.
Prof. Lawrence Friedman, of Indiana University, began his Fellowship earlier this year, at which point he was settling last minute publication details with Scribners, New York, for IDENTITY'S ARCHITECT: A BIOGRAPHY OF ERIK H. ERIKSON (ISBN 0-684-19525), published later in the year in Britain by Free Association Books. It has received very good reviews, and we are told (not by Prof. Friedman himself, however) that Vice President Al Gore rang to discuss it with him. If things go well he should be back in Britain in 2000.
The Trust and the Archive and Study Centre are actively interested in trying to find ways to help support research and researchers in the field. This can take the form of a direct grant from the Trust, as with the Archive Fellowship - Helen Spandler, of Manchester Metropolitan University, has received a grant this year to help towards research involving the Paddington Day Hospital, for example. But there are other ways that we can use the resources of what is, after all, a relatively small charitable trust.
Stijn Vandevelde of Ghent University in Belgium, for example, and Nafsika Thalassis of London received help with travel and accommodation to the Archive. Prior to her grant from the Trust, the Archive helped with the costs of Helen Spandler's visit to record and interview Dr. David Clark in Cambridge, and have transcribed that interview as well as a subsequent interview with Dr. Richard Crocket. We have loaned recording equipment during the year to Dr. John Hopton for his ongoing research into therapeutic communities, to Chris Beedell for an interview with former Mulberry Bush head John Armstrong, and to Lucy Jaffé for her ongoing work on Forest School Camps. We have also acted as recording technician, when that seemed a good way to facilitate an interview, and on occasion have even provided transport.
We are happy to pursue all kinds of possibilities. We have placed queries on our web-site, uploaded archive material to make it accessible, and feel there must be other creative ways in which our access to the Internet could be used for the benefit of researchers or students: dedicated pages for particular bits of research?
If you are pursuing research, or have something in mind, please get in touch and we will see if there is some way in which we can offer support.
One of the most exciting examples of supporting researchers and research came in March, when a mixed group of clinicians, academics, and students came together in the Centre for a day-long leaderless seminar focused on military psychiatry and psychotherapy in Britain during and after the 1939-45 war.
Non-clinical participants included Ben Shephard, writer and historian - "but a professional in the sense that I do it for money and don't have any academic position", who had then nearly completed his history of military psychiatry to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2000; Craig Fees, archivist for the Trust; and Lawrence Friedman, historian from the University of Indiana whose massive biography of Erik Erikson was just going to press, and who had just embarked on preliminary research for a new book on the innovations and development of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy which came out of Britain as a consequence of World War II.
There were two students, Maria Armstrong - at the time doing a one year course in the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute in London; and Nafsika Thalassis, who had just completed her masters at Imperial College and Queens College London with a dissertation on Second World War Psychiatry, and has since begun a Ph.D. on the same theme.
And there were four clinicians: Dr. Malcolm Pines, psychoanalyst and group analyst, who has written extensively about the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Britain and gave the 1998 Henderson Hospital/ Maxwell Jones Lecture on the subject: "Forgotten pioneers: The unwritten history of the therapeutic community movement"; Dr. Robert Hinshelwood, former Director of the Cassel Hospital, Professor of Psychoanalysis at Essex University, and a Kleinian analyst with a long-standing commitment to the history of the profession; Dr. Lesley Caldwell, practising psychoanalyst, teaching in the Sociology Department at Greenwich University, and working on a history of the Cassel Hospital from the 1940s; and psychiatrist Dr. Tom Harrison of the North Birmingham Mental Health Trust, whose major book on the Northfield Experiments to be published by Jessica Kingsley will appear early next year.
It was a stimulating day, which led Lawrence Friedman to propose another, and longer session in Spring 2000. The next event - the first weekend Leaderless Seminar, if all goes well, and construction permits - is scheduled for May.
Would you spend a weekend with Maurice Bridgeland? One of the proposals for celebrating the opening of the new Conference and Study Centre facilities is a kind of archivist's dream: Spending free time with people who have proved fascinating and rewarding company over the past few years of oral history recording; sharing the joy and inspiration of their company with others. One of these people is Maurice Bridgeland. Maurice Bridgeland published Pioneer Work With Maladjusted Children in 1971, and many people in the field may know him only for that. But he was a teacher and practitioner before writing that book, and went on to an intricate and rich career afterwards. A weekend would not be enough.
And what of other events? It is very difficult to plan for an opening celebration when the starting date of the work itself is uncertain, but among other projects is an exhibition on the life and work of Marjorie Franklin, the founder of the Trust and a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst for whose recommendation to the British Psycho-Analytical Society Sandor Ferenczi refused to apologise. She was a colleague with D.W Winnicott in the early stages of the 1939-45 War, and was a friend of Melanie Klein's daughter. She was a painter, and an extremely crabbed hand-writer; from a wealthy family, but sent to Charlotte Mason to train as a nanny-cum-teacher. The exhibition will be curated by our new Assistant Archivist, Teresa Wilmshurst, who is aiming to have it up and running in the Archive by the end of May.
Dr. David Clark, for many years Medical Superintendent at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge, where a great deal of pioneering work in therapeutic community took place (see his classic study, The Story of a Mental Hospital: Fulbourn 1858-1983; Process Press, 1996), gave the annual Peter Vanderlinden Lecture in absentia this year. The lecture is one of the key fixed events of the yearly Windsor Conference organised by the Association of Therapeutic Communities, and honours a late Dutch colleague who was one of the conference's delights. Dr. Clark spoke in absentia because of uncertain health, by way of a video made by the Archivist. His subject was the early history of the A.T.C., and it is typically entertaining and inspirational. Thanks to Dr. Clark, copies can be made available. If interested, please contact the Archive and Study Centre.
The Archive and Study Centre was created by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust to serve the work and those who do it; but it is almost entirely through the generosity of others that it has grown and that it thrives as it does. The belief in the past, and the even stronger belief in the future that is involved when a photograph, or recording, or a collection of records, or a recollection is given to the archive, must translate itself into the people who come to use it, and then into Society as a whole. It goes without saying, but can't be said enough, that we are extremely grateful to everyone who has helped and continues to help the collections to grow.
The Archive and Study Centre is made up of four equally important core elements. The most equal of these, in many respects, are the archives proper – the manuscripts, reports, documents, correspondence, photographs, films, videos and other forms of concrete social and personal memory which form the heart of a traditional archive collection, and which are fundamental to the history and understanding of people, places, and organisations generally.
One of the most intriguing accessions this year, from an archives point of view, consists of three miniature boxes of Nestlé's Smarties with the label "DOC 18.09.99" printed on the underside. These were given out to those who attended the memorial service for Dr. Josephine Lomax-Simpson in Wimbledon in September; and the problem for the archivist is: What do you do with the contents; should chocolate be archived?
Prior to her unexpected death in May, Dr. Lomax-Simpson was in an ongoing process of passing materials into the Archive - a folder of published and unpublished articles from the 1970s on, for example. The process has continued after her death, with the support of her sister Rosemary Lomax-Simpson, her executors Richard Steele and Penny May, and of course her long-time colleague Audrey Beaton, and has included Doc's files relating to her early work in various children's homes, including Liskeard House, the Hollies, and Hartfield House, and records of the Messenger House Trust. Separately, Audrey Beaton has also given the Archive a copy of a video made at the September Memorial Service.
One of the more touching accessions of the year consisted of a number of old newspaper clippings and a brochure relating to New Barns School given by George Foster in honour of his wife, Eva, who worked for very many years at the school as a cleaner and in the kitchen, and had carefully cut out and set the articles aside. Other material relating to the school came from as far away as New Zealand.
Eleanor Barnes gave three photocopied typescript and manuscript talks dated 1948, 1949 and 1968 which philosopher and Chairman of Governors John Macmurray had given at Wennington School. Because of the reflection they shed on her own childhood, Dr. Isobel Hunter-Brown, who last year recorded a discussion with us about her experiences at the early Henderson Hospital, gave us a set of typescript poems written by her sister, Maimie Henderson.
Further material relating to the Cassel Hospital, and a considerable number of files from Dr. Joseph Berke relating to the Arbours Association have come in during the year. Dr. Richard Crocket has lent a variety of materials for processing, including an early Mental
Patients Union circular, an unpublished paper on the Paddington Day Hospital, a diary of a trip he took to the United States in 1968 in which he visited therapeutic units across the country, and a video copy of 16mm films taken by his physician father before the last World War.
Maurice Bridgeland sent the typescript of a novel written by a former child on whom he had clearly had a significant positive impact in an early school for emotionally disturbed children. Helen Frye gave two photographs of Barns House in Scotland, site of the therapeutic work with unbilletable boys recorded by David Wills in The Barns Experiment (1945). And Pauline Weinstein, who worked at Bodenham Manor School under David Wills after the war - and married Judah, who first met David while a Borstal boy in Rochester just before David Wills became Camp Chief at the first Hawkspur Camp in 1936 - gave five photographs, and information on current therapeutic work with children and young people in Norfolk.
It is often very small things which are exciting, and one of the unexpected gems of this year came in a single envelope from Ruth Barling, Elizabeth Wills' sister. Elizabeth, David Will's second wife, was in later life a Jungian art and movement therapist with emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children, who helped to establish the British Association of Art Therapists. But as often happens in this field, her personal earlier history is elusive. We knew that she worked in Birmingham during the war, and for a time after the war was at Withymead therapeutic community in Devon, but beyond that there had previously been few details. The envelope, however, contained her late 1940s CV and a set of references detailing her work as an occupational therapist in Birmingham during the war - effectively a working snapshot taken precisely at the moment she was moving to Withymead. We now know the hospitals, the dates, the nature of the work, and the esteem in which she was held. We also know - more closely, at any rate - when she moved to Devon.
Other accessions are special for other reasons. Sidney Hill, whom we last saw climbing over his hilly burnside land in Scotland, wrote to say that he had had a leg amputated, and was enclosing several envelopes of material relating to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children, and various residential establishments with which he had been associated.
Alexander Gobell has given a variety of materials relating to and which belonged to and were used by Margaret Lowenfeld, the child psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who pioneered art and play therapy with children. There are successive generations of Badger Blocks, Lowenfeld Poleidoblocs, Kaleidoblocs, Mosaics and supporting pamphlets, through which the evolution of her technique and theoretical development can be reconstructed.
Sheila Gatiss gave a number of brochures and other material relating to the creation and progress of the recently-established Acacia Hall therapeutic community for young people in Lincolnshire, and materials relating to Glebe House therapeutic community in Cambridgeshire. David Clark in Cambridge, meanwhile, gave copies of three papers relating to his consultancy on the Mental Health Services in Japan - the first his infamous "Clark Report", compiled for the Government of Japan and the World Health Organization in 1968, followed by typescript papers reflecting on progress or otherwise fourteen and twenty one years later. He has also lent a copy of Love in a Dark House, a novel by Merla Zellerbach published in 1962, featuring a San Francisco Bay Area private psychiatric hospital being transformed towards a therapeutic community approach, and which features Maxwell Jones by name.
Steve Paddock has given a copy of the 1999 Henderson Hospital calendar, the cartoons from which should soon be appearing on the web-site. Dr. Robert Hinshelwood has given several reel-to-reel tapes, one of which records a 1968 Royal College of Psychiatrists conference in which William Sargant and R.D. Laing are featured speakers.
In April the archivist presented a session in London on archives and oral history to a Society of Archivists training day for recently qualified archivists, in which he argued that archivists ought to see the tape recorder as part of their professional tool-kit, taking it with them when they went to pick up archives, or going back to donors afterwards - to enrichen the context and fabric of whatever materials had been given. In October he had a perfect occasion to practice what he preached, spending a day in Bristol with Chris Beedell, recording Chris discovering and describing the contents of a file cabinet of personal and professional papers he was giving to the Archive. A forgotten letter from a Hawkspur Camp boy, written in 1948, after the camp closed. His war-time conscientious objector file. His contract (retained for the family, but captured on tape) for the Bristol Old Vic after leaving Hawkspur. His career at Bristol University, and the development of the Advanced Child Care Course there. And so on. A recording which will probably form the basis for teaching or lectures on archives and oral history in years to come, and a lovely document on its own.
Oral history will come into its own in a different way in relation to another collection which came in this year. Barbara Dockar-Drysdale was one of the most influential and respected workers with emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children in Britain. In the 1940s, with her husband, she founded the Mulberry Bush School and was central to it for many years. She was consultant to the Cotswold Community, as Richard Balbernie and his team forged a therapeutic community our of an approved school. She remained important to both places until her death, and will inspire generations to come through her writing. The majority of her personal and professional papers, however, would appear to have been lost, and the Dockar-Drysdale Collection which has come into the Archive through her daughter Sally Cooper will have to be augmented significantly through the memories and recollections of others. Recordings made at the Memorial Meeting at Friends House in London in October mark a start. It may be that other recordings, or correspondence, photographs and other materials may emerge - Sally Cooper has also given a family Memoir written in the 1930s - but almost certainly oral history will be essential in filling out a picture of the life and work of this extremely gifted person.
Oral history has been one of the Archive and Study Centre’s core elements since the Centre was founded in 1989. It is vital to our work, catching events and memories that may be documented in no other way, but also bringing experiences to life with an immediacy and vividness which can draw listeners and readers in to a deeper understanding and insight - into the lives and work of others, but also into themselves. It is an essential tool in a field in which the creation of enduring records has not always been possible, nor always a priority; in which so much has been lost and destroyed; and where so much that is essential to the work can not be written down in any event.
The work to be done in the area of therapeutic community and education is vast, and it is always a pleasure to be able to support recording which is being done by others. Sometimes this support is simply to provide an archival home for recordings, making copies for the donor and the people recorded and/or their families. More often we provide for the transcription, as well as the duplication of the tapes, and can lend equipment and tapes themselves. We can also help with the costs of travel to and from recording sessions. What is important is that the memories and reflections are captured; and we are grateful to the people who are willing to take something of this work on.
Over the past year, this group of people has included Dr. John Hopton, who deposited a further tape from his on-going oral history project concerning therapeutic community wards in Prestwich Hospital (see his "Prestwich Hospital in the twentieth century: a case study of slow and uneven progress in the development of psychiatric care", History of Psychiatry 10:3 (1999), 349-369, for a report on his work using oral history).
Chris Beedell, a former Manager of the Mulberry Bush School, recorded an initial interview with the Bush's former head, John Armstrong. Helen Spandler recorded David Clark as part of her research on therapeutic environments and their relationship to mental patient self-help initiatives and organizations. And John Cross recorded Prof. Harry Daniels of Birmingham University giving the annual David Wills Lecture for the Association of Workers for Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed Children.
The Archive's programme of recording has divided between oral history proper and oral archiving, or documenting current discussion and events.
For the latter, we recorded several conferences: The Cassel Hospital's “Private Work in Public Places" Conference in March, involving two plenary and two sets of four simultaneous sessions (at which point one discovers how big the Cassel Hospital is); the Arbour Association's celebration conference for the 25th anniversary of the Crisis Centre in June, recorded both on tape and video; and the four day Windsor Conference in September: "Crossing New Thresholds: Conservation - Adaptation - Co-operation".
We recorded the day-long Leaderless Seminar held at the Archive and Study Centre in March, and on not so dissimilar lines, recorded two London-based seminar/ workshops on "Starting up a new therapeutic community" organized by the Association of Therapeutic Communities, in which experienced practitioners and those embarked on or about to set up therapeutic communities shared their thinking and insights.
We also recorded two, in a sense, more intimate occasions: The Memorial Meeting for Barbara Dockar-Drysdale held at Friends House in London in October, featuring (among other contributions) a flute solo by Richard Weigel; and the Henderson Hospital's annual Maxwell Jones Lecture, in which, this year, Harold Bridger reflected on his meetings with Maxwell Jones, and issues and developments over the past fifty years.
On the more purely oral history front: We have recorded a series of interviews with Dr. Richard Crocket, discussing his life and career, focusing particularly on the Ingrebourne Centre of which he was the founding Director, and, with Helen Spandler as the main interviewer, the Paddington Day Hospital. We very briefly interviewed Dr. Joseph Berke, and (with Peter Griffiths) Dr. Eduardo Pinchon during the reception prior to the Arbours Association's celebration of 25 years of the Crisis Centre. We also made our final recording with Dr. Josephine Lomax-Simpson in March.
In a year in which many special things stand out, prominent among them is the interview about his life and career with Dr. Harry Wilmer, which Dr. Wilmer kindly recorded during a brief and rare visit to England. Various people, including David Clark and Dennie Briggs, had long urged such a meeting, but a trip to Texas had never materialised. And then Helen Frye brought in a copy of Retreats magazine for the Library, Jeremy Harvey noticed it and drew our attention to an article on "The Fellowship of Meditation" which he had co-authored, and a notice for the Guild of Pastoral Psychology on the facing page leapt out with the fact that Dr. Wilmer would be speaking at their annual residential conference in Oxford. The interview happened, therefore, through the generosity and concern of a number of people, not least Dr. Wilmer himself; which pretty much reflects the reality behind the Archive and Study Centre.
Sheila Gatiss visited the Archive to record reflections on the work and processes involved in creating Acacia Hall therapeutic community in Lincolnshire, from initial vision to early realisation and operation: A kind of work-in-progress recording, which will increase in fascination and in value as the project itself develops. And two fascinating days were spent with Chris Beedell, the first talking about his library book by book and set by set, and the second discussing personal and professional files being given to the Archive. The value to the Archive, and the historical and archival value of these recordings, will also increase in time, and as researchers begin to discover the richness within the archive materials they discuss.
The third of the core elements in the Archive and Study Centre’s structure consists of the Research Library, where our aim is to create as diverse and comprehensive a collection as possible in the two main focal areas of the Archive and Study Centre’s work – therapeutic community and progressive/democratic/alternative education – and to support these as fully as possible in the related areas of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and group therapy; childhood, family and education; youth work and social services; criminology and delinquency; and so on.
The Library has a regular flow of new books and current periodicals, such as the Psychiatric Bulletin, Residential Treatment for Children and Youth, Current Work in the History of Medicine, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, History of Psychiatry, the Oral History Review, Local History, Addiction Abstracts, Special Educational Needs Abstracts and so on - a mixture of history and current practice. We also keep our eyes open for second hand books and periodicals. But much of the real strength of the collection, which now numbers well over 5,000 volumes, comes from the generosity and awareness of friends: People who let us have otherwise hard-to-find articles and monographs, copies of their own books and articles, books and journals which they have found and think belong in the Library, or books and journals from their own libraries which they know will be of use to other students and researchers in the Study Centre's Library.
Robin Balbernie, via Trustee Helen Frye, for example (who has put in a tremendous amount of work over the past year reorganizing the Library), has given a copy of a monograph, "Infant-Parent Psychotherapy and Infant Mental Health Services", as well as conference materials from "Keeping Attachment in Mind" (1999). John Potter has given us a copy of his "A.S. Neill's Influence on Alternative Education", which appeared in Kogakkan University of Social Welfare Annual Journal 1 (1998), and which it is unlikely we would otherwise have. Ruth Wyner has given articles about Wintercomfort and work with homeless people. Stuart Whiteley and Jan Lees have both given copies of Windsor Conference papers, among those from Jan Lees being "Community, Therapy and the Individual with Special Needs", a set of papers from a Camphill Steiner conference held in 1990.
Brian Gannon has sent us back copies of The Child Care Worker, the monthly magazine of the South African-based National Association of Child Care Workers (1993-1995), and of its continuation, Child and Youth Care (1996-1999); while Richard Crocket has given us his set of the British Journal of Medical Psychology and The British Journal of Psychiatry; Robert Laslett has given Association of Teachers of Maladjusted Children Newsletter, Therapeutic Education, and the AWMC Newsletter; and Malcolm Pines has given a number of foreign-language journal issues on group therapy, psychoanalysis, and therapeutic community.
Anthony Rodway noticed in the last Newsletter that we had been given a hard-to-find copy of David Wills' Common Sense About Young Offenders, and sent his even harder-to-find 1962 paper back copy. Following her death, and adding to the many already received, we were given a considerable number of books from Dr. Josephine Lomax-Simpson's library.
Helen Frye has given a number of books, including J.M. Murray's Community Farm, and E.T. Bazeley's classic Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth. Robert Laslett has given a number of books related to work with emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children, we have received nine H.M.S.O. publications related to child care, Rai Clews has given nine books, Caroline Whitehead has given thirty five books in an on-going donation, and Malcolm Pines has given another twenty English and foreign language books on psychoanalysis (such as O. Pfister's The Psychoanalytic Method from 1915), group therapy and therapeutic community. And in a session recorded as part of our oral history programme, Christopher Beedell gave us five boxes of books from his professional library.
Rewarding in a special way are publications in which the Archive has played some role. We were given their theses by two researchers this year: Keith Burnett's How do users perceive the experience of drug/alcohol rehabilitation in a therapeutic community, Durham University (1999), and Stijn Vandevelde's Die Studie van Maxwell Jones en zijn werk in de therapeutische gemeenschap, Universiteit Gent (1999). Stijn also, very generously, gave us his copy of Maxwell Jones' Beyond the Therapeutic Community, and we are hoping to be able to translate his thesis at some point from Dutch into English.
And Florence Minnis of the BBC very generously sent us video tapes of the three-part “Transformers” series, broadcast by the BBC.
There is, of course, a fourth essential element, which gives meaning to the other three: Sharing the richness of the collections, whether directly through publication, or in responding to queries, or in making materials available to researchers. A great deal of what we hold is, of course, confidential; but by no means all, and we hope, in various ways, that we are gradually building up ways to make things available, along with an awareness of the extent and significance of the research sources which already are.
An archive which holds records relating to residential work with children and young people will find itself playing host to police and social services investigators from time to time, and it has been interesting looking at research from this point of view again this year. More traditionally, it was fascinating early in the year to play host to historian Lawrence Friedman, to see him discovering the Cassel archives, and being present when the germ for an article was born.
Dr. Friedman stayed the better part of week in the Study Centre accommodation. Stijn Vandevelde of Ghent University, completing his thesis on Maxwell Jones, did not stay quite so long, but certainly made himself a welcome guest, as did Nafsika Thalassis, who stayed one night in anticipation of the Leaderless Group Seminar. More conventionally, John Hopton, pursuing his research on therapeutic communities, came for part of a day, and there have been a number of visitors to the Archive as such, quite apart from the events hosted here.
Queries come in all shapes and sizes, and now come in a variety of media - old-fashioned phone, letter, fax, and of course email. Through the latter in particular we have received and responded to queries from South America and Mexico, South Africa, Australia and Asia, the United States and Canada, and, of course, Britain and Europe generally. The questions come from former children interested in specific schools or in the field as such; from parents and partners seeking therapeutic community placements; from researchers, from people working in the media. Some of the questions are easily answered, some are unanswerable, and some send us deep into the Library and archives, wishing we were making better progress with the computerisation of the collections.
A great many enquiries, however, never actually come into the Archive: Indeed, if it weren't for electronic log-books on our server we would probably never know about them. The web-site - at http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk - has now become our principle means of publication and communication with the public around the world. Over the year it has grown tremendously:
Between November 11, 1998 and January 13 1999 there were 3,282 successful hits on the web-site in 845 user sessions - a "hit" being a look at one of the web-pages on the site, and a user session being, in effective, one individual visit. This works out at an average of 50 hits per day in 13 individual visits.
In a comparable 64 day period towards the end of 1999, from October 4 to December 6, there were 15,618 successful hits in 4,378 user sessions, or an average of 244 hits in 68 individual visits per day. This is a substantial increase in traffic. By the end of 1999 we would expect to have been visited 11,000 times, with visitors making almost 43,000 successful hits on just under 200 web-pages.
Why has it grown so rapidly? Usage of the Internet grows enormously day by day, and this must affect the number of visitors and hits. The number of individual pages has grown from dozens to almost 200, so that there are more pages to visit. And of course the site as a whole now consists of four main components, hosted, managed, and for the most part created by the Archive and Study Centre: The Trust/Archive and Study Centre web-site as such, the Association of Therapeutic Communities web-site, the Cassel Hospital web-site, and the web-site for the Society of Archivists' Film and Sound Group, each of which is growing and has attracted increasing traffic. The real significance is that an increasing number of people are seeking and finding information which - simply physically - could and would never have been provided in the Archive and Study Centre itself. This can not substitute for conventional publication, but it is a remarkable opportunity.
Another remarkable opportunity has been provided by the growth of free Internet-based email discussion group services. Through these services one can establish a rolling seminar or discussion network among interested people around the world, based on specific topics or existing organizations.
We have created one egroup of our own - pett@egroups.com - , which is devoted to the history of therapeutic work with children and young people. But we have created seven others:
One for the ATC Steering Group, one for those who have attended ATC residential workshops, and one for the Editorial Group of the journal Therapeutic Communities, on behalf of the Association of Therapeutic Communities; one for the Oral History Society Regional Network, for which the Archivist is the Gloucestershire Representative; one for the Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group; one for the Society of Archivists' Oral History Forum, for which the Archivist acts as convenor; and an egroup set up after the Windsor Conference to facilitate discussion about therapeutic community accreditation and training within a European Community context.
We don't eschew conventional publication, and over the next year, with the coming of the new Assistant Archivist, hope and intend to return to several monographs-in-progress on the lives and work of people represented in the archive holdings.
In the meantime, while much major work has had to be put on hold for the past eighteen months to two years, during 1999 the Archivist gave several papers and presentations using material and experiences from the Archive: A paper on “Access in small repositories”, for the joint Religious Archives Group/Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group Conference in April; a session on “Engaging the Community”, for a Society of Archivists Seminar for Recently Qualified Archive Professionals, also in April; and a paper entitled “This Land is Your Land…a specialist archive and study centre for ‘alternative’ therapeutic and educational environments”, for the Oral History Society Conference in May. The latter featured video footage of Chris Beedell and Ted Barron walking the remains of Hawkspur Camp in Essex, with a voice-over dubbed from an earlier interview with Chris Beedell.
The Archive also contributed in a small way to the BBC’s Millennium Oral History Project, in which over 6,000 people across Britain were interviewed, generating over 10,000 hours of tape. The project's co-ordinator and main interviewer for Gloucestershire was Andy Vivian of BBC Radio Gloucestershire, and he and the archivist met twice at the beginning of Andy's work for the project, discussing the various issues and elements which were arising. The Archive has also lent its mini-disk machine to help Andy Vivian in the post-recording task of making copies of the Gloucestershire recordings (all the original recording was done on mini-disk) for the National Sound Archives and for the Gloucestershire Record Office.
Among the Maxwell Jones Archives is a film entitled "Report From Britain No. 1: Neuropsychiatry 1943". This war-time film features Mill Hill in London, taken over by the Maudsley Hospital during the Second World War as a psychiatric facility mainly, though not exclusively, for military casualties. Maxwell Jones was one of the psychiatrists there, and appears - this was the beginning of his lifelong involvement with therapeutic community and open systems processes - speaking to a group of soldiers with "Soldier's Heart". The Contemporary Medical Archives Centre of the Wellcome Institute and the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute both have copies of the film, and as both are in London, and as most media producers and most researchers are based in London, we regularly refer enquiries about the film to them.
Following up one such reference for a series of programmes on the history of prisons - in one episode of which Grendon Underwood, and hence the history of the therapeutic community movement as such, features - Jane Moss of the BBC queried our reference to the way Maxwell Jones sounds in the film. It appears that the Archive copy, which Maxwell Jones carried around for many years, and which he and his wife Chris and the Archivist viewed together in Nova Scotia before bringing it over - may be the only one in Britain with a soundtrack.
John Cross, Chairman;
Cynthia Cross,
Jonathan Dare,
Lois Elliott,
Helen Frye,
Jeremy Harvey,
Bob Hinshelwood,
David Kennard,
Robert Laslett,
Caroline Whitehead
John Cross, Chairman
Dr. Craig Fees
Helen Frye
Dr. Jeremy Harvey, Trust Treasurer
Robert Laslett
Stephen Ogle, Business Advisor
Archivist, and Newsletter Editor, Dr. Craig Fees
Assistant Archivist, Teresa Wilmshurst
Specialist Curator, Albert Lamb
Archive Assistant, Maureen Ward
Library, Helen Frye
The delay to our new building has, of course, been a great disappointment, but this should not be allowed to detract from all we have accomplished in the development of the Archive and Study Centre during the past year.
Many people have directly and indirectly contributed to this, but in particular I think we must give our warm thanks to Craig Fees; Maureen Ward, who fulfils a number of roles, including that of Archive Assistant and Secretary to the Trust; Roger and Izaak Jackson, who take care of the maintenance and domestic side of the Centre; Helen Frye, who has taken on the reorganization of the Library; and Stephen Ogle, our invaluable Honorary Financial Advisor.
During the year we have, with grateful thanks for their help and service, said goodbye to two of our long-serving Trustees, Diana Holliday - Marjorie Franklin's niece, who has been a direct link to the Founder of the Trust; and Joe Berke, Director of the Arbours Association. We are pleased to have been joined by David Kennard, Director of the Tuke Centre of The Retreat, in York; and Lois Elliot, Associate Director of the Arbours Association.
Church Lane, Toddington, Cheltenham, GLOS. GL54 5DQ, United Kingdom
Phone/Fax: 01242 620125.
Email: trust@pettarchiv.org.uk
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This page authored by: Craig Fees