Association of Therapeutic Communities
PLANNED ENVIRONMENT THERAPY TRUST
Charterhouse Group
Therapeutic Community Open Forum
THE PLANNED ENVIRONMENT
THERAPY TRUST
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"Supporting, promoting, recording and valuing therapeutic work in caring and healing environments/communities/institutions..." |
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Toddington, Cheltenham, GLOS. GL54 5DQ, United Kingdom |
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"Disasters Near and Far", by Craig Fees
There’s something appealing and appropriate about putting together this annual newsletter between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And even more appropriate, this year, that its appearance should be delayed in part because of the effects of the long-awaited construction, now nearing its end: The unexpected power cuts wiping out unsaved text; the phone lines mistakenly dug up Tuesday, temporarily fixed by one of the workmen, but only in time for a planned day-long power outage on Wednesday, and failing again because of damp just before the power comes back that afternoon; British Telecom finally arriving just before lunch on Thursday and repairing one of the two lines, allowing a brief excitement of email and web-site maintenance before the digger pulls the cable out of the ground once again, early Friday morning, intercepting the draft newsletter sent from home late the night before. And, of course, in the wettest year since rainfall records in Britain began, the mud; the thick and sticky limestone and clay mud from which all of the new construction is rising, impossible to ignore, and seeming to get everywhere. Even newsletters have to wait while we keep the place clean.
Earlier in the year we built an ET-inspired plastic-covered porch around the entrance to the User’s Room, with three layers of plastic doorway to knock down the dust and keep the Archive as free of dirt as possible. It made it difficult to get in, but while the walls of the old kitchen were being demolished a few yards away to make way for the newer and much larger one, and a kind of inner-above/seminar room was being built above the old outside doors next to the Archive entrance, it kept the clouds of dust out. Archives don’t like dirt and dust - the ‘dusty archive’ is an ancient calumny - and since work began in April we have had a lot of it around. But the site foreman has been very good, the workmen extremely helpful and friendly, and from the Archive’s point of view it has all gone just about as well as one could hope for, barring the recurrent unpredictable power outages, the mud, the rumbling of the bricks to the tune of machinery, the days when it was simply impossible physically to get in, and a near ‘disaster’, reported below.
Last year’s newsletter went in some detail into the long story of the delays to work on the expanded archive storage and working areas, new 12 room accommodation block, new dining and kitchen facilities, and additional rooms for seminars and meetings. As part of the purchase price for adjacent land, on which they planned to build a series of new houses, Crosby Homes had agreed to build the Trust’s new facilities at their cost. Work on the houses next door began in February 1998; by the end of 1999, ours had still not begun. We had expected the work to begin monthly, sometimes weekly or daily, since February 1998, and the waiting and suspense became increasingly difficult. Through agreement with Crosby’s, which handed oversight of construction to the Trust at the beginning of this year, work finally did begin in April. The contractors, Bensons, are a well-regarded Midlands firm; it has been a pleasure to see them build.
It has been a complex and challenging project for the Trust, the course through which has been steered by Trust Chairman John Cross, playing a vital role in insuring that the finances and the legal and practical niceties have been kept in balance, and under control. It hasn’t been easy, and the construction hasn’t played to time. The incessant rains, the week-long petrol strike, the uncertainties of the ground, the difficulties in recruiting high-quality labour in a rural site - factors of all kinds have played a role in unbalancing every prediction made for completion so far. A mid-October target gave way to early November, which gave way to late November. In mid-December the work is still going on, and will almost certainly carry on into the New Year, with all of the associated add-on costs for the Trust. Once the buildings are finally handed over, the internal fitting will begin - the carpets and furnishings, the modifications that were not part of the original design and contract. If it has been difficult to predict when the construction will end, it is even more difficult to predict the end of this phase, which has not yet begun. When will the formal opening be? It is under discussion, and has been for some time. But we simply don’t know.
There will be a Leaderless Group Seminar here in March 2001, and the Trust has employed a conference administrator (see below). We know the new facilities will become available during 2001. And after three years of anticipation, that is wonderful.
Regular readers may have noticed that this newsletter has a change in title, and a more pronounced feel of annual report than earlier ones did. Indeed, in a manner of speaking this will be the last Archive and Study Centre Newsletter as such. We will continue to do an annual report, but as of March the Planned Environment Therapy Trust will be joining with the other two major British charities devoted to therapeutic community - the Association of Therapeutic Communities and the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities - to produce a common newsletter. It will come out three times a year and will fill a gap in communication, we hope, among all of those many and varied people and institutions which make up this therapeutic community community. The cost, at least initially, will be met by the three charities (although, as charities, we never turn donations down). It will aim to be a genuine source of news about and for the field, in a format similar to this, and to succeed will need the support and input of you and of many throughout the work. It would be very helpful if, as a matter of course, you or the organisation with which you are involved would send us any newsletters, public reports, or news - or cartoons or comment -, from which the new reporter can be built. The Archive and Study Centre will be pleased to gather the material in. Confidential material will, of course, be kept confidential.
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust confirmed Prof. Lawrence Friedman of Indiana University as its Archive and Study Centre Fellow for 2000-2001, renewing the Fellowship first made in 1999-2000 to support his research into innovations in psychology and psychiatry in Britain during the Second World War, with a particular reference to developments in therapeutic community. The Leaderless Group Seminar which sprang from Prof. Friedman’s research in 1999 will take place again in March 2001, with plans formulating for 2002, when Dr. Friedman - whose Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson was published to international acclaim last year - will be based in Berlin, as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Humboldt University for the academic year 2001-2002.
Helen Spandler, of the Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology at Manchester Metropolitan University, was awarded a travel grant by the Trust to enable her to carry forward her research, focusing on the Paddington Day Hospital and the origins and impact of the mental patients’ self-help movement. The Archive has also loaned her a tape recorder, and helped with transcriptions of the consequent tapes. It is interesting how much ground there is to be opened up beneath what is apparently known; and how much really is not known.
On June 16 Berkeley Developmental Resources, in association with the Bayswater Institute and the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, hosted a small working conference in honour of Harold Bridger at the Bayswater Institute’s premises in London. Harold Bridger, a pioneer of the therapeutic community and founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, was the guest of honour. Berkeley Developmental Resources - an association of psychoanalytically-oriented consultants who have been deeply influenced by Dr. Bridger - made a set of video tapes with him in 1982, and selections from these were viewed as starting-points for wide-ranging discussions about organisational processes, communication, and emergent media. The dozen participants came from Canada, the United States and Britain, and, as part of the day’s celebrations, the videotapes played on the day were formally handed over to the Archive and Study Centre as an initiation of a Harold Bridger archive. The complete set of twenty-one original video tapes subsequently followed from the United States, as did other material, as reported under "Archives", below.
The Archive provided equipment for playing and viewing the North American-format tapes, recorded the group discussions, and video taped the proceedings. A large-screen television was loaned for the occasion by Tony Dyer Television of Moreton-in-Marsh, and considerable technical help in relation to equipment for recording the group discussion was generously given beforehand by John Hudson of Audio Visual Services in Gloucester.
The Trust has been fortunate in being able to appoint Mrs. Joanna Jansen as its first conference administrator, initially part time, with the task of helping the Trust to initiate something which has never existed here before. A mother of four, as well as a foster mother with a deep interest in the issues surrounding child care, she is a long-standing governor of our local Winchcombe School, a horse lover who is actively involved in the Pony Club, and a trained administrator bringing to the work not only a personal understanding and commitment, but an extensive background in general administration, bookings, and public relations at nearby Sudeley Castle, where she was also, for several years, Personal Assistant to Elizabeth Dent-Brocklehurst (now Lady Ashcombe).
The Trust agreed some time ago to award the archivist, Craig Fees, a six month sabbatical, in part to help him to deepen his knowledge and understanding of the field. At his request this was broken into two halves - a three month working leave of absence during 2000, to test-run his absence from the work to which he had been central and intensely involved for ten years, without actually being fully absent; and a three month sabbatical proper, to be taken during the course of 2001. The leave began with August, to coincide with the height of construction - when it was anticipated that there would be a lull in new accessions, the Archive would effectively be closed to outside researchers, and major decisions concerning construction would have already been taken. In the event it didn’t work quite like this, and in recognition of this the Trust extended the period of formal leave to the end of November, in time to begin to put together this Newsletter/Annual Report. It is anticipated that the sabbatical proper will be taken after March 2001, when the new storage and work areas will have been fully inaugurated, and movements in archives and equipment completed.
Our Specialist Curator for Progressive/ Alternative/ Democratic Education, Albert Lamb, has been working full-time over the past year for the National Schizophrenia Fellowship (NSF) in Stroud, while doing a course on counselling, leaving little time and energy for other things. Having said that, he has recently visited the United States, where he met Ron Miller and explored the alternative education collection Ron Miller has established at the University of Vermont; continues to consult and to handle queries; and has taken on an editing role for The Education Revolution, an alternative/democratic education magazine published by the international Alternative Education Resource Organization based in New York. With reduced hours at the NSF he is hoping to be able to do more based in the Archive and Study Centre itself.
At the end of 1999 the Planned Environment Therapy Trust made it possible to hire a full-time assistant archivist, at least for two years, and Teresa Wilmshurst, fresh from the Bangor University archives course, was duly thrown into the deep end of archive life: Coping with the mud and near-disaster of ongoing construction while cheerfully tackling the various archive backlogs, taking in new materials, bringing documentation up to date, developing a new database, handling queries, visiting therapeutic communities to see what it’s all about - the Arbours and the Cotswold Community to date -, visiting professional trade fairs, attending archive seminars and training sessions such as the XML/Encoded Archive Description day organised in London by the Public Record Office, taking responsibility during the archivist’s leave of absence, maintaining our presence and participation in organisations such as the Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group (CHARM, for short), and adding to our web-site.
In an unusual but very useful arrangement, and thanks to the generosity and co-operation of Chief Cataloguer Julie Courtney and former County Archivist David Smith, she has also spent five separate weeks this year expanding her professional experience and knowledge on secondment to the Gloucestershire Record Office: A week in January in Cataloguing, the Search Room in April, assisting the Archive’s Education Officer in June, working in the Conservation Department in July, and in the Modern Records and Records Management Department in October. We look forward to her continuing involvement with the record office over the course of the next year.
Teresa also spent one afternoon per week during the March/April half-term helping with Mrs. Wray’s year 3/4 class at Oakhill School in nearby Alderton, developing Teresa’s experience and awareness in the area of archives and education while simultaneously giving us the opportunity to explore our holdings and to discover creative ways in which they can be used and made available more widely.
On top of this, Teresa has been shortlisted, and is one of 170 people invited to interview in January for a hundred "Experience of a Life-Time" 2001 Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowships. Teresa has applied in the ‘Librarians and Archivists’ category, with a proposal to visit state and university libraries and archives in Chile and Peru in order to explore South American approaches to archives and oral history, doing volunteer work in archives where that is appropriate, using her knowledge of Spanish to record interviews with relevant archive professionals, and returning to Britain to share her discoveries with archivists and oral historians here. If her application is successful, the aim is to conclude her two year contract here in November with six to eight weeks in South America, while we desperately seek funds to enable us to re-employ her. There is no question that our ability to serve the field has been immensely enhanced by having her on the team, and it would be difficult to lose her.
The work of the Trust has been considerably enhanced over the course of the year by a number of volunteers, including a neighbour, Deborah Kirkham, who came in to see what we were doing and subsequently gave a considerable amount of time before taking on a demanding new full-time job in marketing and development for a national charity; Morgan Woodland, who helped with cleaning archives; and Derek Mapstone, who helped in the library. David Gribble kindly transcribed a talk by David Wills, and while here as a researcher even more kindly helped us to move furniture. And Rai Clews, to support an initiative by Michael Gopfert to see if it might be possible to update and publish an English version of Dr. Edgar Heim’s classic Praxis der Milieutherapie (published by Springer Verlag in 1985), made substantial sample translations. Meanwhile, long-standing friend of the Trust Dieuwke Twinberrow has agreed to tackle a translation of Stijn Vandevelde’s thesis on Maxwell Jones, written in Dutch. The work of the Centre wouldn’t be possible, certainly not to the extent it is, without this generosity. It’s impossible to be too grateful.
In many ways it has been a difficult year for the Archive. After several years of delayed construction of our new expanded storage facilities, there was already considerable pressure on space, and this intensified as construction began and our small back storage room had to be emptied to make way for the builders. A near-disaster in September (see "Disasters: near and far" below), stretched things further, and had it not been for new shelving built by the archivist, the commandeering of an upstairs room, and the assistant archivist’s remarkable facility for finding space in its apparent absence the problem would have been very severe indeed. As it is, most of the archive collections have been effectively inaccessible for several months, and to reach material has involved a combination of levitation and mountaineering. This means we have had to discourage researchers from using the archives, which is itself frustrating; and that our ability to respond to queries and requests has been severely handicapped. Furthermore, following the September near-disaster, a great deal of time and energy has had to go into the recovery which would normally have gone elsewhere; and even with two additional people brought in to help with the page-by-page cleaning of affected files, much of the day-to-day work of the archive has been necessarily side-tracked.
It’s impossible to be gloomy, however, because during the course of the year not only has much of the backlog in the archive built up over the past five years been dealt with, new procedures brought in to make our future work more efficient, and a new database sketched out, but as soon as we step out of the User’s Room we walk into the beautiful new facility growing up around us, and beyond that the new storage rooms with mobile shelving tracks in place, and extensive space - more than doubling what we had before - waiting to be filled. In two months, once the air conditioning has been installed and the environment has settled down to the appropriate levels, we will be able to move archives in, and the self-imposed restriction on taking new archive collections can be lifted.
Having said that, the generosity which makes this work worthwhile has made this another exciting year, despite the space problems. There have been almost seventy accessions during 2000. A CD arrives through the post, and it is full of digital photographs taken by Dr. Rex Haigh during the housewarming celebrations at the new Main House therapeutic community, established among the old Northfield Experiment buildings in Birmingham. Another CD arrives, and on it is the voice of David Wills: A recording of poetry he made for his niece Kathleen Jennett in America in 1958, which she has had copied and sent to us along with his typescript transcription of the poems themselves. Her sister Audrey Jennett in Sheffield sends us two Wills family reminiscences, and Robert Laslett gives us a photograph of David in his study, the wall behind him filled with books, whose titles can be read.
Peter Millar phones, and asks if we would like a box of material largely from the old Cotswold School. When he arrives there are two old dictation machines and tapes probably of Richard Balbernie (all of our playback and copying equipment is frustratingly in store), a set of sporting trophies, and a series of items which initially don’t seem to make sense: two table knives, ground down to points; two loo-chains, with wooden handles. And then the penny drops: These almost certainly are confiscated weapons from the old approved school, part of the reign of terror which Richard Balbernie and others tackled in transforming the Cotswold Approved School into the Cotswold (therapeutic) Community, as described in David Wills’ book Spare the Child.
The Cassel Hospital needs to make way for their on-going programme of refurbishment and construction, and we pick up the rest of the Cassel Hospital archives, unloading at the Archive with the kind help of visiting researcher David Gribble. The Trust’s first Archive Fellow, Lesley Caldwell, who has recently become Director of the Squiggle Foundation, asks us to take care of the Squiggle’s archives. Among them is a set of gramophone recordings of his BBC Radio broadcasts by Donald Winnicott (who worked with David Wills and P.E.T.T. Founder Marjorie Franklin in Q-Camps at the beginning of the war); we later learn that these records came from the library of psychoanalyst Barbara Woodhead, which psychoanalytic bookseller and publisher Harry Karnac handled upon her death. It was through his friendship with Donald Winnicott that Harry Karnac’s extraordinarily important role as bookseller to the international psychoanalytic community began; and when the disks came into his possession, he hadn’t felt it right to sell them. They had gone to the Squiggle, and so here.
A further series of accessions relating to New Barns School: Two brass doorknobs, originally from the front door of the school; a photograph of a drawing of the Cedar Tree he’d made in 1975, given by a former child; things from a former member of the adult team; the order of service for the funeral of one of the early friends of the school.
Out of the blue, from Kay Carmichael in Glasgow, three letters from Maxwell Jones, as well as one offprint and two typescript copies of Maxwell Jones articles. Her teacher trainee’s newspaper cutting scrapbook from 1972-73, given by Clare Hawkins. An envelope of material relating to the Paddington Day Hospital, given by Jan Lees. From Marya Hemmings at Gartree Therapeutic Community: their Accreditation document, from January 2000, and a long-promised GTC-emblazoned pen, and pin, expressions of a prison therapeutic community’s sense of community and identity.
John Hopton sends an envelope of material gathered during his Nuffield Foundation funded research on therapeutic communities, as well as a copy of the research report itself, for the library. Just before leaving Reading University for a new position at the University of East Anglia, Adrian Ward deposits four ring binders containing material relating to the journal ‘Therapeutic Communities’ dating from 1990 - 1999; David Kennard, the editor of the journal from whom Adrian took over, also sends material; the editorial board will meet to discuss the nature of this deposit later. Derek Mapstone gives us a set of photographs, taken in August, to help us document the construction of the P.E.T.T.’s new facilities. The archivist gives a set of photographs of the first party held in the new buildings - his son’s fifth birthday party at the end of November, complete with flashing lights and magician - a fun inauguration of the future dining room, made possible with considerable co-operation from the builders, and support from Chairman of the Trust John Cross and Roger Jackson.
In the year in which students and friends of Summerhill School faced down the British government’s attempts to close the school down, John Potter from Japan sends copies of his correspondence with the Secretary of State for Education in relation to Summerhill, and Specialist Curator Albert Lamb brings in seven videotapes, raw material for the programme on Summerhill made by French documentary film maker Bernard Kleindienst. Albert also deposits a copy of the Summerhill School Staff Handbook which he wrote in 1995. Researcher and author David Gribble, meanwhile, who taught at Dartington School before it closed, and helped to found the Sands Small School in Devon, gives a further box of materials gathered during his research related to alternative/progressive/democratic education.
Having uploaded last year’s newsletter onto the web-site, with its report on Alexander Gobell’s gift of Margaret Lowenfeld’s desk (complete with ink stains), a BBC researcher doing an Internet search for a programme on Margaret Lowenfeld phones, which in turn leads to our making contact with Margaret Lowenfeld’s nephew, Dr. Beric Wright, one of Dartington School’s first (pre-Curry) students, whose doctor parents were involved with the Peckham Experiment, and who had himself helped to organise the first post-war international conference on Social Psychiatry, involving Joshua Bierer. He subsequently gives us two videos on the work of Margaret Lowenfeld, one of them just recently produced by the University of Cambridge; as well as a set of poleidoblocs, the brightly coloured shapes developed by Margaret Lowenfeld to help children’s development of spatio-mathematical understanding.
The growing involvement with Harold Bridger (reported above) - who was teaching mathematics in Coventry when the war began, before the military career which led him to Northfield and his role in the Experiment there - leads to a series of accessions, starting with 3 VHS copies of videotapes made by Berkeley Developmental Resources with Harold Bridger in 1982, followed by the 21 original video tapes themselves; a set of photographs made during the Harold Bridger celebration in June by Larney "Skip" Gump; 3 VHS videotapes given by Harold Bridger, two from 1987 involving himself and Eric Trist, and a third made with Harold Bridger in Australia in 1992; and two videotapes from James Cummings of Chaos Management Ltd in the United States, containing an interview of Harold Bridger by Rolf Lynton and Racine Brown from July 1999 (followed later by the transcripts).
Chris Beedell, whose career in the area of residential therapy and child care began at Hawkspur Camp for Boys during the war, and included developing and running the influential Advanced Child Care course at the University of Bristol, makes a further substantial contribution of archive and library materials, including a set of reel-to-reel tapes which we are aching to copy and hear as soon as the equipment is available again. Richard Crocket, who helped to pioneer the therapeutic community approach as Director of the Ingrebourne Centre therapeutic community at Hornchurch, in Essex, gives further material, as does Joseph Berke, co-founder of the Arbours Association of therapeutic communities, whose two boxes and seven file cases relate to publications about the Arbours. In addition to all his other encouragement and support, David Clark, formerly Physician Superintendent of Fulbourn Hospital, also makes a further substantial gift of archive material.
We also finally made contact with David Millard, formerly editor of the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, whose career in therapeutic communities began in the early 1960s at Rubery Hill Hospital in Birmingham, under Dr. J.G.O. Wardell Yerburgh, who had himself worked with Denis Martin at Claybury; Dr. Millard went on to set up and work within a number of psychiatric units working on therapeutic community lines, including the inpatient ward occupied by the Psychiatric Professorial Unit in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, also in Birmingham, and later became external consultant for staff groups for a network of units in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and for Francis Dixon Lodge in Leicester. As well as important additions to the Library, Dr. Millard gives a set of diverse files concerning therapeutic communities and therapeutic community, including material on St. Luke’s Therapeutic Community, the Mulberry Bush School, and Windsor Conferences in the 1980s.
And, finally, Stephen Ogle and Dieuwke Twinberrow have contributed to our growing Survey of people, places, organisations and issues, the former with an obituary of Doris Holden-Ortiz, taken from the Guardian newspaper, the latter with Summerhill School-related clippings from the Times newspaper.
It is impossible, in this environment, not to feel enthusiastic, to be excited by the future possibilities being made available to students and researchers by the people who place material here. There have been difficulties, as the article at the end of the Newsletter makes clear; but even there the underlying sense of growth and generosity is palpable. It is what makes this work possible.
One of the strengths of the Archive and Study Centre continues to be the Research Library, which Trustee Helen Frye is continuing to reorganise, and which continues to grow through a programme of planned buying, and through the generosity and foresight of others. Gary Winship, for example, has sent us a set of his papers related to therapeutic community. Dr. Richard Crocket bought us a copy of Tom Ravenette’s book Personal ConstructTheory In Educational Psychology: A Practitioner’s View, because he felt we ought to have it. Brian Gannon has sent us an almost complete run of the South African social work journal Die Kinderversorger/The Child Care Worker. Sam Doncaster sent us a copy of his mother, Margaret’s, 1969 Exeter University Dip.Ed. thesis "The Future of Progressive Schools".
So may of these publications are items which would be very difficult to find, or which would reach our library in no other way. An article from John Potter in Japan on "Alice Miller and the Concept of ‘Poisonous Pedagogy’". David Millard’s 1994 M.D. thesis, Collected Writings on the Therapeutic Community. David Clark’s 1967 M.D. thesis, Psychiatric Halfway House. A set of Windsor Conference papers, 1993-1997, from David Kennard.
Collections: From Eleanor Barnes, a set of books, booklets, pamphlets and reports all written by Kenneth Barnes between 1938 - 1980. From Harry Karnac, fifteen books from his collection relating to his friend Donald Winnicott. From its editor, Colin Ward, a set of the journal Anarchy from the 1960s, helping significantly towards completing our run.
Trustee Robert Laslett continued to add books from his collection, Chris Beedell gave an additional tranche of books and journals, and former residential therapist and friend of the Trust Michael Parker gave a set of books and booklets from his library, while Martine Telders, through Trustee Helen Frye, gave a set of twelve books and a journal from hers. Helen Frye also gave two books which had belonged to the late Elizabeth Wills, senior figure in the British art therapy world, both on art therapy. Harold Bridger gave four pamphlets relating to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Stijn Vandevelde gave a set of monographs and offprints relating to the work of Prof. Eric Broekaert and his department at the University of Ghent.
In addition to his M.D. thesis, David Millard gave a substantial collection of books and other materials - an issue of the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities from his time as its editor, which, for some reason, was the only issue missing from our run; a set of ATC Newsletters and Bulletins; and a substantial number of books, including the 1975 classic After Grace - Teeth by Millham, Bullock and Cherrett, which had not been in our library, and without which the library couldn’t be complete.
A remarkable research tool - it is always a pleasure to see visitors discover how rich the Library is - is made deeper by all of these people. Thankyou.
Partly because of the archivist’s leave of absence, partly because of the added demands of preparing for construction and then managing within it, the Archive and Study Centre’s oral history programme has been less active this year than in the past. We haven’t, of course, been entirely idle:
The archivist conducted a two-hour oral history workshop organised by the Society of Archivists for archives and museums professionals at the Museum of Welsh Life, St. Fagan’s, in March, for example, and joined Andy Vivian of BBC Radio Gloucestershire to conduct a session on oral history at the Gloucestershire Record Office as part of a local history/oral history day organised as a Millennium Celebration event by County Archivist David Smith. We loaned tape recorders to Helen Spandler, for her work on the Paddington Day Hospital; to Chris Beedell, for recording on the Mulberry Bush School; to David Gribble for his work on David Wills and Barns Hostel and School; and to John Everall, a conservator recording interviews for the Society of Archivist’s oral history project.
A number of recordings have been deposited with us. David Gribble recorded an interview with Kenneth Roberton, who had been on the staff of Barns Hostel and School with David Wills. Helen Spandler recorded an interview with David Clark, and then ten further tapes relating to the Paddington Day Hospital. Sola Afuape of the Henderson Hospital sent a copy of the recording of the 4th Maxwell Jones Lecture, given by Prof. Tom Burns. David Gribble also sent a transcript, while in each of the other cases, as part of the terms of deposit, we have or are in the process of providing transcripts. The "we" of the transcribing process is almost invariably archive assistant and Trust secretary Maureen Ward, whose background in languages and history, knowledge of the people and vocabulary of the work, and patience in teasing out meaning from sound give us the consistently high standards of transcription achieved.
The archivist recorded a series of interviews with Richard Crocket, including two conducted by Helen Spandler. He recorded an interview with former Hawkspur Camp boy John Davie and his wife, and interviews with David Clark, Chris Beedell, and David Millard, as well as with Margaret Lowenfeld’s nephew, Beric Wright. And having recorded "A Tribute to Harold Bridger", reported above, he travelled to Southampton to interview Harold Bridger in his home.
This is far too little, given the tremendous amount of work there is to be done. We will actively encourage whatever oral history work we can, in whatever way we can. One of the priorities for the coming year is to seek a grant which will enable us to employ an oral historian on a full-time basis for at least a year; by which time we may begin to feel as if we have begun to scratch the surface of the memory and experience that is there.
Part of the joy of this work, that which completes it, is making the archives, and the library, and the experience and information which are here available to others. There is a great deal we can not make available, because of confidentiality, because it doesn’t exist, or because we simply haven’t learned enough - one of the pleasures of researchers and queries is the way they expand our understanding of the field, and who and what we need to have represented here. But a consistent remark of people who have visited is surprise at how much there is.
We have, in fact, had 23 people simply visit us this year, from neighbours dropping in to see what it’s all about, to people who have given material and want to see the place - such as Richard Crocket, and the Dockar-Drysdale’s daughter, Sally Cooper -, to two Summerhill students brought over by Albert Lamb, to friends of the Trust and passing archive professionals. We have also hosted two professional meetings, accommodated ten researchers, and handled about 80 specific queries by phone, post, and email, some of them quite detailed. There have also been about 42,500 visitors to the combined web-sites.
The greatest number of recorded queries - over thirty - were requests for simple information: Names and addresses of therapeutic communities or people in the field; the location of archives - Margaret Lowenfeld’s or Wilfred Trotter’s, for example; Library questions - do we have a copy of a particular issue of Community Care from the 1980s, what videos are available about therapeutic community, do you have a bibliography for Maxwell Jones; or more general - What was the Peckham Experiment, what sources are available for therapeutic community, what does the Trust do?
Although there is an overlap, a further 12 queries came from people actively engaged in research, and involving deeper responses: Queries about Civil Resettlement Units, Maxwell Jones, John Bowlby and attachment theory, the writings of A.S. Neill, Clare Winnicott, or the history of concept therapeutic communities, for example.
Ten queries came from people who had been children in schools or therapeutic communities either represented in our collections - Hawkspur Camp for Boys, Wennington School, Red Hill School, or Shotton Hall, for example -, or with a presence on our web-site, such as Kingsmuir or New Sherwood School. Sometimes the question is simply "What ever happened to so and so"; sometimes there is a sharing of reminiscences; sometimes we can link them to a former member of staff with whom we are in touch.
There were eight queries on therapeutic community and therapeutic community issues as such: Questions such as ‘What was the influence of Carl Jung on therapeutic communities?’; ‘What is the role of the key worker/key relationships in therapeutic communities?’; ‘What is the therapeutic community situation in America?’
Six queries came from the media - print, television and radio - and ranged from specific requests for photographs of therapeutic communities and visual materials suitable for a television documentary, to general requests on, for example, poleidoblocs, to very broad queries on what sound and visual sources we might have available for 20th century marriage (more than you might expect), or for a project on Yorkshire Women in the 20th Century.
Four queries were placement related - where can I find a place for an autistic young man, for example, or what therapeutic communities are available in my area? Here the combined web-sites - the Directory of Members of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Charterhouse Group Directory, and the linkpages to therapeutic communities around the world maintained by the Archive and Study Centre - come into their own.
When a query comes in that is beyond our capacity to adequately answer - which happens with reasonable frequency - the first port of call tends to be the friendly and extremely useful email discussion list maintained on behalf of the Association of Therapeutic Communities by Chris Evans. The group can be joined by way of the ATC’s homepage, at http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/atc.htm, and like all such groups, is free.
For the better part of this year we have not been in a position to encourage visits from researchers, although the importance of research to us means that we have not turned anyone down. Indeed, some users - those involved in litigation, for example, or racing towards a thesis deadline - have little if any leeway, and a way has to be found to accommodate them. What is rewarding for us is that researchers in general usually spend more than a day - Helen Spandler, pursuing research on Paddington Day Hospital among other things spent two days; David Gribble, researching Barns Hostel and School and (to some extent) David Wills visited and visited again, for a total of four days; Stijn Vandevelde spent the night in the old accommodation upstairs. Ideally, people begin to feel at home.
But for sheer volume, it would be difficult to beat the web-site. In the last newsletter we estimated that by the end of 1999 there would have been about 11,000 visits, with visitors making almost 43,000 successful hits - a "hit" being a look at one of the web-pages on the site. By the end of this year, in contrast, we would expect there to have been almost 42,500 visits, with visitors making about 141,800 successful hits. It’s an inexact science, in part because our Internet Service Provider lost a total of two month’s worth of the site’s logs, from the beginning and the autumn of the year. But even without those sixty days the figures are impressive, at least to us.
There are many explanations for the rise in numbers. When we first launched the web-site in 1996 - the year that the Public Record Office, and the Historical Manuscripts Commission launched theirs - there were far fewer people actually hooked up to the Internet. The growth in Internet access around the world continues to grow exponentially, and this in itself will explain something of the rise in numbers. Furthermore the web-site itself - or, more properly, the combined web-sites - are also growing. At the end of 1999 there were 200 pages on the web-site. There are now over three hundred - the ATC alone accounts for almost 130 - and during the course of the year we added an entirely new web-site, creating an all-new set of pages for the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities.
It’s clearly been a busy year. In addition to the Charterhouse Group site, we totally revamped the Cassel Hospital pages, using the beautiful designs by Rachel Mulligan for a stained glass window entitled "The Seasons" which was installed in the Cassel’s Families Unit. The ATC’s site has been very busy, with a redesigned and hopefully more user-friendly Directory of Member Communities, and with significant additions such as the Kennard and Lees Audit Checklist - a rolling attempt to help to define what a therapeutic community is -, which was visited well over a hundred times in its first month, and was felt to be so useful that an Italian version, translated by Aldo Lombardo, was also put up.
A great deal of our "web-time" has gone into the ATC, Charterhouse Group, and Cassel Hospital web-sites this year, and the Trust’s has noticeably suffered. Having said that, it too has been redesigned, in preparation for the advent of the new Conference Centre, and though we have done far less than we ought and hope to do over the coming year, there have been some exciting and significant additions. Maurice Bridgeland has agreed to let us make his incomparable Pioneer Work With Maladjusted Children available, and work has begun on that. There is a new page devoted to the Birmingham Society for the Care of Nervous and Invalid Children, which founded Bodenham Manor School, and a page devoted to Barns Hostel and School. A long and detailed letter about war-time conditions in England, written for friends in America by Kenneth Barnes, has been added with the kind permission of his wife Eleanor. Richard Crocket’s Diary of a working visit to the United States in 1968 has gone up, with its rich reflections of American therapeutic community practice and society at a critical time - he was in California when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, and records the impact on those around him, for example. Dennie Briggs’ hitherto unpublished book - ‘In Prison - Transitional Therapeutic Communities in Corrections’ (concerning his work in the California penal system), revised and expanded -, went up earlier this year. We have prepared and put up the list of contents of The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities/Therapeutic Communities for Volumes 1-20 (1980-1999); a draft list of papers delivered to the Windsor Conferences from 1979-1999; and most recently a bibliography of Dennie Briggs’ published work. And David Clark has very kindly let us put his autobiographical reflections - "How I Learned My Trade" - onto the web-site.
Over the coming year we intend to mount a web-monograph by Dennie Briggs on the pioneering work carried out at the Oakland, California, Naval Hospital under Dr. Harry Wilmer in the 1950s, as well as a specially-written web-monograph on his subsequent work developing a therapeutic community within a military hospital in Japan. We also have David Clark’s permission to mount his M.D. Thesis, an account of Winston House, a psychiatric halfway house in Cambridge, during its first eight years (1958-1966); and a set of personal annual reports which he prepared for the benefit of himself and staff at Fulbourn Hospital when he was Physician Superintendent there. According to Dr. Clark, "they contain two of the best pieces that I wrote at that time…some of the best formulations that I made…" and we, certainly, are looking forward to being able to make them available.
We have also hosted two day-long meetings of archive professionals.
Fifteen members of the South West Region of the Society of Archivists, including two County Archivists, met for a Regional meeting here on Saturday, May 13. The Trust organised the lunch, and it was followed by a business meeting, a tour of the facilities and introduction to the background and work of the Archive and Study Centre, a presentation by the archivist on oral history and archives, and a very interesting oral history training event in which Andy Vivian of BBC Radio Gloucestershire interviewed Regional Chairman Adam Green, followed by a discussion of the techniques, problems and issues the interview raised
On July 5 ten members of the Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group (CHARM) met here for a similar meeting (including a discussion on oral history led by the archivist) with lunch, however, at a nearby country pub.
We were mentioned, and our phone number given in relation to Margaret Lowenfeld and Poleidoblocs on BBC R4’s "You and Yours" programme on May 16. Our details would have been given to any callers to the BBC Information/Help Line after the piece on Poleidoblocs was broadcast on "You and Yours" the following day.
Craig Fees
This article was written for the benefit of fellow archivists and conservators, who from time to time will have their own disasters and near-disasters to manage. It is reprinted here from the Society of Archivists’ Film and Sound Group News for December 2000 with the kind permission of the Editor, Dr. John Alban, County Archivist for Norfolk. It tells part of the story of living for nine months with construction.
What a friendly profession we’re in. Back in September we had a disaster, when the electrician working on the new accommodation block and archive extension made an unauthorised and unaccompanied visit to our accessions/work room. The room was chock a block with recording/playback equipment and archives, both recently-arrived material and processed things made homeless by work going on in the back strong room. The electrician chopped a wide channel through the plaster in one wall in order to lay a new set of cables, sending debris and a thick cloud of plaster dust around the room. I was on leave, but dropped in serendipitously with my children to do a few things; and used a word that I have never used in front of my children before, and hope never will again. Tape recorders, video players, tape duplicator, projectors, audio tapes, video tapes, computer disks, gramophone disks, negatives, positives, paper archives, some boxed, some not - covered in thick dust. Every surface, wherever in the room, however far down the shelves or tucked behind other things, was coated in dust.
What do you do? It turns out that the best thing to do is to do nothing, at least not in haste. Move nothing, touch nothing. Don’t panic, and don’t despair. And don’t let anyone rush in to try to clean up the mess. In a dry disaster, unless damp or wet is an issue, a rush to clean up will almost certainly make matters worse: It will send dust and debris into places which were previously clear; and it will wipe away the evidence on which the disaster recovery plan should be based. Indeed, if you’re not very careful, the fact that there has been a disaster can be obscured until it is too late and you have done irreparable damage to something. So start by keeping everyone out, and then - with one eye on the insurance claim, and one eye firmly on assessing the extent and nature of the disaster - document what has happened. Take photographs and/or make a video, and start an annotated inventory. If you can safely do it, put a number of expendable items carefully into an archival box, as illustrations. And then stand back and think.
We did some of these things, I’m pleased to say; but apart from apologising to my children, probably the wisest thing I did was to describe what had happened and put a plea for advice onto OHF-Online, the Oral History Forum’s email discussion group. David Lee [former Chairman of the Film and Sound Group, and Archivist at the Wessex Film and Sound Archive] forwarded it to another audio-visual group, and we very soon had messages of support, experience and advice from as far away as Alaska and Texas (Bob Curtis-Johnson of the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association and Stuart Rohre, tape archivist for Applied Research Laboratories of the University of Texas at Austin). Conservator Mark Hingley phoned from the Norfolk Record Office, Ken Howarth of Heritage Recording UK emailed, and Nick Berkeley made contact from the National Monuments Record Centre. Richard Hess emailed from Glendale, California, to say "We had a project where we had installed about a million dollars worth of audio-video-projection equipment and the same thing happened", which was surprisingly cheering, and Rob Perks, oral history curator in the National Sound Archives, shared the Christmas burst pipe in Bradford, which "devastated our offices", forced them out for three months while everything dried, and taught him "to be patient in dealing with contractors whose sense of urgency differed from mine!" Peter Brothers, President of a New Jersey tape restoration firm called Specs Bros., confirmed that "this sort of thing happens all too often", and along with other observations pointed out that the obviously affected area should not be the end of our concern: "We have seen situations where plaster dust has been carried in the air-handling system and contaminated rooms hundreds of feet away on different floors from the incident".
All of which helped to put our ‘disaster’ into perspective, took away the devastated feeling which distracted from the task of recovery, and put the situation firmly back into our own hands. Nick Berkeley emailed to say that "the Midland Group of Conservators has undertaken to offer the services of one or more of its members to anyone requiring help in a disaster involving archives of any description", and, with the permission of his employer, spent a day sharing his experience and getting his hands dirty with us. It is difficult not to be grateful to belong to a profession which has so much generosity rolling around in it.
What to do? Don’t make the situation worse: Wear a face mask, and latex or vinyl gloves, and begin by getting rid of all surface dust and debris. Hoover everything you can - gently - using a machine with a HEPA filter if possible. Put a net filter over the intake if necessary, and use soft brushes to sweep into the intake. Keep the vacuum cleaner itself away from magnetic materials (the electromagnetic field set up by the motor can affect recordings); if it is possible, put the machine itself and its exhaust outside the workshop, using an extra-long nozzle. Our Dyson DC02 with its HEPA filter, filters changed as necessary, seemed to do a good job. Don’t open a box, sleeve or tape case until it has been thoroughly cleaned - opening it will create a vacuum, and any lingering dust will be sucked in. Gently hoover the exposed surfaces of tapes, and the cases and hubs of exposed audiocassettes (making sure the tape inside is not loose - if the tape knocks around inside the casing its edges can be damaged). Softly brush or use compressed air to blow dust from exposed gramophones and negatives. Don’t be tempted to introduce liquids into the situation: moisture will trigger chemical reactions, and bind the plaster into gluey messes on exposed media. Use a portable dehumidifier in the work area if you can: a dry dust is far less problematic than dust swollen and excited by damp. Once you’ve vacuumed, use a dust bunny or smoke eater on box surfaces to get the last clinging dust off. If more appropriate, seal contaminated materials in plastic bags and take them outside, blowing the dust off with a gentle air-line or compressed air (which can be bought from a good photographic shop; beware the kind of canned air some computer or office supplies shops sell, which are not so much oxygen as other things with long names); just make sure that the dust you remove is trapped or blown away, and not ricocheted back or around to settle onto other material. Examine your media carefully after the grosser clean: Audiocassettes or video cassettes might have to be disassembled to be cleaned further, for example; gramophone disks might need further attention. Use a magnifying glass. Take expert advice, and care.
As for recording and playback machines, don’t be tempted to use them until they have been (as in our case) sent away to be professionally cleaned. Dust can get into lubricating grease, or onto recording and playback heads, and destroy the workings of the machines or media played on them. And remember to clean the heck out of any affected room - don’t bring cleaned materials back in until you are absolutely certain it is safe.
Finally, think back. Any material which was in archival boxes and/or archival sleeves (photographs and negatives, for example) was virtually unaffected, even when the outside of the box or sleeve was totally covered in dust: A few extra ounces of prevention, preparing for the unexpected, is worth hundreds in cure. And how did that workman get in? Then count your blessings: Apart from the anxiety and the labour, virtually no irreparable damage was done. Knowing what to do - and knowing what not to do - is 99% of the cure.
Management Committee |
Staff |
John Cross, Chairman |
Archivist, and Newsletter Editor, Dr. Craig Fees |
Helen Frye |
Assistant Archivist, Teresa Wilmshurst |
Dr. Jeremy Harvey, Trust Treasurer |
Specialist Curator, Albert Lamb |
Robert Laslett |
Archive Assistant, Maureen Ward |
Stephen Ogle, Business Advisor |
Library, Helen Frye |
Conference Administrator, Joanna Jansen |
We had hoped to get this newsletter and our greetings out to our many friends and colleagues for Christmas. However, as you will have read, our building programme has not been without further delays and difficulties, and so we are sending this out hoping it will reach you by the New Year.
Despite the delays, we are now optimistically looking forward to the buildings being handed over to us during the next week or so. These will include the expanded dedicated archival storage and new work rooms for the Archive and Study Centre, and the new and expanded facilities which will make up the Barns Conference Centre: an enlarged Common Room, discussion rooms, seminar rooms and a new dining area, kitchen, and living accommodation for visitors, including students, scholars and participants in other events.
The new Conference facility will enable PETT to provide a venue for seminars, conferences and study and training courses for health, education and social work professionals from therapeutic units throughout the field. The Trust also plans to offer the improved Archive, Study and Conference Centre as a "retreat-like" setting for therapeutic unit workers to spend a few days together participating in team building activities and professional, emotional and spiritual replenishment. In addition, it is hoped the Centre will become a resource for the local community as a venue for meetings and other events.
I think one can be justifiably proud of our new facilities, but in one sense our task is just beginning. Once we have taken over the building we have to furnish and equip it, and then start to publicise it as a resource alongside developing our own programme of events. The use of the new resource is vital, not only because that is its purpose, but also because its optimum use will provide a very much needed financial income to fund our present and future activities. The inevitable rise in costs due to delays and other factors of our new building has made quite a large hole in the Trust’s investments, the income from which at present we very much depend on to fund our day to day activities and associated costs. Very early in the new year we shall have to embark on a vigorous fund raising campaign, and the Trust will be grateful for any help or suggestions that might be forthcoming in what is always a difficult and time consuming operation.
Finally, on behalf of myself and the Trust, I would like to convey our thanks to Craig Fees, Maureen Ward, Roger and Izaak Jackson, Helen Frye, Stephen Ogle, Teresa Wilmshurst, Robert Laslett and the many others who in many ways have directly and indirectly contributed to our work this year.
John Cross, Christmas 2000
Trustees: John Cross, Chairman; Cynthia Cross, Jonathan Dare, Lois Elliott, Helen Frye, Jeremy Harvey, Bob Hinshelwood, David Kennard, Robert Laslett, Caroline Whitehead
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust
Church Lane
Toddington
Cheltenham
GLOS. GL54 5DQ
United Kingdom
Phone/Fax +44 (0) 1242 620125 Email:
trust@pettarchiv.org.uk
Association of Therapeutic Communities |
PLANNED ENVIRONMENT THERAPY TRUST |
Charterhouse Group |
Therapeutic Community Open Forum |
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RadioTC International |
| Church Lane, Toddington, Cheltenham,
GLOS. GL54 5DQ, United Kingdom |
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This page authored by: Craig Fees