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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Keep up to date with the Archive and Study Centre News Blog
"A home for research and
discussion about therapeutic community"
David Wills, who died in 1981, was a man who loved poetry, and assumed that everyone else did as well. In a sense his career as a pioneer of therapeutic community came from poetry – from shared poetry and long walks with a fellow Brother at the Wallingford Farm Training Colony named Stuart Payne, from whom Wills learned that it was not necessary to beat up and frighten difficult, disturbed and delinquent young people to get them to listen and respond to you.
According to Kenneth Roberton, who was on the staff there, David assumed that those who worked with him at Barns House near Peebles in Scotland during the war were as much in love with poetry as he was, and in the evenings he and his wife Ruth would regularly gather the staff together in their sitting room to read favourite poems to one another [see his interview with David Gribble, (T) DG ]. He certainly carried this on into Bodenham, in Herefordshire, of which he was founding warden after the war.
In 1978, as a Christmas present for his niece Kathleen in America, he re-created from memory the poetry and music “played in my garden at Bodenham Manor, on Midsummer Eve, 1958 or 1959. The gramophone records used in the reconstruction” he wrote, “are, with two exceptions, the same as were used then, and are therefore at least twenty years old. The voice too, is the same, and is also twenty years older.” [PP/KJ/WDW]. Using a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and calling it “Midsummer Eve in a Herefordshire Garden - A gallimaufry of verse and music” he recorded himself introducing and reading a number of poems, and pieces from Shakespeare, interspersed with classical music from his record collection.
His niece, Kathleen Jennett, transferred these original tape recordings onto gramophone disks, and recently had these copied again onto CD, a copy of which she has given to the Archive and Study Centre. To celebrate this specially-themed issue of the Newsletter, she has given permission to upload material from the recording to the Internet.
The quality of the recording, as you can imagine, is not the best. But through it you can hear the voice of one of the most influential pioneers of therapeutic community in the 20th century, whose public speaking played a major role in spreading the idea of planned environment therapy and therapeutic community both before and after the war - in talks to WIs, in talks to students and teachers; indeed, to countless meetings of all kinds, up and down the country, from the time of Hawkspur almost to the time of his death.
The above is reprinted from The Joint Newsletter 7 (March 2003)
The Peter van der Linden Lecture, 1999
15 September 1999
The Association of Therapeutic Communities
Windsor Conference:
"Crossing New Thresholds: Conservation - Adaptation - Co-operation"
13-16 September 1999
Cumberland Lodge
Windsor
Association of Therapeutic Communities |
PLANNED ENVIRONMENT THERAPY TRUST |
Charterhouse Group |
Therapeutic Community Open Forum |
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RadioTC International |
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This page authored by: Craig Fees