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People and Places:

Lucy Francis
and
Kingsmuir School

Reprinted by the kind permission of Maurice Bridgeland from his PIONEER WORK WITH MALADJUSTED CHILDREN, Staples Press (London), 1971.

It might, perhaps, be appropriate in concluding an account of this last phase of individualistic 'pioneering' ventures to consider the career of Lucy Francis, principal of Kingsmuir School, West Hoathly, until her death on September 30, 1969. Her work may never have been of major importance, except to the children who profited by it, but her life spans the period and is concerned with the personalities and influences of significance in therapeutic education. She may be seen as typical of the untypical individual from whom most work with disturbed children stems. (fn1)

Of middle-class South African origin, she followed her mother into the teaching profession. Her training she found unimaginative and depressing and of little assistance in her first job, in which she was given a class of children all of whom she considered 'maladjusted'. Inspired by reading A. S. Neill's early 'Dominie' books, she tried to teach in a way utterly at variance with the spirit of the school and the instructions of her bullying, autocratic headmaster. The latter thrashed pupils who spoke to Lucy Francis freely on the basis of the trust she engendered and, on one occasion, insisted that she should cane two girls accused of cheating in her class. She refused, but eventually complied in a token fashion after the girls themselves had asked her to. She found that she could teach in her own way only by holding classes out of school.

At the same time she was struggling with her own problems of personal adjustment, which she solved largely by a complete rejection of her own restrictive and religious middle-class background. After the First World War she came to England and bought a rundown coffee-stall in London, near St. Pancras. This she made a centre for down-and-outs, for whom she provided blankets and coats so that they could sleep near the stall. She was constantly warned of the dangers of her position, but she discovered that the chief danger to her health came not from her increasing family of 'drop-outs' but from an almost total lack of sleep, since she found that London in the daytime (when her stall was closed) had a life too fascinating to sleep through. Worn out by this routine she took several jobs, the most significant of which, for her, was one in which she discovered how 'deprived' upper-class children could be. She was appointed 'watch-dog' to two children of a wealthy divorcee and, despite the opposition of their conventional and authoritarian grandparents, she introduced the children to the joys of Woolworths and riding on buses - and encouraged them to speak at table. She lost her job.

Attracted by the principles of 'New Education' she accepted a job in the junior department of Bedales, of which she said: 'Bedales sounded like a free school and then was so awful'. She admired Badley but found the regime in the junior school under Mrs Fish 'terrible'. Still fighting hard against her own background (in a way strongly reminiscent of A. S. Neill at King Alfred's) she was constantly frustrated by Mrs Fish's desire to maintain 'dignity'. This conflicted with Lucy Francis's desire to deal with the disturbed children in her class by close and understanding contact. She also found that contact was difficult to establish with the majority of the largely upper-middle-class children. ('If they saw you they would always say. . . "Please".') Her particular insight and interest was, however, recognized and she was eventually given sole charge of one very disturbed and violently aggressive Indian boy. She began their relationship by saying: 'If you are angry you can come and do something to me'.

She then took a course with Dottoressa Montessori, whom she regarded as a 'frightful boss - terrible to her students'. As had Leila Rendel, she found Montessori's use of her material over-rigid and insufficiently stimulating to intelligent children. Thus when she subsequently started her own primary school at Hemel Hempstead the Montessori principles were very much modified. The school began with the four great-grandchildren of Lady d'Arcy Osbourne, a wealthy eccentric who cut off her own dresses when she arrived home late in order not to disturb her maid and who translated Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into braille at the age of ninety-six.

Lucy Francis's ability as a teacher of disturbed children was soon recognized and the school expanded, but she still wished to live in London and so left the school to become secretary for the Golden Cockerel Press. When the Press collapsed during the Depression she went to Summerhill to work with A. S. Neill who, for so long, had inspired her.

When Neill had been working in Austria Lucy Francis had wished to visit him but she had been too afraid of being disillusioned to go. She did, however, visit him at Lyme Regis and was not disillusioned.

At Summerhill Neill acknowledged her skill by giving her a separate house with about a dozen of the more disturbed children. When the school was evacuated to Wales this arrangement continued in an abandoned and semi-derelict school which she restored with the assistance of Olive Lane, Homer Lane's adopted daughter. Her houses were known as 'junk'.

Although her admiration for Neill was unabated and although Summerhill provided an atmosphere in which she could work as she wished, Lucy Francis had certain reservations about Neill's work. In particular she felt that there were many children in the 1930s who were of a different sort from the earlier more disturbed children and who, stimulated by interested parents, wished to work and wanted to learn and that these were frustrated by Neill's inveterate prejudice against education. John Walmsley quotes her as saying: 'The only thing I used to get annoyed about with Neill was that he'd come round and talk to them and say Hello, and they'd say "Show Neill what we've done in lessons", and he wouldn't look at it. And I'd say "Oh Neill! I wish you'd be interested in what they're doing. You seem to think that all children hate lessons! " But then he'd tell them a story. They were always about themselves, you know, these stories. He would use them psychologically but not at all in a heavy way; and they would have the most wonderful adventures. He'd say: "And then Johnny said, 'No, I won't, I won't go up in that aeroplane. It isn't safe, I'm frightened!' And the child would say, 'I never said that! I would go! I ... I went'! " (fn2) She saw Neill as a marvellous 'natural' analyst who always knew what was happening to a child.

Ill-health forced Lucy Francis to leave Wales and in 1944 she opened her own branch of Summerhill - Kingsmuir (named after Neill's birthplace) in Essex, moving in 1959 to her present school in Sussex. This she started with a capital of £5 and had to rely heavily on Local Education Authority children, but when it became clear that Lucy Francis put therapy first, even to the extent of considering lessons irrelevant to very disturbed children, L.E.A.s threatened to withdraw support. When they were faced with the alternative of leaving the school or of having compulsory lessons, the L.E.A. pupils accepted the latter if Lucy Francis agreed to instruct them. Many of her private, and very disturbed pupils a colleague described as 'the ones Summerhill can't cope with'. Her school, which eventually closed in December 1970, was an all-age, co-educational boarding school - although she clearly felt that she had a special responsibility to the maladjusted adolescent girls for whom there were so few places elsewhere. It was run basically on 'Summerhill' lines with the maximum of freedom of choice and self-determination as expressed through the school councils. Although therapy was paramount, school work was recognized as valuable, but its direction and effectiveness was frequently dictated by the interests and abilities of a very unorthodox staff. Art was seen as of particular value and some work was remarkable.

Therapy was both direct and indirect. The children received regular treatment from a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist and the school was regarded as a therapeutic rather than an educational unit. Lucy Francis considered that maladjusted children are basically 'children who are frightened' and her first principle in dealing with them was that 'they must never be afraid'. Their relationships with the staff must be those of absolute trust. This, Lucy Francis suggested, implied the acceptance of the security of a certain degree of structure without which the fearful and anxious maladjusted child cannot be helped to help herself.

Thus Lucy Francis did not absolve herself of responsibility for the process even when in recent years she had to conduct the school from her bed. She recognized, honestly, the effect of her personality and laid no claim to theory. It may be true of her that it is only by looking at her life that one may perceive her effect. Of her whole career she said what is, perhaps, a fitting epitaph for many pioneer workers: 'I didn't work it out; I just did it.'

REFERENCES

FN1 Material largely from interview with Lucy Francis and from her colleagues. [Return to Text]

FN2 WALMSLEY, J.; Neill and Summerhill, Penguin, London, 1969. [Return to Text]

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This page authored by: Craig Fees