Working in the archive on Saturday, my son and I fit in a bit of ersatz-golf in the Field, having discovered a half-chewed golf-ball in the woods, and then drive up Church Lane through what looks like a crowd of pilgirms (but not the Father kind), and wait with open window discussing events with a local couple walking their dog while an immense fairground lorry tries to make a very tight turn out of the gates to Toddington Manor. Apparently Damien Hirst puts on an Event for the children and people who work for him each year, and this is the third of three huge trucks departing in convoy. They take the turn towards Cheltenham. Puts me in mind of the disparaging remarks which C.R. Ashbee made about the fair put on for his people by Lord Gainsborough on his estate in Chipping Campden, back at the beginning of the 20th century; to which Harry Osborne, writing as a former child who actually attended that fair and enjoyed the heck out of it, responded with unascerbic point back in the 1980s, his memories, an ordinary person, a useful counter to the better-known memories of a famous man. Perhaps that's the meaning of the shark in the formaldehyde.

"How do we know who cared? and what they cared for?" A life story approach to archives of therapeutic environments and a celebration of the people who saved them

[This mini-celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre is based on a paper prepared by Craig Fees for the Oral History Society's 2008 annual conference, "WHO CARED?
ORAL HISTORY, CARING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS:
Marking 60 years of the National Health Service"

held in the Medical School of the University of Birmingham,

July 4-5 2008

The original paper included photographs in a powerpoint presentation, which are included within the text below in their original sequence; and selections of video from places visited after they had closed in my role as archivist and oral historian. These are not yet on the Internet]

Innumerable therapeutic environments small and large have come and gone leaving no trace, except in the rapidly disappearing lives and memories of those who were in some way associated with them. When even some extremely important and influential places leave virtually no surviving archives for key periods and episodes - Summerhill School and the Cassel Hospital for their pre-war manifestations, the Northfield Military Psychiatric Hospital for the whole of its pioneering war-time existence - , and considering the conditions of therapeutic work in pioneering environments and the events and disasters affecting them over the last hundred years, the miracle is that some archive collections do survive. The question is How? Why? What does it mean? And does it matter?

In this celebration, I will focus on the archives of the Q Camps organisation. Why?

1. The significance of Q Camps in its own right.

In its brief life (1935-1948) the Q Camps organisation brought together some of the 20th Century's seminal names in group and residential therapeutic work particularly (but not exclusively!) with children and young people, including Marjorie Franklin, David Wills and Arthur Barron, founders of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust; Denis Carroll, Director of the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD), now the Portman Clinic, and Commander of the Northfield Military Psychiatric Hospital during the Second Northfield Experiment;Otto Shaw, founder of Red Hill School; Hermann Mannheim, a founder of the British field of Criminology; Donald Winnicott, the eminent paediatrician and child psychoanalyst; artist and therapeutic art teacher Arthur Segal. In its two camps in rural Essex - Hawkspur Camp for Young Men (1936-1940) and Hawkspur Camp for Boys (1944-1946), the organisation pioneered a way of living and working with disturbed and delinquent people which stands at the beginning of the history of therapeutic community in Britain, and is still influential.

2. The origins of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust.

The Planned Environment Therapy Trust was the formalised product of a long-standing collaboration among Founder Marjorie Franklin and founding trustees David Wills and Arthur Barron. It began in the first Q Camp at Hawkspur Green in 1936 where the three first met, and culminated in the creation of the Trust in 1966 to explore, research, build on, and communicate the therapeutic approach they had developed in communication together over the intervening thirty years. In a very real sense, P.E.T.T. is the successor organisation to Q (which "stands for 'Quest', according to Marjorie Franklin writing in 1938).

3. As part of the David Wills Collection, the Q Camps archives led directly to the founding of the Archive and Study Centre in 1989.

David Wills, awarded the OBE in 1974 for his contribution to the field, died in 1981. Elizabeth, his widow, was killed by a lorry at the end of 1987. All of David's extensive personal and professional archives – going back to his childhood and up to correspondence just before he died - went to his literary executor, Robert Laslett, a senior lecturer in the School of Education here at the University of Birmingham.

Robert began to sort and annotate the papers, but quickly realised that the task was a massive and specialised one, and that the papers were of immense historical significance and needed to be made available to researchers as fully and professionally as possible. His quest for a solution led ultimately to the decision of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, of which he was a Trustee, to establish the Archive and Study Centre, which remains the only facility of its kind devoted to therapeutic environments in the world. The David Wills Collection, including the Hawkspur Camp/Q Camps records, was the first of what are now over 200 large and small archive collections, with over 7,000 volumes in the Research Library, and over 1,500 audio and video recordings in the oral history collection (not all of which are interviews. Recordings include conferences, seminars, events).

4. As an illustration of the theme of the talk on the vulnerability of archives.

Of the records relating to their work originally held by the three founding trustees, of huge significance and accumulated over many years, only David Wills' have survived. Marjorie Franklin's, including the records of the post-war Arlesford Place School and all her own personal papers, were destroyed after her death in 1975 by a helper whose father had been a doctor, and who had been taught that a doctor's records should be destroyed after their death. Arthur Barron's were destroyed in the early 1990s after a severe stroke, and included the records of the second Hawkspur Camp, for Boys.

The Hawkspur Camp office, designed by Arthur Barron and built by campers.
This is where records were kept

WHO CARED?

Oral history has been a central pillar of the Archive and Study Centre's work from its inception, and one of the things we have attempted to do, where we can, is to record with people as we go over and through their archives or the archives they are placing with us. A part of one of these, with Dr. Anthony Rees, regarding the Frank Mathews Collection – Frank Mathews was a Birmingham philanthropist who founded the Birmingham Society in Aid of Nervous Children (1937) and the Birmingham Society for the Care of Invalid Children (1923) - is on the Internet, on RadioTC International. Last week I recorded an entire day with the daughter of the late Richard Crocket, a psychiatrist with a strong sense of the written record. But despite a remarkable set of surviving archival materials, professional and personal, which are now in the Archive and Study Centre, she was able to tell of an immense amount that had been lost. A fire destroyed the Scottish cottage where many records were stored. An earlier group had simply turned to pulp in the damp underground coal cellar of their house. His war-time diaries, a key period when he served as an RAF psychiatrist in Britain, and then in Europe, preceded by a locum period at the pre-war Cassel Hospital – had gone. leaving a gap in a remarkable series. And a sad set of papers turned up as we were going together through his material – a few pieces of random family material stapled together in the centre, with a paper wrapped around saying that this was all that had been recovered following a break in and theft from his car in Edinburgh.

The miracle of archives is that any of them survive. If they are paper, from the moment they are born they are subjected to things that destroy them – finger grease, food smears, coffee spills, dirt, grime – this is true of tapes, disks, film and photographs as well. Paper, as an artificial matting of fibres, is always working through temperature change and humidity change to tear itself apart, and if the acids used in its production have not been leached out sufficiently in the manufacturing process, or if it is cheap wood pulp as opposed to fine rag – and how many therapeutic units running on a shoe-string, perhaps in wartime austerity conditions or their equivalent – can afford fine paper – it is actively destroying itself. The inks fade in light and run in water. Film seeks to separate into its various constituent components – and generally almost everything we create to make a record of our lives or business is actively working to destroy itself.

And that precedes the external influences – the rodents who make nests of it and insects which eat it; fire; flood; theft; mould; inadvertent loss or destruction.

          

So, the lives of archives are punctuated by a series of crises.

In their youth, as Records, they are politically charged; are handled as transitional and ephemeral objects, gaining and losing value in daily transactions; subject to loss and subject to envy, curiosity and fear. One of the first members at Hawkspur Camp gained access to his records and private correspondence about him, which focused minds in the Q Camps organisation on the lack of locks at the Camp (there were no locks on principle), the need for records to be held locally and therefore useable but also safe and therefore the need to return them to London far from the camp in rural Essex where they could be locked up. It is a recurrent theme in therapeutic environments, certainly in the oral dimension. Two boys in a school whose archives we hold held staff captive in the staff room at knife point, and went through their papers, and such things have happened elsewhere.

But these crises focus the mind on archives when they are still alive and young, when they are Records. When they cease to be current they become Problematic. Very few places make a specific provision for non-current material. In a therapeutic environment where the care and treatment of the individual and the group is the primary and overwhelming task, it is generally no one's specific business to look after records which are no longer current. If they are not disposed of, then spaces out of the way are found for them. If it is no one's specific task to look after them, it is also no-one's specific task to get rid of them. They accumulate.

         

   

 

 
A nurse manager will leave the Cassel Hospital and several generations of nurse manager later one will mention the records still stored in an awkward upstairs cupboard. Visiting a therapeutic community for children there is a pile of old log books stacked almost ceiling high in an old disused bathtub. Non-current records are placed in outbuildings, in lofts and cellars and garden sheds, where birds, rats and the other processes of nature go to work.

   

And here in this no man's land of temporal silence, human things occur. Stored in black bags to protect them, archives of the founder of Hengrove School – one of the earliest to arise out of the Second World War, when so much innovation was needed and bloomed – are mistaken for rubbish and thrown away. Contrariwise, a new head of another special residential school, which also arose from the ashes of World War Two, throws everything out, and the little that now remains – a photograph album from the 50s with little else – was pulled surreptitiously from the skip by staff. Archives themselves rarely tell their own story directly. Their history is contained to a certain extent indirectly, in their absences and structures. But more fully and exclusively their story is contained in the oral testimony of those, and about those, who have cared for them. Without that recorded recollection, we often know nothing.

Archives which are able to go on living in the home or around the buildings of a person or place to which they belong - and in which they have proximal meaning - have one set of possible stories. When a place closes or a person dies, or the records are moved elsewhere for someone's convenience, another set of stories enters. The old ones remain in place, but the archives now become orphans. And then who cares?

A house with wall-shelves full of personal records where I go to record an interview is refined by the time they come to the Archive to a suitcase and a box. An academic specialising in Education, who spent part of her childhood in care, is visiting a residential school, and to her surprise discovers the head destroying records relating to the place where she had been, which had been left at some point presumably for safekeeping. Collecting archives and recording about Chalvington School, the former Director takes a phone call about Dartmouth House, a place for mothers and children, which is closing. He mentions the Archive and Study Centre, but the metaphorical line, as it were, subsequently falls silent and the records disappear. Over a decade later I am gathering the archives of the Cumberlow Community, in London, which has closed, and out comes a pile of salvage bags, Dartmouth House material, put together hurriedly in its closing and left at Cumberlow for safe keeping. The Wennington School Archives went with the school's last head to his new school at Great Ayton, where they were looked after, and from which former Wennington students intent on ensuring their permanent welfare could give them a further temporary home, carry out research into possible placements, and ultimately bring them to the Archive and Study Centre.

 
 

Several years ago another collection from another residential special school was loaded off the back of a van on a rainy night into the vaults of an accommodating city archives, where they remained unaccessioned before coming here because they really didn't belong there. Remaining school staff had brought them in before the school and its people evaporated entirely into the aether, almost literally: The wall of absence of information about a place and the children and staff who were there is almost fully impenetrable once the place is closed and the archives disappear. A West Midlands county official phoned me once to find out whether the County had responsibility for an old closed children's home mentioned on our web-site. They themselves didn't have any records. We had a single sheet of letterhead among the correspondence of one of our archive collections, which showed that, yes, it did, or at least the County's old Education Department had. The loss of archives creates an impenetrable silence, which can only be pierced, when it is pierced, through oral history.

Academics, former staff, researchers sometimes hold onto material after a place closes with the intention of doing something with them; and those too, more often than not disappear; and reappear, if they do reappear, through the connectingness of oral history.

That any archives survive is remarkable, and that they survive closure more remarkable still. So the Q Camp records, and the people who saved them, are even more significant.

          

   

But does it matter?

    A man who was at Bodenham Manor School as a child says in a personal communication that it does: "to have archives and paperwork to say yes you did live here, yes this was your home and yes most of these people cared about you, is very important..." The stillness when something falls into place for someone (see Mini-Celebration 2, below - "The 'Why' of the Archive and Study Centre") says it does.

A Brief history of the Q Camps archives

The Conditions in Hawkspur Camp itself ought to have prevented their survival. When compared with the fate of places which had their own buildings, in cities and towns, many of which are still standing, the improbability of this rural pioneering venture securing its records - living in tents and building their own wooden huts and meeting rooms, trying to grow their own food, living in rain and mud, nearly closing before the end of the first year due to the lack of funds, taking a wide range of members, from neurotic to psychotic, because the Camp could not fully choose their intake - and passing them through the beginning of war to our own time is awesomely impressive.

The breach of confidential files early in the life of the camp meant that confidential material had to be sent and stored in London; Marjorie Franklin said she would resign otherwise. There were several postal deliveries in those days, and the Camp Chief, David Wills, was inundated with correspondence from the Honorary Secretary, Marjorie Franklin, in her dreadful handwriting. She would write two or three letters a day, each day, sometimes repeating herself, demanding responses, sometimes forgetting answers, and, of course, with the crossing of posts. David Wills had no secretary, and himself seems to have had to produce the duplicates which case conferences and such like required ('4' she notes in one letter) not always with the benefit of carbons. "The Camp Chief is sometimes called from his office by "crises" which can prevent documents being copied by a definite date," Marjorie Franklin helpfully explained in a 1936 letter to the administrator at the ISTD (Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency - now the Portman Clinic) "but the work does get done eventually and will be sent you for the files."

Marjorie Franklin letters - Sometimes two or three a day

With the beginning of war the Essex camp came to an end, and briefly relocated to the poorhouse in Bicester, Oxfordshire, where a new intake of unbilletable boys mixed with the rump of older disturbed campers, in bare and unfriendly buildings and with a bit of a hostile local police force thrown in. After several months in which the old campers were found alternative accommodation and the initial chaos settled into a kind of therapeutic milieu, David Wills moved up to Peebles in Scotland, to open a hostel and school for unbilletable boys for the Edinburgh Society of Friends. It was 1940, and with bombing in London, and with the danger of damage through damp, the Q Camps Committee agreed to send the case notes and other Q Camps records up to Scotland for safe keeping. Their train was bombed near Birmingham, the package containing the archives was burned and then doused with water. But the records had been insured, and were therefore given special handling, dried, returned to the Q Camps Committee where T.C. Bodsworth (who had been instrumental in arguing that damp and bombing would damage the records; described as the 'resident camp bursar' he had previously and subsequently been on the staff of the Lingfield Epileptic Colony. Given that David Wills' mentor, Stuart Payne, was also on the staff there, and that David Wills had first met Arthur Barron there, it must have been a dynamic and progressive institution), fully dried and repackaged them again, and sent back up by what turned out to be an anxiety-inducingly series of slow trains. That it was a right decision is laid out in a letter Marjorie Franklin wrote to David Wills on May 6, 1941:

The West Central Jewish Girls' Club and Institute and the day settlement (and of course Q Camps office) attached had a direct hit from a land mine and are now a heap of stones. The 27 killed include Miss Paynter (Secretary) and Mr. and Mrs. Jacobson (caretakers) and 2 of their children - a third was evacuated.

Records of 50 years social and other work have been lost.

Well, good bye

Yrs sincerely

MEF

Then the Q Camps records as identifiable entities disappear. There is an early note suggesting that when David Wills moved he boxed the files and included them with his personal furniture. From Peebles he moved in 1945 to Woodbroke, the Quaker study centre here in Birmingham; had several short-term appointments while waiting to open a new school for maladjusted children for the Birmingham Society for the Care of Invalid and Nervous Children, in Herefordshire; was finally able to start there in 1949 and stayed till 1961, his plans to retire from Bodenham interrupted by intractable disagreements with the governing body; and then moved several times again in short-term appointments before finally retiring and moving to Hook Norton in the Cotswolds. He died in 1981, and his widow Elizabeth (who had once been Head of Occupational Therapy at Yardley Green Chest Hospital, in Birmingham) in 1987. The records of Q Camp then resurface, in the hands of David Wills' literary executor, Robert Laslett. At that point they had an enhanced meaning, as the records of a place, a generation, a man, and a team which directly and indirectly had an immense influence on 20th century residential child care and policy; and (as outlined above) led to the founding of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre.

In his 2002 notes to Oral History Society trainers, Rob Perks quotes Dr. Johnson on the origins of the term 'oral history' – "You are to consider that all history was at first oral." And he notes the work of the Venerable Bede, which brought oral and archival stories together into the Ecclesiastical History of the English People.

Oral history is defined by the presence and absence of archives, and archives-based history. The absence of archives makes oral history absolutely necessary. Their presence – archives and oral history together – gives our understanding of life and the past a much greater fullness than either does alone. By and large archives – except in their structures and absences – are silent about themselves. They are an essential part of the story, but it is a largely occluded part of the story.

It does matter, and this is a plea to oral historians, when carrying out an oral history, to record the story of the records, and the story of those who have cared enough to save them from the irretrievable silence of loss and destruction.

W. David Wills, in official mode

W. David Wills, in camping mode

The 'Why' of PETT Archive and Study Centre

reprinted from TC News 2: Summer 2006, pp. 20-21

Several years ago a lady in America rang. Her British-born husband of 20 years had suddenly disappeared from their apparently happy marriage. In going through his things in a desperate attempt to find something which made sense, she stumbled onto a dimension of his life about which she had known nothing: his childhood, and more specifically his time in a therapeutic community, which was mentioned on our web site. What was a therapeutic community? Why would a child be sent there?

Our presence on the Internet also brought an email from a man who had spent time during the Second World War in a therapeutic camp for troubled and troublesome children. His son had found us and encouraged him to get in touch. After a phone call he came up from Essex, with his wife of very many years, to record his memories for the oral history collection on the one hand, and to gather from the archives what he could to help his still-fragmented childhood to coalesce into something coherent on the other. He had been evacuated from the south coast with his younger brother, who was enuretic, leading to multiple placements in homes around Bedford. His parents split up and his brother returned to their mother. Their four year old sister had been evacuated to Gloucestershire, where she was adopted - he did not see her again until she was 18, and did not see his father again until the last years of his father's life. He found himself breaking into a cafe and stealing ten pence worth of stuff, then in the therapeutic camp, and then in a training ship approved school - "horrific, brutal establishment, absolutely brutal... I've still got cuts on my body now" from other boys who came in the night with razors "as you slept in your hammocks" to create terror. Fourteen boys drowned one day in a single escape attempt. He was a lovely man, with a successful marriage, family and career, and felt he owed much to the Camp. What could the archives tell him?

The telephone rings. It is a young man who has to find someone or some way to prove that he was in a particular therapeutic school, now closed. He is emigrating, and he needs the information to get a job in the new country.

A middle-aged daughter rings for her mother who, in her 90s, is trying to settle the story of her brother, who disappeared into the pre-war mental health system wreathed with unsatisfactory family stories. The daughter's distress at an infinite hall of blank walls evaporates when we share what we have; and it is clear that something more than the uncle or mother's lives have fallen into place.

As archivists we - or some of us - sometimes speak of archives as 'forms of social memory', as if archives fulfilled the role within society that memory does within an individual. To some extent that is the case. A group or society that distorts, neglects or loses its records becomes like the person who is straight-jacketed in their own narrow and self-confirming story of the world, growing increasingly irrelevant, or destructive, or incapable of creative change, and determined by external forces; or who ceases - like an Alzheimer's patient, or a person with dementia - to be, except by the grace and definition of others. But memory is a very particular and dynamic aspect of a human being's presence and belonging in the world. Its richness, its definition, its accuracy, depth and accessibility determine who as well as how we are. Archives are different. They are not memory in and of themselves, but substitutes and adjuncts to memory. Where memory fails, where it is absent, or where it has been distorted or dismembered by experience, archives can step in. A disturbed childhood, an obscuring family narrative, an apparently meaningless act, a moment of time with no foundation can acquire, through archives, something of order; of meaning; of grounding; even of healing.

The stillness of things falling into place does not last long. The new or renewed capacity for curiosity and moving-on kicks in almost immediately. 'Getting there' with the enquirer can be an emotional roller coaster for the archivist - perhaps a subject for another article. More difficult is not getting there. But the rewards of being an archivist in a charity which holds records of broken and disrupted lives, when that noise starts up - of the past falling into its place and new things growing - is immense.

Craig Fees

Planned Environment Therapy Trust

Spent the day here at the Archive with Ruth Crocket, Richard Crocket's daughter. (Who was Richard Crocket? Founding Director of the Ingrebourne Centre therapeutic community, and founding member of the Association of Therapeutic Communities? See brief biographical article). Going through trunks of material which came out of the house in Oxford after Richard died, and stored here until Ruth had had a chance to go through and set aside material not intended for deposit. Not so much of the latter, as it turns out, at least on first viewing; but while going through objects and manuscripts some interesting and exciting things emerge. A plan for a cottage sharing scheme which he realised later is sketched out as early as 1960, a working out of psychotherapeutic community processes in an everyday environment. Tuning forks and a variety of knee hammers from his neurological testing days. A reconnection letter from Bonn, immediately after the Second World War, illustrating in one life the immense destructiveness of the Nazi regime on German citizens who did not wholeheartedly support it. Material on his visits to Germany before the war, as a boy. Personal and family correspondence, pre-war and post. Research material from his time as tutor in psychiatry at the University of Leeds, 1950-1954. Drawings and paintings. Published and unpublished writing. An immense amount of material, now waiting to be catalogued.

Among the manuscripts there is a four page sketch that begins:

"On the use of the word 'enemy'

Sutherland [this will be his friend and colleague Jock Sutherland, with whom he trained before the war] remarked on Wednesday that the question 'What would your worst enemy say about you if asked?', included in that battery of tests given to officer candidates, elicted the reply "I have no enemies" in a moderate proportion of cases. Miller has therefore modified his question to 'What would a severe critic say about you.' But Bion concluded that the question ought to be left unaltered as, he said, a man without enemies was immature and not qualified for officer status.

It is a matter involving a delicate nuance of meaning..."

The whole of the manuscript is reproduced with Ruth's permission in pdf format here

2008.023 Wooden sign


March 2004: The old sign on the right replaced by the new, on the left

Wooden sign? (a mere wooden sign...?)

20th anniversary Mini-Celebration 1.

Back in the cold wet winter of 1997 the old school sign which stood on the road for many years was taken down and painted over. "Archive and Study Centre" was printed in seven sections in large letters on A4 photocopy paper using the old Atari computer and laser printer, cut up and glued to the painted board with exterior wood glue.

The Atari was the Archive's first computer, bought secondhand well before the computer wars assigned Atari to the shelves of history and Evesham Micros, from which it had originally been bought, moved from the corner of Bridge and Mill Streets in the lower side of Evesham to the Four Pools Industrial Estate on the edge (what a friendly outfit they were! servicing Ataris well after the world at large had abandoned them to obsolescence) before their final move to the new purpose built enterprise estate on the outskirts of town, from which the whole world came to know of them.

Several coats of yacht varnish over several nights while the children were in bed, and computer-printed paper became a temporary sign, designed to last perhaps a year. Bolted firmly to a post in the wake of a spate of local vandalism, the sign stood on the right hand side of the entrance drive for the next six and a half years. Replaced in March 2004 by a commercially printed metal sign, it was moved to the left of the entrance where it continued to guide people in for the next four years. Handmade, warm and reliable beyond original expectation, embodying much of the history and ethos of the Archive and Study Centre, it was finally retired, ten and a bit years after first going into temporary service, in the June of this year. 2008.

In 2009 the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre will celebrate its 20th year. Over the next six months we plan a series of mini-celebrations of the work and history of the Centre, largely online, and invite anyone with memories and recollections to share them. Visions of the future? Share those as well. Keep in touch with updates here at http://news.pettarchiv.org.uk/

***
The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre is the only facility of its kind in the world devoted to therapeutic communities and environments.

It is

It holds over

It has

It has associated onsite residential accommodation, and seminar and conference facilities, as part of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust's Barns Centre;

It is the seat of the Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments, a research and study centre of the University of Birmingham.

2008.021 Photograph, "Eaton Hill Therapeutic Community" taken and sent by Geraldine Curtis



Eaton Hill in Derbyshire had two children in its care at the beginning of 1948, when it opened as a children's home. From 1981 it began to develop a specifically therapeutic culture "providing a high standard of care, treatment and perseverance when working with traumatised and damaged young people who exhibit various forms of anti-social behaviour. Many have a history of failure or rejection in other community and residential placements", according to its entry in the directory of the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities. It closed it doors on September 14, 2004.

The entry describes the house as "attractively furnished and decorated to give a feeling of homely warmth and comfort", and "set in three acres of parkland surrounded by woods and pasture....the physical surroundings of the house and grounds provide an environment which helps our residents feel secure and valued; a place where their fears and anxieties can be identified and resolved." It goes on to say "Together with the overall environment and therapeutic culture, we aim to give a clear and overt message about individual behaviour, group expectations, shared responsibilities, the need for warmth and self-expression, and the value of the individual - powerful factors in stimulating personal growth, enabling development towards maturity."

Geraldine Curtis teaches art to adults and piano, lives locally, and has a blog   which mentions the therapeutic community, and through which the Archive made contact. She has taken a set of photographs of Eaton Hill, and has made them available on Flickr. 

The cover of the March 2003 issue of the Joint Newsletter, number 7  (http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/jointnewsletter/7.pdf) carries the face of Julian Maclaren-Ross, cult English author and resident for a time in Northfield Military Psychiatric Hospital, a rare witness of the Northfield Experiments from the side of the client. Inside the issue is published a short story he wrote for the Northfield patients' magazine, found among Northfield pioneer S.H. Foulkes' papers at the Wellcome Library (http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTL039939.html )

Paul Willetts, who wrote the excellent biography - "Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Julian Maclaren-Ross" published by Dewi Lewis Publishers in 2003 - has brought out a collection of Maclaren-Ross's "Selected Letters" (Black Spring Press, London, 2008. ISBN 978-0-948238-3). Sandwiched between a letter of 17 February 1943 ("Off to hospital Birmingham tomorrow") and 10 May 1943 when he was returned to his unit ("at a moment's notice and without seeing Major Backus [his therapist] before leaving...". Thank goodness all THAT's changed) and eventually discharged there are eighteen letters by him written from "Military Hospital/Northfields/Birmingham". There are also two extensive letters in an appendix, written by Maclaren-Ross's girlfriend Scylla Yates at the time describing her visit to Northfield and discussions with Dr. Backus.

Northfield, of course, is where the term "therapeutic community" first becomes anchored in British psychiatry, through Tom Main's famous paper in the 1946 Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. (Haven't seen it? The ATC Administration Team still has copies of the special edition of Therapeutic Communities in which they were reprinted. 01242 620077 or post@therapeuticcommunities.org. The Archive and Study Centre has a copy of the original, picked up from a cardboard box full of ephemera in an Oxford secondhand book store, just up the road from the rail station, priced 50p, about fifteen years ago).

Personal accounts of life in a therapeutic community today are rare enough, even in a time of blogs. How special an articulate patient's comments, in letters to his publisher, written sixty five years ago, in the complex dawn of the history of therapeutic community?

"Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters", edited by Paul Willetts, published by Black Spring Press, London, at £9.95. £6.56 from Amazon.uk

2007.079


Book:  "The Strengths Way": published by Management Books (Kemble, Gloucestershire), a gift of the author, Mike Pegg.

See Mike Pegg's Strengths Way web-site and Blog

2007.078 Post-closure files related to Eaton Hill Therapeutic Community

2007.077: Twelve books from the library of Dr. David Millard, including:

Social Work Practice in Health Care: Carel Bailey Germain
Human Nature and Suffering: Paul Gilbert
Mental Health Social Work Observed: Fisher, Newton & Sainsbury
Locking up Children: Millham, Bullock, Hosie
The Social Engagement of Social Science: Ed. Eric Trist & Hugh Muney
Clinical Sociology: Glassner and Freedman
Environmental Practice in the Human Services: Neugeboren
The Social Animal: Aronson
Towards Understanding Relationships: Robert Hinde
Social Rules & Social Behaviour: Lois Meek Stoltz
Group Dynamics: Cartwright and Zander

 Director: Arbours Crisis Centre

 A Unique and Important Opportunity

 
The current Director of the Arbours Crisis Centre (whose archives are held at the Archive and Study Centre) will retire in January 2009. Consequently, the Crisis Centre (CC) is seeking to appoint a new, creative and dynamic Director to begin any time after January 2008. Interested persons should contact the Crisis Centre directly at info@arbourscentre.org.uk with a copy to Dr. Joseph Berke at jhberke@aol.com, or see the Crisis Centre website at www.arbourscentre.org.uk.

 

 Job Description:

 Job Title:       Director

 Hours:            17.5

 Employment Basis:            Schedule D

 Reports to:     Arbours Housing Association (AHA) Management Committee

 Accountable to:  AHA Board of Trustees and Management Committee.

 Overall Description

 
The Director will hold responsibility for, direct and supervise all aspects of the Centre’s work. In general, he or she will be responsible for representing and holding together the heart and soul of the Centre as a radical alternative to conventional psychiatric care. He or she will:

1)  Contain and carry and the anxieties and feelings of both staff and guests

2)  Have great expertise in working with borderline and psychotic guests

3)  Have an extensive network of friends and colleagues who can support the Centre on all levels, clinical and practical

4)  Ensure the survival of the Centre as a PsychoSocial facility

Managerial responsibilities:

 1. To sit on the AHA Management Committee, and together with the Centre Manager to ensure that the appropriate information is communicated to the Management Committee as required.

2. To attend AHA Board of Trustees meetings, and together with the Centre Manager to ensure that the appropriate information is communicated to the Trustees as required.

3.  To be responsible for ensuring, in conjunction with the Centre Manager, the appropriate supervision and support of all staff and students involved in the work of the Centre.

4.To ensure, together with the Centre Manager, appropriate levels of clinical cover at all times.

 CSCI

1. Be the responsible person for the Crisis Centre

2. To ensure, in liaison with the Centre Manager, that the standards of treatment and care of guests are maintained according to the requirements of the CSCI (including the appropriate keeping of medical and clinical records, the fulfilment of care plans and contracts with purchasers and working within the AHA’s business plan)

3. Be available to liaise with CSCI Inspector

 

Clinical responsibilities:

2. Supervise the work of the Team Leaders, Art Therapist and Movement Therapist through the Wednesday clinical meetings, clinical seminars and individual supervision.

3. Supervise the work of the Resident Therapists through the Wednesday clinical meetings, clinical seminars and group supervision. Maintain a good working relationship with the Consultant supervising the Residential Therapists (RTs)

4. Ensure that the cover staff  and students on placement are adequately supervised.

5. Maintain a good working relationship with the Clinical Consultant, at present Paul Williams, to develop and expand the clinical work of the Centre.

6. Maintain a good working relationship with the Consultant Psychiatrist covering the Centre.

7. Maintain a good working relationship with the Centre GP, Dr. Wardle and her practice.

8. Help to organise and chair the bi-yearly clinical conferences.

9. Promote and maintain the Journal of the Crisis Centre

10. Promote and maintain clinical standards of the CC.

11. Promote Follow-up Research Project on work of the Centre

Liaison:

 1. To liase with other clinicians regarding the work of the Centre.

2. To liase with the Centre Manager, Consultant Psychiatrist, and Nurse regarding nursing and medication matters.

3. To liase with other professionals regarding clinical matters pertaining to the work of the Centre.

Promotional Responsibilities

1. To promote the clinical work of the Crisis Centre in appropriate forums, attending various conferences as appropriate

2. To write about the work of the Centre for publication, encourage and supervise the staff at the CC to write about and generally publicise the work of the CC.

3. Support and encourage the general dissemination of the work of the Centre through the Media.

4. Help organise and chair the yearly Professional Advisory Committee meeting

5. Promote and encourage fund raising for the Centre from individuals, trusts, companies, and any other means.

6. Liase with other professional and public bodies to promote referrals to the Centre

7. Arrange for appropriate advertising to promote referrals to the Centre

8. Help organise and maintain the CC website or ensure that this is done

 

Desired Qualities or Characteristics of Future Director

Provide strong, inspiring leadership at the Centre

Be deeply committed to a psychodynamic, social dynamic approach to helping people in emotional distress  ( as opposed to medical-biological framework)

Be interested in working with, and be compassionate to, severely emotionally disabled     individuals and families

Be deeply committed to the continuation of the Centre as a psycho-social facility.

Be interested in developing and expanding the CC project, and contribute to this happening

Bring their own dynamic, creative vision to an established and internationally respected psychosocial project

 

Suggested Remuneration Package

Self Employed, Schedule D

£65,000 / year pro rata

£5,000 expenses allocation

6 weeks holiday

 

Interested persons should contact

 info@arbourscentre.org.uk with a copy to Dr. Joseph Berke  jhberke@aol.com

VISITORS' COMMENTS

The group which used the P.E.T.T.'s conference and meeting facilities last weekend left the following comments in the Visitor's Book:





What a pleasure to read.

Therapeutic Living with Other People’s Children: An oral history of residential therapeutic child care, c.1930 - c.1990

An integrated oral history, archive, Internet-based, and person-to-person approach to gathering, preserving and sharing a neglected aspect of the nation's industrial, cultural and social heritage.

This is a project which is to be led and guided by former children and young people from residential therapeutic environments. It will involve them, together with former staff, family and friends, as interviewees, as interviewers, and to help carry the project forward generally.

1. The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre is the only archive facility in Britain devoted to gathering, protecting, and making available the national heritage related to residential therapeutic environments for children and young people.

2. The Archive and Study Centre, founded in 1989, is seeking funding to carry out a major oral history-centred project relating to life and work in therapeutic residential environments for deprived, disturbed and delinquent children and young people between about 1930 and 1990. It will involve a web-site in which audio, visual and documentary materials are brought together to tell the story of residential therapeutic child care generally through this period, with more detailed concentration on six therapeutic communities for children and young people, the archives of which are held in the Archive and Study Centre. New archive material will be sought, and one of the aims of the project will be to create a model for online presentation which can be replicated for other therapeutic environments.

3. The project will concentrate its attention on the period from the early 1940s, when the national evacuation scheme led to the creation of a new generation of experimental therapeutic hostels for difficult-to-billet children across Britain, to the early 1980s, by which time most of the early pioneering figures had either died or retired and many of the pioneering institutions had closed or changed nature and direction. Those institutions which retained their pioneering roots and ethos had either begun or were about to begin a rapid adaptation to meet the radical demands and challenges of new social, economic, and cultural conditions, which included new and rapidly changing legislation and regulation, and the changing public perception of childhood, vulnerable children, and the residential approach to working with them.

4. Although largely unacknowledged, many of these changes were a consequence of the contribution which therapeutic residential environments made during this formative forty year period in the history of the nation\'s relationship and response to vulnerable, disturbed and delinquent children. During this period workers for children in therapeutic community environments forged a new body of professional knowledge and understanding, established new organisations, shaped and informed new legislation, and fundamentally helped to change the nation's approach to child care practice and training. Much that is common sense and even part of legislation today was trialled and proven in residential therapeutic environments then; and much that was common sense at the time was shown to be inadequate for the task in hand, and in some cases actively damaging.

5. This is an immensely influential and fundamentally important area of the nation's heritage, but it mirrors, in relation to the national heritage, the marginalisation and social exclusion often suffered by the children and young people themselves. It is characterised by the invisibility, by the inaccessibility, and by the destruction and loss of records, of memory, and of objects of memory relating to the children and the places and people who looked after them, as well as of the wider work itself. It has, in a sense, fallen out of the national heritage.

6. This absence, loss and destruction of memory and heritage is reflected in the lives and memories of many of those children and young people themselves, who, as adults - and however creative and productive their lives may have become - retain a part of themselves which does not belong to the mainstream community around them, or have a safe and valued place in the wider heritage. In the absence of memory by, about, and for them, their personal histories remain hidden, or protected, or simply unspoken, unknown and unarticulated; but in any event detached from the mainstream history and heritage of the community.

7. It goes beyond this, however, and here the project can play a particular role. For many former children and young people the loss, invisibility, and inaccessibility of records about them, of people who remember them, and of significant places in which they lived, translates into a corresponding lack of personal foundation and certainty about themselves and who they are. In the absence of being remembered, and enjoying an ongoing dialogue with familiar objects, places and people from key stages in childhood, they have a lack, to some degree and at some level, of a coherent and connected understanding of their own place within the scheme of things, or even a firm understanding and knowledge that they have such a place. Once again, through lack of certainty and belief in their own personal heritage and its value, and the ability or opportunity to experience, articulate and share it, they are effectively excluded and estranged from full and confident membership in the heritage of the nation as a whole; and whatever they may have given back in their lives, it remains difficult for them to feel entirely as if they belong, and as if the riches of the nation's heritage truly belong to them as they do to others.

8. As currently conceived, the core project will cover three years, and involve a full-time oral historian, a full time archivist/support officer, and a full-time digital and web environment officer, with the support of current Planned Environment Therapy Trust staff, as well as volunteers.

9. Alongside new and innovative use of Internet resources, we will be seeking other creative and effective ways to share more widely the heritage which the project gathers. One suggestion has been to arrange visits of former children – men and women with a long experience of life beyond the therapeutic environment – to current therapeutic environments, to share if appropriate their experiences and memories with current staff and children. Another has been to create a theatre piece or pieces, which could be taken to current therapeutic environments and other accessible performance venues. Another would be a computer-based travelling exhibition, which could go into current therapeutic environments, for use and input by staff and children. Solutions to communication is one of the functions of the project.

WHO CARED?
ORAL HISTORY, CARING, HEALTH AND ILLNESS

Marking 60 years of the National Health Service

 

Oral History Society Annual Conference
In association with the Centre for the History of Medicine,

University of Birmingham

To be held at the University of Birmingham Medical School

4-5 July 2008

 

We are keen to encourage presentations from those using oral history in understanding health care relationships in the histories of medicine; illness; well-being; disability; and planned environments.

 

We particularly welcome papers that further our understanding of the experience of formal and informal caring in community and institutional settings and amongst professionals, the cared for, carers and kin.

 

Our themes will include:

 

• Witnessing the impact of, and challenges to, medical knowledge;
• Power, humour, emotion, loss, resistance and changes in care relationships;
• The making of ‘expert patients’;
• Emerging counter-knowledge and complementary and alternative therapies;
• The health/social care interface;
• The relationship between oral history and the histories of medicine, health and illness.

 

Abstracts (200 words) should be submitted by 18 January 2008 to Belinda Waterman, Department of History, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ.

Teresa von Sommaruga Howard and Russian workers feature in latest addition to the RadioTC International Series, "Who's Dropped in to the Archive and Study Centre?"

Archivist Craig Fees took advantage of the recent joint Mulberry Bush Training/PETT residential course to interview MASHA PICHUGINA  and MARIA KRIVENKOVA. Twenty-two year old Masha grew up in Kitezh - the eco-village/therapeutic community established in Russia in 1992 to live and work with orphaned, abused and abandoned children - and is now head of Kitezh's new sister therapeutic community, Orion.  Maria is a teacher and foster mother in Kitezh. The 14 minute interview in English and Russian describes their experience, and invites volunteers to come and help to build and support the communities. The Kitezh web-site is www.kitezh.org. To listen to the interview, click here.

TERESA von SOMMARUGA HOWARD conducted the large groups, and took time from the Mulberry Bush Training/Planned Environment Therapy Trust residential course "A Living Learning Experience - An Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care" to record a frank and intimate interview about her life and career: A life and career which has included "therapeutic community outside the therapeutic community" work in a London "sink" estate, turning environment and relationships around as a local authority architect; childhood emigration to New Zealand, with a German refugee father and English mother; a staff team consultancy at the Henderson Hospital as a group analyst, bridging the transition from Stuart Whiteley to Kingsley Norton as the Hospital's Director; and a road of personal discovery, over a landscape blown apart by two world wars over several continents. And much more. Recorded live in the Archivist's office, to listen to her interview, click here.

Earlier Drop-ins

Earlier "Drop-ins" have included MIKE PEGG, Director of the Richmond Fellowship's Lancaster House therapeutic community in the early 1970s, now a successful Mentor to major corporations (Sony, Microsoft/MSN - see his blog at http://thestrengthsway.blogspot.com/);  JANICE JONES, Executive Officer of the Australasian Therapeutic Communities Association (ATCA); and DR. TONY REES, co-author of the iconic Aitken, Webster and Rees (1958), "Magnetic Prospecting", Antiquity 32, pp. 270-271, and (incidentally) donor of the archives of Frank Mathews and of the Birmingham Society for the Care of Invalid and Nervous Children. For a full list of Drop-ins, go to http://www.tc-of.org.uk/wiki/index.php/P3S0

"A Living Learning Experience -An Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care"

First Mulberry Bush Training/PETT residential workshop, September 27-29, a  success!

Course Leader Linnet McMahon writes:

"We have just come to the end of our joint first residential workshop at PETT, 'Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care - a living learning experience', which went extremely well.  It was oversubscribed and we had 16 participants who were from a wide range of private and statut