A New Trustee

Linnet McMahon

I am delighted to have been asked to join the Trustees of PETT. I would like to explain the origins of my connection with PETT, together with some thoughts about the Trust’s future.

In 2007 I retired from 15 years as part of the staff team of the MA in Therapeutic Child Care (TCC) at Reading University, working alongside and learning from course leader Adrian Ward, and taking over the leadership when he left in 2000 – and then, of course, learning a whole lot more! I think my first visit to PETT was for the celebration of Chris Beedell’s life and work, a moving occasion with Chris’ lovely family present. Chris’ pioneering course in residential child care at Bristol was influential in shaping the pattern of the Reading course. His course, in turn, owed much to Clare Winnicott’s child care training at LSE. Another day at PETT, with Olive Stephenson and Joel Kanter, celebrated Clare Winnicott’s work. I remember Chris telling me that a course lasts about 15 years before it succumbs to envious attack. Sadly he was right, and the Reading course has now come to an end.

When a course closes, the loss of a physical ‘home’ for students and staff is palpable. Bowlby quotes Frances Cornford’s poem on the work of attachment and separation:

They must go free

When they cannot ‘casually come again’ there is a gap. The culture will be carried in the heads of former students and demonstrated in their work with emotionally damaged children young people, and further, in the training courses which some are setting up. However, the familiar home is no longer there to be held in mind, if only occasionally turned to.

PETT was involved in the Steering Group which set up the TCC course in 1990. It continued invaluable support through all the years of the course, providing help with journals for the library and offering an essay prize. The Archive provides the obvious home for the records of the TCC course and the Library will hold copies of students’ dissertations.

The Trust can also provide a place that is about the present and not only the past. It can provide a meeting ground where those involved in the work can have discussions, seminars and training workshops. It is not the only place – for example, in London there is the Tavistock Centre as well as the National Centre for Excellence in Residential Child Care at the National Children’s Bureau. However, PETT’s grounding in therapeutic community approaches and in psychodynamic thinking make it a good place to support the real nature of the work, which is about groups of people working together to think about and respond to the feelings which the work arouses.. It has firm links with the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities for Children, withThe Mulberry Bush School  and with Childhood First, and a valuable connection with the Cassel Hospital whose work involves both children and adults. These links need to be developed and strengthened. The presence of an Archive of national significance invites research and I know there are plans to develop this further.

The Trust’s location does not so readily lend itself to day meetings, except for those in the Midlands, South and West, but its setting in beautiful surroundings and its residential facilities mean that it can offer something different. If the Trust is to develop it needs to increase its already good residential provision by creating more single rooms. It needs to update its rather spartan meeting rooms, and create a space where a circle of people can meet in comfort (Teresa von Sommaruga Howard, group analyst and architect has some ideas!)

PETT has a great potential role in contributing to the way in which therapeutic child care and therapeutic community approaches are sustained and developed. Its foresight in creating the Archive has seen to that. There are choices to be made about the shape of the Trust in the future.

I keenly support the development of training initiatives, including a residential workshop A Living Learning Experience - An Introduction to Therapeutic Child Care, the first of which takes place at the end of September 2007, in conjunction with the training section of Mulberry Bush School. This has been fully subscribed and more are being thought about for 2008, possibly including one on therapeutic foster care.

Other possible workshops are on Attachment or on Therapeutic Play. I would welcome hearing your ideas for developing opportunities for people to learn together. How about a monthly (quarterly?) seminar or professional workshop where experienced people could bring current concerns to think about together?

Perhaps we can work together to help PETT grow.

Trustee Profile: Cynthia Cross

Chair, Planned Environment Therapy Trust

Personal and Professional Background

I first started in Residential Child Care for the London County Council (LCC) in1960. I come from a pacifist family and was involved as an active pacifist in the late 50s in London. A group of us started a small pacifist community in Tulse Hill, which consisted mainly of people involved directly or indirectly in “direct action” against the nuclear bombs/deterrents. From time to time we also took in people in need and it was one of these people, a former barge boy living rough who motivated us to do something with our pacifist principles. He was very good for us, asking basic questions which made us think about our assumptions, and he was also puzzled that we did not spend more time helping people.

The outcome was that we felt that we should help troubled children as, if difficulties are not resolved in childhood, they can lead to conflict in later life.

It was then that I got my job with the London County Council as an assistant housemother in a “cottage home”. Later I became a deputy housemother, and then went on the Residential Child Care Course (CRCCYP) before going on to work at Hartfield, the LCC home for primary aged children who were deemed maladjusted. While on the CRCCYP I was fortunately able to do one placement at the Caldecott Community and be supervised by Leila Rendle; and another at Barratt’s Green Reception Centre, which had been run by Donald Garrod who later became one the Trustees of the Homer Lane Trust.

During this time members of the pacifist community had been saving a little money towards “the project”. A friend then gave us some money, and we felt that we had to start doing something more than just talking. We got together with my brother (John Cross), who wanted to continue and develop the work of David Wills and the principles and methods upon which that work was based. In particular John felt that therapeutic communities for children who were emotionally and psychologically hurt, damaged and deprived required a group of adults who were willing and able to share a significant part of their lives and emotionality with the children they were seeking to heal, and so we formed the Homer Lane Society and the Homer Lane Trust. Later the Homer Lane Trust merged with the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, as the aims of the two trusts were almost identical, as were the trustees.

There were a number of people who believed that we could achieve our aims, including David Wills, Donald Garrod, Frank Dawtry (whose wife worked for a time at the Little Commonwealth), Gertud and Godfrey White; and because of their support we were able to secure funds and start New Barns in 1965.

I worked at New Barns for the first five years it was open. I then moved back to London to become a Social Services Training Officer for Lambeth, running a short course for newly appointed residential child care workers and organising and running courses for child care officers, foster carers and other related personnel. I was also one of the management team and ran a group of foster carers who had teenagers placed with them.

I left Lambeth in 1980 to work in the London Borough of Bromley as a (Children’s) Homes Adviser, progressing to Principal Officer responsible for children’s homes, day nurseries, fostering and adoption. When I left Bromley in 1990 and became freelance I had the rather magnificent title of Principal Child Care Consultant.

After 1990, I worked as a Child Care Consultant and Trainer mainly with residential establishments. I also was a part time tutor on the DipSW Course at Bromley College, and did a period of locum work as a London Borough as Registration and Inspection Officer for Children’s Homes.

I continue to keep my knowledge and interest in the child care world through being on the Executive of the Social and Emotional Difficulties Association (SEBDA) and attending YoungMinds and the Council for Disabled Children on their behalf.

Values, beliefs and influences

I still have the same values and beliefs I had 45 years ago. Children who have difficulties need to be helped by people who are prepared to give of themselves and will try to understand why the children find it so hard to behave in the way society expects. Some of these children will need to live in a planned environment where all aspects of daily living are used to help them understand and come to terms with their upset, anger and difficulties.

The books by David Wills were my first encounter with anything written down which expressed how the things I believed as a pacifist could be translated into working with children. Therefore David Wills as the first Chairman of the Trust was very important to me, not only as an example of what could be achieved but also because of his faith in the team at New Barns, particularly in the early days when we had not been tried and tested. During the early years of New Barns David Wills wrote a short essay about the community entitled “What’s New about New Barns?”, from which (with, I hope, some modesty) I quote. I do this not just because this experience had a profound effect upon my own ideas and development, but because in these extracts from his paper David indicates what I, and indeed PETT, believe are some of the fundamental principles that should in some fashion be at the heart of any therapeutic environment for children.

David wrote:

What’s new about New Barns? I suppose you could say there's very little that's really new because the methods are based upon principles that others have used. I have tried to use some of them myself for thirty years, and so have others, both in my time and before it. But there is at New Barns a remarkable combination of factors which certainly make it unique, and I should like to tell you about them.

First, then, the idea of starting the school was conceived by the very people who now form the nucleus of its staff. And what of those principles to which they attach so much importance? They again are not particularly new, nor are they perhaps among informed people controversial. I cannot attempt to compass them in detail, but I should like to enumerate some of the practice arising from them.

The people who formed the Homer Lane Trust had themselves lived together as a community, and this experience had led to the conviction that a community is sterile unless it has a social purpose. New Barns provides that social purpose. All who live there, from the Principal to the newest and smallest child, live together as a community of equals. which means, of course, that what I implied when I named the two extremes of an hierarchy is totally rejected. No adult expects to have the respect of any child except as he earns it, and the Principal expects no more from his colleagues. There are no superior and inferior grades among the staff, but each works at his specific job with equal dedication for the wellbeing of the children.

How could there be? Their prime and principal purpose is to make each child feel that he is loved and cared for, and to respond freely and fully to the tentative gropings of the children towards a satisfying human relationship. That is what those children have lacked, that is why they are at New Barns, and any loving adult is liable to be sought after by them, whether he stokes the boiler or types the letters or cooks the dinner or teaches a class. The children are equal because they are in need: the adults because all are equally liable to be called upon to supply those needs.

New Barns is a community, but it is also a school. A school, moreover, in which education takes place not only in the classroom, but throughout the day. The therapeutic work of the community ministers to education, and the work of the classroom ministers to therapy. Formal schoolwork takes place in small groups under qualified teachers, and the head teacher is specially qualified in the teaching of children with learning difficulties. Informal schoolwork is carried on in even smaller groups by anyone who has anything to give - and that means pretty well all the adults, whether teachers or not.

Extensive and dynamic use is made of shared responsibility. This does not mean that responsibilities are thrust upon the children which are too heavy for them to bear. It means what it says that the children share with the adults the task of finding a happy and reasonable way of living together. This ensures that the school is one community and not (as so often happens) two communities with divergent or conflicting interests - one of children and one of adults. It also ensures that there is a natural medium for group counselling.

Every child's history is examined with painstaking care by a selection committee, of whom one is the psychiatrist, and no child comes unless the staff have some idea of his ultimate placement when the time comes for him to leave.

Each of these features is to be found in other schools; in very few are they all to be found, and that is why I call New Barns unique. It has, however, one over-riding feature which to my mind is more important than any other, which colours all the others and imparts to them an added value and significance which are difficult to assess. This feature is almost impossible to describe without risking the charge of sentimentality. It is not merely that all these aspects of planned environment therapy are carried out with remarkable faithfulness (which they are) but they are carried out in the light of the firmly held conviction that they are without real therapeutic value unless they are administered - there is no other way of putting it - with love.

It is apparent from the above that I feel it is immensely important that the writings of practitioners and records of work done in therapeutic environments, together with the theoretical underpinnings should be preserved and used by those carrying the work into the future.

The PETT is in a unique position to do this. I hope additionally that in the future we will be able to use the material in the archives and the knowledge and expertise of our supporters to “spread the word” and give hope and stimulus to both workers and those they seek to help 

Meet a pioneer

Sophie Kuerth-Landwehr

May 2007

Ich betrete einen suesslich duftenden, antik moeblierten Raum. Viele Fotografien, schwarz-weiss und bunt, alte und neue, stehen auf dem Kaminsims und schmuecken die Waende. Erinnerungen eines Lebens, das vor beinahe 100 Jahren begann.

Das Zimmer wird jedoch von einem grossen Krankenhausbett beherscht und zwar von dem „besten Bett Englands”.

In ihm liegt eine schlanke alte Dame, das weisse Haar huebsch frisiert. Die Haende, vom Alter gezeichnet ruhen nie, sondern sind in staendiger Bewegung. Auf ihrem Schoss doest eine schlanke dunkelbraune Katze.

Lisa Gobell, geboren im Jahr 1907 ist eine faszinierende Frau. Ihr ganzes Leben war ein stetiges Auf und Ab, von den Geschehnissen der Weltgeschichte stark gepraegt.

Lisa Gobell wurde in Deutschland, als Kind mittelstaendischer Unternehmer geboren. Ihre Eltern waren haeufig zu sehr mit sich selbst beschaeftigt, daher war Lisa’s Kinderheit und die ihres juengeren Bruders nicht die froehlichste. Die Ehe ihrer Eltern zerbrach als Lisa knapp 16 Jahre alt war. Das Thema Scheidung verstiess in dieser Zeit gegen jegliche Regeln und machte Kinder geschiedener Eltern zu Ausgestossenen. Selbst in der vetrauten und meist so unterstuetzenden Kirchengruppe fand Lisa wenig Hilfe.

In jener Gemeinschaft traf sie zum ersten mal auf Alfred, ihren spaeteren Ehemann. Trotz anfaenglicher Schwierigkeiten, sie waren 3 Jahre lang getrennt, in denen Alfred studierte und Lisa nach Amerika weilte, fand das Paar zusammen und heiratete kurz nach der Wiedervereinung in London.

Beide hatten sich beruflich in die Richtung der Sozialwissenschaften orientiert und reisten zusammen zurueck nach Deutschland, um dort einen gemeinsamen Neuanfang zu starten.

Leider machte das die politische Situation in 1932 aussgesprochen schwierig. Zwar versuchte das junge Paar in dem sich stark verandernden Deutschland Fuss zu fassen, doch die Versuche scheiterten und sie hatten keine andere Wahl, als auszuwandern und England zu ihrer neuen Heimat zu machen.

Ein Plan liess Lisa auch in dieser Zeit nicht los: Sie wollte ein „Zuhause fuer Kinder gruenden ­ ein „House of the Sun”.

Alfred’s Mutter stellte dabei ihre Idee der „perfekten Muetter” dar, eine fuersorgliche und warme Hausfrau, die so ganz den Gegensatz zu ihrer eigenen Mutter bildete.

Zunaechst arbeitete Alfred Gobell als Deutschlehrer, er schrieb jedoch weiterhin Texte und Gedichte und ihre finanzielle Situation besserte sich zunehmend, so dass beide ihren Traum 1948, verhaltensauffaelligen Kindern zu helfen, verwirklichen konnten.

Viele Familien ihrer ersten Zoeglinge, litten unter Nachkriegszeit in der schon die Bewaeltigung des Alltags zu einem Problem wurde.

Schon bald darauf suchten die Gobell’s ein groesseres Gebaeude in laendlicher Umgebung, in dem sie ihren eigenen beiden Kindern und ihren aufgenommen Schuetzlingen ein sicheres und froehliches Aufwachsen gewaehren zu koennen.

Sie fanden ihr ‚House in the Sun” in der Naehe von Tring in Hertfordshire. Das Hengrove-Haus wurde zum Pioneer Haus, dass Kindern ein wahres zu Hause bot.

Das "House of the Sun” war eine Einrichtung fuer verhaltens-auffaellige Kinder, die in der behueteten familiaeren Umgebung, psychologisch betreut werden konnten.

In ihren Behandlungsmethoden war die Arbeit der Gobell’s stark von Fritz Kunkel’s Sinnespsychology und der Idee des „we-feeling” beeinflusst, sowie von der Arbeit der Kinderpsychologin Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld, mit der die Einrichtung eng zusammen arbeitete.

Die Gobell’s etablierten somit eine einzigartige christliche Gemeinschaft.

Die Community lief erfolgreich fuer 40 Jahre, erst unter der Leitung des Ehepaars Gobell, spaeter uebernahm diese Arbeit dessen Sohn Alexander.

 

"The House in the Sun” kann als Lebenswerk Lisa Gobells betrachtet werden. Ihr ist die Waerme und Liebe zu verdanken, die diese Community so einzig artig gemacht hat.

Ich ueberlege, vor hundert Jahren: 1907 war eine Zeit in der man noch nie etwas von einem Weltkrieg gehoert hatte, ein Jahr in dem Maria Montessori ihr erstes Kinderhaus in Rom gegruendet hat und indem die ersten Farbfotos entwickelt wurden.

Diese Zeit scheint fuer mich unheimlich weit entfernt. Die Fortschritte und politischen Veraenderungen seit damals scheinen nicht in nur ein Leben zu passen sondern in mehrere.

Und doch sitze ich nun an Lisa’s Bett und merke, dass diese Frau viel erlebt hat und trotzdem immer sie selbst gelblieben ist.

Sie hat viel erreicht in ihrem Leben, hat einen Traum gelebt, wurde und wird geliebt und geachtet.

Es ist ein wunderbares Gefuehl neben ihr zu sitzen und mit ihr zu sprechen. Sie hat sich sehr auf mein Kommen gefreut teilt sie mir mit. Mit trauriger Stimme erzaehlt sie mir dass Gott ihr zwei der liebsten Dinge genommen hat, die Faehigkeiten zu lesen und zu schreiben. Dinge, die sonst ihren Alltag bestimmt haben, sind nun nicht mehr moeglich.

Und sie ist froh ueber Besuch, da „sie ja nun nicht mehr in die Welt hinaus kann, muss die Welt nun eben zu ihr kommen”.

Die schoenste Zeit habe ich mit ihr, als die anderen Anwesenden in den Nachbarraum zu einer Besprechung gehen und nur ich bei ihr bleibe.

Lisa kann nur noch sehr schlecht hoehren und sehen, wenn sich mehrere Menschen in ihrem Raum unterhalten, kann die den Gespraechen nicht folgen. Daher bevorzugt sie eine Unterhaltung mit einer Person, auf die sie sich konzentrieren kann.

Wir unterhalten uns ueber “the house of the sun”, ueber Katzen und das „Aelter-werden” im allgemeinen. Ich frage sie, was ihr Lieblingsessen waere, sie antwortet sie haette seit einiger Zeit gar keine lust mehr darauf. Ich sage, das Essen aber doch wichtig sei und sie meint nur es gibt wichtigere Dinge.

Unser Gespraech gibt mir Kraft und Zuversicht. Das Gefuehl ist nicht einfach zu erklaeren. Ich spuehre nur, dass diese Person in dem Bett neben mir eine wunderbare Persoehnlichkeit hat. Und das dieser Charme auch nach so vielen Jahren, nicht verblasst ist.

 Es war eine wunderbare Begegnung und ich bin ihr sehr dankbar fuer die Zeit die sie mir zukommen liess.

Lisa Gobell wird im September, so Gott will, 100 Jahre alt.

Geburtstag 23 September 1907