Sighcology: The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

It's time to post another of the Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. It used to be called Changes, which must have saved a lot of typing.

You can watch Out of True for free on the British Film Institute Site, and The Snake Pit is not hard to find online.

The Snake Pit, Out of True and Nellie Bly

Olivia de Havilland is sitting on a bench in the sun. We hear a man asking her questions, de Havilland’s thoughts and then her replies. The camera pans a little, but we still don’t see the man. Suddenly a young woman is in shot, talking to her. Then we hear the voice of an older woman calling them both in.

They’re in an institution, but what kind? Seeing some open balconies with bars on the upper storeys, de Havilland decides it’s a zoo. Once inside, she fears it’s a prison. “How did I get here?” A kindly man tells her not to be afraid. She is reassured and explains she is a novelist, in the prison for one day and now it’s time for her to go home. The man asks what her name is and she finds she does not know. She’s in a mental hospital.

This is the opening of the 1948 Hollywood film The Snake Pit, which tells the story of de Havilland’s recovery thanks to the gentle psychotherapy of Dr Kik – her problems turn out to originate in early childhood trauma. How much of his reputation did Freud owe to Hollywood? His work suggested stories whose endings were as surprising and as neat as that of any detective story.

Dr Kik, it seems worth recording, was played by the British Jewish actor Leo Genn. Before the war he combined a stage and screen career with work as a barrister. His last forensic employment was investigating and prosecuting the war crimes committed at Belsen.

The ward from which patients can go home is Ward 1, but de Havilland falls foul of a nurse jealous of the attention the doctor pays her and finds herself dispatched to the most distant back ward of all, the snake pit of the title. There she is forced into a cold bath and then into a straitjacket. 

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De Havilland is rescued by her kindly psychiatrist and eventually taken home by a model American husband, but this was not the first time such scenes had been laid before the American public. In 1887, Nellie Bly, an ambitious young freelancer, doorstepped the editor of the New York World.

He turned her ideas down, challenging her to investigate instead the notorious New York mental asylum Blackwell’s Island. Bly accepted, feigning mental illness convincingly enough to fool the doctors and have herself admitted. What she saw there was revealed in a series of articles for the World and then collected in a book, Ten Days in a Mad-House.

The articles created a sensation – this is from a paraphrase in a rival newspaper:

Weak, shivering women were plunged into baths of ice cold water, one after another in the same water until the fluid was so thick that it had to be changed. … The bath over, the helpless ones were thrust into their garments wet and so they shivered through the long night. Nurses swore at the patients and beat them. Complaint to the physicians had no other effect than to increase the beatings in number and ferocity until the poor creatures promise to tell the physicians no more.

Bly spoke to as many women as she could and found many were immigrants who didn't understand English and had been sent there in error. Others were just poor and thought they were going to a poorhouse, not an insane asylum. 

Nurses, she reported, administered "so much morphine and chloral that the patients are made crazy," and “attendants seem to find amusement and pleasure in exciting the violent patients to do their worst". The asylum was also hopelessly overcrowded: 400 inmates had to sleep on the floor each night, and 300 had to stand while they ate.

Bly’s investigation brought about reforms at the asylum and then its closure seven years later.

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For a few years after the war, the British censors were more relaxed than their American counterparts, yet The Snake Pit was shown over here in butchered form. Out went the straitjackets and scenes of what was decreed inappropriate humour – there had been a campaign to ban the film altogether.

In 1951 a British response to The Snake Pit appeared, made by the Crown Film Unit and sponsored by the Ministry of Health as a training aid and to raise public awareness. Out of True told the story of a woman who attempted suicide after a nervous breakdown and of her recovery in a mental hospital.

This is no Freudian detective puzzle: it’s clear from the outset that the woman’s problems are an overcrowded flat and the pressures of running the household. She is played by Jane Hylton, a graduate of the Rank charm school and a little too genteel to convince in the role. Her husband, puzzled but sympathetic, is better and his mother, who is living with them, is no caricature. She senses that her presence is one of her daughter-in-law’s difficulties and takes herself off to live with another relative.

The tone is hopeful, though it’s admitted that not every patient gets better and goes home, and the stigma of being a mental patient is acknowledged. I suppose we should not be surprised that Hylton is given ECT on entry to the hospital without warning, anaesthetic or any mention of consent. Her husband does question the treatment, saying it has affected her memory, but he’s told this is normal and she will soon recover.

Out of True can be watched on the British Film Institute website without charge.

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Nellie Bly stopped acting when she arrived at the asylum, but the staff assumed her normal behaviours were symptoms of insanity anyway. And if she had told them the truth, that she was there to research an article,  wouldn’t she have sounded just like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit? The newspaper gave her 10 days as a patient before it informed the authorities of the deceit.

Rosenhan would have understood.

Professor Strange: Victorians, modesty and table legs

Long ago, in its February 2004 issue to be precise, I wrote an occasional humorous column for Clinical Psychology Forum under the name Professor Strange. As I still come across people who are quite convinced that the Victorians thought table legs indecent, I am repeating it here.

I doubt you will find anything like this in Clinical Psychology Forum today, but Professor Strange is an ancestor for the columns I now write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Victorians, modesty and table legs

The Victorians do not get a good press these days. A random trawl of the Internet finds the American AIDS Czarina complaining of a ‘Victorian society that misrepresents information, denies sexuality early, denies homosexuality particularly in teens, and leaves people abandoned with no place to go.’ A sermon tells us that ‘Thanks to the 1960s, we have given up Victorian hypocrisy when it comes to ourselves.’ And a journalist announces that ‘Victorianism today is generally interpreted to mean little more than an atmosphere of sexual repression and hypocrisy’.

Well, I knew Victorians; I worked with Victorians; Victorians were friends of mine. (Indeed, I cannot wholly rule out the possibility that I was a Victorian myself.) And I do not believe that they were any more repressed or hypocritical than we are today.

Yet this libel persists. So much so, that many otherwise intelligent people are convinced that the Victorians were so afraid of the power of sexuality that they felt obliged to cover up the legs of their pianos. Perhaps you believe it too?

You are not alone. An Australian website on sexuality and modernity is convinced they did. Another on culture and colonisation reports that ‘An era that could wrap table and piano legs with frilled covers that men may not harbour “certain” ideas is incredible, to say the least.” 

How true! For something does not fit when a website on the Victorian pantomime tells us that “audiences were not accustomed to viewing the legs of a pretty actress, especially in an era when even piano legs were cloaked for modesty's sake! However, in a male or ‘Breeches’ role, the actresses were allowed to display as much leg as they dared.’

So piano legs have to be swathed but, in certain circumstances it is fine for human legs to be displayed? The Victorians I knew were odd, but not that odd.

The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the strait-laced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny. In my experience the Victorians had more go that the Bloomsbury types who came after – Virginia Woolf was particularly hard work – but the mud has stuck to this day.

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

"My name's Cole-Hamilton. Alex Cole-Hamilton"

It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that he was too:

Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang – if he had chosen to join MI6.

The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni.

But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion – who believe in non violence – when he was told the information he gathered could potentially lead to the loss of lives.

We've all watched enough Tinker Tailor and Slow Horses to know that life in the intelligence services is nothing like that, but what is it about Liberal Democrats that attracts the spooks? Or is it that spies are attracted to the Liberal Democrats?

I wrote in one of my Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy columns:

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

 And I still consider Paddy and Jo Grimond as the two best Liberal leaders of my lifetime.

For the JCPCP: Norma Varden, the Norman Yoke, Being Normal and Norman Bowler

I've just sent another of my columns off to the The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, so it's time to publish an earlier one here again. The theme for this issue was "Norma, Norman or Normal".

Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.

In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”

There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.

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Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?

O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.

Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.

The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.

And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.

Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:

Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.

Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".

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I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.

But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.

When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.

This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.

Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.

You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.

These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.

People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.

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I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.

When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:

In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.

But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act. 

What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.

So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.

After reading this column you will never think of Barbara Cartland in the same way again

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Another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Barbara Cartland has her own label on this column, and I think all this material had appeared on Liberal England before, but I suspect it is not common knowledge among radical mental health professionals.

Barbara Cartland as a political activist

The writer Damian Le Bas once interviewed a man whose mother, a Conservative county councillor, had fought for travelling families to have somewhere to live and for their children to be educated. 

"People offer all sorts of reasons why they don’t want a Gypsy site near them,” said Le Bas. "You’ve referred to it as old-fashioned racism, and your mother compared it with the situation in the South of the United States of America."

The man replied: “It was definitely prejudice. It was really, really nasty. My mother had a lot of hate mail and people were rude to her, but she persevered. She was not one to be deterred, my mother, in any way. She stuck to her guns."

Her name? Barbara Cartland.

When I told someone who I was writing this column about, they dredged up Clive James’s description of her on television in old age:

Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.

But then if Barbara Cartland is remembered at all today, it is for this late eccentricity of appearance. 

Matthew Sweet, who is writing her biography, has observed that, though you would expect her romantic novels, of which there were hundreds, dictated from a chaise-longue to relays of secretaries, to be a staple of charity shops, but they have not lasted. Not lasted physically, that is: they were cheaply produced and fell apart in the hands of a vigorous reader.

So, though Barbaraville Camp, a permanent site for Gypsies on the outskirts of Hatfield named in her honour, is still open, we have to look further back to pay Barbara Cartland her due.

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The hero of The Glamour Boys, Chris Bryant’s study of the group of gay – if that’s not an anachronism – MPs who opposed appeasement in the run up to World War II, was meant to be Major Ronald Cartland, who died at Dunkirk aged 33. But doesn’t his sister keep breaking into the story?

Their father’s death had left Barbara and her two brothers in straitened circumstances, but they weren’t for long once she started writing. First there was a racy High Society novel with a fair amount of sexual innuendo, Jig-saw (1923), then a column for the Daily Express and risqué plays, one of which was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.

Bryant writes:

Barbara was no prude. She wrote wry and naughty copy for Bystander under the pseudonyms Miss Hamilton or Caviare, she turned out gossipy pieces for Tatler as Miss Scott and passed on titbits of society news as Miss Tudor in the Daily Mail. The copy she filed was invariably bubbly and enthusiastic, with no hint of the prim coyness that was so common at the time. Her advice to young women in her book of modern morals, Touch the Stars: A clue to happiness, was remarkable: 

Remember that you are not a miserable sinner… nor were you born in original sin; the sex instinct is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It is sent to inspire us, and help us understand Nature and the workings of the Divine. It is the nearest approach we get to the beauty, the intensity and the power of Life.

And in between all this writing, she found time to be the darling of the fast set at Brooklands motor racing circuit and a pioneer of gliding.

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What first made me take Barbara Cartland seriously were her wartime memoirs, The Years of Opportunity, as they showed her to be a notably sensible voice in welfare work.

She defended servicewomen, saying the remarkable thing was how few unwanted babies there had been, given wartime conditions. And when women did become pregnant:

It was nearly always a case of being brought up in ignorance, of being given a new and exciting freedom in the Services, and often of being “stood a drink” for the first time in their lives! Many of them didn't know what was wrong with them, and when the Medical Officer told them they were going to have a baby they were stunned and astonished.

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Not that the men were much better informed:

I know one RAF padre who had a straight talk with every man on his station who came to him wanting to get married or in domestic trouble. He said the abysmal ignorance of the average man about women and love was appalling.

She also wrote with understanding and compassion about the needs of children, particularly those in public care. In 1945, the death of Dennis O’Neill, a 12-year-old foster child, on a farm in Shropshire had scandalised the nation:

How many Dennis O’Neills who don’t actually die are living a life of cruelty and torture, of privation and utter hopeless misery? How many little boys and girls are existing in filth and degradation in Public Institutions without any knowledge that there is love and kindness in a world which to them is only harsh and horrible?

She remembered a little boy who had come from a public institution to live in the cottage next to hers:

He was three years old, but he had never seen a toy of any sort, and when my boys gave him some of theirs, he didn’t know what to do with them. 

One of those boys was Ian McCorquodale, who was interviewed by Damian Le Bas.

And Cartland writes of her friend Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who deserves a column of her own: 

As chairman of the Nursing School Association she visited homes and institutions and what she found was appalling.

It wasn’t all words either. In this volume of memoirs Cartland describes bursting into a stranger's hotel room to stop a little girl being beaten.

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The moral of this story is that someone who ends their days on television in a pink chiffon ballgown and caked with make-up – as I fully intend to do – can still be worthy of your respect.

Child prodigies: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.

You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.

Prodigious talent

Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist. 

And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.

Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:

"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know." 

Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.

So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.

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The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.

Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:

"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."

I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.

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I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.

It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.

Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:

"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."

Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.

And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.

But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:

Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.

Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”

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If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.

Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.

Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:

“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”

Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:

“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”

Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.

Helen Maguire backs campaign to restore cemetery where 9,000 mental hospital patients lie in unmarked graves

Helen Maguire is backing a campaign to restore a derelict cemetery in her Epsom constituency.

Horton Cemetery contains the graves of 9,000 people who died at one of the five mental health hospitals that made up the Epsom Cluster between 1899 and 1955. Today, it’s neglected and not accessible to the public.

Interviewed by the Lost Souls project, Helen Maguire said:

“I would really welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with the landowner to see if we can find ways to return this graveyard to a public location so relatives can access it.

“It's about heritage, education and people being able to learn about what Epsom used to be. This isn't just in Epsom, it's in other places as well, other locations where graveyards have even built over. This is the start of a conversation that raises the awareness of mental health.

“I think a memorial is a great idea. These individuals have been forgotten, and in many situations it’s not like Horton, where we might have the possibility of making it public one day.”

The video above, which is produced by The Friends of Horton Cemetery, tells you more.

I wrote about the Epsom Cluster in one of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. It was so vast that it had its own railway system:

In 1896 the London County Council purchased the Horton Estate in Surrey with the intention of building a cluster of mental hospitals and other institutions there. A railway system, linked with the main line, was built to carry materials for the construction of the hospitals and then carry the coal and other goods they required for day-to-day operation. The cluster, naturally, had its own power station.

In the 1920s the volume of coal and coke delivered to the power station, and to glasshouses at one of the hospitals, reached a peak of 15,000 tonnes per year.

This railway system was little used during the second world war, when some of the hospitals were given over to wounded and recuperating soldiers, and it was scrapped not long after hostilities ceased. But before it closed, enthusiasts in sports jackets and flannels came to photograph the operations for railway magazines. It is said you can still find traces of the lines among the housing estates, private roads and golf courses that now occupy the Horton Estate.

And, as the horrific story about the home at Tuam in County Galway reminds us, it’s not only asylum inmates who lie in unmarked graves.

I write often here of Dennis O’Neill, who in death was the most famous child in the country during the opening months of 1945. His death from abuse and neglect while in foster care shocked the nation, even as the Allied forces closed on Berlin.

Yet when Dennis's brother Terry, who had been with him when he died, later went with his girlfriend to look for Dennis’s grave, this is what they found:

Pat and I had to walk up and down the row several times before we found the correct grave, because there was no headstone or marking on it, only a metal plate with a number. Long grass grew up around it and some kind of prickly bramble had twisted its way across, sinking in deep roots. I saw a cemetery attendant and ran over to confirm that this was, indeed, Dennis’s grave. 

I just stared at the spot, as if somehow I would be able to see through the soil to where he lay. Pat got down on her knees and started tearing up the bramble.

“We should come back with some shears to trim the grass, and bring some flowers next time,” Pat said.

It Newport Borough Council felt any guilt over sending Dennis away to his death, it was not deep enough to lead them to buy him a headstone. 

The Jesus Army: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

There is a long read on the Jesus Army in today Guardian, and on Sunday the BBC beings showing a two-part documentary series called Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army.

I have been blogging about the Jesus Army several times in the last three years and devoted one of my quarterly Sighcology columns in the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy to it.

Sighcology: The Jesus Army

Somehow Bugbrooke isn’t the sort of place you expect to spawn a dangerous cult. People with well-paid jobs in Northampton, a few miles to the east, search for houses there. It has a pub on its high street and a second just outside the village where you can watch boats go by on the Grand Union Canal. St Michael and All Angels, its church, dates from the early 13th century.

But it was Bugbrooke’s Baptist chapel that in 1969 gave birth to the Jesus Fellowship, later to be popularly known as the Jesus Army. Its leader, a lay pastor called Noel Stanton, soon attracted a younger and larger congregation.

In 1974 the village’s Anglican rectory was purchased to house a Christian commune. By the early 1990s, there were 850 people living in 60 Jesus Army communal households scattered across the Midlands. 

The Army also preached to people in the street, seeking out the addicted and destitute. Some were scooped up and came to live in its communes and work in its commercial activities – the Army operated shops, businesses and two large farms. As Medieval monasteries proved, taking vows of poverty can make you paradoxically prosperous.

Stanton, described in one BBC report as “a firebrand who preached daily about sins of the flesh”, died in 2009. It will come as no surprise to you students of human psychology that allegations he had committed sexual assaults against boys soon began to emerge. 

By 2019, accusations had been made against 43 people who were active in the Jesus Army, and hundreds of former members were seeking damages for alleged abuse. This included rapes, bullying, brainwashing, forced labour, financial bondage and beatings of young boys by groups of men. The BBC was told that children suffered sexual, physical and emotional abuse “on a prolific scale”.

*****

One of the talents of a backwoods Conservative MP used to be the ability to spot bounders and bad hats – I think it was something to do with the number of buttons on the cuffs of their suits. And you have to hand it to Michael Morris, who sat for Northampton South between 1974 and 1997: he was on to Noel Stanton.

Thanks to the extensive online archive of press coverage maintained by Jesus Army Watch, we can see that in 1985 he expressed concern about members of the Army holding posts as teachers, doctors and social workers: 

“I strongly object to people following a particular cult or philosophy holding an influential position in society where there is a danger they can influence people into their faith.”

A year later he called on Northampton Borough Council to ban the Army from its land and buildings.

Another item you can find in this archive is an article William Dalrymple published in the Independent in 1989 after visiting Bugbrooke. He was only 24, but this was also the year Dalrymple published his first book, In Xanadu. Today he is a much-decorated historian with particular expertise in the Indian subcontinent and its religions.

Dalrymple listed many of the charges laid against the Jesus Army, contrasting this catalogue with the happy experiences of the people he met in Bugbrooke. He then quoted a sociologist as saying that the term “brainwashing” is nothing more than a metaphor used to explain strong religious convictions by people who find them inexplicable.

But Dalrymple had already quoted an account by a former member of the Army that shows this explanation won’t do: 

“You have to fit in,” he says. “They take away your ability to make your own choices and you cannot express your own opinions. If you don't obey Noel you're accused of not loving Christ.”

In the end, he clashed personally with Stanton. “He turned everyone against me,” he remembers. “All my old friends cut me dead. One guy came up to me and fell on his knees crying and weeping, saying 'God forgive him.' It scared the hell out of me. Then they began trying to persuade me I was insane – possessed by demons.”

Eventually he fled to Denmark … but the Jesus People traced him there. “They kept ringing me up and telling me I had the heart of Judas Iscariot and was under God's judgement.”

As a partisan of the Midlands, I take a certain grim satisfaction from seeing a writer who has mastered the subtleties of Eastern religions defeated by those of Northamptonshire.

******

It’s easy to call someone like Stanton a hypocrite, but we’re all good at keeping contradictory beliefs and actions well apart in our minds. I recall someone else who shared Evangelical Christians’ remarkable affection for corporal punishment, John Smyth. He was Mary Whitehouse’s barrister and a fellow campaigner for purity, who posthumously brought down an Archbishop of Canterbury.

He had attached himself to Winchester, the public school, leading some pupils in religious discussions. One of the housemasters described a friendly conversation with him. “It’s good of you to give up your time like this,” he said to Smyth, “and the boys obviously enjoy their time with you, but I notice you only ever invite the good-looking boys.”

At this, he recalled, Smyth curled up in his chair into an extraordinary foetal position. I suspect he feared the compartments in his mind were about to be ripped down.

******

I no longer see the Jesus Army’s bus, in its Scooby Doo colours, passing through the town where I live; nor do I see it parked up in the centre of Leicester as the crowds are evangelised. The Jesus Centre in Northampton, a striking art deco cinema the cult owned, is now a theatre and conference centre.

A news report I saw late last year said the organisation winding up the Army’s affairs had accepted liability for 264 perpetrators of abuse, but 539 people have been named as offenders by former members.

So far £7.7m has been paid in compensation, the money raised by sale of the Army’s properties. And I am left wondering why this extraordinary scandal has not received more media coverage.

Georges I-IV, Boy George, George Harrison and Henry George

Here's another of my columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. 

This time the theme of the issue was Georges - they've already done Davids. I wish I'd thought of including George Eliot.

Georges on my Mind

The future George I and his wife Sophia Dorothea fought all the time. He once pulled out her hair and throttled her until she lost consciousness – her life was saved by attendants who intervened. When George inherited the British throne, he had already forbidden his 11-year-old son, the future George II, to see his mother or even mention her name. When he came to England from Hanover, the younger George revenged himself by scheming with his father’s enemies at Westminster.

George II and his wife both hated their son Frederick, Prince of Wales, and he obliged them by dying before they did. It used to be believed that his death was caused by a cricket ball, but sadly the story has been discredited.

It was Frederick’s son who inherited the throne, as George III. The theory that his madness was due to porphyria is as out of fashion as Fredrick’s cricket injury, but whatever the cause of it, he was still clear-headed enough to see through his son. George IV enjoyed a dissolute life but not his father’s approval, and left no legitimate children.

Thanks goodness none of this enmity has come down to our present-day Royal Family.

******

The uncle of Boy George used to be the priest at our local Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories. I heard that from a taxi driver who had it from two nuns, so it must be true. 

******

There’s a photograph of boys from a Liverpool primary school on the beach during a 1951 holiday on Isle of Man that surfaces regularly on social media. Two are instantly recognisable: John Lennon has pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and next to him a smiling Jimmy Tarbuck has adopted a boxer’s stance. Perhaps because he is younger, the boy on the other side of Lennon is not so easily recognised, but he is Peter Sissons. A friend of Paul McCartney’s at secondary school, he grew up to be an eminent television reporter and newsreader.

Sissons recalled a meeting with a third Beatle, George Harrison, in the days when he was reading ITV’s News at Ten: 

I got a phone call on the news desk and the receptionist said “George Harrison is here to see you”. I went down to reception and there was George with most of the Hare Krishna people from Oxford Street. The place was full of these men in saffron robes and in the middle was George in a rather way-out sort of hippie suit. He said to me, “Peter, I’ve got a terrific story for the news, it’ll be the lead story, you’ve got to put it on the news tonight.”

I said: “Terrific, what is it?”

He said: “Peace.”

I said: “Hang on, where?” He said: “Just peace, it’s a great thing, you’ve got to put it on the news.”

I explained there had to be a bit more to it than that to make the lead on News at Ten. We parted on very good terms and off they went banging their tambourines.

******

George can be a surname too: there’s Bobby George, Charlie George and probably George George too. But the most famous such George was once Henry George.

After he died while fighting the New York Mayoral election of 1897, says a contemporary report:

Thousands upon thousands of people waited in the streets from early morning to obtain places in the seemingly endless line that drifted past the candidate whose strange and premature 'election' had thrown the politicians into confusion. Sobbing women lifted their children to look upon the face of the 'martyr'. Tears became contagious, and rough men sobbed without shame.

Another reckoned New York had seen no comparable demonstration of popular feeling at the death of a public man since Abraham Lincoln had lain in state at City Hall.

Henry George achieved this extraordinary fame, not as a politician. but as an economic theorist. People argue over whether he or Karl Marx have sold more books, but there’s no doubt that George sold millions. Reading groups of working people were founded to discuss his ideas.

At the heart of those ideas were the beliefs that land was the ultimate source of all wealth and that, as the song goes, God gave the land to the people. It followed that the proceeds of rents on land and the minerals beneath it should be taken in tax by the state. This, he argued, would remove the monopoly power that allowed landlords to exploit wage earners and make possible the abolition of other taxes. 

Henry George’s ideas still have their advocates, but his most tangible legacy is a board game.  A follower of George’s, Elizabeth Magie, and her friends invented The Landlord’s Game. When she patented it in 1904, she said it was designed to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".

The Landlord’s Game evolved into Monopoly, a celebration of rapacious landlordism that has done more to lay bare the tensions underlying family life than anything since the early work of Salvador Minuchin.

It happens that I reached the finals of the British Monopoly Championships in 1977. They were held on top of the nuclear pile at Oldbury-on-Severn power station – the Electricity Company, you see. It may have been only a promotional event for Waddington’s, but I managed to wangle the time off school.

I won two games on the first day to become one of the last twelve players. In the semi-final, I built hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane – they’re not the best sites to develop, but the dice fall how they will. My anticipation grew as my main rival moved round the board towards them. Suddenly, he had drawn a ‘Go to Jail’ card and, safe from my West End rents for three turns, he went on to win the game.

You have to hand it to Henry George and Elizabeth Magie: they had foreseen the Britain of the 1980s.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

******

Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

Mike Brearley: A column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

A piece of unashamed hero worship from the JCPCP. You may recognise some of this from posts on this blog, but then I have always regarded one function of a blog as being acting as a writer's notebook.

Such was Mike Brearley standing in 1981, his last summer as captain of the England cricket team, that the writer of a letter to the Guardian claimed to have seen him set the field and then "look up at the sun and indicate that it should move a little squarer".

For me, it was a wonder to have a representative of liberal North London occupying the most prestigious position in what can be a very Tory game. It was as though Jonathan Miller or Michael Frayn were leading England out.

Of his 31 tests as England captain, Brearley won 18 and lost only 4; and in that summer of 1981, he resumed command when England were a test down to Australia. Under his leadership, the team reeled off three consecutive wins, with a previously despondent Ian Botham playing like a cricketing Superman.

His path to the England captaincy, despite his public school and Cambridge background, was not a conventional one. He made enough runs for the university and Middlesex to be picked for the 1964/5 England tour of South Africa at the age of 22, but after that – as a postgraduate student and then a lecturer – he played for Middlesex only in the university vacations, like at old-fashioned amateur.

Brearley showed his mettle in 1968 when the England selectors left the mixed-race Basil D’Oliveira out of their party to tour Apartheid South Africa to avoid a political row. He insisted on seconding the motion condemning the selectors at a meeting of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which was then the game’s effective governing body.

Soon afterwards, he became a lecture in philosophy at Newcastle University, in thrall to the later Wittgenstein like most young academic philosophers of his generation. I spent most of Brearley’s reign as England captain studying the subject at York, and we discovered that he had unsuccessfully applied for a lectureship there.

“I can’t escape the feeling that you’re slightly disappointed in me,” said the man who had got the job instead. We weren’t, but even liberals are allowed to have heroes.

******

By the time Brearley retired from cricket in 1982 he was already training as a psychoanalyst, and he was later to serve as president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Fans and journalists were interested in how his psychoanalytic studies had informed his captaincy – the Australian fast bowler Rodney Hogg famously said that Brearley had “a degree in people” – but Brearley himself has emphasised that there was an effect in the opposite direction.

In his latest book, Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and the Mind, he writes:

Playing cricket, and captaining, taught me a lot about what makes players tick, both those on the same side and opponents, and it stimulated my interest in what others and I myself feel, how we respond to pressure, how we impinge on each other, and so on. 

There are of course two main features of the job of captaincy – one to do with tactics and strategy, the other to do with human relations. the latter calls for personal qualities of empathy, truthfulness and courage.

But not everyone was convinced. Brearley recalls one patient asking him: “How can a little boy like you, playing latency games with other little boys, have anything to offer a mature woman like me?”

Why an educated man should spend his time playing games is a question that clearly occupied Brearley even before he turned to psychoanalysis as a profession. His first cricket book The Ashes Regained, an account of his first series as England captain in 1977 written with the journalist Dudley Doust, includes a chapter on the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, the author of Homo Ludens – A Study of the Play-Element of Culture. 

This may have nonplussed readers more interested in how Brearley persuaded Derek Underwood to bowl over the wicket at Greg Chappell in the second innings at Old Trafford.

In Turning Over the Pebbles, Brearley discusses the writings of Wilfred Bion and his belief that a game must be played purely for its own sake. Bion wrote in his memoirs:

Games were in themselves enjoyable. I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies – such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and keeping a fit body the for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind.

 For Bion, unlike Brearley, even being captain detracted from the game.

******

One of the great things about Mike Brearley’s books are the indexes. His willingness to discuss psychoanalysis, philosophy and high culture alongside cricket produces some striking juxtapositions: 

• Archer, Jofra/Aristides the Just;
• Bowlby, John/Boycott, Geoff; 
• counter-transference/Cowdrey, Colin;
• Gower, David/Gramsci, Antonio;
• idée fixe/Illingworth, Ray;
• Muralitharan, Muttiah/Murdoch, Iris;
• Snow, C.P./Snow, John;
• Thomson, Jeff/Thorndike, Sybil
• Trueman, Fred/Trump, Donald;
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig/Woakes, Chris;

******

‘The best leaders are great teachers,’ says an article I’ve turned up in the Harvard Business Review, and there was always something of the teacher about Brearley. A photograph that shows him, perched on a windowsill, answering questions at a press conference as England captain could easily be of a friendly young academic leading a seminar.

As captain of Middlesex, he challenged the dressing-room ethos that young players should be seen and not heard. If the county was fielding and the game was in danger of drifting, he would start asking his players, the younger ones included, what they thought he should do.

Some youngsters welcomed this more than others, and I’ve recently heard two of them talk about Brearley’s approach. Simon Hughes, now a cricket journalist, had thought “Why’s the England captain asking me what we should do?” – he rather sounded as though he still thinks that – and felt vindicated when the bowling change he suggested failed to bring a wicket.

By contrast, Mike Gatting, who was a teenager when he made his Middlesex debut, remembered being flustered the first time Brearley turned to him – “But I made sure I had something sensible to say the next time he asked me.” Gatting went on to captain England himself.

Spying: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I've just sent off another column to the JCPCP, so it's time to post another of my earlier ones.

The idea that Noel Coward had a role in wartime intelligence has been taken seriously by recent biographers - something else to read up on. And whatever the truth of that, he had upset the Nazis enough to appear on the list of people to be executed after the invasion.

When this list was revealed after the German surrender, Rebecca West, who also appeared on it, sent Coward a telegram: "My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with."

Spychology

The only spy I have known is the one I wrote jokes for. 

Back in the 1990s, I had friends at Liberal Democrat court and could send in lines and ideas for Paddy Ashdown’s speeches. The 1997 general election campaign was, I think, the last at which BBC Radio 4 broadcast a daily late-evening round up of speeches from the hustings, and I sometimes heard my work used. At the following election, a programme satirising the election was broadcast in that slot. It was Peter Cook who said, back in the 1960s, that “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea.”

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

Ashdown’s memoirs told us inevitably little about his MI6 years, though his friend the former Labour minister Denis MacShane suggested after his death that he had been involved with Operation Gladio, which set up arms and supplies caches all over Western Europe for the Resistance to use if Soviet tanks ever rolled in.

Admirers of John le Carré were not surprised by what Ashdown did say about the organisation:

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multi-storey tower block south of the Thames whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions.

But even George Smiley must have winced at this:

The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, "Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere."

******

Ian Fleming’s first choice to play James Bond was Noel Coward, but The Master sent a telegram in reply to the offer: ‘DR NO? NO. NO. NO.’ Coward, it is true, had played a spy in Our Man in Havana, but that was a deskbound one with no licence to kill.

What doesn’t work on the screen, however, can work in real life. The Carry On actor Peter Butterworth, for instance, was one of the vaulters who helped in the Wooden Horse escape from a World War II German prisoner of war camp in, but when he auditioned for a part in the film he was told he ‘didn't look convincingly heroic or athletic enough’.

And so it was with Coward, though quite what he did in the war is not clear. Some sources say he was a member of a network of rich travellers who gathered information from across Europe just before hostilities broke out: others that he worked in black propaganda in the same unit as Guy Burgess and Kim Philby.

What seems more certain is that he ran the British propaganda office in Paris, telling his superiors: "If the policy of His Majesty's Government is to bore the Germans to death, I don't think we have time." He later used his showbiz fame to help persuade the American public and government that they should enter the war.

Coward and Fleming were near neighbours in Jamaica, where much of Dr No was filmed, and both members of the slightly disreputable international elite that had flocked to the newly independent island – there was nothing slightly about another of its members, Errol Flynn. A young Chris Blackwell, who came from a family in that set, helped find locations for the film and was offered a job by Harry Salzman, who produced it alongside Cubby Broccoli.

Blackwell was tempted, but decided to remain in the music business. He moved to London and imported Jamaican records to sell to the expatriate community there, then founded his own production company. He discovered first Millie Small (‘My Boy Lollipop’) and then Steve Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group, and with them on board, Island Records took off. 

In 1976 Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate on Jamaica came on the market, twelve years after his death. Blackwell bought it, but only after he had failed to persuade another Island artist to do so. Bob Marley could be stubborn.

******

When the BBC showed Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective at Christmas I found it had curdled since I saw it in 1986, but their adaption of John Le Carré’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979 never disappoints. I know its seven episodes so well that I had to steel myself before seeing the 2011 film of the book and then steel myself not to walk out of the cinema. It was all wrong. Really, it was just different, though two hours was not enough time to do justice to the book’s intricate plot.

If the TV series, like Fawlty Towers, gets a bit more Seventies every time you see it, that’s only to its advantage. Much of the publicity about the film concerned its efforts to recreate the look of that decade, but the television series didn’t have to try at all.

Someone working on it for the BBC asked a contact if he could be smuggled into the MI6 building - the spooks had moved since Paddy Ashdown’s day - to see what it was like. "There’s no need," he was told. "It’s exactly like Broadcasting House."

Social class: Another column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. I've slightly lost the thread of which issue which column has appeared in, but this one has certainly been published. In fact, I don't remember writing parts of it.

Sighcology

The progress of the working-class grammar school boy and the estrangement from his background it brought about were once such a theme of English letters that it was honoured with a Monty Python sketch inverting it. 

A coal miner returns home to his playwright father and receives a cold welcome:

“Hampstead wasn't good enough for you, was it? You had to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and your coal-mining friends.”

The grandfather of this school of writing was D.H. Lawrence, and I was studying his novel The Rainbow for A level when David Storey’s Saville won the Booker Prize. Our teacher talked of Storey’s debt to Lawrence and suggested we considered reading his novel.

Saville introduced me to David Storey, whose early life encompassed elements no novelist would dare combine. At one time, Storey’s posthumous memoir A Stinging Life reminds us, he was studying fine art at the Slade in the week and supporting himself by taking the train north at the weekend to play rugby league for Leeds.

Fashions change, and a few years ago I saw Andy Miller from the Backlisted podcast exclaiming online that Saville had won the Booker Prize yet he could find no one who had read it.

******

Writing for the online publication Too Little / Too Hard, Rachael Allen recalls being the first in her family to receive any kind of schooling after the age of 14:

At Goldsmiths, I did not meet the children of cleaners or shop workers. I met the children of landlords, the children of airline pilots, and actual princesses, the children of executives at mega pharmaceutical companies, people so wealthy they owned their own charities. I met the children of TV personalities and doctors, barons and writers.

And she goes on to record a revelation that many of us have experienced:

One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working-class person moving into educated and middle-class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever. I held onto this misconception for longer than I should have, because, at university, and then into my professional life, I was surrounded by the rich.

The English are indeed likely to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence – a failing that more than one contemporary comedian has exploited to land a more serious column. But Allen says her working-class father reads more than anyone she knows, giving himself a summer to read War and Peace and then everything around Tolstoy and Russian literature he can find. She grew up with him pointing out flowers, leaves, and trees in the Latin that he had taught himself over the years as an amateur naturalist.

My own class background is complicated – my mother once claimed to have “gone from rags to rags in one generation” – but when I was a poor teenager, I was still able to pass as middle class. The disadvantage of this was that, in an instance of the same fallacy, it did not occur to any teacher that I might be having problems. 

******

Class, which once held a central place in our political discourse, now competes with other sources of injustice. The Conservative MP David Johnston once wrote about his time running social mobility. recalling a firm which, while it thought itself fully signed up to the concept, nevertheless raised queries like: 

“Our clients need us to have worldliness and you get that by travelling the world. So how will the young people you work with be able to demonstrate it?"

and

“They’ll be alongside the children of high net-worth individuals who we’re teaching how to invest the assets their parents gave them, so you’ll have to send us someone suitable.”

Johnston would watch banks professional service firms fall over each other to hire black graduates if they were privately educated and from professional families:

These young people were deemed to have the requisite social capital they claimed their “clients expect from us”. If, however, you were the sort of black young person my organisations typically helped – poor and from a council estate – enthusiasm waned.

All these companies, said Johnston, would talk on their websites about valuing diversity, but diversity of social background was not tend to be high on their agenda. You could be black or white, but you had to be middle class.

Without the right social connections you will never break into the circles where the best jobs are on offer. Andy Burnham was mocked when he spoke of the problems in this he had still faced with a Cambridge degree – hadn’t been in the cabinet before he was 40? – but then he had found an alternative network in the shape of the Labour Party.

******

I saw a tweet from another female academic, Professor Amanda Vickery, the other day:

Found Saltburn unpleasant. Brought back memories of being working class at uni. Am decades from that & obvs privileged now, but still recall that any time I said "no my father was a bricklayer & no we never went skiing", boys would launch into the Monty Python sketch.

There’s little doubt which sketch that was, though the Four Yorkshiremen were originally seen in an earlier television programme, At Last the 1948 Show, and the sketch was written and performed by Marty Feldman, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, as well as John Cleese. You know, I think we’ve found a hill I will die on.

A radical reading of the Four Yorkshiremen is possible – we are laughing at the self-aggrandisement of the rich as they tell increasingly incredible stories of their own childhoods – but Vickery’s fellow students found the very idea of poverty amusing and old fashioned. It’s become just one more of those odd notions that private school pupils tease one another out of holding so they can be sure of fitting in.

Which may be why, if British novelists wrote of nothing but the experiences of the bright poor boy in the Fifties and early Sixties, they now seldom mention the working class at all.

On being a member of the Four Tops in an insane place

There was a headline on Sky News the other day:

Four Tops star says hospital put him in straitjacket and ordered psychological examination after not believing he was famous singer

I thought it too serious for my Headline of the Day Award, though 'funny' headlines often stop being funny if you think about them for more than a moment.

But this story did make me think of several things.

The first was a description of Shelton Hospital, Shrewsbury, in the 1960s:

The hospital consumed 865 pints of milk per day. The grounds were infested with feral cats, which were a source of ringworm. There was a single post box, by the front door, for patients, staff and the hospital itself, which was often full to overflowing, meaning that letters often went missing. Nurses smoked constantly, in part to block out Shelton all-pervading smell: of a house locked up for years, in which stray animals had occasionally come to piss. The kitchen had a butcher with an attitude problem and the laundry sometimes went wrong, meaning that patients were forced to wear socks shrunk to half their normal size.

That comes from Sam Knight's book The Premonitions Bureau, which I still heartily recommend, and I first quoted it in a column I wrote for the the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Yes, mental hospitals are strange and intimidating places, particularly the old county asylums like Shelton. 

I once went to meet a psychologist at Queen's Park Hospital, Blackburn, in the course of my old day job. The signage for the clinical psychology department ran out before I got there, so I had to ask someone the way. 

I had visions of the conversation going: "I'm from the British Psychological Society." "Of course you are, dear. Come with me." (When I told this story back at the office, my colleagues kindly said they would have denied all knowledge of me if the hospital had rung them up.)

So how do you show you are sane in such a strange place? Alexander Morris, who is the lead singer of the current incarnation of the Four Tops, struggled to do it and I think I would have too.

But don't just take our word for it. Here is the beginning of the abstract of a famous paper on the subject - the second thing the headline made me think of:

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment - the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling - seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.

That paper is On Being Sane in Insane Places by David l. Rosenhan, which was published in Science in 1973.

The paper itself is behind a paywall, but you can read a more lay account of the experiment it describes by Rosenham on The Wayback Machine. And that experiment has its own Wikipedia entry - Rosenhan experiment:

In the first part, psychiatrically sane people said they heard hallucinations, to get admitted to a psychiatric ward. This was done to test how the psychiatric hospitals would react. The second part was the reverse. Rosenhan told the hospitals, he would send fake patients. But he did not send any fake patients.

The results of the study were very controversial. When Rosenhan sent the people, the hospitals were unable to detect them. On the other hand, when he told them he had sent some patients, but really did not, the hospitals recognised a large number of fake patients. The study said that it was impossible to tell a difference between the sane and the insane.

And the third thing the headline made me think of was a story about a therapeutic poetry study group in a hospital on the Isle of Wight where an elderly patient rightly declared that, years before, he had written one of the poems they were studying.

I found it in a piece by a hero of this blog, Iain Sinclair:

[David] Gascoyne's rescue, his return to life in the suburban house on the Isle of Wight, was brokered by two remarkable people. Judy Lewis, a vet's estranged wife, who read his "September Sun: 1947" to a depressed group at Whitecroft Hospital, provoked the previously mute writer to speech. "I am the poet." "Yes, dear. I'm sure you are." But it was true. He was the poet and it was always 1947. He became a living quotation recovered from a midden of fragments: "All our trash to cinders bring." There was to be a notable late flowering for the willowy and disconsolate figure in the bow tie, the time traveller from the 30s. Gascoyne married Judy. He had found his loving companion and chauffeur.

You can read more about David Gascoyne in his Wikipedia entry.

As I said, Alexander Morris is the current lead singer with the Four Tops, but I've gone back to the band's glory years for my choice of video above.

I'm not sure his predecessor would have faired any better though:

"We've got a patient here who says he's Levi Stubbs." 

"Sure, and I'm Sam Cooke."

Chess, Freud and paranoia: Another column for the JCPCP

Embed from Getty Images

Another of my Sighcology columns for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy. There are three more posted on this blog, covering private schools, Davids and mental hospitals.

More about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Publishing site. 

Reuben Fine could have been a contender. When Alexander Alekhine, the reigning world chess champion, died in 1946, the game’s authorities announced a tournament involving the world’s strongest players to find the new champion. And Fine, along with three Soviets, a fellow American and a Dutchman, was among the six players invited.

Fine, however, declined to take part, arguing that the conditions favoured the Soviet players. He soon dropped out of elite chess altogether, preferring to concentrate on his career as a psychotherapist.

As an orthodox Freudian, Fine took a particular view of chess. Bill Harston, writing Fine’s obituary for the Independent in 1993, explained:

Drawing heavily on the earlier writings of Freud's biographer Ernest Jones, Fine supported the view that chess is an embodiment of the Oedipus Complex, with the father-figure King ('indispensable, all-important, irreplaceable, yet weak and requiring protection') and powerful mother-figure Queen providing the elements for the player to enact his parricidal fantasies. The pieces, according to Fine, are mostly phallic symbols.

His writings have been widely quoted to explain the dearth of strong women chess-players and the absence of homosexuals at the highest levels of the game.

******

In 1972 an American player broke the hegemony that the Soviet Union had established after Alekhine’s and won the world chess championship. That was Bobby Fischer, whose match with Boris Spassky in Reykjavik acted as a symbol of the Cold War and put game on the world’s front pages.

Fine wrote a book about Fischer and his achievement. In it he revealed that for many years ‘chess players approached me with the request to try to help Bobby out of his personal problems. In spite of his genius, he was socially awkward, provocative, argumentative and unhappy’.

In fact, or so Fine wrote, he had already tried to help Fischer. Bobby’s mother had consulted him soon after her son had won the US Junior Championship at the age of 13:

He came to see me about half a dozen times. Each time we played chess for an hour or two. In order to maintain a relationship with him, I had to win, which I did. ... My family remembers how furious he was after each encounter, muttering that I was “lucky”.

Hopeful that I might help him to develop in other directions, I started a conversation at one point about what he was doing in school. As soon as school was mentioned, he became furious, screamed, “You have tricked me,” and promptly walked out. For years afterward, whenever I met him in clubs or tournaments he gave me angry looks, as though I had done him some immeasurable harm by trying to get a little closer to him.

******

Dr Fine might have got on better with Fischer’s opponent in the match that won him the world title, because Boris Spassky’s reminiscences of first encountering chess are pregnant with Freudian meaning – as the psychiatrist said of Basil after staying at Fawlty Towers, “There’s enough material here for an entire conference.”

David Edmonds and John Eidinow wrote in Bobby Fischer Goes to War:

In the summer of 1946, Spassky passed his days watching the players in a chess pavilion "with a black knight on top" on an island in Leningrad's river Neva. "Long queen moves fascinated me," he recalls. "I fell in love with the white queen. I dreamed about caressing her in my pocket, but I did not dare to steal her. Chess is pure for me." 

Spassky had learnt how the pieces move by watching older children play when he was sent to an orphanage during the Siege of Leningrad. When he was back home, his first trainer used to feed him as well as teach chess. He remembered those summer days in the chess pavilion:

He had thirteen kopeks for his fare and a glass of water with syrup to see him through until the last streetcar carried him home. His feet were bare. "Soldiers' boots were my worst enemy."

Chess can be a great escape.

******

Bobby Fischer never defended his world title. The conditions he insisted upon proved unacceptable to the game’s authorities as they would have given him an unfair advantage over his challenger. So Fischer walked away from chess.

His only return to the game came in 1992, when he and Spassky played another match. Fischer won again, but neither player was the force he had been 20 years before. Over those two decades there had been worrying reports about Fischer’s mental health, and this second match caused him further problems. It was held in the short-lived Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was under United Nations sports sanctions, and the United States issued a warrant for Fischer’s arrest. He was never to return there.

This did nothing for his state of mind and his raging paranoia was exposed to the world by his reaction to the terrorist outrage of 9/11: 

"[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military – they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders."

It was Iceland, the scene of his greatest triumph, that stepped in to offer Fischer asylum, in both senses of the word. He died there in 2008.

******

I could conclude with the words of Bill Hartston, who was briefly Britain’s best chess player at the start of the Seventies and later became a journalist and then a star of Gogglebox: “Chess doesn't drive people mad: it keeps mad people sane.” But maybe chess isn’t a good occupation if you have a tendency to paranoia, as you spend your life encountering ingenious people who are plotting your downfall.

And paranoia about professional chess was never confined to Bobby Fischer nor obviously unjustified. There were those in 1946 who wondered whether the Soviets had murdered Alekhine to hasten the crowning of their first world champion, while Reuben Fine’s doubts about the ensuing tournament appeared justified when one Soviet player contrived to lose all four of his games against another.