For Immediate Release.
19 January 2005

It isn't every day that government archives shed fundamental light on
the beginnings and endings of a therapeutic community. But sensitive
and detailed United Kingdom Home Office files released in 2005 under
the 60 year rule do just that.

Hawkspur Camp for Boys was set up in 1944 by the Q Camps Committee.
It is one of the acknowledged sources of the modern therapeutic
community movement for the treatment of children and young people.
The Q-Camps work brought together pioneering figures of the calibre
of paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Red Hill School
founder Otto Shaw, London University criminologist Hermann Mannheim,
Northfield Military Psychiatric Hospital Commander Denis Carroll
(where the term 'therapeutic community' is said to have been coined),
Forest School headmaster Cuthbert Rutter, Braziers Park founder
Norman Glaister. David Wills, O.B.E., was Camp Chief at the first
Hawkspur Camp. Arthur Barron - who trained as a psychoanalyst after
the war under Anna Freud, and went on to become an influential
consultant in therapeutic schools, communities, homes and Child
Guidance Clinics throughout the South and West of England - was Camp
Chief at the second. Chris Beedell, founder of Bristol University's
Advanced Child Care Course and teacher and mentor to generations of
therapeutic child care practitioners, found his vocation and lifelong
inspiration there. Wills, Barron and Q Camps Honorary Secretary
Marjorie Franklin joined in 1966 to found what is today one of the
three main charities devoted to therapeutic community in Britain, the
Planned Environment Therapy Trust, whose internationally known
Archive and Study Centre was created in 1989.

And yet, Hawkspur Camp for Boys very nearly did not happen. And as
recently released Home Office records make clear, its short, rich and
controversial life was brought to a premature end by disapproval in a
government department. The Home Office file, discovered by a
researcher for the "In Living Memory" series currently running on BBC
Radio 4, was brought into the Planned Environment Therapy Trust's
Archive and Study Centre yesterday by the programme's producer,
visiting the Centre to explore sources for a possible programme on
the Camp and the file.

A programme like this needs four things:

1) The voices of living people;
2) Archive recordings;
3) Relevance to the present;
4) Significance to the past.

The Home Office file contains the names of all the boys and staff at
Hawkspur Camp for Boys during its brief and influential life. The BBC
had gone through the British Electoral Rolls and had written to every
likely man with the same name as one of the boys, and possible staff.
They had turned up one former Hawkspurian. One was not enough to
build a programme on. Could the Archive and Study Centre add
anything, over sixty years after the Camp closed?

Recordings with two former boys, five former staff, the wife of the
Camp Chief, as well as his brother? Archives of the first camp, and
Q-Camps letters covering the period of the second? Contact details
for the two boys, and possibly two adults (the Producer brought the
news that two of the members of staff interviewed by former Director
of the Archive and Study Centre Craig Fees had died; Fees confirmed
the death, since recording, of two others). Had it been for
television, the resources would have included photographs, and a
video made by Craig Fees of a visit with Chris Beedell to the
derelict site of the former Camp, accompanied by Arthur Barron's brother Ted.

Relevance to the present? Part-time archivist Fees was able to place
Hawkspur in the context of the recent "All in the Mind" programme on
Radio 4 featuring Shirland Road Therapeutic Community soon to close,
and the Young Peoples' Service in Cambridgeshire, facing closure; the
successful services for adult Personality Disorder, but the
controversy surrounding funding and closures; the work of the
Charterhouse Group communities; the ceaseless round of empty 'tough'
government initiatives on yobs and anti-social behaviour vs. the
grounded and proven work of therapeutic communities.

Significance to the Past? With reference to Maurice Bridgeland's book
"Pioneer Work with Maladjusted Children": The revolution in so much
of what is now considered "common sense" surrounding child care,
which the pioneers in therapeutic community were fighting to
establish, sometimes against opposition and even hostility, as
demonstrated in the Home Office file; their direct and indirect
influence on the progressive legislation around children and
education following the war; their demonstration of what was possible.

The Archive and Study Centre as set up in 1989 by the Planned
Environment Therapy Trust to provide a home for archives,
publications, and any other material related to the history and
practice of therapeutic community and
progressive/democratic/alternative education. It currently holds over
200 archive collections, almost 2,000 oral history items, and over
7,000 volumes in its library. It has supported the work of the field
in various ways, including the setting up of the original web-sites
of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Charterhouse Group
of Therapeutic Communities, the Cassel Hospital, and the Therapeutic
Community Open Forum, as well as maintaining a rich site for the
Planned Environment Therapy Trust and of the Archive and Study Centre
itself. The Chairman of the Trust is Cynthia Cross. The Executive
Director is John Cross. Its Registered Charity Number is 248633,
phone number is 01242 621200, and website address
www.pettrust.org.uk. It welcomes donations to help support its work,
and in 2004 set up an Archive and Study Centre Endowment Fund
specifically to support the work of the Archive and Study Centre. For
further information please contact Executive Director John Cross, on
01242 621200 or at [log in to unmask]

Craig Fees said he was pleased to be able to help Radio 4. "We are an
'engaged archive'", he explains. "We are involved with the field, we
are part of its ebb and flow. The fact that we established a web-site
so early (in the 1990s) meant that we made many contacts which would
not be possible today, and we had the funds at that time to record
and to travel to create unique and irreplaceable documents which can
be used today. The day I drove Chris Beedell over to Essex from
Bristol there was some kind of accident on the other side of London
which put us at Hawkspur very much later in the day, and with less
time than we would have liked; but the recording of Chris looking
around the old buildings, and then singing a cappella in Thaxted
Church, where he used to perform in the church band while at
Hawkspur, is priceless. You can have no idea at the time what value
this or that recording or piece of work on the web-site, or book or
record you take in will have; but you can be guaranteed that it is an
investment, and that that investment will be realised - with the
emphasis on "will be" - sometime in the future. The Joint Newsletter
was the way we kept in touch with many of the people who had recorded
for us, or given us material. The couple who died - Noel and Margaret
Hustler, who were bursar and matron (and, of course, everything else
besides) at Hawkspur -must have died around the time it came to an
end, because they would comment on issues, and send Christmas cards.
We didn't get a Christmas card from another of the Hawkspur staff
this year, and given the contribution he made to the Joint Newsletter
- "you must talk to so and so and get an article from --" would be
the phone call - the absence of a card worries me. But that is the
privilege of an engaged archive. You are part of the life of the
people you serve, and they are a part of yours, joy or pain. I don't
know where this 'dusty archive' stuff comes from."

The Archive and Study Centre is open Tuesdays to Thursdays, 9-3. A
small charge is made to most users. If planning a visit, it is best
to ring or confirm in advance, at 01242 620125, or
[log in to unmask] The Archive and Study Centre web-site is
at http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk.





Dr. Craig Fees
Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre
Church Lane
Toddington
near Cheltenham
Glos. GL54 5DQ
United Kingdom

Phone/fax 01242 620125
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk