Unpublished classics:
CHILDREN'S HOSTELS (1943)
by Arthur T Barron
with a Preface by Craig Fees
Preface
With this issue we are initiating a new occasional series with the title
"Unpublished Classics". Underlying that title are the quieter
questions "What is a classic?" and "What are the classics in
this field?".
This previously unpublished paper was written in 1943 for a fledgling
organisation, by a young professional, Arthur Barron, in a field which was then
being born, and in a world of child care which had been transformed by the war.
Having had the enuretic, malnourished, abused, confused, wild and difficult
children of the cities thrust upon its attention by its national evacuation
scheme, the State was about to enter into the scene in a major way. The 1944
Education Act raised the State's profile, and with the follow-up 1945
Handicapped Pupils and School Health Service Regulations, recognised the
category of maladjusted children as requiring special educational treatment and
gave local education authorities the powers not, as previously, "to
support individual children at a few `special', privately run, schools, but to
found, finance and control special schools of their own as well as to
recognize, support and inspect existing schools" (Bridgeland, 1971,
p.289). The shock of this change is still being worked through.
The author, born in North Hammersmith in 1919, was the son of a
general labourer. For reasons which are not clear, by the age of 11 he had been
sent to live at the Lingfield Epileptic Colony - undernourished, perhaps
tubercular, he was certainly not epileptic. But there he came under the wing of
Stuart Payne, who had been the fulcrum in David Wills' transformation at the
Wallingford Farm Training Colony from "Basher Wills" into a pioneer
of the more difficult therapeutic community approach with children and young
people. Barron then joined the first Q Camps experiment in 1937 as a student
helper, a joiner/carpenter studying architecture. When the Camp closed at the
beginning of the war he joined the staff at psychotherapist Ida Saxby's Rest
Harrow Abbey in Surrey - a kind of residential container for the child clients
with whom she conducted regular sessions of psychotherapy, and where war
conditions and competence quickly elevated Barron to the position of senior
master. War conditions and internal contradictions led to the closure of
"Batty Abbey" (Bridgeland, 1971, p. 219), and in the Autumn of 1941
Barron moved to a Quaker-run farm-based hostel for mixed refugee and evacuee
children at Market Rasen in Lincolnshire run on self-sufficient and democratic
lines, where he had responsibility for the `maladjusted' children, and from
which he and his newly-wed wife went in May 1942 to take responsibility for a
hostel for forty to sixty evacuated boys in Cornwall.
In this hostel, spread across three houses, 90% of the boys wet their
beds. There were no case records, and no contact with parents. The boys were
sent to bed as soon as they had finished their tea at 5 p.m., and apart from
one favourite, were neglected by the Matron. The staff ate the children's
rations, and the children were fed on a substitute diet of pea-flour soup. When
the Barrons ensured that the children got their food rations, the staff
rebelled. There was confrontation with the Management Committee, staff
turnover, and more pressure on the newly-married couple as Margaret Barron was
appointed in place of the matron whose resignation they forced. They created
case notes, attempted to make contact with parents, liaised with the local
teacher, and took the boys out of the hostel to let them play on the nearby
beaches. But the Committee not only would not give them the scope to work as
they felt necessary, but actively opposed their reforms. Therefore, having
"rectified the outstanding evils of the place" (Arthur Barron to
David Wills, 19.12.1942), they moved in December 1942 to become warden and
matron of an evacuation hostel near Malmesbury in Wiltshire.
Although smaller and more civilised, this hostel, too, had its
problems. The County was "anti-psychology", and this created a
base-line of anxiety. There was an initial period of chaos and destruction on
the road to creating a self-governing therapeutic community - "trying to
make it more or less self-governing on the one hand and trying not to get the
police too interested in us on the other" (Arthur Barron to David Wills,
22.1.1943). It was chronically understaffed, and the Barrons overworked: In the
first nine months of 1943, they had no more than eight free days, with a staff
of three instead of five. At the same time he was talking about an Association
of Workers in Children's Hostels and thinking about the future of a profession:
"I believe that it is going to be so very difficult for parents to
readjust to one another and children to the parent after at least four years of
separation that the need for hostels a year after the war will be greater than
at the moment..." (Arthur Barron to David Wills, 29.9.1943). It was here,
in December 1943, at the age of 24 and in this context, that he wrote the paper
published below.
By July of the following year he had moved again, this time to become
warden of the second Hawkspur Camp, for boys. 19 year old Chris Beedell came as
a student helper at the end of 1944, and left in July 1945 with a vocation, and
with insights and experiences which stayed with "and informed the way I
think, act and write" for the rest of his life. To Beedell - himself an
inspiration to generations of therapeutic residential workers (see Obituary,
Therapeutic Communities 22:3 (2001), 249-250) - Barron and his wife Margaret
were immensely influential. Fifty years on, he devoted his David Wills Memorial
Lecture to those influences, stating "it is important to me that I share
with you some of the things I learned from them". (Beedell, 1995, p. 4).
In a sense, this is a paper written by a man who was racing ahead of
his time. The briefly-lived "Association of Workers in Children's
Hostels" of which he was chairman intended "To raise the standard of
the work ... To promote fellowship between hostels ... To concern itself with
the status of workers and the position of hostels in the post-war world"
(Arthur Barron to David Wills, 29.9.1943), but it was opposed by the Board of
Education "who feared that it would become a channel of complaint"
(Bridgeland, 1971, p. 220), fizzled out, and was not succeeded until the
Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children was founded eight years later
in 1951.
By the end of the war his progressive and unorthodox methods had
earned Barron the active hostility of the Home Office, which effectively
ensured that he would not be employed in child and youth care work (Arthur
Barron to David Wills, 14.12.1947). Reluctant "to get out of this work
entirely, a course that I think would be as unwise as it would be painful"
(ibid), he took a decisive turn - he applied and was accepted by Anna Freud for
training as a Child Psychotherapist at the Hampstead Clinic. Blackballed, in
effect, for pioneering therapeutic community approaches to the work with
difficult and delinquent children, he went on to develop an influential career
as a psychotherapist and therapeutic advisor in schools and child guidance
clinics within the Greater London area, and later as a consultant
psychotherapist based in the South West: Kingsmuir, Coombe Hall, Conyboro,
Bodenham Manor, New Woodlands, Farney Close, Greenacres, Eagle House, Warleigh
Manor, Poolemead Centre. He continued to work intensely until stopped suddenly
by a stroke in 1986. He died in 1993.
Is it a classic?
In the words of one professional, talking with Arthur Barron about the Work
was "like sitting at the feet of Gamaliel" (Maurice Dobbs, interview,
30 June 1995). He did not write very much. Including this 1943 paper, and
including book reviews, case studies, manuscripts and fragments, there are
perhaps two to three dozen known pieces of his writing. His experience and his
wisdom tended to flow into case notes and into people - like many pioneers and
practitioners in this field, he was an extraordinarily gifted and insightful
person who will disappear from history because his gifts were invested in the
lives of others. When they pass, so will he. Unless.
This text, written early in his career, at a time of rapid change in
the child care field, gives the cracks in the mantle of a volcano which is
about to explode. The question is, to what extent have those cracks gone cold,
and hard? And to what extent are that young man's insights and passions as
alive today, as when he stole time from the work, in the midst of war, to get
them down, sixty years ago?
The original typescript of this paper - a foolscap carbon copy with
emendations in ink - was sent to David Wills, probably at the beginning of
1944, and subsequently kept among his correspondence with Arthur Barron [PP/WDW
21B/J. It is the only surviving copy. Unless otherwise noted - Bridgeland
(1971) is an essential resource - the details of Arthur Barron's life and
career are taken from a variety of unpublished sources held in the Archive and
Study Centre, the most important being the letters between Arthur Barron and
David Wills which David Wills saved, dated 1936-1948 and 1963-1979, some of
which are quoted above; the records of the first Hawkspur Camp, 1936-1940;
letters between Marjorie Franklin and David Wills, dated 1935-1941 and
1944-1946; the early records of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust, of which
he was a founding Trustee; a sprinkling of serendipitously preserved
professional notes and documents, which now form the Arthur T Barron Collection
in the Archive; recorded interviews with his wife, Margaret, and daughter Jenny
Summerton; and interviews recorded with friends and colleagues in 1995,
covering each phase of his career from 1944.
References
Beedell, C. (1995), "The 1994 David Wills Memorial Lecture: Sharing
Power and Responsibility - its meaning for living groups and the practice of
politics". Therapeutic Care and Education 4:3, 3-11.
Bridgeland, M. (1971) Pioneer Work With Maladjusted Children,
London:Staples Press.
CHILDREN'S HOSTELS
Arthur T Barron
Chairman of Committee, Association of Workers in Children's
Hostels.
December 1943
The war has, by disrupting the family, caused the growth of innumerable
hostels, which as temporary homes set out in varying degrees to be social
units.
The term "hostel" is widely used and is being applied
indiscriminately to any building housing a collection of persons who are not a
family. Thus there are hostels for different classes of workers and other
adults. This wide use of the name helps to lessen the stigma that could so
easily be attached to the children living in hostels. On the other hand this
sharing of a name may be one of the causes why some children's hostels become
what a hostel for adults is intended to be; - merely a place for sleeping and
feeding in. This is quite apparent in some of the Government Evacuation Hostels
- which at the moment constitute the majority of Children's Hostels -
especially where one person, such as an Evacuation or Welfare Officer, has to
direct the management of all those in one area, (usually administered by a
County, District or Town Council). In the absence of agreement and direction
they are apt to judge all by the same standards irrespective of their different
purposes and functions. One result of this is that a hostel is liable to be
called "good" if it has "good ideas", which only too often
means that some detail of the social life has been concentrated on at the
expense of the whole, in order to make a show with which to impress visitors; -
such as a fine array of handicrafts, pretentious dramatic performances or other
good things that have been misused.
I am loath to criticise people who have to supervise the management of
several hostels, since in the areas in which they work there is better
classification than elsewhere. The muddle of two years ago when children of all
school ages and both sexes and all types were mixed together has been largely
sorted out, but there is still great need for better classification of
Evacuation Hostels and their co-ordination with other social welfare
organizations. I have found the usual divisions to be, at present 1. for those
who wet the bed; 2. have skin diseases; 3. are "difficult" (including
psychoneurotics and behaviour problems, a considerable number being on
probation); 4. need a change of billet. (These are sometimes known as buffer
hostels). Of these classes the largest appears to be the "difficult",
closely followed by the enuretics, but there is now a tendency to include
enuretics in the same hostels as other difficult children, and I think this is
an improvement. The remainder of this article refers only to hostels for
mal-adjusted children.
Although hostels in the evacuation scheme are wartime mushrooms that
have sprung up to meet an emergency, the ideas that they embody - or should
embody - are not so new. Penal reformers have for many years been advocating
less use of prisons as places for young people, and the fact that their efforts
have met with considerable success suggests that the majority agree with them.
Prisons, however, are not greatly different from other institutions except in
degree and I believe the chief reason they are condemned is because they are
institutions par excellence and produce (also par excellence) the institutional
person or type. It is generally recognised that to become
"institutionalised" is a terrible thing to happen to a person. Yet
how are large numbers of mal-adjusted children to be treated except in some
sort of institution? A partial answer was attempted in the 1939 Criminal
Justice Bill by Howard Houses, and my experience of hostels supports the
proposal. But there is no automatic safeguard to prevent a hostel being as
institutional as a "Home", even where, as is often the case, the
children go out to school or to work.
Evacuation experience has shown that the foster-parent idea is not a
solution capable of wide application. Of the children under my care in the past
two years the majority had been in at least six different private billets
before coming and some in as many as sixteen. These numbers do not include
previous hostels, which in some cases were as many as five, the average being
about three. This constant change of abode is one of the most potent causes of
insecurity with which I am meeting.
The danger of hostels turning out institutionally minded citizens
cannot be avoided by rules and regulations governing procedure, but only by the
appointment of Heads who are alive to the dangers and are qualified by
experience, training or both to recognize its symptoms and prepared to remove
them. Such people are to be found among young men and women with experience in
youth clubs, scouts, settlements, etc. that is to say whose introduction to
social work was obtained with "free" youth and who start with an idea
of service. There are some of these already in the Hostel Service (if such it
can at the moment be called) with up to four years experience of this work, who
have built up by trial and error their personal methods of assisting balanced
character development. Some prefer that amenable creature the institutional
child to the more spiky specimen who has not been so much suppressed, but the
majority of these workers, I think, are alive to the need for vigilance and
persistent effort to prevent institutionalising their charges. These remarks
apply also to the nurses and teachers who are running hostels. I count among my
friends people from both these professions who are making excellent hostel
wardens, but somehow I believe them to be exceptional.
What more is needed? That halfpenny worth of tar that saves the ship!
In evacuation hostels the state bears the cost of all the needs of physical
life - house, heating, food, etc. and is doing so with admirable generosity.
The standard of feeding in hostels, for example, is ahead of pre-war standards
in institutions and is often quite equal to that of middle class families in
wartime. There are exceptions. I once knew a hostel that served pea flour soup
as the main dish every day etc. But besides this generosity on the physical
side, we have to balance a great reluctance to spend money on the social life.
Thus some children go month after month without pocket money; games, handicraft
materials, sports equipment, have to be supplied by voluntary bodies. Staff
salaries are low and the conditions of work for assistants such that wardens
are often left with (and often without) only domestic help for months.
None of these things account fully for the blunders that are so well
known to all who have any dealings with hostels: children getting the wrong
treatment, or more usually no help at all for their disordered emotions; of
children becoming institutionalised; of their relying on routine and punishment
to determine behaviour instead of becoming persons of initiative and
self-discipline. There is a need for a clear conception of what each hostel
exists to do. This is often shrouded in highsounding phrases. An official who
is responsible for several hostels recently said to me, "we are trying to
take the place of the parents and must not do anything that they would not
do." A very noble idea, but which parents? The one who has deserted her
child three times and attempted suicide once? The father who is buying his
son's love away from his divorced wife at 10/- a week? The dozen or so that
never write unless co-erced? The eight who did not even write for Xmas? And so
on, for almost every one whose child I have tried to help. No, hostels cannot
replace parents - nor should they - but they can, by a careful study of each
child, supply what the parents have failed to give, be this affection or
opportunity, discipline or freedom. In short, the purpose should be, in so far
as the limitations permit, to remedy each child's difficulties.
The use of environment as a method of treating delinquency is an old
idea. It is implicit in the term "reformatory". However, the methods
employed in the more modern places are so different as to be opposed to the old
school of thought, which was based on the theory that if you made a person by
force toe the line for long enough, he will continue to toe it when the force
is removed, through sheer habit. This is recognized as largely true, and in
those cases (fortunately quite numerous) where it is not, it is usually because
the "treatment" has not been continued long enough. It is also
recognised that these successful "toers of the line" are little (or
nothing) better than just that; in fact they are institutionalised. We do not
want our "curative hostels" to do that to their charges, so they must
discard the old methods and find a new way. To do this effectively we should
have - say a dozen - experimental hostels run by the best people with knowledge
and experience of these things, each working according to a definite policy or
method and acting as a research unit in close co-operation with Psychiatrists
and Child Guidance or similar Clinics. They should have sufficient funds at
their disposal to create the conditions required. The majority of hostels would
have to continue to accept circumstances more or less and do what they can
within them. What they will be able to do will to a very large extent depend on
the heads, but both war-time and pre-war experience seems to indicate the
general principles on which they should work.
Firstly; environmental treatment of the mal-adjusted requires the
building up within the hostel of a socially conscious community. This takes at
least a year, hence the value of using existing hostels where this has been
done. I know of one excellent experiment that failed because it tried to judge
the problems of each child, as it were in vacuo, without reference to the
communal bonds. I suspect this to be the cause of other disasters, especially
in the early days of evacuation hostels. This social sense, I believe, is best
established by allowing the children some voice in the internal management,
especially of the social activities. I have refrained from the use of the term
"self-government" since it is associated with a lack of adult
participation; but would like to borrow the Q Camp term "shared
responsibility" which better expresses the communal as well as the
personal role.
Secondly; it is necessary to make each child feel of use and wanted.
Being "wanted" means being liked. It is not always possible to like
every child, but it is relatively easy in that case to see to it that he has an
adult advisor and if possible confidant. In selecting staff for a hostel I
think it wise to have as wide a range of character types as possible to ensure
this. Being of use means having a job to do, but it does not mean being a
slave, and the young are quick to recognise this. The domestic work should
therefore be done by all members of the staff as well as by the children.
Thirdly; it will be necessary to have a fairly complete case history,
including a psychiatrist's report, on each child. (These are at present almost
unknown at hostels); to keep regular notes on each child's development,
recording objective details of possible significance. (No hostel Warden of my
acquaintance has time for this as things are now.) From these two sources the
needs of each child should be reasonably clear, and steps should be taken to
supply them. The results, being noted, can be reviewed from time to time. It
would be of immeasurable help to the residents if there were an experienced
outsider present at these reviews to help them to be objective. I often find I
am too near a child to see him properly.
I do not think that any hostel Warden would seriously quarrel with the
need for these three things: a Community sense and Self-Respect in the
children, and an objective outlook by the staff, (to stop a soft heart becoming
a soft head or vice versa) as being almost basic principles. To the outsider
they must surely seem elementary. But how hard of realisation, and what
personal effort must be made to bring them about! Yet with what results, even
where they have been tried only partially and against insuperable odds. I have
seen a group of 20 boys, who were the nucleus of a hostel with an average
number of 36 (the other 16 constantly changing) be transformed in six months
from dull, routine-riddled idlers into an active and progressive group - from
robots into persons. I have the testimony of other similar miracles from widely
diverse types of wardens, all of whom would, I think, agree with the three
needs I have listed.
There is a danger in this of getting uniformity, the encumbering of
wardens with rules and regulations. This danger is approaching proportions that
might swamp the good that could be done by further co-ordination and
classification. Were this not so I would not have ventured on these
suggestions. My hope is that since the course I have tried to sketch is a big
one (as these things go) it will be directed by "big" people having
sufficient time and assistance. They are less likely to fall into error than
the numerous local administrators who are now saddled by hostels in addition to
their normal work, and have to work with depleted staff.
Two years ago when hostels were still a novelty in the evacuation
scheme many men and women who had long wanted to work with children had their
chance. Whether they are still at the work is hard to say but there seems to
have been a subtle change of spirit since those early days. My impression is
that in spite of the muddle and lack of equipment, the most courageous
experiments were then made; e.g. many refusing to rely on punishments, others
combining this with the use of self-government, etc. Indeed although this is
but a personal impression of a nation sized movement, I think of that time as
one in which a hostel run on "institutional" lines was a rarity. This
impression is supported by the views expressed by a lecturer at a course for
Hostel Wardens who had lectured in previous years and was therefore able to
compare, and by others who have been working in evacuation since the beginning.
Gradually this experimenting seems to have ceased, and in many ways it is a
good thing that it has, for human beings cannot be discarded if an experiment
of which they are the subject fails, and the experimenting was largely in
inexperienced hands. But in ceasing it has taken a lot of the sincerity and
awareness of difficulty out of this new branch of service. The time has surely
come to replace some of it so that the experience of the war years can be
effectively applied to the mal-adjusted youth that well be revealed by peace.
Although it was the intention (and may still be) of the Government to
close Evacuation Hostels when the armistice is signed, I think that there are
serious reasons to doubt the wisdom of this happening in toto. Many of the
children now in hostels will still need care. Moreover, four years of war has
surely not provided a better environment for the young of twenty years of
peace, and let us remember what we found the conditions to be amongst children
at the first evacuation! In these hostels may lie the solution when residential
care is advised for first offenders, pre-delinquents and the otherwise
mal-adjusted.
I have said that I believe there are the right people available for
this work, but this does not mean that there is not a serious need for a
recognised training for hostel and other residential children's workers. This
is one of the most pressing needs and will be more acute when war-time
tolerance is no more. I would like to see a form of training somewhat analogous
to that of a nurse; e.g. that theory and practice are taught during the same
period, for one of the most important factors of success in this work is being
able to live on easy terms with "difficult" children. The
experimental (research) hostels that I have suggested could be used as the
training schools and the lecture course of the Institute for the Scientific
Treatment of Delinquency could be used to supplement the tutorial given at the
hostels. W.D. Wills in the "Hawkspur Experiment" similarly compares
the nursing profession with that of the residential hostel worker. With the
training of hostel workers the need for trained supervisors of hostels would
become imperative. These might well be recruited from the ranks of psychiatric
social workers.
This paper is written unofficially as an expression of my personal views.