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People and Places

George Lyward
and
Finchden Manor

Reprinted by the kind permission of Maurice Bridgeland from his PIONEER WORK WITH MALADJUSTED CHILDREN, Staples Press (London), 1971.

If men are made the recipients of understanding love, they may learn to accept the interests of others as equal to their own, submit to the rule of law and be admitted in common fellowship. - T. S. Simey, The Concept of Love in Child Care Oxford University Press: 1961.

Although the general rethinking of education and psychology had a considerable and sometimes direct effect on the treatment of maladjusted children, the inter-war period was marked mainly by the growth of a number of communities notable for their differences in basic ethos. Although one can perceive certain antecedents, precise chronology is of little significance when considering work of such an individual nature. The pioneer at the centre of the community owed only one debt to time. Experiment was at first tolerated and then appreciated and encouraged by an increasing number of people aware of the problems. Moreover, new approaches based on personal ideologies were still, at this time, free of the necessity of academic empirical justification. Individuals were, therefore, free to demonstrate the effectiveness of communities derived from their beliefs, and were not inhibited, as we may now be over-much, by a compulsion to await research evidence in a field in which such evidence has always been negligible.

George Lyward is rare in this field in that he was, for sixteen years, a schoolmaster. Education, in the widest sense, was his means and end, transmitted through a person who was not only deeply educated but inspired by a profound love of others. Although he began his career in the 'new era' of education he did not so much rebel against traditional schooling as realize its inadequacies. He taught with an intuitive recognition of the needs of other persons and conceived education to be a co-operative and creative enterprise aiming at the quality rather than the quantity of the response. This he found led not only to better 'results', in the conventional sense, but also the development of understanding in depth - a process which took 'time, growth, and inner consolidation'. Thus, as a housemaster at Glenalmond in the 1920s he found that he could use his position as a sixth-form teacher, a rugby coach and a housemaster to create an atmosphere in which real education was possible. He remarks that: 'It is an irony of my life that I came to healing through a discovery of how to use "subjects" to release and emotionally re-educate young people, but now have so frequently to plead or insist that they should be protected from subject-teaching in so far as it can do harm.' (1)

For Lyward the step from education to therapy did not exist. His object was to teach, and to allow, his pupils to think. 'To think is to be released from the tyranny of feelings. Head and heart together is the way to fuller life and richer relationships.' Again: 'We should teach to the feeling for the sake of the thinking, for the sake of the subject, and still more for the sake of the child. It is only what he makes his own that helps him to think clearly; to live not possessively. To make his own he must see, synthesize, and seek and find unity. He must not merely analyse or accumulate and so lose gradually the power of keeping alive to the "mysterious, threatening soul-searching realm of being which lies behind and within the sphere in which organization achieves its ends".' (2) The alternative is a schizophrenic disunity of thought and feeling.

It is this belief in the unknowable and inexpressible, in the mysterious and poetic nature of life, and in the almost incidental existence of organizational substructures, which makes Lyward's work so difficult to describe. It has to be viewed in metaphysical rather than sociological or psychological terms. Superficially, as I have suggested, there is a chronology and there are certain discernible characteristics.

Lyward left Glenalmond in 1928 having, according to the chairman of the governors, raised the standard of work by 40 per cent in the fifteen years he was there. (3) In 1930 he began his therapeutic re-educational work with two boys in a Kentish farmhouse - Guildables - and, five years later, moved to Finchden Manor. Finchden is a small Elizabethan manor-house near Tenterden with a particularly peaceful air of having grown from the soil. As Lyward says, 'not adapted but lovingly adopted'. It now houses a community of fifty-five young men, normally of between sixteen and twenty-four years of age. Before the Second World War his work was mainly with ex-public school boys but after the Education Act of 1944 money became available to widen his clientèle. The staff, one or two of whom have themselves been boys at Finchden, also include adults who are glad to share, for a longer or shorter time, the therapeutic environment of Finchden Manor. Others come drawn to the experience of working with Lyward.

Because Lyward holds 'strong wishes about the dead wood in education, about pressure, about early specialization, of the way in which subject teaching of a certain kind can rob a school community of depth of group life; and how the subject teaching suffers also', (4) academic education at Finchden is at first indirect and then tutorial, and dependent on the varying skills and experience of the members of staff and, even more, on the members' ability to learn for themselves. Study, like the discipline of relationship, is based on individual need and especially on spontaneous sharing, as are other aspects of the community's life. Drama and the arts are encouraged and some very interesting work is done in pottery. Individuals take public examinations but any pressure to do so comes from a healthy recognition of the needs of ordinary life. The emphasis remains always on therapy.

Michael Burn, the author of Mr Lywards Answer, who himself spent a considerable time at Finchden, said that Mr Lyward made no claim for his community other than it was one. Burn nevertheless claims that in the first twenty-two years of its existence 290 people - men, women and children - had lived in the community and that, apart from ninety who left before treatment was completed, 'nearly all ... have settled down, some in distinguished careers, many in jobs which would have appeared fantastic when they came'. These are not 'hard' figures but they impress particularly in relation to the severity of the 'cases' - often sent to Finchden as a last hope.

Many of the members have suffered in various ways from the inadequacy of substitute parents and from disturbance largely occasioned by failure to adjust in adolescence to the demands of the so-called adult world. With many the disturbance was very severe, causing trouble with the police or making the youth completely unacceptable either in his own or a substitute home. They are immature because they have never experienced the reality of childhood. They come to Finchden because 'however they may look, and however big and cleverly they may talk, they may in truth be no more than seven-year-olds with an L sign'. It is Lyward's task to reduce the unbearable tensions of adolescence by easing the transition from childhood to adolescence in a relaxed atmosphere which enables them to re-live and to re-grow. Such an adolescent is tied to his childhood because the problems of this period have not been resolved and yet he is conscious of the demands of adolescent status. While inwardly there is confusion, doubt, guilt and humiliation, 'outwardly there is chiefly a vague sense of confusion, frustration and defiance and a determination at all costs to keep hold on the adult world in which he feels he must at all costs maintain a stake'. (5) The adolescent must not only be allowed to experience his past but its hold on him must be relaxed. Within the tolerant atmosphere and emotional security of Finchden both processes are possible and fear and guilt can progressively vanish away.

In the early years at Finchden deep analysis played an important part in treatment, but increasingly the deepened group life was allowed to loosen the bonds. At the beginning the boy was allowed to regress to the fullest extent necessary in an atmosphere of almost complete acceptance. He was then gradually 'weaned' towards the joy of interdependence within the body politic of the community.

This concept of 'weaning' away from childhood and towards a rebirth into adulthood is central.

At puberty the child becomes something of an adult physically. But the word adult should not really be used about anybody who is only physically changed and who has yet, himself, to play his part in the translation of his childhood experiences. If he is to move towards a full life, he must so grow that these experiences shall no longer hold him to a life in which they are merely repeated in a disguised form, but shall be revised (seen anew) and recognized for what they were as distinguished from what he felt them to be at the time. Otherwise he will remain in bondage to the past and be, for the most part unconsciously, a good boy or a rebel, both something less than a man.

It takes the whole of the period of adolescence for this bondage to be cleared. Or rather - and this alteration is important - until it is cleared the child has not become an adult, whatever be his age in years and however sound his intellectual valuations. (6)

The boy must first be given his childhood back. He must not remain unchildlike merely for fear of sometimes being childish and doing childish things. 'If they don't do them now they'll do much worse things later.' The process of rehabilitation started, boys who for a long period have perhaps wandered aimlessly around attach themselves to a person or an interest. The members of staff become mediators. At this point challenges become inevitable and a boy's adjustment is frequently tested by a sudden or gradual arrival at what may well seem a merely arbitrary restriction. An attitude towards one's self as part of a community is nourished until eventually the boy is involved in what is seen as a surrender. 'It is at such a moment that insight is important, insight rather than any planned technique. The challenge may come in the refusal of ... money, while he sees his friend receiving ten shillings, or it may come in the sudden gift of twenty pounds to start a hobby. A reasoned argument may be met by a reasoned reply, or by an apparently irrational quip, a deliberate deflection or frustration of thought. Insight sees beneath the request, the argument, the rude remark, to the need from which these spring; and the action meets the need not the gesture" (7) -although it may, at other times, and for the same purposes, meet the gesture.

The boys' ideas of themselves are challenged and a rebirth is required. Unhampered by a fear of criticism they are forced back upon the unknown self. The acceptance of the community is almost complete. One boy wrote to Mr Lyward: 'You began the operation of stripping off my outer skins. Life has removed most of the others. I feel singularly naked but I am beginning to enjoy life.' (8)

This dynamic process involves certain special approaches to 'discipline' and to 'love', which Lyward considers necessary if the adolescent is to be regulated into some creativity. 'Self-government' Lyward rejects as 'an extra, liable to be served out in little parcels, and no solution for the boy's tautness, being only another kind of imprisoning formalism', (9) although he recognizes that self-government may have some value as a sort of institutional compost: 'It is as recurring opportunities of breaking up the institutional soil that "self- government" should chiefly be welcomed and emulated.' (10) On the other hand. formal discipline which brings about a premature crystallization is considered suspect. 'The secret of discipline lies largely in being casual, for that leaves both parties on the same side.... True discipline is that which maintains fellowship."(11)

Great emphasis is put on flexibility, play and humour, and sometimes sheer nonsense, in maintaining the necessary 'flow'. 'Let us see to it that our children's communities are real havens, sensitive to rhythm magic circles within which the children can meet with uncertainties and unfairnesses and as a result become aware of the giver and thus know our membership one of another. Then they will not cling to the gift. Then they will develop a strength which will allow them to re-dedicate themselves to something more challenging than any system or than any state.' (12) Certain arbitrarily chosen 'possibilities' recur as part of the game. 'If you read a paper at mealtime you are liable (not certain) to have it torn up - this is part of the tradition. If you were there and I walked in, you might see the paper quickly sat on, but again the atmosphere is not made tense by rules and sanctions! If you are found smoking in bed, you are liable to have a bucket of water thrown over you, because you are on fire. The play is not lost, even then. Sternness need not be moralizing.'

The essence is to keep a rhythmic flow in people who are 'everything by starts and nothing long' and so to work towards analysis and synthesis. 'Prior to analysis the elements are sustained in a vital rhythmic connection, and it is that vitality which we need to maintain in community life.' (13)

To Lyward the development of a sense of individuality, however important, is but a first step to the development of a sense of 'oneness'. In this development the community acts as a microcosm of humanity and ultimately of universal existence. The process of analysis and synthesis is not scientific but poetic, the aim being the unification of disparate but related parts, both in and out of time and space. to create a 'one-ness' of the logos of the soul which, in Heraclitus' term, has no discoverable frontiers. In this pursuit, Lyward sees not only the hope of the fulfilled, because related, individual but the only hope for the continuance of civilization.

In terms of daily living this alchemy often transmutes through conditions of 'much admired disorder', within a security which is the product of, and promotes awareness of, love as a reality. 'Stern love' is a term which Lyward uses frequently. In stressing the need for stern discipline in therapy Lyward cites as interview with a 'tough guy' seeking admission to Finchden.

'I asked him straight away what he would really choose if I could give it to him and he blurted out immediately: "An 'ome and I'd 'ave one if that bloody lodger hadn't gone off with my mum."

"'Would you like to have stern love here?" (adding to myself, "as distinguished from strict rules")....

"'I've never 'ad that kind: it sounds a better kind as long as it's still love." So he had it in a community where, as in all true communities, the psychological and moral approaches can to some extent be left to weave themselves together, so that the moral is not abrogated but deepened in meaning; given meaning, I would almost say. (14)

'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds,' although the demands that it makes will change as the members' needs alter. Some of the demands will appear inconsistent for, as has already been mentioned, Lyward frequently refuses 'reasonable' requests from a boy who, he feels, is, as it were, asking to be tested and challenged in order to establish for himself 'a secure relationship between two people who know how to give and take'. The rationale of this part of Lyward's technique, which is often misunderstood, he explains thus:

The real secret of living in a House with children is to know how to be creative in taking away and in being 'unfair' and haphazard, so that the gift shall never deny the children increasing awareness of the giver. Most people know what we must give to the children. But the kind of giving that can include 'taking away' and yet be known for giving - that is what is needed. Else you have missed the 'deeps'. Such ,unfairness' can be one of the chief ways of producing a deeper sense of security, and where this is being successfully achieved, 'please' and 'thank you' are not so much polite words frequently heard from those under an obligation, as echoes (sometimes shy, sometimes exuberant) of something heartfelt. (15)

The atmosphere becomes one of challenge to break the restrictive barriers of self and ultimately to accept the obligations of an individual in society. 'Love of the strong kind is surely an act of creation.' (16)

Through understanding and love the will is finally 'baptized into reality'. 'Behind frailty and the trouble it causes is love and its power - love locked out or loved locked in, whichever you will. Our love, yours and mine, can, it is true, open the door. Their wills - or shall we say their power of willing spontaneously and intelligently - will become more certainly theirs to surrender to the Highest they know'. (17)

REFERENCES

(1) LYWARD, G. A. 'A Comment on Standards: particularly for Parents', New Era 34 (7) p 122, 1953. [Return to Text]

(2)BURN, M. Mr. Lyward's Answer p 38. Hamish Hamilton, London, 1956.[Return to Text]

(3) LYWARD, G. New Era (Ref. 1.) p 119. [Return to Text]

(4) ----- The Residential Care of Disturbed Children: the proceedings of the 14th Inter-Clinic Conference of the N.A.M.H. 1958. [Return to Text]

(5) ----- Feeling Their Way Through. New Era 3 (7) p 116. 1938. [Return to Text]

(6) Ibid. p 115. See also DANBY, J.F. About Finchden Manor, New Era, 37 (3) p 168, 1956. [Return to Text]

(7) BARNES, K.C. About Finchden Manaor (Ref. 6), p 169. [Return to Text]

(8) BURN, M. op.cit. p 227. [Return to Text]

(9) ---- op. cit.p 128. [Return to Text]

(10) LYWARD, G.A. In Conclusion, in Problems of Child Development, p 94, New Educational Fellowship, London, 1948. [Return to Text]

(11) ---- The Permanent Need for Discipline, Summing-up of annual conference of Home and School Council, 1948. [Return to Text]

(12) ---- In Conclusion (Ref. 10) p 94. [Return to Text]

(13) ---- The Residential Care of Disturbed Children. N.A.M.H., 1958. [Return to Text]

(14) ---- Loyalty to the Maladjusted Child, New Era 36 (3) pp 43 and 45, 1954. [Return to Text]

(15) ---- In Conclusion, (Ref. 10) p 93. [Return to Text]

(16) ---- Loving Children, New Era 4 (12) p 240. 1940. [Return to Text]

(17) ---- Loyalty to the Maladjusted Child (Ref. 14). 1954.

© Maurice Bridgeland

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