PLANNED ENVIRONMENT THERAPY TRUST ARCHIVE AND STUDY CENTRE
Reprinted by the kind permission of Maurice Bridgeland from his PIONEER WORK WITH MALADJUSTED CHILDREN, Staples Press (London), 1971.
In the days before child guidance clinics when the name of Freud had an unsavoury connotation in the minds of respectable people there lived a remarkable man called William Henry Hunt, who was in charge of a large colony of what we should now call maladjusted youths, near Wallingford....'W. H. Hunt was something of a genius. I remember him saying very often in his gruff voice as he peered through or over his oval pebble lenses: `People are always saying to me, "What do you do to these boys?" and I say "We don't do anything to them." '(1)
David Wills, who worked with Hunt and who described him thus, does not find this reaction surprising. He comments that there are indeed many forms of maladjustment which may respond to a warm, restful, non-provocative environment.
Hunt, in some ways, appears to form a bridge between the work of nineteenth-century precursors such as Mary Carpenter, working with the destitute and delinquent, and later exponents of `planned environmental therapy'. For the first three decades of the twentieth century he was superintendent of Wallingford Farm Training Colony (afterwards Turners Court), which housed about 250 rejects of the Poor Law system. His colony might well be considered to be a forerunner of the `rehabilitation centre', were it not for the fact that about three quarters of its inmates were adolescents. Hunt had no training in social work, being originally a journalist, and his motivation appears to have been Christian altruism of an old-fashioned, liberal, nonconformist pattern.
He clearly believed that adolescence is the age of loyalty to the group. The adolescent boy expressed himself through the group's common actions. Only by the keen sense of membership of a group could his deeper impulse be satisfied. More recently, Crutchfield has detected a strong `dependency motive' in unstable characters(2) although this is not equally true of `persons with acute psychoneurotic symptoms'.(3) Hunt's clientele were perhaps more likely to be maladjusted `displaced persons' rather than suffering from specific psychoneuroses. Be that as it may, Hunt organized the boys in squads of eight or nine, each with an elder `brother' who shared their life work and was responsible for their well-being. He always insisted that the `brother' should be the `stroke oar' of his squad but that his primary duty was to love his charges.
The work was largely farm training and allied crafts considered appropriate to the inmates' lowly social status, and the intention was that they would subsequently emigrate to the Dominions, which most of them did until the war intervened. The `brothers' were intended to be high-minded and altruistic young men who, after a period of about three years' training at Wallingford, were to go in for other forms of social work. Some of them were satisfactory but many were, in fact, men who had tried other things and failed, and were thus frequently less reliable than their charges. There was much in the colony that was undesirable. It was here that Wills learnt that harsh physical `discipline' was derived from fear and that aggression only produced aggression; that the strong-arm methods of many of the staff led from violence to violence which `is seldom more than a transitory deterrent, if that - not a cure of the desire to inflict it', and that the victim identifies with the punisher's strength rather than with any more valuable qualities.' Dr Marjorie Franklin raises the pertinent question of how culpable of negligence Hunt was when, despite his humanitarian principles, he gave so little guidance to his staff and condoned, by default, such treatment of his charges.(4)
When Wills speaks of a `warm, restful, non-provocative environment' it sounds a little like the prospectus of a luxury hotel. The ethos of the Wallingford colony may have been `warm, restful and non-provocative' but the physical conditions were crude, hard and squalid. Hunt may have seen some virtue in this as a situation in which mastering the environment had some therapeutic value as well as keeping the deprived adolescent in touch with reality. Wills, himself, at the Hawkspur Camp, did not discount this value, although various exponents of `planned environmental therapy' have always found the exact degree of creative rigour required difficult to determine.
Despite the crises which one would expect to be inherent in the system, particularly with the very large numbers involved, Hunt persisted and both preceded and survived his better-known contemporary, Homer Lane. His work was, perhaps, less spectacular, if more arduous, than Lane's, his personality less flamboyant, and his achievement, therefore, less widely known. Although one can trace his progenitors in child care to the founders of the French agricultural colonies or the National Children's Home at Edgeworth, he seems to have been little influenced by them. Nor was his influence great, for his model was essentially a nineteenth-century one, appropriate largely for a nineteenth-century poor-law problem in nineteenth-century agricultural terms, although he did cause individuals, other than Wills, connected with the care of delinquents to consider or reconsider the rationale of their work. Among these Frank Foster was in charge of the Borstal after-care service until it was absorbed by the probation service, and was largely responsible for the after-care hostel which Miller described in Growth to Freedom,(5) and Wilfred Chinn organized the first Israeli probation service and became adviser in social services to the Colonial Office. This is not to discount Hunt's value to his adolescents, but to place him as an `original' rather than as a pioneer.
REFERENCES
1 WILLS, W. D. Throw Away Thy Rod, p 18. Gollancz, London, 1960. [Return to text]
2 CRUTCHFIELD, R. Conformity and Character Am. Psych. X. 1955. [Return to text]
3 HOVLAND, C. I., JANIS, I. L. and KELLEY, H. H. Communications and Persuasion. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. 1953. [Return to text]
4 FRANKLIN, M. E. The Work of David Wills, p 23. A.W.M.C. Newsletter No. 10. 1968. [Return to text]
5 MILLER, R. D. Growth to Freedom, Tavistock, London, 1964. [Return to text]
© Maurice Bridgeland
Planned Environment
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