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Abstract

This article explores the pioneering rehabilitative work of the Q Camps Committee's Hawkspur Camp (1936–1941), which supported young men deemed at risk of delinquency. It argues that understanding Hawkspur can reshape perspectives on the development of psychiatric, criminological, and residential childcare practices in the post-war period. Challenging the conventional view that World War II was the dominant catalyst for advances in these fields, we demonstrate how the cross-disciplinary groundwork of the 1930s significantly influenced later developments. Hawkspur's cross-disciplinary nature, stretching across the increasingly institutionalised disciplines of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, social work, and education, may have contributed to its historical neglect. Yet this very trans-disciplinarity played a crucial role in shaping post-war therapeutic communities, child-centred approaches to childcare, and new perspectives in mental health. The first section outlines the interdisciplinary theories and practical methods underpinning Hawkspur, highlighting how radical views on the mind and society were used in practice. The second section examines the post-war dissemination of its methods, with particular attention to the contributions of Donald Winnicott and others in applying its insights to psychiatric and childcare settings. The final section addresses how Hawkspur's engagement with those who resisted conventional psychiatric categorisation helped reframe understandings of mental health. This influence extended to the conceptualisation of difficulties now often referred to as ‘personality disorders’, contributing to the growth of community-based therapeutic models. By foregrounding Hawkspur's legacy, this article underscores the significance of pre-war innovation in shaping modern mental health practice and challenges the dominant narrative that has more narrowly focused on wartime innovation.

Keywords

cross-disciplinary theory personality disorders psychiatry psychosocial space residential childcare

Introduction

This article explores the forces and ideas that shaped an experimental rehabilitative intervention for troubled young men considered at risk of delinquency between 1936 and 1941, and traces the influence this intervention had on post-war developments in therapeutic childcare and work with adults. This intervention was organised by the Q Camp Committee, whose primary project was Hawkspur Camp for young men (Jones and Fees, 2023). The meaning of Q is not defined, but the strong links to Quakerism and the number of protagonists who had Quaker links are worth noting (Boyling, 2011). A historical analysis of this initiative highlights the innovative theories and practices from the 1930s that – despite being under-recognised today – significantly influenced post-war developments in theory and practice.

It has become common orthodoxy that World War II (WWII) spurred not only great social changes but also the growth of social sciences (Solovey, 2013), and particularly psychiatry (Christie, 1994). Innovations in military psychiatry during the war are credited with generating community and group treatment approaches (Harrison, 2000, 2018), with Northfield Military Hospital portrayed in a particularly pivotal role (Nicholson, 2014). It is widely accepted that psychological theories on battle stress and public morale helped expand psychiatry's influence in the latter half of the 20^th century (Rose, 1985), and psychoanalysis is recalled as playing a key role in post-war criminology (Garland, 1997). This paper suggests, however, that these developments must be contextualised within the significant social upheaval of the 1930s and the novel ideas about mental disorder and rehabilitation which it fomented. The Q Committee's project exemplifies some of these developments. It offered an alternative to traditional institutional detention for young men (and by extension, young women).¹ It also challenged the conventional understanding of mental disorder by proposing that pathology existed in a psychosocial space formed at the intersection of individuals and their social environments, and that treatment therefore needed to address this intermediate space.

The article is divided into three sections. ‘Hawkspur: Shaping the project’ examines theoretical and practical developments shaping the Hawkspur project. It highlights the cross-disciplinary thinking of the time, where psychoanalytic ideas were integrated with concepts that blurred the distinction between individual psychology and social groups. While Northfield's post-war practices were influential, they were informed by earlier ideas shaping Hawkspur. Additionally, the rise of psychiatry in the post-war period was facilitated by ideas about the role and scope of psychiatric practice in the 1930s.

The advent of WWII led to Hawkspur's dissolution but also helped propagate its ideas. ‘War: Scattering and propagation’ explores how ideas and practices developed at Hawkspur influenced significant post-war institutions. The Q Camp Committee applied Hawkspur's concepts to a residential setting for difficult child evacuees, and experiences here significantly influenced Donald Winnicott and shaped his later work in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, not only impacting UK residential childcare practice in the latter half of the 20^th century (Price et al., 2018), but contributing alongside developments at Northfield – also examined in this section – to defining what were to become significant issues of mental health in subsequent decades.

‘THOSE OTHERS: A new client group and a different understanding of “mental health”’ explores these issues, discussing Hawkspur's role in refining an understanding of a new client group described by Marjorie Franklin as ‘THOSE OTHERS’ – individuals who did not fit neatly into existing categories of psychosis or neurosis and were, according to Franklin and colleagues, an overlooked group. Hawkspur helped conceptualise a psychosocial space fostering community and group practices, which influenced psychiatry's expansion into new domains and the development of what became known as the ‘personality disorders’. This area has become a major focus (and source of contention) within mental health services over the past 70 years. The interdisciplinary efforts exemplified by Hawkspur laid the foundation for some of the thinking that informed the emergence of those categories, although these origins have been obscured by modern institutional practices in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and criminology.

Hawkspur: Shaping the project

Hawkspur emerged in 1930s Britain during a period of socio-economic-political crisis (Gardiner, 2011; Overy, 2009). The aftermath of World War I (WWI) profoundly affected individuals and undermined faith in civic and religious institutions. Economic turmoil, industrial unrest, and mass unemployment presaged a shift towards a post-industrial era. The achievement of full universal suffrage in 1928 sparked both excitement and anxiety. Meanwhile, fascist movements were gaining ground across Europe, and the authoritarian nature of the Russian Revolution was becoming increasingly apparent.

Psychoanalysis is now recognised as having made significant intellectual waves (Overy, 2009), but less attention has been paid to ideas concerning the relationship between individuals and society – an issue that Hawkspur sought to directly address. The project grew out of the efforts of several key figures, all of whom were responding to the social and psychological crises of their time. They shared a conviction that the relationship between the individual and society was in urgent need of rethinking. At the heart of the initiative was psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Marjorie Franklin, whose 1935 ‘Memorandum’² laid the conceptual foundations developed through collaboration with social worker, David Wills, and the psychiatrists, Denis Carroll and Norman Glaister, the latter bringing an interest in experimental community living. Together, they contributed to a distinctive synthesis of ideas drawn from psychoanalysis, progressive education, and socio-political radicalism. Their collaboration, together with input from other colleagues, resulted in a rich cross-disciplinary experiment in therapeutic community practice. It is argued that the make-up of this innovative fusion of theory and practice has been largely neglected in the decades since (Jones and Fees, 2023).

Marjorie Franklin used her wealthy and well-connected background to leverage support to establish and sustain Hawkspur (Wills, 1967). Her father worked successfully in banking, and her mother, Henrietta Franklin, was a leading suffragette, advocate for the liberalisation of institutional Judaism (Kuzmack, 1990; Kuzmack and Wilson, 2021), and an active proponent of progressive educational methods. Marjorie seemed to inherit these passions for progressive causes. Henrietta Franklin was a dynamic organising secretary of the Parents’ National Educational Union (PNEU), founded by Charlotte Mason, a pioneer of progressive educational methods (de Bellaigue, 2015). The PNEU was groundbreaking in promoting teaching as a professional endeavour and in encouraging parental involvement in education. Encouraged by her mother, Marjorie trained with Mason in Ambleside (Coombs, 2015), absorbing key themes of progressive education that later shaped Hawkspur. Mason's philosophy, based on the ‘Science of Relations’, rejected rote learning in favour of experiential engagement with the world (Cooper, 2023a). She conceptualised the mind as driven by an inherent appetite for knowledge through experience rather than passive absorption:

a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts … our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of – ‘Those first-born affinities that fit our new existence to existing things’.³ (Mason, 1925: xxix)

This dynamic interplay between individuals and their environment became a central tenet of the Q Camp initiative. Franklin's commitment to progressive education persisted as Q Camp evolved into residential care for children during WWII (as described later).

Rather than education, Franklin chose a career in medicine, specialising in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She briefly worked with Adolf Meyer in the US before undergoing psychoanalytic training under Sándor Ferenczi in Hungary. Ferenczi's influence on Franklin, which David Wills described as the ‘turning point of her life’, was profound.⁴ A controversial figure in psychoanalysis, Ferenczi challenged prevailing orthodoxy by emphasising the reality of childhood trauma over the theory of unconscious fantasy, and advocated for engaged, supportive therapeutic approaches (Clarke, 2014; Ferenczi, 1920). His work resonated with Hawkspur's focus on addressing the psychological toll of disruptive environments and seeking practical methods of intervention. His influence also extended to Adolf Stern, who provided the first formal account of borderline disorder (Stern, 1938), which also intersected with Hawkspur's later work (Jones, 2023).

Franklin's involvement in progressive social reform included her early membership in the Howard League for Penal Reform (Wills, 1975) and leadership roles in the Royal Medical Psychological Society's Research Committee from 1928. She convened key discussion groups, including the ‘Social and Psychological Discussion Group’ that brought together figures from the Howard League and the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD). The group, meeting in Franklin's flat, featured prominent psychoanalysts such as Kate Friedlander (e.g. Friedlander, 1947) and Melitta Schmideberg (e.g. Schmideberg, 1947), the latter an influential figure in the controversial debates of the London Psychoanalytic Institute during WWII (King and Steiner, 1991; Roazen, 2001).

A crucial dimension of the Hawkspur project were ideas about the significance of the group to individual psychology. These ideas were brought into the project through psychiatrist Norman Glaister, who had been profoundly shaken by traumatic WWI experiences as part of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the loss of his wife to the 1918 flu pandemic, such that he feared he would ‘lose his reason’ (Faithfull, 1991: 7). Glaister found inspiration in Wilfred Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, which theorised the belief that war was symptomatic of the dysfunctional relationship between individuals and the groups in which they lived. Trotter's ideas, which also influenced Wilfred Bion's theories of group psychology (F. Bion, 1995: 3), were so fundamental to Hawkspur's focus on the relationship between the individual and society that Franklin credited Glaister with making Q Camps possible.⁵ Trotter's work merits attention in the following section.

Trotter to Glaister: Instincts and the group

Wilfred Trotter was a mercurial figure who, through the 1920s and 1930s, built a reputation as one of England's leading surgeons (Holdstock, 1986). Earlier in his career, he had been interested in psychology and sociology, maintaining a close friendship with (and later becoming the brother-in-law of) Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud's passionate advocate (Rosen, 2006). Indeed, Trotter had initially introduced Jones to Freud's work, and his engagement with psychoanalytic ideas informed his theories on human society, originally published in two volumes of The Sociological Review (Trotter, 1908, 1909).

Trotter rejected the separation between sociology and psychology that had emerged in the previous century. Consistent with much thought at the time, he believed that human behaviour must be understood within biological paradigms, with instincts as crucial drivers. His unique contribution was the identification of a fourth instinct, that of ‘gregariousness’, in addition to the drives to feed, reproduce, and survive. This instinct, he argued, was vital to human development. Trotter suggested that humans’ extended period of infantile dependency allowed for the internalisation of social and cultural expectations, equipping individuals with the psychological frameworks necessary to function within their social worlds, enabling a sense of attunement between internal and external realities. However, when individuals he classified as ‘sensitive’ perceived a disjunction between their internalised values and external social reality, they experienced alienation and psychological distress. Meanwhile, the ‘normal’ majority were more resistant to the perception of the incongruities involved.

Trotter's insights were foundational for Norman Glaister, who believed collective endeavour could integrate both ‘sensitive’ and ‘resistive’ tendencies (Faithfull, 1991). This perspective shaped Glaister's work with the Hawkspur project, which focused on the psychological impact of societal change on young men. His experience as a single parent likely guided him to involvement in the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry – a progressive alternative to Robert Baden-Powell's militaristic Scout movement. Inspired by Ernest Seton's ‘Woodcraft’ movement (Morris, 1970), it emphasised camping, pioneering, and collective living while incorporating liberal educational methods (Pollen, 2019 discusses the significance of the ideal of camping at this time). He met and later married Dorothy Revel, a strong advocate of progressive educational methods (Revel, 1928, 1934). In the ‘Order’ the distinction between the sexes were questioned, and a permissive attitude towards sexuality, including homosexuality, was evident; ideas which would later inform the philosophy of Hawkspur (Jones and Fees, 2023).

Glaister's experience with the Order contributed to the development of the Grith Fyrd movement, from which Hawkspur emerged. Grith Fyrd (Old English for ‘peace militia’) sought to provide young men of all backgrounds with opportunities for communal living and meaningful work. In 1933 correspondence in the British Medical Journal, Glaister et al. (1933) outlined a vision for a ‘chain of permanent camps’ to support unemployed men, which integrated other men from privileged backgrounds in a community analogous to college. The camps would emphasise cooperation, self-governance, and emotional well-being, in a vision of social reform where individual and collective development were intertwined (Glaister, 1933). For context, by 1937, government-supported camps had hosted around 200,000 men, explicitly aiming to enhance employability (Field, 2012).

Grith Fyrd's more radical elements were shaped by figures like John Macmurray, who achieved the status of a public philosopher in the 1930s (Costello, 2002; Hunt, 2001). A member of the Society of Friends, Macmurray's philosophy, shaped by WWI experiences, critiqued Western notions of rationality, arguing that emotions and actions were as vital as cognition in rational judgement. Claims to truth, he argued, could only ever be made through practical relationships to the external world, and such relationships inevitably involved actions and feelings rather than reflection (Macmurray, 1962[1935]). More radical was his questioning the value of considering human beings solely in terms of the individual. Here, Macmurray went further than Trotter. By stressing the immanence of the social nature of the human mind, he rendered Trotter's appeal to a social or gregarious instinct, as an explanation of human sociability, superfluous. Whilst clearly in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition, he referred directly to relatively few writers, but did reference Karl Marx and the psychoanalyst Ian Suttie. Whilst the reference to Marx reflected something of the political ferment of the time, the use of Suttie pointed towards something more remarkable: dialogue with a form of psychoanalysis and object relations thinking where quite radical perspectives emerged about the indivisibility of the individual and the social world.

Suttie worked as a psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic from 1928. He had become friendly with Ferenczi (Gosling, 2020), and he had also moved away from Freudian orthodoxy in arguing that the mental capacity of human beings had freed them from much biological determinism, and that the psychological and the sociological realms were entwined. Indeed, Suttie (1922) had written a critical review of Trotter's ‘Herd Instinct’, taking issue with the use of ‘instinct’ as implying a too superficial relationship between mind and society. He noted, in what was to become his classic text, The Origins of Love and Hate, that ‘psychologists are prone to describe mind as if it were an independent, self-contained but standardised entity, a number of which, grouped together in some mysterious way, constitutes a Society’ (Suttie (1960[1935: 12]). This separation of the study of ‘Mind from that of Society’ was, according to Suttie, ‘arbitrary’ (ibid.: 12–13) since ‘the mind’ was ‘social in origin and content’, and therefore ‘individuality’ was ‘largely an illusion due to the complex interplay of cultural influences’, as the mind was ‘selected, moulded and developed to cultural or traditional pattern, not constrained or subordinated thereto by a regulating motive’ (Suttie, 1922: 251).

Macmurray carried this theorisation through into Grith Fyrd. As he explained in a Grith Fyrd pamphlet, the catalyst might have been the problem of unemployment, but this was merely a symptom of a deeper malaise; a ‘sign of a derangement of our system of economic life’ that had to be understood as ‘the product of a general social disease which needs to be diagnosed and cured (Macmurray, 1933: 5)’. He proposed ‘a psychological diagnosis of the crisis in our social life’, believing that the economic system itself was ‘one of the results, of a derangement in our inner life’ (ibid.: 6). He argued that the chief cause of this derangement was the distance that modern, urban life had put between individual development and natural engagement with the environment. Such barriers between the growing young person and their need to belong to a social group were particularly important in determining ‘an individualism which is not rooted in and controlled by a true sense and experience of community’ (ibid.: 7). So, to Macmurray, whilst there were clear benefits in removing people from a ‘ruined industrial life’ and liberating them from the pressure was to find work where there was none, the main personal gain was that effected through engagement in ‘a communal life’ (ibid.: 9). The experience of personal value was not through instrumental/transactional interactions, principally represented through one's labour, but through meaningful and purposeful relationship in community with others.

Macmurray's prescription for Grith Fyrd offered a ‘psychological diagnosis’ of the social crises, advocating for communal life as a remedy for urban alienation and economic disenfranchisement: meaningful relationships, rather than labour in isolation from mutually engaged relationships, were key to a fulfilling life. Together, the intellectual lineage from Trotter to Glaister, Macmurray, and Suttie shaped the philosophy of Hawkspur, foregrounding active social belonging, progressive education, and psychological well-being as essentials in addressing the social challenges of the day.

It was another key figure in Grith Fyrd, Guy Keeling (e.g. Keeling, 1933), who suggested to Franklin that she might extend the work of the organisation, of which she was a Committee member, into the field of delinquency. This was a move partly born out of creative necessity, both because Grith Fyrd was encountering men with greater personal difficulties than the camps could manage, and because the Government was increasingly funding various other initiatives connected to unemployment, and was less keen to fund Grith Fyrd.

David Wills: Social work and education settlement association

Whilst Glaister brought philosophical and political momentum to the project, the individual who was to run Hawkspur on the ground was David Wills. He brought practical experience of working residentially with disturbed young men, and of community work in areas of industrial decline, work that had its own political edge.

Wills's social background was rather different from that of others on the Q Camp Committee. He acquired professional standing through practical social work. Born in 1903 in Swansea, he grew up near Sheffield as one of eight children in what he later described as white-collar poverty – despite an income lower than that of a skilled labourer, his father maintained a middle-class façade.⁶ Wills left school at 14, and after several unsatisfying jobs and a spell of unemployment, he was nudged towards evening classes by an employer. These, alongside positive experiences running a Scout group, led to employment leading a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) group in Norwich at around the age of 21. From here, with a view to eventually pursuing formal training in social work, he became a ‘brother’ at Wallingford Farm Training Colony (later known as Turner's Court), a form of residential placement designed to train men viewed as on the edge of society for gainful employment, principally in the colonies (Johns, 2002; Sladen, 2011). His experience in what he came to see as a brutal environment helped him reject the idea that a violent disciplinary regime was the way to improve anyone's life, and he began to formulate a dream of a very different approach based on respect and love.⁷

In a life-changing move, he applied for the social studies (social work) training at Woodbrooke College, a Quaker establishment affiliated to the University of Birmingham, and with considerable financial help, he was admitted.⁸ Whilst there, on his own initiative, he applied to the New York School of Social Work, and was again successful, becoming, in his own words, ‘the first Englishman to train as a psychiatric social worker’.⁹ The training was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, but significantly and despite his interest in psychoanalysis, Wills distanced himself from the psychological orientation of the casework, arguing that social work in the US was ‘entrenched’ in a ‘private-enterprise-socio-psychological-case-work approach’, which meant that any problems occurring within families or associated with individuals were assumed to be symptoms of a treatable pathology rather than a socio-economic problem. If, ‘for example a man was unable to support his family, there must be something wrong with him’, or a family that struggled to pay their rent must be ‘a pathological social unit, in need of diagnostic investigation to find the source of the trouble’. The diagnosis would likely be ‘psychological’ and ‘(w)hen that had been done (on Freudian lines) it should be possible to find the appropriate remedy’. Reflecting back, Wills explained that even though he felt himself to be ‘raw, and inexperienced’ when he arrived in New York, he had worked in a community camp for unemployed miners at Llantwit Major in South Wales and had come across ‘a thousand men of all types and kinds’ who were ‘a good cross-section of normal working class society, whose poverty was obviously and entirely due to a defect in our social and economic structure’:

To suggest that their unemployed state was a symptom of some pathological condition in them or in their families was laughable, and no-one ever seriously suggested such a thing. Here now were these hundreds of Harlem negroes in the same situation and it seemed to me to be a silly waste of time to try to find out what was wrong with them.¹⁰

In 1930, he returned to the UK, where he and his newly-married wife Ruth took up roles as wardens of the Oxford House Educational Settlement Association (ESA) project (Davies and Freeman, 2003), based in Risca, a small town on the eastern edge of the South Wales coalfields – an area being ravaged by high levels of poverty and unemployment, and scarred by bitter industrial disputes which fermented high levels of political activism (Francis, 1998). Wills was directed towards Risca by William Hazelton, secretary of the ESA. Something of its political context is apparent in a manifesto brought together by ESA organiser Alfred Barratt Brown and signed by 150 distinguished leaders in their fields, called ‘Liberty and Democratic Leadership’. It argued for a revitalisation of democracy so that it might survive ‘the new wave of violence in political thought and action’ coming from both the fascist right and the communist left.¹¹ Alfred Barratt Brown was also a Quaker, and had facilitated funding for Wills’s bursary whilst at Woodbrooke before becoming Principal of Ruskin College Oxford.¹² In Risca, David and Ruth wrote a short piece for the local paper describing the aims of Oxford House as ‘[to bring] knowledge and enlightenment on the everyday problems of life to people of all kinds young and old, rich and poor’:

The sort of Education that Oxford House offers is not, generally speaking, the sort that helps a man or woman to get a better job; we are not interested in degrees and diplomas. But it is the sort of Education that helps an individual to take hold of and appreciate the good things that are ready to hand for everyone's enjoyment, but which so many of us have never been taught to recognise. It seeks to liberate man's minds, and set them on the path to intellectual and spiritual freedom.¹³

While they achieved much at Risca between 1931 and 1935, when the ESA began to change and others high in the organisation felt ESA's role should be to help the community feel more content with their lot, rather than to engage with and change their environment, Ruth and David felt the need to move on.¹⁴ Their vision and principles propelled Wills to write to the Quaker periodical, The Friend, proposing a form of community intervention which resonated with Marjorie Franklin's interest in carrying the work of Grith Fyrd into work with delinquency (Faithfull, 1991: 6), and this led to their meeting.¹⁵

ISTD: The multidisciplinary study of delinquency

Hawkspur gained prominence and contemporary influence largely due to its strong ties with the ISTD. The ISTD itself emerged from meetings in 1930 and 1931 that explored Grace Pailthorpe's research on the causes of delinquency (published in 1932). It played a key role in developing Hawkspur by providing resources for evaluation, clinical advice, treatment guidance, and personnel.

Denis Carroll, who co-founded the ISTD with Edward Glover, was also a founding member of the Q Camps Committee. Marjorie Franklin was an early and long-serving ISTD staff member, while Hermann Mannheim, another leading ISTD figure, was actively involved in the Q Camps Committee. Later, Denis Carroll's role as Commanding Officer at Northfield further extended the ISTD's influence there, building on groundwork laid by Bion and John Rickman, both of whom had ISTD experience (Harrison, 2000: 70; Shapira, 2013).

From its inception, the ISTD engaged in clinical work with offenders, establishing the Psychopathic Clinic in 1933. This later evolved into the Portman Clinic, which was assimilated into the newly formed National Health Service in 1948, and eventually merged with the Tavistock to become the Tavistock and Portman Clinic. There were various foci within the ISTD on public opinion, education, student training, and provincial clinical centre organisation, and it was avowedly cross-disciplinary, ‘determined to avoid the pitfall of exclusively psychological or sociological interpretation’ (Glover, 1942: 6). To this end, it attracted a diverse membership, including members of Parliament, magistrates, Home Office officials, lawyers, police, prison staff, probation officers, and social workers, such as Wills (Shapira, 2013: 145). Edward Glover, a driving force behind ISTD's evolution, articulated its primary objective as ‘the provision of facilities for examination and, where possible, treatment of cases of antisocial conduct especially among young people’ (Glover, 1942: 5). ISTD and Q Camps had shared outlooks, comprehension, people, and methodology.

Life at the camp: Theory in practice

After months of preparatory work, the camp at Hawkspur formally began on 9 May 1936 as Ruth and David Wills pitched their tents in fields acquired by the Q Camps Committee near the village of Great Bardfield in Essex, around 45 miles northeast of London. They were joined by a number of helpers, and they took in their first ‘member’ on 20 May. In the early months, they lived in tents, but slowly, through collective effort, they built wooden huts, latrines, drains, bathrooms, and a kitchen hut (Barron, 1966[1943]). This collective effort was very much part of the therapeutic process as outlined in the ‘Memorandum’ initially drafted by Franklin in 1935 (and revised in 1936; see Jones and Fees, 2023).¹⁶ The ‘Memorandum’ was intentionally short on detail, as both Franklin and Wills felt that the camp would develop ‘organically’ from first principles. Such economy belies the depths of experience and thinking (as outlined in this article) that led to and informed its practice (for more detail, see Jones and Fees, 2023). Franklin wrote a summary of what she felt were the key ‘instruments’ that were used at Hawkspur as the experiment ended. These were that it involved: pioneering activities (bringing the members of the camp into contact with nature), work, love, the group approach, an individual approach, and shared responsibility between members and staff and between staff and the wider Committee that supported the work (Jones and Fees, 2023). The principles developed at Hawkspur were codified through the notion of ‘Planned Environment Therapy’, a term coined by Franklin herself (e.g. Franklin, 1945), and which continues to be used (see Kornerup, 2010) and to influence the methods of environmental treatment in the third decade of the 21^st century, for example, in the form of Psychologically Informed Planned Environmental Therapy (Kuester et al., 2022).

Impressions of life at Hawkspur and the way that the theoretical frames structured the everyday activities can be gleaned from a number of sources (Jones and Fees, 2023), which include Wills’s published book on Hawkspur (Wills, 1967), his unpublished work, a collection of papers largely written by the protagonists (Franklin, 1966[1943]), case and administrative files, and some oral histories, particularly of Hawkspur Camp for Boys.^17,18

Hawkspur II (1944–1946), a successor to both Hawkspur and Bicester (see below), was established by the Q Camp Committee as a hostel and school for boys aged 11–15 with social, behavioural, educational, or emotional difficulties. Like Bicester, it served a similar clientele but offered the more congenial setting of a camp, adapting Hawkspur's original principles, such as pioneering and self-government, for younger boys. Denis Carroll was Consultant Psychiatrist, while Arthur Barron, a former Hawkspur volunteer and key Bicester staff member, served as warden alongside his wife Margaret. A 1945 newspaper described its mission as ‘to heal the family and social wounds inflicted by the war on the young. In a word – rehabilitation’. Had its records not been destroyed and follow-up studies published, as they were for the original Hawkspur, Hawkspur II – an early, theoretically developed therapeutic community for children with influence on later practice via figures like Barron and Christopher Beedell – would likely hold a more prominent place in the history of the field.¹⁹

The records and accounts of Hawkspur tell us that the days were structured around a balance of routine and voluntary engagement (Bodsworth, 1966[1943]) that reflected the theoretical underpinnings of its founders. Hawkspur's daily schedule – starting with breakfast duties at 6:30 am, followed by community meetings, work, leisure, and educational activities – offered a framework within which members could find their own means of participating in camp life. The case records strongly suggest that this structure was not enforced in a rigid, authoritarian manner; instead, it was a flexible guide that emphasised voluntary participation and the development of personal responsibility. This approach aligned closely with Wilfred Trotter's and John Macmurray's beliefs in the social nature of the human mind and the importance of fostering an environment where individuals could navigate their own paths to engagement with their community.

A key principle of life at the camp was democratic engagement (Wills, 1967). Tangible here also were Trotter's ideas on the significance of human gregariousness and Macmurray's critique of individualism. Camp life encouraged open discussion and self-governance. Decision-making was largely placed in the hands of the camp members themselves, with community meetings providing a forum for discussion, critique, and collective decision-making. Rather than compliance, the goal was active engagement – whether through participation or even opposition – which was seen as vital for both personal and community development (ibid.).

One illustrative case involved a camp member who was brought before the Camp Council as he was seen as not making sufficient contribution to camp life. His reaction was to organise a revolt and a vote of no confidence in the Council's leadership. Far from disruptive, David Wills, as the camp's Chief, saw the act as a positive step toward engagement with the community: such moments of resistance were viewed as therapeutic opportunities, reinforcing the idea that fostering critical thinking and self-assertion within the social frame were central to the camp's ethos.²⁰

This philosophy extended to the regulation and order of daily life. For example, complaints about nighttime noise were handled through community discussion rather than top-down enforcement of any rules. Wills believed that the camp's self-governing structure would naturally address such issues over time, trusting that collective responsibility would outweigh the need for imposed rules. In this way, the camp mirrored broader democratic ideals, with the goal of encouraging young men to question authority and engage thoughtfully with the social world, not only equipping them to cope better but also helping to create a better world beyond Hawkspur.

The camp's rural setting fostered a connection to nature, echoing Macmurray and Glaister's work with Grith Fyrd. Gardening, building, and outdoor labour were seen not just as practical tasks but as ways to cultivate purpose and connection beyond the self (Barron, 1966[1943]). Initially, such work was unpaid, part of the rejection of transactional models of productivity and meaning. However, as concerns arose about unequal contributions, a wage system was introduced at the members’ request, via the Camp Council to bring structure and motivation. While this shift disappointed Wills, it reflected the tension between the camp's idealism and the realities of democratic engagement with young men (Wills, 1967). Still, the core philosophy remained: work was about fostering belonging and responsibility, not simply completing tasks.

Psychosocial approaches and transference

One of the most obvious features of the camp was that punishment was considered an inappropriate response to rule breaking, and that such ‘rule breaking’ could be understood as a form of communication. As discussed, Hawkspur was not simply an experimental approach to delinquency, but was conceived to meet the needs of a new and emerging ‘client’ group – young adults who struggled to adapt to societal expectations. Many camp members were viewed as young men who exhibited behavioural difficulties when placed in restrictive or unsatisfactory environments. Franklin and Wills recognised that these individuals required a more flexible and supportive intervention, one that acknowledged the complexities of modern life and the psychological toll of social dislocation.

Although the Camp Chief, Wills, expressed scepticism about overly theoretical approaches (Wills, 1967), it was also evident that psychoanalytic ideas – particularly those related to transference – played a significant role in shaping therapeutic interactions (Franklin, 1943: 21; Harrison, 2000: 70). Many of the young men at Hawkspur had experienced disrupted or difficult family relationships, and the camp environment provided opportunities for them to project and work through these unresolved dynamics.

One case highlights Wills’s approach to managing transference relationships. A young man expressed deep admiration and affection for Wills and was distressed when Wills was absent. Rather than dismissing, shaming, or interpreting these feelings, Wills acknowledged them while also setting boundaries, demonstrating a balance between genuine emotional warmth and therapeutic detachment.²¹ Such interactions aligned with Marjorie Franklin's views on the importance of real-world attachments within the therapeutic setting, where transference relationships could not be entirely separated from genuine emotional connection (Franklin, 1945: 6).

Overall, life at Hawkspur Camp was a living experiment in progressive psychosocial intervention. Through its democratic structure, emphasis on voluntary engagement, and nuanced and practical use of theories of transference, the camp sought to create an environment where young men could confront their struggles and develop new ways of relating to others. In doing so, Hawkspur embodied the theoretical insights of thinkers like Trotter, Macmurray, and Franklin, translating their ideas into a practical setting that challenged traditional notions of rehabilitation and social conformity.

War: Scattering and propagation

Whilst Hawkspur grew under the looming shadow of war, the Q Camps Committee accurately predicted that war itself would mean losing the funding available to meet the needs of young men (delinquents, misfits, and outsiders or not), who would be required instead for civilian and military labour in the war effort. In the event, the enormity of WWII broke up the camp and its continuities, strained its networks, and perhaps was conducive to a kind of institutional forgetting of Hawkspur itself. Meanwhile, the personal and professional experiences of those who had been involved remained profoundly important throughout their lives and were taken with them in a kind of diasporic dissemination and propagation of understandings, theories, and practices, which continue to have lasting impacts in diverse fields.

Two particular initiatives, both directly associated with the advent and consequences of war, facilitated this propagation. First, the Q Camp organisation took on the running of a home for young children in Market End House, the former workhouse at Bicester in Oxfordshire, a scheme led initially by David Wills that provided a therapeutic refuge for children who had been evacuated from London but whose behaviour rendered them too challenging to survive billets in ordinary families. In the second initiative, the ideas of the ISTD and Hawkspur were taken into Northfield Military Psychiatric Hospital through Denis Carroll and others, and particularly into the second of the two immensely influential experiments in group and community therapy with men who were suffering from battle trauma or other psychological reactions to military life (Harrison, 2018).²²

Both initiatives brought to prominence people who have become remembered as key therapeutic innovators, among them Donald Winnicott at Market End House, and Wilfred Bion, S. H Foulkes, Tom Main, Harold Bridger, and John Rickman at Northfield.

Market End House

The children who arrived at Market End House (MEH) usually came from disrupted backgrounds and carried with them significant difficulties. MEH was a vast former workhouse built in the 18^th century, described as ‘bleak, and forbidding’ a few years earlier (Gray, 1931: 44), and ‘very difficult and indeed quite unsuitable’ by Wills at the time (Fees, 2010). Amongst the many complexities they had to deal with, relations with the local police, community, and school ranged from uncomfortable to hostile, with little understanding and less appreciation for the Q Camp approach and methods. The combined and compounding impediments, frustrations, and impossibilities embedded in the work ultimately led Wills to resign in June 1940, leaving to begin a new venture in more amenable conditions in Scotland.²³ The immediate trigger was a disagreement about who should pay for windows that the boys had broken. Whilst in part the argument reflected Q's lack of funds, it also revealed the schism between the Q Camp ideals and the environment in which they were trying to implement their methods. To Wills, the breaking of windows was a relatively safe way for the children to communicate their destructiveness and therefore played an important role in the therapeutic process. That this could not be accepted by the authorities, and his feeling that the Q Committee was not robust enough in their support in challenging the authorities’ lack of understanding, precipitated his resignation.

Others, such as Franklin, felt more sanguine, and with considerable help from Donald Winnicott, the initiative survived for almost a year after Wills left before the massed contradictions finally ended it. For Franklin, her recruitment of Donald Winnicott into direct work with Q Camp methods, and into the field of residential therapeutic work with children, was probably the finest legacy of the Bicester initiative. He joined Q in February 1940 as Medical Psychologist and worked closely with Wills for four months as they struggled to organise a therapeutic experience within the old workhouse for the evacuated children. At the end of his life, Winnicott credited the work with Wills, and the experience at Bicester, for transforming his perspective as a therapist in very significant ways (Fees, 1997, 2010). Indeed, in 1970, he devoted what came to be his last public talk before his death to MEH and the influence it and Wills had on him: how he came to ‘grow smaller’, questioning his former zealous belief in the therapeutic power of the 50-min psychoanalytic hour and the impact of his ‘smashing interpretations’ ‘based on deep insight’ on those disturbed children. He realised instead:

that the therapy was being done in the institution, by the walls and the roof, by the glass conservatory which provided a target for bricks, by the absurdly large baths …. [It] was being done by the cook, by the regularity of the arrival of food on the table, by the warm enough and perhaps warmly coloured bedspreads, by the efforts of David [Wills] to maintain order in spite of shortage of staff and a constant sense of the futility of it all, because the word success belonged somewhere else, and not to the task asked of Bicester Poor Law Institution. (Winnicott, 1984b[1970]: 221)

Whilst Winnicott's acknowledgement of the significance of his Q experience highlights its importance for him, that this acknowledgement came so late in his life and after numerous publications in which it was first obscured and then lost altogether (Fees, 2010) undoubtedly contributed to the forgetting of Hawkspur; but it has also served to de-emphasise the significance of the where, when, and why of the shift towards a more environmental perspective in his own theorisation, and hence Q's contribution to it.

Meanwhile, a more overt and direct influence of Q Camp principles came into post-war residential childcare practice through the work of others involved in Q Camps. David Wills took his knowledge and experience from MEH to Barns House Hostel and School in Scotland, and then to Bodenham Manor in England (itself a major seeder of leaders and innovators) (Wills, 1945, 1960). After training under Anna Freud, Arthur Barron, a student volunteer and staff member at Hawkspur I and warden of Hawkspur II, became a significant consultant to a range of children's facilities (Fees, 2003). Chris Beedell, deeply influenced by Barron at Hawkspur II, established the highly regarded and influential Bristol Therapeutic Child Care Course (Beedell, 1995; Clough, 2001). Marjorie Franklin herself created Children's Social Adjustment Ltd, which founded Alresford Place School, and in 1966, the Planned Environment Therapy Trust (PETT), with Barron and Wills, to carry forward the work begun at Hawkspur.

Other developments included New Barns School (1965–1992), named for Wills’s Barns House – a direct development from and beyond his work, in Wills’s own words, who was also the school's first Chair of Governors.²⁴ It was a partnership between the school and PETT which created The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre (1988–2018), the research collections of which have now been subsumed in the Planned Environment Therapy Archive, and contributed significantly to this paper.

The longest continuously running childcare institution in this apostolic tradition is the Mulberry Bush School, founded by Barbara Dockar Drysdale. It began as a wartime nursery in her home near Oxford (Fees, 2020; Fees and Sampson, 2018). Dockar Drysdale was closely connected with Franklin and consulted with ISTD figures including Edward Glover,²⁵ Emanuel Miller, and Augusta Bonnard. She acknowledged both Franklin and Wills in the preface to her collected papers (Dockar Drysdale, 1993: xiv). The most influential consultant was Donald Winnicott, though he only became directly involved in 1955 after being invited by Dockar Drysdale to speak to the Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children, which she had helped to establish with Franklin, Wills, and others (Reeves, 2002). By then, she was already describing children whose disturbed behaviour stemmed from early emotional deprivation, but who could recover with the right care (Dockar Drysdale, 1953b). Her early writings, such as on ‘frozen children’, were shaped by conversations with the Winnicotts (Dockar Drysdale, 1953a). Over time, her focus shifted toward the idea that the therapeutic power lay in the environment of the institution itself rather than in any one individual (Dockar Drysdale, 1963), a view that developed as the school continued to grow (Diamond, 2013).

Northfield

The experiments in community and group therapy that were carried out within military psychiatry at Northfield have been written about relatively extensively (Harrison, 2000, 2018, 2020) and have almost mythical status (Hinshelwood, 2000). The efforts of Bion and Foulkes have been regarded as almost sui generis to the establishment of schools of group psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic and the Institute of Group Analysis, respectively. Among other prominent graduates of Northfield were Harold Bridger (2005), who went on to become a founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and Tom Main, who led the development of the Cassel Hospital into a renowned pioneering therapeutic community.

While the line of influence from Hawkspur to Northfield does not have the richness and definition of that between Hawkspur and post-war childcare work, the line into the Second Experiment is nevertheless clear, through the involvement of ISTD staff such as Emanuel Miller and of Q's Denis Carroll in particular. Indeed, John Mills and Tom Harrison, the leading authority at Northfield, stated categorically that the Second Northfield Experiment, which ran from the spring of 1944 to the autumn of 1945, ‘became possible’ through Carroll's appointment as Commanding Officer in March 1944: He ‘laid the requisite administrative groundwork by bringing the hospital and the rehabilitation wings into a closer relationship’, and it was because of Carroll's changes that Harold Bridger (who had worked briefly with Bion at Northfield, and was in charge of the Training Wing) had ‘educational materials, arts and crafts, recreational activities, and industrial trades’ at his disposal (Mills and Harrison, 2007: 34), making the famous ‘social club’ possible. Describing the origins of the Northfield Experiment and the opportunity he had there to ‘extend a group oriented approach as far as my own territory reached’ in his Introduction to Group-Analytic Psychotherapy (1948: 18), Foulkes said: ‘For this period I owe a debt of gratitude to my then C.O., Lt.-Col. Denis Carroll, for his active interest and support’; and reflecting Carroll's own framing, Franklin commented in a footnote to the 1966 edition of the Q Camp monograph, published in 1943 at Carroll's suggestion, that ‘He told, with humour, how his Colonel showed him the newly published “Q Camp” (first edition of this pamphlet) and advised Major Carroll to use the methods!’ (Franklin, 1966[1943]: 6), a story she repeated later.²⁶

That story and those influences demonstrate that Northfield was swimming in similar intellectual waters to those that had supported the development of Hawkspur. So, whilst psychoanalysis was very much part of their assumptive worlds, there was also keen interest in ideas that radically questioned the distinction between sociology and psychology and supposed that human psychology was really group psychology. Wilfred Bion, chief protagonist in the earlier work at Northfield, had, according to Francesca Bion, been taught and impressed by Trotter as a medical student and he was ‘an important influence on Bion's interest in, and nascent theories about, group behaviour’ (F. Bion, 1995: 3). Like Suttie and Macmurray, Bion rejected the idea of an instinct of gregariousness, as well as the suggestion that group psychology only ‘comes into being’ when people gather in a group, instead favouring the more radical position that:

The individual is, and always has been, a member of a group, even if his membership of it consists of behaving in such a way that reality is given to an idea that he does not belong to a group at all. The individual is a group animal at war, both with the group and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his ‘groupishness’. (W. Bion, 1961: 168)

Whilst Bion did not continue to work with group therapy, he did not turn away from the psychological significance of the group. Indeed, as Schneider (2015) argues, it dominated his subsequent theoretical framework.²⁷ Meanwhile, the idea that forms of group analysis could provide therapeutic experiences for the individual was guided by Foulkes and operationalised by the Institute of Group Analysis (Foulkes, 1948, Foulkes and Anthony, 1957). At the same time, they also adopted, as almost axiomatic, the principle that the individual is first and foremost a social being, such that the notions of the individual and the group should be considered merely useful abstractions that might facilitate further study, with neither separately constitutive of human reality. Whilst Foulkes had also worked at Northfield but had already been working with groups, he was also significantly influenced by his friendship with the sociologist Norbert Elias whose remarkable work located human psychological development within the evolution of social structures (Elias, 1994: 63), thus helping to theorise the rejection of the individual/group dichotomy that became so central to group analytic thought (as spelt out by Dalal, 1998).

THOSE OTHERS: A new client group and a different understanding of ‘mental health’

Whilst Hawkspur had the most obvious influence on therapeutic practice, it was also a significant part of a broader movement that was opening up new psychiatric territory. Marjorie Franklin was particularly interested in ‘the young adult offender of “prison” age, or maladjusted, adventurous personality’, for whom much needed to be done.²⁸ To her, the camp needed to cater to the needs of ‘THOSE OTHERS’ – ‘certain types of young men’ between the ages of 17 and 25 who had ‘hitherto been excluded’, being too old to be dealt with by juvenile courts, and exhibiting behaviour difficulties when placed in restricted or otherwise unsatisfactory surroundings. These included men on probation and other offenders against the law. Franklin's later reflections on the ‘types of cases’ best suited for this ‘planned environment therapy’ suggested they were ‘the more diffuse character disorders, especially when shown in relation to society, as, for example, antisocial behaviour, delinquency, etc’ (Franklin, 1945: 7). With hindsight, we can see Franklin identifying aspects of what would become a new client group that gained significant prominence within psychiatry in the latter half of the 20^th century and into the 21^st. This group has since been categorised under the problematic label of ‘personality disorders’ in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; e.g. American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013), a classification that first appeared in the DSM's inaugural edition in 1952. Over time, the most significant and enduring diagnoses within this category have been antisocial and borderline personality disorders (Jones, 2016, 2023).

Further evidence from assessments conducted within the ISTD and preserved in the Q Camps case files suggests that Hawkspur was already using concepts that were later associated with the diagnoses of ‘personality disorder’. One of the early arrivals at the camp (002) was assessed at Guy's Hospital London and described as a ‘Psychopathic personality’, with observations noting that he was ‘vague as to his thoughts concerning the morality of the act’.²⁹ The term ‘psychopathic’ in this context might best be understood as a precursor to the broader concept of ‘personality disorder’, as reflected in Henderson's Psychopathic States (1939), a work that carried its own significance. Throughout the Hawkspur case notes, we see the emerging use of terms such as ‘psychopathy’, ‘borderline’, and ‘narcissism’. For example, Case 001 was described as a 22-year-old man, raised by multiple foster parents, with a mother described as a streetwalker, and himself living as a tramp.³⁰ Assessed by Denis Carroll at the ISTD, he was believed to be ‘a borderline schizophrenic’, prompting Carroll to recommend that his persistent demands be met with a balance of attentiveness and discretion:

I think his tendency to decide what is best for him and worry people to do it is characteristic of people in this state, and that in consequence it is wise to humour him by listening seriously to all he suggests, and at the same time to use our own judgement as to what is actually done.³¹

Perhaps even more significantly, the term ‘borderline’ was being picked up by the camp members themselves. This same man later referred to himself as ‘a person who is called a “borderliner” by doctors, and who is made continuously wretched by his ailment’.³² This is particularly striking given the timeline: this (1936) letter predates Adolf Stern's (1938) paper, which is widely regarded as the first formal account of ‘borderline’. This suggests that Stern's theorisation emerged from a milieu in which similar ideas were already circulating – a point that gains further weight considering Stern's known influences, including Ferenczi (see Jones, 2023).

The theoretical and practical frameworks surrounding Hawkspur that were helping to conceptualise this ‘other’ category of mental disorder were also evident through the work of Winnicott. Andre Green (1977: 24) described Winnicott as ‘the analyst of the borderline’ at a conference (Hartocollis, 1977) convened to facilitate the controversial inclusion of ‘borderline personality disorder’ in the DSM-III (APA, 1980). Green attributed this title to Winnicott because of his emphasis on forms of ‘psychopathology’ that were relational rather than strictly individual, existing in a transitional space between the internal world of the individual and the surrounding social world. Winnicott's exploration of transitional phenomena and space (Winnicott, 1984b[1970]) marked a departure from traditional psychoanalytic perspectives, shifting towards an understanding of mental disturbance as an interplay between the external and internal. The work reviewed in this paper highlights the origins of this shift in Winnicott's outlook and underscores the radical nature of the ideas emerging from Hawkspur.

With hindsight, we can see how specific elements of Winnicott's theoretical framework were shaped by his experiences with Q Camp's methods. His concept of the antisocial tendency as a hopeful signal that a child was seeking a response from their environment (Winnicott, 1984a[1956]) resonates with the MEH experience, where the therapeutic process involved allowing and holding disturbance within the environment. This principle was clearly visible at Hawkspur and remains evident in institutions such as the Mulberry Bush School (Price et al., 2018). However, Winnicott's most significant departure from classical psychoanalysis lay in his radical critique of its traditional techniques. He questioned the effectiveness of the standard 50-min session and the analyst's role as a blank screen, advocating instead for a more active and institutionally embedded form of engagement (Winnicott, 1984b[1970]). This line of thinking blurred the conventional boundaries between mind and social world, a perspective deeply connected to the influences that shaped Hawkspur – from progressive education to the radical psychosocial philosophies of Macmurray, Trotter, and Suttie.

This conceptual and practical innovation also left its mark on social policy in the post-war decades, facilitating the otherwise puzzling inclusion of ‘psychopathy’ in the 1959 Mental Health Act (Department of Health, 1959) as one of four recognised categories of mental disorder. Parliamentary debates referenced the work of David Henderson, with Edith Summerskill MP citing his definition of ‘psychopathy’ and his argument that it was amenable to social treatment (‘Hansard’s House of Commons Debate’, 1957). Henderson's pre-war work referenced Hawkspur and echoed Macmurray in presenting ‘psychopathy’ as a problem of conventional society rather than simply an individual pathology, advocating for the creation of a welfare state as a means of fostering social cohesion (Henderson, 1939: 139–50, 169). His optimism underpinned the legislative recognition of psychopathy and was later reflected in the renaming of the Belmont Industrial Neurosis Unit as the Henderson Hospital, a pioneering therapeutic community that remained operational until its closure in 2008–2010. In tracing these connections, we see how the influence of Hawkspur extended far beyond its immediate practice, shaping both psychiatric thought and broader social policy.

Conclusion

Hawkspur was most overtly an intervention into the criminal justice system, premised on the notion that the territories of mental health and criminal justice overlapped. It offered a form of rehabilitation as an alternative to the punitive models of prison or borstal. It needs to be emphasised that this was not a notion of rehabilitation that focused solely on the transformation of the individual offender or patient. Instead, the model construed the relationships between the individual and the group, and the significance of the actions of individuals in transforming the group, as fundamental to social and psychological functioning. Perhaps it is this radical definition of rehabilitation that has been most obviously forgotten. In other ways, the influence has been notable, although in ways not always well understood.

Hawkspur's links to the ISTD, and to the work of Hermann Mannheim (Mannheim, 1966[1943]) as a member of the Q Camps Committee in his early days and in establishing the academic discipline of criminology at the London School of Economics (LSE) following his flight from Nazi Germany in 1934 (Chorley, 1970), reinforce the significance. At first glance, the work of Hawkspur fits well with the conventional foundation story of British criminology as ‘inspired by Freud rather than Marx’ (Garland, 1997: 44). The presence of psychoanalyst Edward Glover and of the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller alongside Hermann Mannheim on the founding Editorial Board of The British Journal of Delinquency, which produced its first edition in 1950, and later evolved into The British Journal of Criminology, provides prima facie evidence of psychoanalysis's influence. But a historical exploration of the Hawkspur project points us toward a more complex picture. Embedded as it was within the philosophies and practices that surrounded and nurtured the ISTD, Grith Fyrd, and Northfield, its inspirations were much wider and more radical than this. The philosophy that emerged saw the causes of delinquency as not located exclusively within the worlds of psychology (even when understood as a nuanced realm that incorporated an understanding of the unconscious), nor could delinquency be understood simply through sociological inquiry. Instead, there was a belief that in the human realm, in which delinquency occurred, the two were inseparable.

Such thinking helped earn Winnicott the label of ‘the analyst of the borderline’ as he formulated an understanding of the character disorders that existed in a transitional space that was neither solely of the internal nor simply an aspect of the social world. In doing this, Hawkspur was part of a wider project that was staking out a new territory that has come to preoccupy many in the various professions concerned with issues of mental health.

Hawkspur's most obvious and direct impact has been to help instigate therapeutic community practices (Kennard, 2004), and most especially on residential childcare theory and practice as exemplified today by the work of the Mulberry Bush School. The influence of Donald Winnicott on Dockar Drysdale's work there has been generally acknowledged, but the deeper significance of Q Camp thinking to Winnicott has largely been underplayed. Winnicott's experiences at Hawkspur help explain not only the when and why of the shift in his thinking, but also the radical nature of that shift, as he became more sceptical about the sanctity of the intense clinic-bound relationship between therapist and patient, and more interested in the therapeutic importance of the surrounding environment and social milieu.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

David W. Jones

Craig Fees

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the British Academy and Wellcome Trust (grant number SG152275).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

David W. Jones is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at the Open University. His research focuses on the history of psychiatry and diagnosis, especially where mental health meets criminal justice. He has written on ‘moral insanity’ and ‘personality disorder’ diagnoses from critical psychosocial perspectives, and edits the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

Craig Fees served as founding Archivist (1988–2018) for the Planned Environment Therapy Trust. He has held academic positions at the University of Dundee, and as Honorary Research Fellow at Birmingham. He has carried out extensive oral history work and serves as a trustee of the Oral History Society.

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Making space for ‘THOSE OTHERS’: The Q Camps Committee's cross-disciplinary exploration of disturbance and rehabilitation in 1930s Britain

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Hawkspur: Shaping the project

Trotter to Glaister: Instincts and the group

David Wills: Social work and education settlement association

ISTD: The multidisciplinary study of delinquency

Life at the camp: Theory in practice

Psychosocial approaches and transference

War: Scattering and propagation

Market End House

Northfield

THOSE OTHERS: A new client group and a different understanding of ‘mental health’

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Funding

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Notes

Author biographies

References