Maurice Bridgeland (1927-2013)

Citation

(2013), "Maurice Bridgeland (1927-2013)", Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Vol. 34 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/TC-10-2013-0031

Maurice Bridgeland (1927-2013)

Article Type: Obituary From: Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Volume 34, Issue 4.

Maurice Bridgeland had many talents, but above all was his great concern for others, which inspired his development as an innovative and effective educational therapist. He was totally unassuming about his unsparing generosity in the service of children and adolescents; for him, simply to do one's best with one's natural abilities was no more than appropriate. He was at heart a serious person, though he was almost always socially charming and full of laughter. He was not disingenuous about the inadequacies of humankind; yet for the many people supported by his concern and strengthened by his encouragement, his was undoubtedly a transforming influence. Maurice regarded everyone as possessing unique qualities – a conviction that underpinned his patience and unfailing commitment to others. As a teacher, his professional objectives were not merely to install knowledge, or to fit into any defined uniformity of being. If he could be said to have had a precise purpose it was to encourage the individual to discover for themselves whatever within them might bring fulfilment. Maurice Bridgeland regarded such an opportunity as a privilege.

Those who knew Maurice might speculate about what inspired his many altruistic qualities; perhaps the most outstanding of which was his intuitive grasp of the essence and process of each person's psychological development. What began as a rare native talent, developed, during his lifetime into a professional skill, supported by his sharp perception of the processes through which our childhood experiences the nurture, or impediment, of the growth of our adult personality. Throughout his adult life he always retained his instinctive concern for those who struggled to relate to others and to achieve their emotional potential. He could understand precisely how they were often their own worst enemies and how, unless they could overcome their personality impairments their future was barren. His hope was that they would in time gain the capacity to become creative and loving adults, having discovered how to re-direct their lives. The daunting problem about such profound change is that no one can achieve it at the behest of others, nor can they do so out of admiration for someone else. Who they might become must be for them to discover themselves. The best help anyone else could offer them would be as a guide whose encouragement enables the growth of insight despite, and perhaps because of, the darkest times. Often the inability to develop more determined progress leaves such a guide with a self-questioning sense of inadequacy. A teacher, as any psychotherapist, must develop the resilience to remain constant, irrespective of apparent resistance to emotional change.

Maurice began his professional task as a teacher. He recognised, of course, that there is a place for the traditional learning of skills such as the three “Rs”. However, many teachers would agree with him that even while teaching the cognitive process of say, a quadratic equation, another underlying process quietly accompanies the ostensible activity. This is similar to the practising of newly encountered skills in early childhood. Practising these skills itself nourishes the capacity to address sequential developmental challenges and with this our increasing self-confidence. Maurice Bridgeland soon realised that without an increasing store of successful past encounters, development, at best, only grinds rather than flows. His approach has often been described as inspiring, but it was more. He recognised that learning and emotional growth are often essential drivers of psychological development.

Yet most children have both beneficial experiences and sometimes impediments to their growth. Of course, they need nurture, but they also need struggle. It is probable that both ingredients contributed to Maurice's own growth. Whatever his own early struggles had been, his initial education had not been straightforward, yet he eventually gained a scholarship to Sevenoaks School and from thence to Cambridge to study History.

At this crossing-point into adulthood, Maurice Bridgeland's life could be said to be going well, but on leaving Cambridge he found himself subjected to the random incoherence of National Service, when he was sent to join a Highland regiment, stationed in the eighteenth-century Fort George, built on a promontory into the icy North Sea. The appalling physical conditions were responsible for a serious bout of tuberculosis. He nearly died, both from the illness and the cure. No young man would welcome such a grim experience – but Maurice converted it into a learning experience. His long recovery time gave him room to develop a serious view of what to do with the life he was lucky enough to possess still. From this point he seemed to have consciously used insight into his own emotional experience to inform his initial professional practice.

Maurice Bridgeland's professional progress was also much influenced by A.S. Neill and Bill Curry of progressive schools such as Summerhill and Dartington, which had begun to challenge the existing disciplines of formal education between the two World Wars. They believed that giving children the opportunity to discover their emotional needs through “play” would motivate a capacity to respond to structured learning without losing their creative capacity. This was a view that seemed to fit with Maurice's sense that educationalists need to ensure the presence of a developmental psychological element within their curricula.

Children whose motivation to explore through “play” has been undermined – and thus, even their capacity to learn – require, even more than most, teachers who understand that they must focus on overcoming pupils’ complex psychological impediments, if they are to become able to learn according to their chronologically appropriate level.

Maurice Bridgeland's first full-time posts in Sussex, at Midhurst Grammar School and then at Ifield Grammar School, clarified for him the dual professional requirements for educationalists who work with problem children. Psychotherapy and pedagogy must form an integrated process of healing and learning. Later, at Lendrick Muir Special School in Scotland, he became even more certain of this and so he began part-time study towards an MEd, which enhanced his practical experience by adding a relevant academic base. Out of Maurice's dissertation eventually came the book for which he is best known – Pioneers of Work with Maladjusted Children.

Maurice Bridgeland's career progressed through a post at Liverpool University to the Headship of Frensham Heights School. He was not entirely happy there with the multiple tasks of leading such an enterprise, which distracted him from the kind of educational process in which he was becoming seen as an innovator. He returned once more to individual children in a child-guidance setting. He also gave many talks to groups of professionals, which were seen as exceptionally illuminating, especially in their interpretation of the imagery in various forms, of those with whom he worked. Their paintings and poems, for example, revealed what was often beyond the youngsters’ capacity to express in words – such as their fear, confusion and the traumatising experiences of their lives thus far. Like Freud's revelations, more than half century earlier, of his clinical work with patients, Bridgeland's work undoubtedly stimulated new professional insight and growth in others, as well as in himself.

Though Maurice Bridgeland was utterly serious about his professional work we should remember that it was often experienced within the cheerful context of bustling groups of young people drawn by his charisma. His room at Midhurst and his tiny house in Crawley were settings for those youngsters to discover among all their adolescent inconsistency and their anxious searching for hopeful futures, perhaps a permanent love of music, or a passion for poetry and drama, or perhaps rugby football. The setting provided a diverse cultural immersion in which the respect given to their ideas and individuality fertilised their self-esteem – a base for positive adulthood.

It is remarkable that Maurice in his mid-20s had already grasped the elements of what made him such an outstanding teacher and therapist. He understood his pupils in terms of their individual childhood roots, the significance of their social contexts for their development and that the best education for them required a synthesis of psychological and pedagogic principles.

At this time, Maurice and Ruth met and married. As their marriage developed they were able to augment their love for each other with their maturing personal qualities. They were each fortunate in this marriage for it was based on their mutual and complementary deeply held attitudes. There was no false sentiment here. They encountered stress as well as joy; and sometimes they struggled, but they respected and nurtured each other too. It was indeed a terrible experience for Maurice, so little time ago, to lose Ruth. He felt life's diminishment keenly.

Maurice had experienced the misfortune of serious illness early in his life and it seems ironic that he should have suffered a degenerating physical condition at its end. He knew from its start, how stark the outcome might be for him, but his ability to maintain his concern for others and indeed, his general enthusiasm for life without complaint or resentment, again illustrated his human spirit. For all his remarkable stature, even Maurice would have found it exceptionally difficult to maintain an appreciation of the absurdity of life, without cynicism and with constant good humour, without the kind and unfailing care of his close family. That's the Bridgelands for you and none of them would regard their solicitous emotional and daily care for Maurice as anything exceptional!

For Maurice Bridgeland's family and friends, his departure, as well as the too recent loss of his beloved Ruth is a great sorrow despite our recognition of death's inevitability. Maurice and Ruth now lie in a green and quiet place. Those who grieve know that the pain of loss will cease eventually. In its place, his family and friends will be left with the recognition of what he has done for so many. His wisdom has encouraged many in the caring professions, who will therefore, in turn, support others yet to come. His was a good life. Those who were fortunate enough to know Maurice can thank him unreservedly for his influence.

June 2013.

Melvyn Rose

 

Classic turns 30

From The Joint Newsletter, 3 November 2001, p. 30.

It's difficult to believe, but Maurice Bridgeland's classic text, Pioneer Work With Maladjusted Children (Staples Press, 1971) turned 30 this year. There are few books which both capture an era and stay alive, and this is one of them.

Bridgeland's career began, in a sense, when he was sent to a special school in Ramsgate at the age of 11. Why was never explained to him, but he escaped when, having previously sat the scholarship exams, he was awarded a place as a day boy at Sevenoaks Public School. At a time of war, fresh from the closed and constricted world of a boarding school run by nuns, he flourished: “it wasn’t that education became child centred, but it stopped being staff centred, because the staff just weren’t there [….]”. He spent his sixth form year in the rabbit shed, reading “hundreds and hundreds of books”. In university-style tutorials he was tested and drawn out: “That was the crucial experience as far as I was concerned, in my own approach to teaching: that people learn not by your telling them things, but by their finding out things”.

During National Service he had a massive haemorrhage, and in hospitals and sanatoria over the next couple of years had “the most formative experience of my life”. Apparently dying of TB – on at least three different occasions he was expected to die – he had the isolation in which he could read, and think, and listen to music. When he finally emerged, it was to go to Cambridge, where he took a degree in history and a diploma in education, and began his career proper: Going first as a housemaster and English teacher to Midhurst Grammar School in Hampshire, where the head master had a special concern for disturbed boys and a deep interest in art; then to a new grammar school, Ifield Grammar School, at Crawley (“another good experience in working with disturbed children, because all the [other] grammar schools that had all these bright Crawley children chucked out the ones they didn’t want […]”); and then as a housemaster and teacher to Lendrick Muir, a school for disturbed children founded by Janet Grieve in Scotland (“Lendrick Muir was incredible […]”). It was there, while waiting later to take up a joint appointment with his wife as houseparents in a proposed new boarding house for girls, that Pioneer Work began. He was accepted on the educational psychology course at St Andrews University, and Pioneer Work began life as his thesis.

Before that, Lendrick Muir sent Bridgeland to a conference of the young Association of Workers for Maladjusted Children (as it then was; now the Association of Workers for Emotionally and Behaviourally Disturbed Children) in Bristol. Otto Shaw, David Wills, A.S. Neill and others were there, “And I thought, you know, ‘These are extraordinary characters’” and after attending a few more meetings “I thought: ‘Somebody's got to write something about these people’”. “So I then sent out questionnaires to everybody I could think of, David Wills, Otto Shaw, Lyward […] [asking them] what they thought maladjustment was, and what their principles of education were, and so on and so forth. And my tutor said, ‘We must soon see what you’re going to do for this thesis, and get it planned.’ And I said, ‘I’ve started,’ and showed him this stuff. He was horrified, because I hadn’t asked anyone's permission to conduct a questionnaire or anything like that, and the scheme of work hadn’t been accepted by the university. But […] they let me go ahead with it”.

He completed Pioneer Work while lecturing in the Special Education Department at Liverpool University – “after having been at Lendrick Muir where I had these 65 h stints and so on, being at university was the nearest thing to paid retirement you could imagine”. It came about specifically when a paper by Bridgeland on teaching English to maladjusted children appeared in Child Education and was picked up by Atticus of the Sunday Times. Atticus wrote a column about Bridgeland's methods, after which he was approached by publishers to write a book. So, with the thesis as its core, the time, and research money from the university, he decided to make it “something like the book that it ought to be”. He built up the sections on Health and Social Services, “and I had time to go round and interview everybody […]” and, significantly, was able to circulate his writings about them to many of the pioneer workers involved, and to incorporate their observations in the finished text.

By the time the book was published, in 1971, Bridgeland had moved on to become the head at Frensham Heights, an established independent co-educational progressive school (“being a headmaster is the worst job in the world. And being a headmaster of a co-educational independent boarding school is the worst of all […]”). He then moved to Portsmouth, again to work with disturbed children and young people.

If you haven’t read Pioneer Work With Maladjusted Children: why not? Thirty years after it was published it remains a standard text, unsuperseded; a labour of love by a practitioner turned academic turned practitioner, in which many of the founders of the therapeutic community movement for children and young people remain alive. It is a classic, a primary source for the field.

Craig Fees