“In 1926 [the year Jimmy Savile was born] An appeal to The Commonwealth Fund (New York) by Cyril Burt and Amy Strachey, (born Amy Simpson 1866) ‘Mrs. St Loe Strachey’ for funds to start training psychiatric social workers at the London School of Economics (see below) and support for Child Guidance.” What exactly do economics have to do with psychiatry or child guidance? Three years later, in 1929: “With money from The Commonwealth Fund, a Diploma in Mental Health started at the London School of Economics to train Psychiatric Social Workers. The fund’s Director, Barry Smith, had written in 1928 that ‘the training of psychiatric social workers is an essential and fundamental part of [a] child guidance program.’”
Some corroboration from the US National Library of Medicine:
“When the Commonwealth Fund agreed to finance the establishment of child guidance clinics in Britain, it stressed the need to train social workers in a university setting. Thus in 1929, the London School of Economics established the first course to train social science graduates with some experience of social work as PSWs. In the same year, the Association of Psychiatric Social Work (hereafter APSW) was inaugurated with the dual objectives of promoting mental hygiene, and raising the professional status of psychiatric social work.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 6687/#fn11
The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation that is still around today. There’s no reason to assume any relation to Acland’s Common Wealth, but, then again, no reason not to. It was founded in 1918 by the widow of Stephen Vanderburgh Harkness, the American entrepreneur who was a silent partner with John D. Rockefeller, Sr. in the founding of Standard Oil (Harkness was a director of Standard Oil until his death). Today the Rockefeller Foundation houses all the archives for the Commonwealth fund. From their website: “As an independent, nonpartisan organization, the foundation has aimed to help develop common ground from which policymakers across the political spectrum can lead the nation toward a health care system that assures its residents have long, healthy, and productive lives.” (http://www.commonwealthfund.org/about-u ... on-history, emphasis added)
Cyril Burt was a member of the London School of Differential Psychology, and of the British Eugenics Society, so probably a Fabian. Amy Strachey a.k.a. “Mrs. St Loe” was the wife of John Strachey, a British journalist and father of the other John Strachey already mentioned in this thread, the Labor politician who was at Oxford in 1922, when my grandfather arrived. Strachey joined the Labor Party the following year in 1923. From 1946 to 1950, he was the Minister of Food, which would have given him plenty of reason to have had dealings with my grandfather. While I found no definite links to MI5 or MI6, his name certainly cropped up a lot in related literature, and he was almost certainly one of the circle.
The Mental Health Timeline continues (for 1929) by mentioning a work called Our Baby—For Mothers and Nurses, published in 1936 by John Wright/Simpkin Marshall, which “on page 126 lists Idiocy under Congenital Defects”:
“This is a term for mental weakness which dates from birth. It varies in degree from a mere feebleness of intellect, to a state in which the mind seems wholly absent. Should a child fail to answer to most of the tests of normal progress given on page 88, it must be considered backward, and the child should be taken to a doctor, as systematic training should be begun very early, considerable improvement being then almost always possible.”
It then quotes a “Wood Report on Mental Deficiency published by the Board of Control” from the same year:
“the majority of the feeble-minded are to be found within a relatively small social group, a group which may be described as the subnormal or social problem group, representing approximately 10 per cent of the whole population. Most of the parents in this subnormal group are themselves of poor mental endowment, and would no doubt have been classed, when children, among the dull or retarded. Similarly the dull children of the present generation, who form a large majority amongst children in this subnormal group, are the potential parents of many feeble-minded in the next generation. Therefore, from the standpoint of the prevention of many social evils it is of the utmost importance that the problems of the education and social care of the borderline retarded child should be effectively tackled. . . . Let us assume that we could segregate as a separate community all the families in this country containing mental defectives of the primary amentia type. We should find that we had collected among them a most interesting social group. It would include, as everyone who has extensive practical experience of social service would readily admit, a much larger proportion of insane persons, epileptics, paupers, criminals (especially recidivists), unemployables, habitual slum dwellers, prostitutes, inebriates and other social inefficients than would a group of families not containing mental defectives. The overwhelming majority of the families thus collected will belong to that section of the community which we propose to term the ‘social problem’ or ‘subnormal’ group. This group comprises approximately the lowest 10 per cent in the social scale of most communities.”
(Full report in several parts here: http://www.educationengland.org.uk/docu ... d1929.html)
The Mental Health Timeline then refers to Letter from the April 1929 Journal of the American Medical Association about the establishment of the London Child Guidance Clinic (citing “Bowlby 1936” and “Tavistock 1967” and cites (in 1929) a “Conference on Mental Health convened by the Joint Committee of the National Council for Mental Hygiene and the Tavistock Square Clinic. Held in Westminster.”
The Bowlby referred to is Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. (A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002 ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.) Bowlby worked during World War II in Canonbury in the child psychiatry unit with maladapted and delinquent children, and this led to an interest in the development of children and to his work at the Child Guidance Clinic in London, in Islington. By his own account, he had help getting established from some “academic economist” friends. (See: http://www.beyondthecouch.org/1207/bowlby_int.htm)
As for the Child Guidance Clinic, it was founded by the Jewish Health Organization in 1927 and was the first children’s psychiatric facility in the UK, and allegedly, also Europe. From The Use of Psychoanalytic Concepts in Therapy with Families, by Hilary A. Davies:
The citation about doing the work of civilization is attributed, via a website, to “Lady Lawrence” who was Chairman of the Clinic in 1934 and had written a foreword to a report. The website states its source as The Times and makes a guess as to the identity of the Lady Lawrence in question being Lady Rosamond Lawrence, a British novelist who wrote several popular books before marrying and relocating to India. However, it’s also possible the Lady Lawrence referred to was the British Labor MP Susan Lawrence, who was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in 1929. Lawrence had joined the Fabian Society a few years previously, and was close friends with Sydney and Beatrice Webb.
Returning to the Mental Health Timeline, John Bowlby joined the Tavistock Clinic in 1946 as Deputy Director and set up the Children’s Department to develop clinical services, training and research. In 1948, he obtained a small grant from the Sir Halley Stewart Trust to “empirically study the effects of early separation and deprivation” (emphasis added). For his research, he hired a psychiatric social worker (James Robertson, presumably LSE-trained). The London Child Guidance Clinic eventually became the Child Guidance Training Centre and was housed in the Tavistock Centre from 1967 (the year I was born). In 1985, it merged with the Tavistock Clinic’s Department for Children and Parents and became the Child and Family Department.
I noticed in the Timeline at this point (1986) the mention of “MBE [first appointment to the Order of the British Empire, the one before OBE] in New Year Honours: Miss Eve Saville, General Secretary, Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.” A quick search revealed that Miss Eve Saville was a Fabian. Whether she was related to Jimmy, OBE, I do not know and I doubt anyone else does (not counting those in the know). The names Savile and Saville seem to be more or less interchangeable, and it would be one way for Sir Jimmy to cover his ancestral tracks to remove one of the l’s. Eve is a somewhat mysterious character, considering there is almost nothing about her online and yet there is a Memorial Lecture named after her. She was the author of this obscure tract: A HISTORY OF THE I.S.T.D [Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency]: A STUDY OF CRIME AND DELINQUENCY FROM 1931 TO 1992.
After a period searching through Google Books, I found a most unexpected affiliation between Eve Saville and Victor Neuberg, Crowley’s ill-fated homosexual lover and disciple. In The Magical Dilemma of Victor Neuberg, the author Jean Overton Fuller reveals, through her correspondence with Saville, that Neuberg was one of the founding members of the ISTD!
Full book here.
(FYI: Primrose Hill is next to Hampstead)
And we haven't even got to the Islington sex rings yet.
Jeepers, creepers, Batman. It's gonna be a hell of a Halloween.