Psychology--Fiction and Fact

A blog for the psychological aspects of writing fiction

Introduction to Jane Shaw’s Crooked Sixpence, by Ian Evans

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Introduction to Crooked Sixpence[1]

Ian M. Evans[2]

Crooked Sixpence (1958) is the last in a series of six Jane Shaw books featuring Penny Carter and her younger sister Jill, published between 1953 and 1958. All of the titles are a play on the theme of pennies.  The first, Penny Foolish (1953), is a neat corruption of the common expression for misguided thriftiness: “Penny wise, pound foolish”. Twopence Coloured derives from the price tag “penny plain, twopence coloured,” written by Robert Louis Stevenson when referring to the different printed sheets of figures and costumes for Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre Shop. (Jill snippily calls her big sister “Penny-plain”, on occasion.) Threepenny Bit  is the thruppence piece that in fifties Britain was a 12-sided brass coin with Elizabeth II on one side and a Tudor portcullis on the other. Fourpenny Fair refers to the local church fair that is central to the story’s action, but for a while in the 19th century there was a fourpenny piece, the groat, designed to make it easier to pay a cab fare, but much despised by the cabbies, who usually got to keep the change from a sixpence. Fivepenny Mystery—who knows?  It’s a mystery. Crooked Sixpence, of course, comes strictly from the Mother Goose nursery rhyme about the crooked man who “Found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.”

            In Crooked Sixpence, as explained on the inside flap of the dust cover, “Penny’s hobby of coin collecting was largely responsible” for solving two of the mysteries. Coins play a central role in most of the Penny stories. In Threepenny Bit we learn that Penny “becomes a collector” after her “eccentric godfather sent her two old coins and a book about coin collecting.” Actually it was Jane Shaw herself who started me collecting coins early in 1952.  The two coins she gave Penny and me were a George III tuppenny piece, dated 1797, “which weighed about a ton”, and a penny of the same date. My mother found them on one of her antique shop excursions and loved their hefty feel, which reflects her great fondness for chunky objects. I also had some pieces of the Maundy Money that hit Penny on the head in Threepenny Bit—the photograph of these three coins, together with a more modern (1944!) non-crooked sixpence, gives a good indication of the difference between a silver maundy penny of George II and the copper penny and tuppence from 1797 which started Penny’s collection.

            Crooked Sixpence, like two of the other Penny stories, is set in and around the city of Bath, one of my mother’s favourite places. She knew Bath and the Somerset region well, both from her love of Jane Austen novels and from visiting her great friends Jane and Bert Gibson (see pages 18 and 19 of House of the Glimmering Light, GGBP, 2020). In fact to escape the threat to London of the V-1 flying bombs, my mother and sister Jane went to live with the Gibsons, and in June, 10 days after the first attack by the “doodlebugs”, I was born in that fine Roman and Georgian city. She also knew the village of Monkton Combe, three miles south of Bath—which is called Friars Combe in this book. The Gibsons’ sons attended Monkton Combe School; Dr. Bert Gibson was the school doctor. John Mallory, one of the Carter sisters’ best friends, attends Friars Combe School.

Jane Shaw further created a sense of verisimilitude by mixing and matching places and names from her past and current experiences. A good example is the other little village that features in this story as well as in Fourpenny Fair: St. Ursula, along with St. Ursula’s Court, where—spoiler alert—something very interesting is found. Alison Lindsay, in Susan and Friends (Bettany Press, 2002) correctly identifies this as the real life village of St. Catherine, a picturesque village five miles from Bath and one mile from where Somerset, Gloucester, and Wiltshire all meet.  The village is renowned for its 12th century church and 16th century St. Catherine’s Court. The latter is a Tudor manor house, once a priory grange for the monks of Bath Abbey, and more recently owned for a time by the actress Jane Seymour, of James Bond movie fame (Live and Let Die).             

In shifting the hagiography from Catherine to Ursula, Jane Shaw clearly had a personal connection in mind, as noted by my sister Jane. In the fifties, when the book was written, Jane attended Roedean School (SA) in Johannesburg. Two of the school’s houses were St. Ursula’s (bears) and hers, St. Katherine’s (cats). Looking for a convenient disguise name for the real St. Catherine, Ursula was Jane Shaw’s little private joke. She was always blending the fictional with the familiar and the personal in her life, which allowed her to write descriptions in vivid detail. For example, the Evans family dogs in South Africa were an Airedale, Biddy, as in this story, and a Dachshund—not called Candy, but called Mitzi. (Mitzi, however, was the name of Candy’s mother, as recounted in Fourpenny Fair). From our Mitzi, Jane Shaw could generate such passages as: “She came tearing across the grass like a little brown streak of lightning, her pencil tail whirling, her ears streaming in the breeze…she flung herself at them, wriggling in an ecstasy of welcome….”

Jane Shaw’s sense of place in her novels is widely acclaimed. One reason for this is that she drew on her detailed memories of the places she knew well—like the Isle of Arran, Paris, Glasgow, and especially Bath and its surrounds. As Alison Lindsay has written: “Jean’s life can be largely traced through her books, where doctor fathers like her own appear regularly, and where characters visit or inhabit many of the places she knew…..I believe…it was her fondness for what she had known in her own life which led her to describe places so vividly” (Folly, 32, March 2001, p.7). In the short story Crooks Limited  (think “Ltd.”, to catch the pun), at least two of the streets mentioned are minor variations of the names of actual Glasgow streets—Alison Lindsay has traced the routes taken by the girls and how their school uniforms resemble those of The Park School[3]. And as it happened, my mother had also recently made a trip, on her own, to Britain and Europe, from early in April to late June 1955, catching up with friends and relatives. Three of the postcards she sent to me from Bath mentioned looking for old coins in antique shops or the Roman Baths museum. So even after living in South Africa for five years she was still able to capture the feel of Bath and its many wonderful sights—and sugary buns.

Another important skill Jane Shaw possessed for creating realistic and sparkling dialogue was her observant eye and ear for people and their conversations during her travels. She and my father delighted in repeating stories of little moments of human behavior and overheard chats that had amused them—or occasionally appalled them. As I grew old enough to read her stories, often as galley proofs, I was sometimes horrified to discover that friends of mine, or stories from school I had told her, would re-appear in her books, thinly disguised.

I have long believed that Sid, the orphan and important protagonist in Crooked Sixpence, was based on Johnny Orpen, one of my charming schoolfriends at St. John’s Prep School in Johannesburg. Round about 1954, for my birthday party, four or five of my classmates were invited over to our house for the afternoon and my father took us all to the Sterkfontein Caves. This is a vast limestone cave complex about 25 miles northwest of our house, where important scientific discoveries of early hominid remains had been made. It is now a well-developed tourist attraction, but back then it was pretty basic, and I now wonder why my father thought it a good idea for a bunch of 10-years-olds to be roaming around in these slippery caves with torches in hand. What made the trip especially precarious was that Johnny, a skinny, untidy boy with severe squint (but no stutter), whose school tie was always half off, his shirt always untucked, and his school socks around his ankles at all times, was clinically overactive. My parents talked with amazement about Johnny for weeks after this party—he wasn’t bad, he was just more hyper than they were used to. However, as it is Ginger in this novel who is the naughty one, Johnny might well have been the well-deserved inspiration for two characters.

            Another important element to creating a natural and realistic story is that Jane Shaw eagerly collected reports from newspapers and magazines of events that particularly interested her—art theft, smuggling, crooks (only the non-violent types), forgeries, discoveries of long-lost literary manuscripts, and best of all, the unearthing of ancient treasures, such as hoards of coins, Roman villas, terra cotta savings banks (“money pots”), and buried mosaics. She had a whole collection of such newspaper cuttings in a folder. It is thus highly likely that she knew about the Roman villa in the village of Low Ham, 40 miles south of Bath, discovered in 1938 by a farmer while digging a hole to bury a dead sheep. It was excavated by archaeologists in the early fifties, revealing the amazing 14-square-foor mosaic of Dido and Aeneas. Okay, no dolphins, but dolphins were common in other Roman mosaics—there’s one in the Corinium Museum in Cirencester, just 35 miles north of Bath (https://coriniummuseum.org/schools/resources/roman-mosaics/doplphin/ . In Crooked Sixpence there is mention of other fine Roman mosaics found at Silchester (Hampshire) and at the Roman villa in Lullingstone (Kent)—before leaving England she had visited Lullingstone with us kids in tow, but we only remember the silkworms at the castle, not the mosaics. Since then, of course, there have been exciting Roman villa discoveries at places like Chedworth and Boxford, strengthening the credibility of fictional events in Crooked Sixpence.

            In terms of personality, Penny is quieter, less excitable, and more introspective than Jane Shaw’s other well-loved character, the ever exuberant Susan Lyle. Penny is more empathic and perceptive, such as when Penny first sees the carload of “orphans”:

“Their faces were scrubbed to a shining cleanliness; their hair was plastered down with water. None of their clothes quite fitted them – you could see the faint outline of its former owner behind each clean but well-worn and patched garment, Penny thought, and she suddenly found them almost unbearably pathetic.”

Penny’s father, an industrial chemist (like Jane Shaw’s older brother John Patrick), and her mother, a child psychologist, play insignificant roles—a common device in children’s books—affording greater autonomy to the Carter girls. When we first meet Penny at the beginning of the series, playing off the title of Penny Foolish, Penny is seen as lacking self-confidence. In the dust jacket blurb for Penny Foolish, she is described this way:

“Penny is rather helpless, whereas her younger sister, Jill, is tremendously practical, so that the roles of elder and younger sister are usually reversed.”

By Crooked Sixpence, however, Penny is more assured but certainly more imaginative than bossy and sometimes dismissive Jill, whose mockery no longer bothers her. Penny shares a number of pleasures with Jane Shaw—they both love antiques, delight in historical mysteries, savour their food, and have a sweet tooth. In my mother’s first published writing, aged 9 (in the school magazine, The Park School Chronicle, No. 2, June 1920 ) her tale “The Lost Wand” was how a young man slayed a dragon by feeding it a large toffee, which then stuck its great teeth together! And in Crooks Limited, Julie wanted to buy sweets with her bus money. In no obvious or deeper traits, however, is Penny similar to either my mother or my sister, and I think her development over the series was cleverly crafted to allow readers to identify with Penny as a somewhat timid girl who manages dangerous and challenging experiences with growing resilience.

I doubt that my mother ever thought of her characters, which nowadays one might, as “role models”. I see the emphasis as being on creating Penny as a universally likeable and sympathetic character, with a mildly self-deprecating sense of humour, of a kind, as one critic has noted[4], that is gentler and less slapstick than in some of Jane Shaw’s other works. Nevertheless, witty dialogue, madcap plots and the confusion which ensues, all characterize the humour which is Jane Shaw’s forte—she loved the Marx brothers, and Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) was one of her favourite films.

Coin collecting is an ideal hobby to give to Penny, since it requires a fair degree of historical knowledge, appreciation for the feel and touch and mystique of holding an ancient coin, and an eye for what few details can be extracted from the often barely legible and cryptic information embossed on the coin. It is a far more original vehicle for sustaining an early teenage heroine than the more conventional activities such as taking ballet lessons, or owning a pony, or being captain of the school hockey team.

            In this respect, consider some of the details of the Roman coin Penny found, which is actually one I once had in my collection: a bronze assarius or nummus, the smallest unit of currency in the later Roman Empire. On the obverse, Emperor Hadrian’s bearded image appears, wearing a laurel wreath, surrounded by the letters HADRIANVS AVG COS III PP. AVG was an

abbreviation for Augustus, meaning Emperor; COS III was boasting that he had served three consulships; and PP stood for pater patriae, father of his country—not a modest man. On the

reverse is a personification of Africa, an important province in the Empire as it provided Italy with most of its grain, which is why the reclining female figure sits with a basket of wheat staves at her feet. Hadrian had many such coins minted, known as his travel series, to celebrate his various visits to different parts of the Empire; or, as John says so amusingly in Crooked Sixpence: “Hadrian was a great one for touring around the empire, seeing that everything was all right.” Also on the reverse are the letters SC. This stood for “Senatus Consulto”, indicating that the coin’s value had been decreed by the Senate. This became necessary with bronze coins, especially as they began to contain metal of lesser value than the nominal denomination of the coin.

            It may be a bit too far-fetched to think that the basket of wheat gave Jane Shaw the unlikely idea of sending Penny to help with the harvest. It does, however, provide an amusing set-up for a romantic girl who thought the “old ways” were best until discovering that gathering sheafs (stooks) of corn was very hard work, best left to the combine harvester. As a note to non-British readers separated by a common language, the word “corn” in the UK refers to wheat, oats, or barley.

            In his excellent blog Wichwood Village (http://wichwoodvillage.blogspot.com/), Robert Stewart has provided interesting detail regarding the illustrator of Crooked Sixpence, Gilbert Dunlop (1909 -1984). He was one of six children, brought up in the Scottish Lowlands. He showed promising artistic aptitude, and in 1927, aged eighteen, was employed by D.C. Thomson, a newspaper and magazine publisher in Dundee. Although he attended some evening classes at Dundee School of Art, he was largely self-taught. After serving in the RAF during World War II, he concentrated on illustrating children’s books, and worked with several children’s writers, most notably Enid Blyton. My mother was very fond of his work, but not very fond of Enid Blyton. Jane Evans has hanging in her flat the perfectly conceived original painting by Dunlop for the frontispiece of Penny in Paris (in Twopence Coloured), presumably given to my mother by the publisher, Thomas Nelson and Sons. Oddly, however the Nelson company wrote formally to Alison Lindsay in 1994: “We have not been able to find any information about Gilbert Dunlop, the illustrator.” Doubtless it is the long reach and infinite memory of the Internet that now enables us to easily find such information—consider, for example, the pleasing fact that Dunlop’s daughter and granddaughter are both artists—see https://www.alloaadvertiser.com/news/13531508.four-artists-three-generations/.

            The editor at Nelson for the Penny series was Jocelyn T. Oliver. Jane Shaw first met him in the 1930s, when they were both working for William Collins Sons and Co, Ltd. According to her own account, it was he who first encouraged her to publish, and they became close friends. He always addressed her in letters as “Dear Wee Jean”; she always called him “Ollie”. When he moved to Nelson, he shepherded the Penny books with close attention to detail and firm directives. In his first letter to Jane Shaw on receiving the Crooked Sixpence manuscript, he wrote: “I am pleased to see that I am now immortalized as Mr. Parfit.” That curmudgeonly character is described in the book as “a gaunt old man with a close beard and savage eyebrows.”

            Jocelyn Oliver is acclaimed in publishing history for his championing of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, whose The Palm-Wine Drinkard  was the first African novel published in English outside Africa. It was originally submitted to Lutterworth Press but rejected by a senior editor; it was then submitted to Nelson, who also declined to publish it. Tutuola’s agent showed it to Jocelyn Oliver who was then still at Lutterworth. Despite his own company having rejected it, Oliver was highly taken with the “one work of real genius [I have] come across in [my] twenty-five years of publishing.” Accepting that despite its literary merits it would have been “a costly flop” for Luttterworth, Oliver took it upon himself to push the work with Faber and Faber, suggesting they ask T. S. Eliot to read the manuscript. I don’t know what T. S. Eliot thought of it, but this “courageous publisher”, as Oliver called them, agreed, and published the book in 1952, heralding “postcolonial” literature in British publishing.

            Jocelyn Oliver and his wife Nancy were acknowledged in Jane Shaw’s dedication for Highland Holiday. Two books in the Penny series were dedicated to me. In Penny Foolish I share the dedication: “FOR ROSEMARY AND IAN WHO WERE BORN IN BATH”. Rosemary is the daughter of my mother’s great friend and near neighbour in Dulwich Village, Clare Fisher. The two of them would prowl the London antique shops and they were together when they bought the George III coppers for me. In Crooked Sixpence the dedication is to just me, teasingly using just my initials: W. I. M. E. Very nice, thank you Ma, except those aren’t my initials at all—I was christened William (after my paternal grandfather), John, (after my maternal grandfather), and Martin (after an unknown great grandparent’s surname), thus legally I am W. J. M. E. Apparently the intention was to call me Ian, the Scottish equivalent of John, and my parents, and thus everyone else in my life, called me Ian from birth. Sometimes, the school I attended in South Africa, St. John’s, put me down as W. J. M. Evans, but more often would just go with the flow and enter me in the official class list as W. I. M. Evans. Thus my supposed friends, seeing my name was Wymie, added very unfairly and inaccurately the nickname “Slimy”. Prep-school boys can be so juvenile!

            A final word about my mother’s writing. Her style is quite distinctive, with realistic dialogue, quick repartee, not so evil villains,  eccentric but generally well-meaning characters revealing harmless self-deception, like Winnie the Pooh making the best of a bad situation. The girls’ vernacular is very British—lots of “gosh”, “golly”, and “smashing”. But after living in South Africa, and listening to Jane and me and our friends, one can detect a subtle shift to words that might be more Johannesburg than Bath. We used to say “natch” (naturally) for confirmatory agreement, and so do her characters now, and they sometimes “hold thumbs” instead of keeping their fingers crossed. It’s a uniquely South African phrase, originating from Afrikaans!

            One noteworthy feature of her writing is the pure mechanics of it all. When did she have the time? Not long after going to South Africa she started working full-time at The Children’s Bookshop in Johannesburg, continuing to do so for some 20 years. Jane and I don’t remember, as children, paying much attention to the fact that our mother wrote books. We do remember her sitting with a pencil in an armchair in the living room most evenings, writing away in long-hand on ruled “Tudor” brand writing pads, then just bashing out a manuscript on a slim portable typewriter at the dining room table. Yet between 1952 and the publication of Crooked Sixpence in 1958, she had moved her family, furniture, and one dog from London to Johannesburg (alone—my father had gone ahead months earlier), and written all six Penny books. During roughly the same time period she had also written four Susan books, two Thomas books, and five short stories.

Of course, South Africa had no distracting TV at the time, as the Dutch Reformed Church, to which most members of the governing National Party belonged, thought television was the work of the devil (the only thing they may have been right about). But she regularly played golf with an Australian friend, we went on long annual summer holidays to the Natal south coast, extra excursions to the magnificent South African game reserves, and had numerous dinner parties for friends and relatives. Again, you might say that white South Africa had domestic helps, as we indeed did, allowing much leisure time. However I do not remember ever being told that she couldn’t do something with us, or listen to us, or admire some self-assessed accomplishment, because she was “too busy”.

Despite her amazing productivity during those approximately six years, she quite often described herself as lazy, doubtless being slightly self-effacing. Yet in a 1970 interview in the Johannesburg evening newspaper, The Star, the reporter wrote:

Mrs. Evans admits frankly that she is the kind of writer who has to have a deadline hanging over her. ‘If you knew the schemes I devise to avoid getting started,’ she sighed. ‘Like cleaning cupboards, which is always a sign in our home that I should be writing.’

So, having stopped cleaning cupboards, Jane Shaw took up her pencil to take Penny and her coin collection back to Bath and Somerset. And here now is the result.

 

 

 

 

 

Book Cover

 

 

 

 

 

St. Catherine’s Court

George III tuppence and penny, Maundy pence, and modern sixpence

 

 

 

 

Emperor Hadrian and Africa

 

[1] This is the introduction to the facsimile edition published in 2021 by Girls Gone By Publishers, https://www.ggbp.co.uk/

[2] I am the son of Jane Shaw (Jean B. S. Evans). My sister, Margaret Jane Evans, known as Paddy in the family (sometimes Paddy McGinty, thanks to my father’s love of comedic music hall songs), contributed significantly to this essay, and corrected a number of my errors, as a big sister should.

[3] Lindsay, A. J. (2002). Starting from Glasgow: Jane Shaw’s Scotland. In A. J. Lindsay (ed.), Susan and friends: The Jane Shaw companion (Chapter XI, pp. 116-127), London, UK: Bettany Press.

[4] Auchmuty, R. (2002). One of the great 20th century writers for girls. In A. Lindsay (Ed.), Susan and friends: The Jane Shaw companion (pp 1-21). London, UK: Bettany Press.

Turning the Page: from academic scholarship to writing fiction podcast 11/18/21

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What I personally have found most difficult when ‘turning the pages’ from academic writing to fiction writing is transitioning from the expository style to the narrative style.

The specific challenge I’m going to focus on are my attempts to introduce a serious moral or ethical dilemma going well beyond any conflict experienced directly by the characters. While not strictly essential to the twists and turns of plot and character development, I’ve always wanted to suggest deeper social, historical, and political concerns. And I know I’ve failed, because thus far no reader, reviewer, literary agent, editor, critic, or friend has ever said “Gee Ian, what an interesting deep and profound issue you introduced in your novel!” Ok, so now you know how sensitive us late-onset novelists actually are!

I’m going to illustrate all this by summarizing the hoped-for deeper themes within the plots of four of my five novels. I do think it is rather predictable that retired academics assume they can write fiction, just like every celebrity, politician, or faded Hollywood star is convinced they can write a charming children’s book. But I swear I had had the idea for my first novel, Forgive Me My Trespasses, at least 10 years before I retired with time to write it. My idea was simple. I had seen media reports that Bill Clinton, after avoiding impeachment in 1999, was receiving counseling. And Monica Lewinsky was being treated for depression. I’d had 30 years’ experience of doing psychotherapy and I couldn’t stop wondering what it would be like to be the therapist for Bill Clinton, or for Monica Lewinsky? Could one, or even should one, help them cope with the shame and guilt, or with the opprobrium heaped upon them by society? At the time, an important new concept had emerged professionally, the idea of self-compassion—the need for clients to forgive themselves for their transgressions. Can there be any redemption for men of influence and achievement who had become caught up in sexual scandals and accusations of sexual impropriety: Ted Kennedy, Eliot Spitzer, Clarence Thomas, all appear, thinly disguised. Writing today I might have included Al Franken and Andrew Cuomo. The principal character, Professor Dave Gordon, is, of course, an academic clinical psychologist, teaching a graduate university class in psychotherapy. By a plausible set of circumstances he had in the past treated Monica as a client, and he uses this case study to teach about the treatment of guilt and shame, with various disastrous interpersonal consequences for him and the students. Thus the novel, which is essentially a satirical comedy about university life, has this very serious and complex underlying theme which would appear to be highly relevant in the age of the Me Too movement. Yet no reader has ever interpreted the book as relevant to the ethics of responding to and preventing sexual harassment.

Let me try a second example. My next novel, The Eye of Kuruman, is a love story set in Botswana and South Africa—write about what you know, yes? The protagonist is a young public health nurse who’s been sent into remote rural areas by the World Health Organization to improve women’s maternity health services. She’s torn between her love for two very different dynamic men—that is her main conflict in the story. But she is also wrestling with her desire to be accepted by the local people, as was her hero David Livingstone, and to introduce Western medical practices without being patronizing or undermining the authority of the traditional healers in the villages. I used the device of connecting her childhood reading about Dr. David Livingstone, who greatly respected and understood the people of Kuruman a hundred and fifty years earlier. He was a hopeless missionary, he only converted one person the whole time he was in Southern Africa, but he recognized—which I learned from closely reading his diaries–that customary African practices were no less meaningful than his “scientific” approach to medicine. But again, I failed to make that deeper theme recognizable.

Now I’m on this self-pitying roll, let me mention that novel number four, The First Village, is set in Roman Britain in 383 AD.  Everyone who has read it describes it as a sort boys adventure story with Roman army deserters and Celtic warriors and a beautiful princess chasing each other around Wales. But the deeper question I’d hoped to explore was this. In that year, AD 383, after almost 400 hundred years of military occupation, an ambitious general pulled the entire Roman army out of Britain to march on Rome and establish himself as Emperor. Suddenly, a dominant colonial power was gone. What would the locals do, I wondered? There is no written historical record, and so I offered two scenarios— one in which the Christian domina of a Roman villa tries to protect the community by sharing her wealth and encouraging their agricultural self-sufficiency; and the other in which her intellectual son and high ranking military officer attempts to maintain civil order by elevating the local tribal chieftain to a kingship. I thought it presented a rather fascinating socio-political conundrum. Apparently I was alone!

So, now, in Singing Grass, which is a kind of psychological mystery, I again had a clinical psychologist, Richard Young, seeing an unusual and difficult client in therapy. The client’s name is Christopher Carson, and he bears an uncanny resemblance to the historic Christopher “Kit” Carson. Is the modern Christopher Carson experiencing vicarious guilt for the actions of his namesake? The key back story to the plot, therefore, had to be the violence and injustice imposed on the Native American nations during the western expansion. And lots of American readers have told me that they were not aware of many of the truly horrible massacres and acts of betrayal enacted by our national heroes, from George Washington to Kit Carson. But my own more fundamental moral question, and one I’d often puzzled over, was a bit different.

To save me from too much laborious research, I wrote to a number of distinguished academic historians and posed my question: Why did there appear to be no large-scale protests or political opposition to the decimation of the American Indians, such as was the case with the abolitionist movement against slavery? One historian kindly put me onto an excellent book called The White Man’s Indian, which summarizes the complex history of attitudes towards the indigenous people. And the answer, by the way, is essentially that there were no significant voices raised against the genocide. In order to be able to explore that deeper theme, I made Dr. Richard Young an immigrant from New Zealand, which allowed him to ask questions of actual Americans, in addition to being tormented by his weird client’s highly distressing stories of the past.

There are only two passages that addressed this deeper question.  The first one I wrote directly, based on Richard becoming interested in the beautiful pottery of the Indian nations of the American Southwest, after he’d been given one exquisite piece when a graduate student in New York:

That was the beginning of Richard’s fascination–and of his clay pot and bowl collection. Good pieces signed by the artist are quite expensive and he’d had to be selective. Reg gave him helpful suggestions and guided his choices. And then, suddenly, and hurtfully, circumstances had brought him to the Southwest and the heartland of the artistry with which he had become so entranced.

All the roots of his current obsession were now entangled. The beauty of his pots had entwined itself with his growing understanding, as a foreigner, of the tragedy of the native peoples of the Americas. His wife, a creative artist, whose work he loved, had alerted him to the unique talents nurtured by the region and the strikingly different beauty of the indigenous artwork. The intermingled emotions cried out a simple question: How could the national diversities, the social complexities, and the artistic and creative accomplishments of millions of indigenous people have been so easily dismissed as worthless by the first European colonists? People who had complex political structures, like the Iroquois and the Incas, who had thriving communities like Casas Grandes and its closely related Chaco Canyon, and produced wonderful art and pottery and weaving, could be chased away, or massacred, or exterminated. How was that possible?

            Fifty million people at the time of Columbus? Diverse cultures and nations stretching from the Bering Strait to Cape Horn. Dating back six thousand years.   Muttering to himself was becoming a feature of the distress growing within him–triggered by a confusing and toxic client, Christopher bloody Carson.

And a bit later I tried to be more subtle by embedding Richard’s moral outrage within a conversation between him and Sharon. Sharon has been impatient with Richard’s growing obsession with horrific events she’d rather not think about, but then surprises him with a new insight. One evening he promises to pour her an amaretto with double thick cream and a dash of Kahlua if she’ll listen to his latest discovery–that the historical Kit Carson, after driving the Navajo out of their stronghold, Canyon de Chelly, had ordered their three thousand prized peach trees to be cut down.

“You know hon, as his last act, it seems to me, a psychologist always trying to understand human behavior, to be such a hateful, angry, act of wanton nastiness. The only possibly way to understand it is as a severe form of scorched earth policy—”

“Sure. That’s plausible, dear,” Sharon interrupted. “But let me offer something else—isn’t that why you’re talking to me, or are you just thinking out loud to yourself?”

“I’d love any thoughts you might have, truly.”

“Well, did I ever tell you one of my favorite courses at college was a history class on attitudes in America during the colonial era? We read a bunch of accounts from that time period and one of the things I remember the professor talking about—he was way passionate so it, like, stuck—was the early English settlers saw themselves as gentlemen farmers, which they thought created a classless society in which everybody could have a bit of land for themselves. Of course, this kinda ignored the fact other people were already on it.

“So,” Sharon continued, “my prof argued that in order to justify shoving them off the land, they had to depict Native Americans as wanderers, who didn’t really own anything and could just be pushed out of their tribal area because it wasn’t a permanent home. So the colonists had to portray the natives as hunters, not serious farmers, like them. If they were farmers, working the land, then they couldn’t justify displacing them quite so easily.

“Now, if the Navajo had thriving corn and beans and also wonderfully productive ancient orchards, that would challenge the narrative they were hunters who could just piss off and go hunt elsewhere.”

“Jesus,” Richard exclaimed, “ you must have paid a lot more attention to your professors than I ever did. But that’s fascinating. My only thought is they didn’t seem to need any damn  justification for stealing the land.”

“Maybe most didn’t,” Sharon agreed, “ but there were some religious voices seeking to convince themselves what they were doing was OK in the sight of God. That’s why they kept on having to refer to the native people as ‘savages’—we did a couple of classes on that discourse as well. The fact you’re now telling me of the Navajo being good farmers and easily able to feed their people in addition to their great hunting prowess, must have been especially irksome to hostile white people. You’re the psychologist—don’t people particularly hate it when their deepest beliefs and prejudices are being challenged with evidence?”

Richard sat back and stared at his wife in admiration. Artists like her sometimes pretended their skills were in their visual creations and tend to denigrate their verbal and reasoning skills. But he’d come to appreciate through many different avenues, that Sharon was clever and wise and really understood people, without any formal training in psychology—maybe because of that, he thought ruefully.

“You’re amazing,” he said with feeling. “I adore you!”

Sharon smirked. “Can we please go to bed now? I was tired before the Amaretto and now I can barely keep my eyes open.”

Subtle, I was trying to be, but it’s about as subtle as a bowl of porridge. And once again I’ve had no comments from any reader that this socio-historical question is one that was worth exploring or was a plausible contributing factor to Richard’s eventual mental breakdown and hospitalization.

I do have some insight. As a professor you can tell people stuff. As a novelist you can’t be so direct. I still have to find a way of revealing truths about human nature, showing not telling, so that by the end of the story the reader will also have absorbed my attempts to explore deeper moral and ethical dilemmas that interest me. I’ve got to be much more careful never to preach or to try to be directly persuasive or let the characters pontificate. The action elements of the story have to carry any messages beyond the basic plot, and this is something I still have to learn to do. Or no come to think of it, I’m an academic—I can just end each chapter with a list of learning outcomes!

Thank you!

 

Henry Meurig Nicholas Rees (1927-1999): Welshman, Psychiatrist, Thinker, Mentor, Friend— A Tribute and a Reminiscence

By

Henry Meurig Nicholas Rees (1927-1999):
Welshman, Psychiatrist, Thinker, Mentor, Friend—
A Tribute and a Reminiscence

Ian M. Evans , PhD FRSNZ

In the powerful movie Equus (1977), based on Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name, the psychiatrist treating the disturbed teenager is played by Richard Burton. In the movie he is highly introspective and drives a brown Rover. Every time I see the film I’m reminded of Henry Rees, who also was Welsh, drove an identical Rover, and thought deeply about his child patients. Henry loved the puzzle many of the children presented. He once told me that he had originally trained in internal medicine and had been working on treatments for Welsh miners with lung disease. Then a new drug was discovered that essentially cured their illness, rendering his work obsolete. So he thought to himself: What is a medical field where there won’t be any ground-breaking discoveries for a long time? And so he re-trained in child psychiatry!
Henry Rees’s psychiatry training was, I believe, at the Maudsley Hospital (Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College) in London, sometime in the early sixties. There were various brilliant child psychiatrists there at the time, such as Michael Rutter (now Sir Michael) and Lorna Wing, of Asperger syndrome fame. When I met Henry he was the consultant psychiatrist at the Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit, in Sutton, Surrey (South West Metropolitan Region of the NHS). In the UK, consultants typically did “sessions” at various clinical settings, which meant that Henry was only in the Unit one or two days a week. I was there as many days as possible, coming by train from Victoria Station. Sutton was the first stop on the fast train from London to Brighton. Henry arrived by car—the Rover—from his home in Horsham, Sussex, twenty miles to the south. He typically wore a slightly scruffy beige mac, a sportscoat jacket, and wooly-looking ties, smoked a pipe, and had a rosy complexion to his round face and thin nose.
The Children’s Unit had been the brainchild of the hospital Superintendent, Dr. Louis Minski, who had made a name for himself championing the cause of psychiatric patients who were deaf. Recognizing that the challenge of diagnosing and treating deaf patients was further complicated when they were children, he set up a six-bed child unit in 1953. I met Dr. Minski often, as he regularly came down to our meetings to discuss individual cases, along with his Registrar at the time, Dr. Shepperd. He was a down-to-earth, blunt but kindly, old-fashioned doctor, in the image one might expect of a gruff, country physician on a TV drama. He knew from the start that a hospital ward was no place for children. So he moved out of his official Superintendent’s residence on the hospital grounds and turned the house into a short-term residential unit for young children from all over Britain. A couple of years later he persuaded the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust to establish a second facility, and they bought and equipped a large detached, Edwardian family house in the Sutton suburbs, afterwards called the Annexe (Minski & Mary J. Evans, 1961).
Thus, by 1966 the Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit consisted of two family-style homes with about six children in each, staffed by nurses and nursing assistants called housemothers, none wearing uniforms of any kind. The two senior nurses, both young very capable women who shared a flat nearby, were Patricia Evans (no relation) and Rosemary Williamson. In the first house, meals were delivered from the main hospital; in the Annexe there was a full-time cook, who could have come straight from a BBC period drama. There was an austere, well-regarded Educational Psychologist, Dr. Agatha Bowley, who provided the psychometric testing, and a full-time teacher of the deaf, Miss Joan Taylor, who ran the classroom in each unit. There was also a social worker who worked with the parents and families, thereby completing what the great American child psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg once called “the holy trinity”: the medical psychiatrist, the psychologist, and the social worker.
In early autumn 1966, my first year as a doctoral student in psychology at the Maudsley, I was introduced to this rich and complex setting by an experienced Australian clinical psychologist, James Humphery. Some years earlier, Jim had come to London to work on his PhD under Professor Hans J. Eysenck. I had become close friends with another post-graduate student, Rosemery O. Nelson, who was on a one-year visiting Fulbright scholarship from the USA. We were both very keen to gain practical experience in the rapidly advancing field of behavior therapy, and Jim took us out to the Belmont to show us what he had been doing using simple reinforcement procedures with some of the children as part of his doctoral thesis on the outcomes of behavioral treatments. However a problem arose in the presentation of his statistics and he failed to pass the oral exam and returned abruptly to Australia. This left Rosemery and me the inheritors of his program and we gradually adjusted it and made it our own.
Henry was fascinated by the potential benefits of behavior modification. The clinical application of Skinnerian operant conditioning principles represented a new approach in Britain, and both Rosemery and I were well versed in the theory. But it was his broader interest in data and research, and his total commitment to understanding and improving the lives of the young children in the units that allowed me to learn an enormous amount from Henry about every aspect of the mental health of our complex and multiply diagnosed children. Due to an earlier rubella epidemic we had deaf children, as well as children with intellectual disabilities, children with autism, children with developmental aphasia and elective mutism, children with what at the time was referred to as minimal brain damage, and children with emotional disturbance. Most children showed symptoms of more than one such condition. Adding to that complex mix was the fact that a few children came to us from highly deprived family environments: one child’s parents had both been institutionalized with schizophrenia; another child had been tied to a cot all day by his elderly grandmother to “keep him safe” while his parents were away working. Children with severe social withdrawal, and marasmus (failure to thrive), as a result of such extreme physical and emotional deprivation, were the ones who responded most rapidly to the warm, nurturing, family atmosphere of the two houses. Henry often pointed out how different that pattern was from the social “avoidance” of the children with autism, which seemed relatively unresponsive to the positive emotional atmosphere of the two houses..
In the early months Rosemery and I were at the units, Dr. Minski ran the monthly formal case conference discussions. He sat at the head of the table and asked the educational psychologist to present her tests scores. Then he asked the social worker for a summary of the family, and then he wrote up his conclusions and decisions about the child. “Wrote up” is a misnomer. He confidently dictated his clinical report there and then, speaking into a small Dictaphone, while the rest of us sat silently around the table—holy trinity indeed. While I didn’t necessarily disagree with Dr. Minski’s summaries of each case, there was no attempt at a conceptual or psychological analysis. When Henry took over these events, however, his style was completely different. He asked detailed questions, formulated hypotheses, wanted evidence for our assertions, and ended up not so much with a categorical label as a functional description of the child’s needs. For eager younger scholars such as Rosemery and myself interested in behavioral assessment rather than textbook diagnoses (Evans & Nelson, 1974), his approach was the ideal form of good clinical description and analysis. If some degree of certainty around a diagnosis could not be established, it was put on hold until we had more opportunity to observe and to try out little experimental tests to see what the child might do under different circumstances. Henry was in no hurry to plonk down a diagnostic label and he was in no hurry to medicate any of the children unless the nurses reported one of them was physically ill.
On one occasion the staff were concerned that Simon was not eating at mealtimes and efforts to cajole, demand, and threaten him were not working. I suggested a simple operant shaping procedure, starting with a very low demand (“Finish these three peas”), followed by a simple reward (“Good boy! Now you get a scoop of ice-cream”). The criterion behavior was steadily increased, and the reward placed on a partial (intermittent) schedule—always praise but not always a treat afterwards. After some weeks of this program, at one of the group case meetings, Rosemary Williamson, announced with some enthusiasm that “Ian’s plan worked wonders and Simon is now eating normally.” Henry sat up in pretend high dudgeon and said “Nonsense! I solved it. I’ve been giving him a pill that increases appetite!” A classic example of confounded variables in assessing treatment outcomes, and we all laughed and learned together.
Henry fancied himself as an excellent general practitioner. I had a perfectly good GP in Pimlico, central London, where, after a year in London House, I lived in a bed-sit in Warwick Square. To get to see him, however, required a full morning of sitting in the sparse NHS waiting room of his surgery. I preferred to cough and sneeze my way through my train journey and then get wet in the typical rain, walking from Sutton station to the hospital. On arriving as a drowned rat, I would complain to Henry: “I think I’m getting a bit of a sore throat. Maybe I’m coming down with strep or something.”
“Ooh, let’s see boyo. Stick out your tongue and open wide,” Henry would respond.
He’d then dig around in his doctor’s bag for a tongue depressor and a little flashlight he produced from his coat pocket.
“Ah yes, boyo, I see some swell-ing,” he’d say. He’d rustle around in his bag and find a free-sample bottle of pills and carefully read the label:
“Here you go, swallow these. It says take one, but take two, boyo, take two; get it into the blood stream!”
Henry gave Rosemery and me a tremendous degree of free license to design our intervention programs, mostly around the development of spoken language given that a communication deficit was the one common feature of all the children. While there were occasional outbursts of negative tantrums and aggressive behavior, the overall level of challenging behaviors was very low, despite most of the children having one at least comorbid diagnosis of autism. Rosemery and I basically followed Jim Humphery’s program at first, but then added to it by combining our reward and shaping procedures with some ideas from speech therapy (Nelson & Evans, 1968). We were aware of Ivar Lovaas’s work at UCLA because two of his graduate students, Irene Kassorla and Bernie Perloff, had arrived that same year at the Maudsley, with Irene starting a doctorate under Eysenck. But applied behavior analysis was not well known in Britain at the time and we were the only program in the UK applying operant principles with children—the BBC (Midlands) even came to the Unit and made a documentary on what we were doing .
Henry implicitly supported a positive, reward-based approach to behavior modification and so punishment procedures or any other negative interventions simply never arose as a possible intervention strategy. His humanity and caring for the children always took precedence in any treatment decision. He added a strong interest in neurological issues, about which Rosemery and I knew very little. He had simple clinical tricks for establishing cortical dominance, such as handing a child a toy telescope and observing which eye he or she put it up to. And he was an acute observer of what are sometimes called “soft neurological signs,” which helped us to be more observant of the children’s idiosyncrasies. He was fascinated by repetitive motor mannerisms (stereotypies) as well as echolalia, and was the first clinician I had encountered who suggested the core difficulty for autistic children was, in his words, “They have a perceptual problem, a sensory problem; they don’t experience the world the same way we do.” He had a delightful way of confronting the issue of whether autism could be considered a true syndrome in nature: “It’s like the Irishman who is asked about leprechauns. ‘Oh,’ the Irishman would reply, ‘there’s no such thing—they’re about so high’”—holding out his hand to gesture the height of about three feet off the ground!
I think that apart from being a trained physician, Henry’s interest in the children’s neurological problems derived somewhat from his own dysphasia. He would sometime stop in the middle of a conversation, indeed in the middle of a sentence, and pause for quite a long time. Often one could guess what he was about to say, but if you filled it in for him, he found it very disruptive. He explained to me once that in his conscious mind he knew what the next words should be, but he could not express them. He described that while he was in this state of suspended speech, he felt a strong, palpable sensation in his stomach or diaphragm. He did not know why, and he never said anything more to explain his condition, other than openly acknowledging it.
Henry and the staff of the units gave Rosemery and myself an amazing amount of freedom—I shudder when thinking about it. Jim Humphery had set up a little lab in one of the hospital buildings and we walked the kids up there for structured teaching sessions. Later I actually managed to persuade—who exactly?—to let me have one of the bedrooms in the Annexe which I converted into a one-way observation therapy room and where I built an operant-style console for presenting stimuli on a screen from a projector in an adjacent room (Evans, 1970). Without any formal release, the Children’s Unit allowed Rosemery and me to take one of the kids, the afore-mentioned Simon, for a day’s outing. We picked him up on Saturday morning and took him into central London to see the changing of the Queen’s Life Guard at 11.00 am at Horse Guards Parade. There was quite a throng and I lifted Simon up and put him on my shoulders so he could see what was going on. There was a moment of silence while the guards were being inspected and Simon used the opportunity to shout something out, very loudly. As I told the story later, I claimed that the guards all snapped to attention, but that is entirely apocryphal. I doubt they even twitched slightly, but lots of people turned and looked at Simon, unaware that we had spent countless hours teaching him words and were thrilled that he shouted anything at all. We hurried away and bought him an ice-cream. But what in heaven’s name were they thinking letting two first-year graduate students, neither of us British, just take one of the children for an outing without any formal consent process whatsoever? We managed well, I have to say, but not being parents ourselves the one challenge we didn’t anticipate was having to urgently find him a toilet in the heart of London.
While relishing this high level of trust and confidence in me, the feature of my interactions with Henry that I valued the most was the many hours we spent just talking about the children. Autism research was in its infancy at the time, no pun intended. Henry was well-informed on the epidemiological research being carried out by Michael Rutter and his team at the Maudsley, which reported an incidence of early infantile autism (Kanner syndrome) of approximately 1 in 2,000 children. (Compare that figure to contemporary estimates of the prevalence of ASD!) Henry also knew, and once invited to the Unit, Dr. Mildred Creak, the granddame of child psychiatry in Britain. Her “working party” had recently specified nine points, being the criteria for diagnosing autism—although they unwisely called it “childhood schizophrenia” (Creak, 1964). Apart from years of confusion, this eventually resulted in Rutter pointing out how the syndrome bore no resemblance to schizophrenia. Young children with autism often developed neurological problems, such as seizures, in adolescence; they do not end up looking at all like patients with schizophrenia.
Henry was interested in language, particularly echolalia, and the children’s self-stimulation and fascination with spinning or flickering objects. And so we spent many hours observing the children, trying out little mini-experiments, and observing everything such as gait, balance, self-stimulation, lining up rather than imaginative play with toys, finger dexterity, cerebral dominance, aversion to touch, and gaze avoidance. He inspired me to do a small N-of-1 study of Sharon, who after being seemingly mute for a number of months after arrival was very echolalic once she started using words (described in Evans, 1971). Henry often interspersed our stimulating medical discussion with his theoretical ideas and general wisdom about life.
Sometimes these discussions went on so long into the evening that I would miss the last train back to my digs in London. “No matter,” Henry assured me, “you can just come home with me. We’ll have some dinner, and I’ll find you a toothbrush.” So back to his house we’d drive, in the Rover, a terrifying journey as Henry was still engaged in analyzing some issue about one of the children and paying absolutely no attention to the road. When we got to his house it was all dark. Clearly his wife Nansi , a GP in the local area, had gone to bed and there would be a terse note about his dinner being in the warming oven. Of course there was a phone in the units, but it never seemed to occur to Henry to let her know he was running late. Finding me in the house the next morning didn’t please Nansi, but she took it in her stride. She just made me a piece of toast with Marmite, and Henry took me to Horsham Station for a train to Victoria—via Balham and Clapham Junction. I can still hear the guard, in his strong Indian accent, singing out these stops on the line.
At some point in time of the three or more years I spent connected to the Children’s Unit (eventually being formally appointed and paid as a Staff Psychologist from 1968-9), Henry took up a new consultancy. He moved to Birmingham, a large city in the Midlands about a hundred some miles north-west of London, and was employed as a consultant in child psychiatry at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital . I was not privy to his reasons for the move; however I think he felt there were some interesting possibilities allowing a more traditional mental health and family focus to his work. He spent some time telling me how he worried the new residential estates were socially and emotionally disastrous. These estates were rapidly replacing the traditional English working-class attached houses all in a long row down a street. Row houses in deprived areas were being bulldozed in cities like Birmingham in the name of progress, to make way for high-rise towers of modern flats, on large estates that also had some sterile playgrounds and pubs and other ‘amenities’. Henry believed these arrangements were a major cause of family dysfunction, mental illness, and crime. He argued the traditional row house might have only had a tiny back yard, outdoor privy, and washing line, but ensured excellent opportunities to hang over the fence and talk to your neighbors and for the children to go right out onto the street to play. Mothers were totally isolated in high-rise buildings. They were too fearful to let their children leave the flat unaccompanied—the lifts (elevators) were seen as dangerous and the entire area infested with drug use. No-one, he claimed, went to the modern pubs on the estates as they didn’t have the casual run-down atmosphere of the residents’ former local. I think he saw this whole situation as a challenge for a psychiatrist with a social conscience and an understanding of community mental health.
For me personally, and I think for Rosemery Nelson as well, the freedom and intellectual stimulation of an intensive practice setting with good, caring people, was a marvelous learning experience. After a year, Rosemery returned to the US to begin a clinical doctorate at SUNY-Stony Brook, and she later became a highly regarded professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and one of the most influential cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) scholars of our generation . After I completed my PhD under Professor Hans Eysenck and Dr. Irene Martin, I took up an Assistant Professorship at the University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and immediately pursued clinical work with children with autism. That is another story, but it was made possible because of having Henry Rees as a teacher and role-model.
Sadly, I lost track of Pat Evans and Rosemary Williamson when I moved to the US. But there is no doubt that their skill with children with disabilities, their professional competence, astute clinical judgment, and their warmth and humanity and sense of fun is what made the Children’s Unit a special place. The positive emotional climate of the two houses was a direct result of their commitment to their work.
Of course, in retrospect, there were many deficiencies in the services offered at the Children’s Unit, which had begun primarily as a short-term diagnostic service. Subsequent educational opportunities for the children were limited—indeed an official category of intellectual disability at the time in Britain was Ineducable. The power of positive behavior modification allowed such a categorization to be seen as meaningless once applied behaviour analysis surged across America and eventually into Britain. However, the language programs we implemented paid scant attention to natural language acquisition contingencies and generalization, although we did ask everyone on the staff at the units to rehearse and practice communicating with the words we were teaching. What was perhaps most unusual, given contemporary practices, is that the parents and families of these children (living all over the British Isles) had little or no contact with the program and certainly never gave consent to any of the procedures we implemented—including taking their child to London for the changing of the guard. The Unit was proud of how much like a family the setting was, but actual families were nowhere to be seen, nor given support to continue interventions we had established. I don’t know what Henry thought about such matters. He had, somehow, met all or most of the parents, perhaps when the children were first being officially admitted to the Unit, and he had interesting thumb-nail sketches of some of them. One child’s mother, he told us, had “run away with a pastry cook”; another had schizophrenia, a third had had rubella during pregnancy, one father was an alcoholic. Yet the clinical implications of this anecdotal information were rarely explored, although he always commented on the importance of finding out if child had been “wanted”.
As a person, as a doctor, and a scientifically-minded psychiatrist who valued psychology and had little time for psychoanalysis, however, Henry was a magnificent teacher. I became immensely fond of him, perhaps not appreciating that fact until he was there no more, and we had a rather arrogant new consultant psychiatrist who curtly ordered the junior nurse to make him a cup of tea on his arrival. The contrast with Henry was extreme. And while Henry was not a tortured soul like Dr. Martin Dysert, the psychiatrist in Equus, he shared not just Richard Burton’s Welsh accent and a Rover 2000 P6 car, but also his intelligence, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and clinical skill with young people. Henry Rees was an outstandingly warm, genuine, and talented person, totally devoted to the children in his care, and I feel very privileged to have had him as a supervisor and mentor .

References
Creak M. E. A. (1964). Schizophrenic Syndrome in Childhood: Further Progress Report of a Working Party (April 1961). Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 6, 530–535.

Evans, I. M. (1970). Research [with non-communicating children]. In L. Minski & M. J. Shepperd (Eds.), Non-communicating children. London, UK: Butterworths.

Evans, I. M. (1970). A modular teaching unit for research and therapy with children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 11, 63-67.

Evans, I. M. (1971). Theoretical and experimental aspects of the behaviour modification approach to autistic children. In M. Rutter (Ed.), Infantile autism: Concepts, characteristics, and treatment. London, UK: Churchill.

Evans, I. M., & Nelson, R. O. (1974). A curriculum for the teaching of behavior assessment. American Psychologist, 29, 598-606.

Minski, L., & Evans, M. J. (1961). An analysis of 107 non-communicating children. Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 5, 77-97.

Nelson, R. O., & Evans, I. M. (1968). The combination of learning principles and speech therapy techniques in the treatment of non-communicating children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 9, 111-124.

Rees, H. N. M., Minski, L., Humphery, J., Bowley, A. H., & Evans, I. M. (1968). Autism in early childhood—an approach toward a rational investigation and therapeutic care. Unpublished manuscript, Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit.

A few photographs I took during my time at the Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit

Henry Rees–A Tribute final version
Pat Evans, in the Annexe backyard Ian Evans Andrew McC Rosemery Nelson, keeping data

Rosemary Williamson The most junior assistant housemother

The cook Sharon has her fingers pushed into her ears

The Whisky Blog , Part 2

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The Whisky Blog: Part 2 .

Towards the middle of May, 2020, having run out of single malts—you might say the sun had set on them—we were forced to switch to brandy—temporarily, I assure you. The cognac we had on hand, probably bought originally for making brandy butter at Christmas time, was Courvoisier VS, sort of bottom of the range. But we liked it and decided to go a little more upmarket and try a VSOP. So we went to our very excellent wine shop in Kaimuki, Tamura’s, and with some expert advice selected a middling priced Remy Martin 1738. 1738 was the year that King Louis XV gave a reward for excellence to Mr. Remy Martin. It is rated low on fruitiness, high on smoothness, and medium on opulence and length. Sadly, length doesn’t mean how long the bottle will last during the pandemic but refers to the length of time for which the tastes are expressed after a sip. We enjoyed it. We’ll keep drinking it, but in order to maintain our loyalty to the malt, we did get at the same time three new bottles of proper Scotch whisky.
We’ve now tried all three and have some thoughts. The first we tried was new to us: Kilchoman (more or less pronounced kill-hōman, but if you start the very slightest of gags somewhere between the ‘l’ and the ‘h’, you’ve got it nailed). I’d never heard of this distillery which is understandable as it is really a very new small farm on the most westerly coast of Islay. They have two lines, Machir Bay and the one we bought, Sanaig, “named after a weather-beaten headland, north-west of the distillery”. I must say that I think it quite redundant to describe any headland on the west coast of Islay as ‘weather-beaten’, but there it is. The whisky has spent time (but not much, it is quite young) in Oloroso sherry casks, and an even smaller amount of time in bourbon hogsheads. It has a truly lovely Islay smokiness, but if you detect the claimed flavors of “burnt cocoa (I’ve never had burnt cocoa, so I’m not sure what it tastes like) apples, spice, a touch of cinnamon oil and hazelnuts”, you’re a better person than I am, Gunga Din.
The second one we bought was in memory of many a climb on the Isle of Arran to the isolated little loch called Coire Fhionn Lochan. About halfway up on that walk (when you are neither up nor down), if you stop, turn around, and look west you see for the first time on the other side of the Kintyre coast, two small bumps. These are the tops of the two hills on the Isle of Jura, known rather rudely, as “the paps of Jura”! So that’s why we had to buy a bottle of Jura. The only distillery there has been going since 1810. There is also one pub, one road, and 200 residents. Our malt is called Jura Seven Wood. This is because it has been matured in seven different types of oak barrels: ex-bourbon American white oak, Limousin, Troncais, Allier, Vosges, Jupilles, and Bertranges. Except for the first one, these—as everyone knows—are all different oak tree forests in France, in which the nature of the wood contributes different properties to wine. They then cleverly sell their old used barrels to the 200 residents of Jura. According to the tasting notes, you get hints of ginger, coffee, caramelized peach, chewy liquorice, with just a suggestion of sea spray and smoke in the aftertaste.
Thinking it best to leave the western isles, our third choice was a delightful gentler malt we’ve had before back in New Zealand: Dalwhinnie. The name derives from the Gaelic for ‘meeting place’. Thank god they didn’t actually use the Gaelic word itself: dailcoinneeamh. The distillery is in the central Highlands on a windswept Grampian hilltop. It has a heather-honey sweetness.
After I confidently made such pronouncements, Luanna, thinking I was full of b.s., challenged me to a blind taste test: the brandy and the three whiskies laid out in glasses in random order. The benefit for me, even if proved a fraud, was that I got four drams of spirit that night. Much to her surprise I correctly identified all of them. Some help came from the fact that the brandy is a distinct rich dark color and tastes different as well, the Kilchoman has an intense Islay peaty smokiness, the Dalwhinnie is a mild, sweetish, pre-dinner sipping malt, and the in-between one just had to be Jura!
Needless to say such challenges did result in all four bottles being finished rather quickly. And as the COVID19 restrictions were still in place and more extreme measure were being threatened, late in June 2020 we dashed off to Tamura’s for a new supply. To celebrate our anniversary on June 27, and bot being able to go out to eat, we bought an outrageously expensive cognac, Martell XO, in a fancy bottle that must have been half the cost, but as this is a whisky blog, I’ll say no more about it. And happily at that moment our son Ezell had sent us a bottle of Scapa, which I have described before and may well be our very favorite, not just for its romantic Orkney Isle location, but because it is complex without being overpowered by percentage ABV (‘proof’ in America).
So the three new ones are firstly a different bottle of Kilchoman. We thought we’d give this wee distillery a second chance and try their other offering, Machir Bay, named after Islay’s “most spectacular beach”. Let me assure you that a spectacular beach on the north west (Atlantic) coast of Islay is very different from a spectacular beach on Oahu (Sandwich Islands)—like you can actually swim in one of them. Although proud of the fact that they only use barley grown and malted on their farm on Islay, I have to say this is our least favorite single-malt tried thus far. The claimed “citrus sweetness balanced with tropical fruit” is rather overpowered by peat smoke, iodine, and sea-weed laden sea spay. Maybe they have never tasted the tropical fruit on Oahu!
The next try-out was very successful: Mortlach, sometimes known as “the beast of Dufftown”. Dufftown is a burgh in the Moray region, a little to the east of our relatives in Nairn. This makes it a Speyside whisky, but what makes it a beast, I’m not sure. Maybe its effect on those who drink too much of it? I feel that if you say the word “Mortlach” with a pretend Scottish accent, a well rolled ‘R’ and a good throaty sound to the ‘CH”, often enough, it begins to sound like the name of a monster in Lord of the Rings. The distillery is very proud of the fact that the spirit criss-crosses between six different copper stills that have never been replaced or repaired. The final still, Number Six, is the smallest and is known as ‘The Wee Witchie’. I’ll let you decide why it got this name, but it is useful for confusing Luanna when she asks which single malt are we having tonight, I can reply, mysteriously: “Och, ta’nite, it’s the wee witchy!” It’s a very nice whisky, rich and bold.
Our third new bottle was an old friend. It has long been the favorite of another old friend, Dr John Durocher. We always had to keep a bottle in the house on Beartown Road, Port Crane, NY, and again in Hamilton, New Zealand. What I think he liked about it, and certainly what I like about it, is that you have to call it “THE Macallan.” You may not say, ‘I’ll have a Macallan, please’, or ‘forget the wee witchy, I want a Macallan’. No, it is The Macallan; ours is the 12 years old matured in sherry oak casks. It’s a really smooth drinkable whisky and if one is trying to acquire a taste for single malts it would be a good one to move onto after initiation with Dalwhinnie, which you can just glug down. The Macallan is a rich gold color from the Oloroso sherry casks from Jerez, Spain. It is slightly fruity, spicey, and a classic Scotch whisky, and it’s also from Speyside (i.e., classified as a Highland whisky). Highly recommended.
As all three bottles (four including the Scapa) are now very light, and as the coronavirus shows no signs of departing our fair islands any time soon, we are going to have to pray that Governor Ige and Mayor Caldwell will soon declare Tamura’s an ‘essential service’ and allow it to re-open. Otherwise there will be much sadness in One Waterfront Towers, Kaka’ako.
Ian M. Evans
Honolulu, Hawaii, 9/16/2020

The Paps of Jura Machir Bay, Islay (I think the blue sky has been photoshopped)

Scapa, on a typical day Orkney islander, met a Viking back in the day