Introduction to Gleanings
As the final deadline to vacate the Toddington site on June 30th 2026 approached, with books from the library having gone to all the partnering archives which wished them, MB3 threw open its doors with a "come one, come all: take books" . The ultimate alternative for the remains of the Archive's former Research Library was the skip.
There were too many books for Oxfam and most secondhand book dealers, and even The Book Rescuers was defeated by the logistics.
I visited on the 25th, the last Thursday in June. The main object of my visit was not books - I thought I would be able to return - but to pick up four boxes of archives and a few other things which had been set aside for me as a Depositor, and then to accompany the welcoming and generous venue manager Mike Staines on a tour of the building and grounds to identify and try to suggest where and to whom indoor and outdoor museum objects - not wanted by tradition-bound archives, strangely - might go. The building was filled with packed and labelled boxes, with a magnificent sense of purpose and order. The grasses on the field were high.
As I was leaving, and encouraged by Mike, I quickly picked out about a dozen books from several dozen in a set of short shelves on a wall in the main Hall. There will have been books elsewhere, and it is to my regret that I didn't take time then to see these. A more flexible secondhand book dealer came along not long after, and took away all the books that remained.
It wasn't until I got home that I looked closely at what I had. These "Gleanings" share four books that stood and stand out. Three came from the libraries of three eminent figures in the therapeutic community movement, professional libraries which I had picked up, boxed, and brought to the Archive many years before; each book a classic/basic reading in therapeutic community history, with a story to tell. The fourth was/is part of my personal history in a different way.
Gleaning 1: Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocket, The Peckham Experiment: a study of the living structure of society, George Allen & Unwin, London, Fourth Impression 1944.
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The first time I interviewed Harold Bridger, he said he was looking forward to catching a documentary on The Pioneer Health Centre, a.k.a the Peckham Experiment, on BBC Radio 4 and would need to make sure he left in time to get home to listen. The book had been a significant influence. He was genuinely excited.
The book on its own is a prize, a classic in the therapeutic community world, or should be. To find it on the open shelf of left-behind books, free to take, was like a smile from the universe. To get it home, see his signature, and realise that it came from Harold Bridger's own library - a library I had picked up from him twenty-plus years before...that was an affirmation. To open it and find he had made annotations.... I think he read it before and/or while he was at Northfield, and that the annotations are original source material for what he was seeing, paying attention to, and taking with him into Northfield.
Check out the annotations below. See what you think.
Harold Bridger used pencil in the outside margins to mark certain passages. What he marked, bearing in mind the "social club" and the work he did at Northfield II, is fascinating. He began at Northfield in 1944, the year his copy of The Peckham Experiment was printed.
p. 69
The whole building is in fact characterised by a design which invites social contact, allowing equally for the chance meeting, for formal and festive occasions as well as for quiet familiar grouping. It is a field for acquaintanceship and for the development of friendships, and for the entertainment by the family of visiting friends and relations. In these times of disintegrated social and family life in our villages, towns, and still worse in cities, there is no longer any place like this. Nevertheleess, man has a long history of such spaces that have met the needs of his social life and the tentative adventure of his children as they grew up :- the church, the forum, the market-place, the village green, the courtyard; comfortable protected spaces where every form of fruitful social activity could lodge itself.
p. 121
...those few individuals who do exercise their capacity in co-ordination, the intrepid, are members of families with a marked social integration...
...the effectiveness of the existing methods of education has been observed by us to vary directly with the degree of social integration of the family from which the child comes.
p. 128
...in the subsequent chapters of this book the reader will find a notable absence of deference to the modern clamour for leadership. Our members have already taught us that leaders require no training; they emerge naturally given the right circumstances. In the Centre the visitor is generally very surprised to learn that what he sees before him is spontaneous action and not the result of programme, persuasion or regulation. It is the conjunction of order with spontaneity that faces him which so repeatedly draws from him a question about leadership.
p. 129
Much experience of this sort has taught us that all committees should be ad hoc ; for self-appointed leaders come and go. Hence to stereotype an organisation on the basis of any primary enthusiasm is usually to [the page turns; the pencil line ends; the sentence continues on p. 130:] sterilise the spontaneity and effort of the ordinary person, and often to thrust him back into inactivity.
p. 214
Certain individuals of the group seem to be always on the fringe, others right in the centre, and there is movement between the centre and the periphery. These groups appear as spontaneous and self-originating zones of activity into which individuals can freely pass in response to the degree of attraction for them of the activity carried on there, or can unostentatiously withdraw to merge again with the general body of society, or perhaps temporarily to consort with some adolescent of the opposite sex. The groups are only exclusive in the sense that any individual attempting to enter for other purposes than that of the activity pursued, is immediately ejected. From the biologist's point of view therefore we should perhaps not speak of them as groups of adolescents, but rather as foci of activity, each 'focus' having to some degree a roving capacity. So, for example, we may see a shift from say swimming - which might carry 20 individuals - to an accomplishment like dancing in which only 15 of these same individuals might be involved, and so on. Nevertheless the sociological aspect must not be overlooked, for we find that there is at each focus of activity a certain nucleus of individuals all of whom engage in each pursuit shared by the group. Thus it is no surprise to find that at the very centre of the zone there may be - though it is not always so - a leader. This young man whose versatility in skill focuses the other members' efforts, is often a leader unbeknownst to himself and unacknowledged by those he leads. He holds his position in virtue of the relevance of his skill to that particular situation. His leadership though real is as ephemeral as the group itself, and he as spontaneously emergent in the group as the group is in the society of the Centre.
p. 270
[From the first paragraph in a section called Youth and Leadership]
The two extremes, the neglected and the overlain, are few in number...
[...We know what the world at large is doing to correct these pathological adolescents; it is shouted from the housetops at every Education Conference and at every Youth Committee. First it segregates them, then isolates them from the opposite sex] tends always to isolate them from all the older and younger members of society - and then cries out for "leadership".
p. 272
Indeed, how can there be a scientific study of psychology until an experimental field for the study of the healthy has been established?
