Appendix III/1: Reinden Wood House Therapeutic Community, 1969-1980

https://mulberry-bush.epexio.com/records/REINDEN

From the Catalogue entry (the full entry is at the url above)

Comments

These are digital files scanned in the old Archive and Study Centre from negatives loaned by Damien McLellan in 2012. Their accession number was  2012.142, and the collection name, following the model of the Wellcome Library, was PP/DMC, for Personal Papers/Damien McLellan. They were used on the website for a general celebration of Reinden Wood House Therapeutic Community. For the photograph and collection information see: 

Internet Archive: http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=326&Itemid=406

"PP/DMC: Reinden Wood House photographs
Photographs of Reinden Wood House therapeutic community near Hawkinge in Kent (1969-1980)
Gift of Damien McLellan (acc. 2012.142)"

The provenance of the original negatives was Damien McLellan, and the originals were returned to him. I think he would be the presumptive creator, although this is not knowable from the webpage, and at this stage he would have to be asked. He was in contact with both MB3 and myself in 2022 about the disappearance of the pettrust.org.uk website, and the consequent loss of a point of contact for former children of Reinden Wood House to touch base with their past, and with him. The Archive and Study Centre had commissioned a plaque in 2016 from the same company and based on the pattern of the plaques fabricated for the Therapeutic Living With Other People's Children project, in which the contact details for former children and others were given as pettrust.org.uk, the Planned Environment Therapy Trust home page. There was a picture of the Reinden plaque on the PETT home page, with links to several webpages on the site devoted to and celebrating Reinden Wood House:

Celebrating Reinden Wood House therapeutic community (2016)
Scroll through the presentation below to learn a bit about Reinden Wood House
[the presentation uses the photographs, putting them into context]
https://web.archive.org/web/20161022122638/http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=405&Itemid=409https://web.archive.org/web/20161022122638/http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=405&Itemid=409

Siting and installing the Reinden Wood House plaque, June 3, 2016
https://web.archive.org/web/20170305210935/http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1273:getting-the-plaque-in-place&catid=405&Itemid=409https://web.archive.org/web/20170305210935/http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1273:getting-the-plaque-in-place&catid=405&Itemid=409

Unveiling the Reinden Wood Plaque, June 4, 2016
The plaque, veiled and waiting. Marion Kidd's son, Martin Hughes, speaks of its meaning and importance to a special community.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170305203343/http://pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1271:unveiling-the-plaque-june-4-2016&catid=405&Itemid=409

Reinden Wood House plaque one year on
https://web.archive.org/web/20190616201300/http://www.pettrust.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1395:reinden-wood-house-plaque-one-year-on&catid=60&Itemid=176

The plaque itself was paid for by Damien. Winchcombe Reclamation gave us the old railway sleeper on which to mount it, and Antony Jansen created the extra strong fixing of the plaque to the sleeper. Prof. Michael Gorman of the University of Virginia and I drove it across country in my almost too small car to Hawkinge, along with bags of quick setting cement and digging tools. We dug the hole and installed the plaque in front of the fence behind which Reinden Wood House had stood, with the permission and supervision of the Ministry of Defence, which owns the site. There was an official unveiling the next day by the late Marion Kidd's son Martin, and with a lovely crowd of former Reinden Wood House children, after which they were allowed to roam and remember over the site of the house and its grounds, many picking up bricks and other sacred remnants to take home. We took some back with us to the Archive and Study Centre, which I imagine have gone. I videoed the unveiling, a copy of which should be in the MB3/PET Archive. This is the event described at the end of the presentation I gave at the Archives and Records Association Conference in 2016, "Creating places of belonging", which you can see here. It really was an eye-opening moment.

The twelve photographs listed in the catalogue entry as the Reinden Wood House Therapeutic Community Archive, and on the Internet Archive page linked above, do not represent the complete set of items in the original 2012.142 accession.

The 12 photographs themselves have not been saved by the Internet Archive, but their file names have been. Putting those into sequence, we can see that 03/02, 03/03, 03/09, 03/10, 03/11 and 06/01-04 are not there. I have not included 01/ because, given the naming conventions I tended to use, I am puzzled by the three numbers 008, which suggest not only that 001-007 are missing, but that this part of the accession, 01, had in excess of 99 items, which rings no bells and seems implausible. It seems more likely that I made a mistake in naming the 01/008 image file, or when putting the webpage together - adding an extra 0, which indicates three digits worth of items in the accession. It unfortunately doesn't tell us how many items were in 01/. We would have to learn this from the accession register or other sources.

2012.142/01/008
2012.142/02/01
2012.142/03/01
2012.142/03/04
2012.142/03/05
2012.142/03/06
2012.142/03/07
2012.142/03/08
2012.142/03/12
2012.142/03/13
2012.142/03/14
2012.142/06/05

The pattern of the numbering on the webpage might have been a clue, but without any other context or source of information the cataloguer won't have known the fairly consistent file-naming system used in the Archive for images uploaded to the Internet. Text was lower case (which doesn't apply here). Underscores were used for blank space, and either underscores or dashes were used for full-stops and slanted lines. Conventions have probably moved on, but the idiosyncracies of different browser and operating systems in the earlier days of the Internet in relation to the handling of case, blank spaces, and special characters, guided practice which I, in self-taught fashion, continued. I seem to remember that Linux was particularly finicky.

 Alarm Bells

Where - in what sources - could we expect to find information about the provenance and other details, or at least clues? And have these sources not been used because they no longer existed at the time of cataloguing, because the cataloguer wasn't aware of them, or was it something else?

1. ACCESSION REGISTER

2. CATALOGUES

3. ARCHIVIST'S REPORTS

4. ARCHIVIST'S CORRESPONDENCE

5. THE FILES THEMSELVES IN A DEDICATED FOLDER ON THE DIGITAL STORE

6. THE WEBSITE

7. PETT NEWSLETTERS 

8. ASKING A PERSON WHO WOULD KNOW

Note: The PETT website was taken down by the Mulberry Bush in 2020. The catalogue description was compiled in 2021, and suggests some form of the website was available to the cataloguer then, within the Archive. But the information on provenance which was on the website, as per the Internet Archive save, was not available to the cataloguer, who asserts that there is none there. This is an interesting mystery.

There are sources of information for Reinden Wood with links to PETT webpages in four issues of the PETT eNewsletter: 21 (May 31, 2016); 22 (June 29, 2016); 23 (September 12, 2016); 30 (November 13, 2017). From the latter: "With the inspiration of Damien McLellan, we created and installed a plaque alongside a popular wooded walking trail in Kent in June 2016 to commemorate Reinden Wood House therapeutic community. It was in an area notorious for vandalism. A year later, how has the plaque fared?."

The clear implication is that none of the sources 1-7 above were available, either from having been lost, or preserved, but in a non-searchable format. 

 Damien tells the story of Reinden Wood House in this webpage:

https://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/MemoriesOfReindenWoodHouseTherapeuticCommunity.html

This is the image used on that website.
I think the plaque, and the sleeper, and the setting are stunningly beautiful.
I'm particularly fond of this image, which I presume was taken by Damien, because it shows me in the background, digging the hole the sleeper base will go into.

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