2020: "Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara", in The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, ed D.T. Cook

Details: Parent Category: Online Papers; Category: Chapters, Papers, Talks and Reports

Craig Fees, 2020: "Dockar-Drysdale, Barbara", in D.T. Cook, ed., The Sage Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, Sage, Vol. 2, pp. 667-669.

[copyright Sage, published with permission]

DOCKAR-DRYSDALE, BARBARA

Barbara Estelle Dockar-Drysdale (born Gordon) [1912-1999] was a British psychotherapist who treated both adults and children, but is best known for her work with children and young people, especially at the Mulberry Bush School which she founded in 1948 with the support of her husband, and led as co-principal until 1964; and the Cotswold Community, a therapeutic community for boys for which she was Consultant Psychotherapist and Therapeutic Advisor for twenty years from 1969. She discovered her calling by accident working with refugees and evacuees during the Second World War, and then actively sought professional training among specialists in children's psychiatry, as well as undergoing a personal analysis. Supported and encouraged by her mentor and friend, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, she transformed her work at the Mulberry Bush and the Cotswold Community into rich and accessible concepts which continue to be influential in understanding and managing the consequences of early traumatic experience in children, and the challenges and stresses this places on institutions and adults who live and work with them. She is particularly identified with the concepts of the "frozen" and "archipelago" child, in whom traumatic interruption of primary experience in early infancy leaves the child with unmet fundamental needs and the basic good enough experience required for integration and the formation and discovery of a secure self. The resulting stresses are virtually intolerable for the child itself and for those around it, and almost irresolvable outside a specialist environment through which the child can be therapeutically "held" and in which appropriate reparative primary experience can be given and received. The Mulberry Bush School which she founded continues as an internationally regarded leader in the residential treatment of children with severe and complex social, emotional and behavioral needs, having added new 52 week a year provision in 2018.

Barbara Estelle Gordon was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 17th, 1912, the youngest of five daughters in a prominent Anglo-Irish Protestant family. Her father, Thomas Eagleson Gordon, was senior surgeon at Dublin's Adelaide Hospital, Professor of Surgery at Trinity College Dublin, and twice elected President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. Barbara ascribed her intellectual formation and her ability to use her mind to her father; although his conservative principles prevented her, as a woman, from studying medicine. Barbara's mother, Ellen Marguerite Gordon (born Blake), came from a deeply rooted Irish family. She appeared in Burke's Landed Gentry of Ireland as a lineal descendant of Richard Caddell (alias Blake), Sheriff of Connaught in 1306, and in The Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval's The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal, as a direct descendant of King Edward III. Her adventurous "free range" childhood on an island in the middle of a lake in rural Connemara created a template for the early regime at the Mulberry Bush, while her lineage gave Barbara a profound sense of foundation.

Barbara grew up in a fashionable part of urban Dublin in an aspirational, loving, and secure family. Her private tutoring as a younger child included Greek, and as a teenager she attended Alexandra College for girls, where she prepared for a university education. The world outside was less secure. Her birth in 1912 coincided with the start of the Irish Revolution, and her childhood included World War I, in which her father served in France as a temporary military surgeon in 1917; the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916; the War of Irish Independence following the war; the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, and the Civil War that followed. In 1929 the family's security was disrupted with the sudden illness and death of her father. Barbara was 16, emotionally devastated, and the family in financial distress. University was out of the question, and to prepare her for a professional life, as an international librarian, she was sent to live and learn German with family friends in Vienna. Her hosts, the Wittgensteins, were among the Austrian aristocracy, lived in a castle, and he was curator of the historical collections of Austria. She returned to Ireland two years later fluent in German, and with lifelong friends. When she came to read Sigmund Freud it was in the original, encouraged by the refugee Austrian psychotherapist Milan Morgenstern, who helped with the Mulberry Bush School accounts.

When Barbara returned to Ireland in 1931 at 18, it was to fall in love almost immediately with a visiting Englishman; become engaged; move with her mother to the English village of Blewbury in Berkshire to be near her future husband, while he established himself sufficiently to marry; and set up her first playgroup-cum-preschool in the village.

The Englishman was Stephen Dockar-Drysdale, son of William Dockar-Drysdale, a successful Berkshire squire, close personal friend of Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald, High Sheriff of Berkshire in 1909, chair of the local magistrate and police courts for over 40 years, and listed in Kelly's Handbook to the Titled, Landed and Official Classes from 1899 until his death in 1952. Stephen was the second youngest in a family of seven children (five survived to adulthood). His mother came from a comfortable and well-educated London family, and maintained a welcoming Victorian household for the many friends and visitors entertained at Wick Hall, the beautiful and rambling family seat near Oxford. His was a secure country childhood, and as a member of a prominent family deeply woven into the fabric of the local farming, business and political community, he and the extended Dockar-Drysdale family offered Barbara an actively and financially supporting environment of dynamic stability and foundation in which to explore her dreams, skills, and ideas.

Stephen completed his education, took on managing farms in the family estate, and married Barbara in 1936. They moved into the estate's Home Farm, and started a family. Sally was born in 1937, William in 1938, Charles in 1943, and Caroline in 1945. The context for Barbara's work and achievements over the next quarter of a century include pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a family within the therapeutic environments she created, for troubled children with whom her own shared their lives.

Barbara started a nursery/pre-school at Home Farm for local children, including those of the masters of nearby Radley College, and locally-stationed military personnel. The onset of war in 1939 brought evacuees and refugees to the area, and three unaccompanied children lived with the family. Barbara hired a qualified teacher, and children's nannies helped, but with growing numbers and more children with deeper needs - local professionals began to recognise Barbara's skills and refer children to her -, the little school outgrew the relatively isolated farm site, and moved to a large private house in the nearby town of Abingdon. A mulberry tree in the garden, around which the children had their morning milk, symbolized Barbara's growing awareness of her skills and direction, and 'The Mulberry Bush' gave a name for it. When Stephen was called into the Army in 1945 the family had to leave Home Farm, and the family and the school moved together into new premises in the village of Radley, into a large Victorian house in which the school became a residential community: Some two dozen people, including mothers with babies, nannies, nursemaids, children and cooks, lived together under Barbara's direction. In the long shadow of the war the country began to rebuild, with new health, social, and education reforms redefining the role of the State in individual and community health and well-being - the National Health Service opened in 1948. Barbara was encouraged by widening circles of professionals to continue her work, and by 1947 was taking formal clinical referrals from local authorities in London. When Stephen demobilized in 1948 they bought a rambling farm in the village of Standlake in Oxfordshire, far from traffic and with fields and trees for the children. This became The Mulberry Bush School, and their new family home. It was the focus of Barbara's work for the next sixteen years, after which, in 1969, following a brief time as Therapeutic Consultant to the Mulberry Bush, she began twenty years as Psychotherapeutic Consultant and Advisor with the Cotswold Community, a former failing and abusive Approved School which began transformation into a therapeutic community for older boys in 1967.

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