Susan Isaacs E-Book

Philip Graham

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This revised and expanded edition of Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children by Philip Graham, provides a comprehensive biography of a highly influential educationist and psychoanalyst. The book covers Isaacs’ childhood through to the end of her life, making it of great interest to historians of British education and of psychoanalysis as well as to practicing early years teachers and psychoanalysts.


Graham describes the origins of the theories behind Isaacs’ work while also placing her contribution into context with other contemporary educationists. He draws on a range of sources including her own published and unpublished papers, multiple archives and intimate letters. Such wealth of information and anecdotes gives an insight into her childhood, marriage, and career creating a deeper understanding of both Isaacs’ personal life and her achievements.


As only the second biography on Isaacs, this book is a valuable resource that shines a light on the life of a figure who has often been neglected in this field of study. It provides a shift away from the various male-dominated accounts currently prevalent within this area of research. Susan Isaacs is crucial reading to raise our awareness and appreciation of the person behind the work, while also highlighting and celebrating the impact she has made on today’s education and psychoanalytic practice.
 

Leseprobe

SUSAN ISAACS

Susan Isaacs

A Life Freeing the Minds of Children

Second edition

Philip Graham

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2023 Philip Graham

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Philip Graham, Susan Isaacs: A Life Freeing the Minds of Children. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0297

Cover image by Margaret Weir (2018) on Unsplash.

Cover design by Katy Saunders.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Preface ix

Preface to Second Edition xv

Introduction xvii

1. Damaged Roots 1

2. Our Star Student 25

3. An Academic Marriage 43

4. Finding A Place on the Couch 63

5. The Malting House School: A Dream Becomes Reality 93

6. Rise and Fall of The Malting House School 111

7. Resurfacing 139

8. Settled on the Couch 161

9. The Wisdom of Ursula Wise 185

10. Teaching the Teachers 211

11. Psychoanalysis in the 1930s: Building up to War 231

12. Battling for the Minds of Children 259

13. Legacies 287

14. Postscript 313

References 333

Index 347

Acknowledgements

I should first like to thank Barbara Tizard who suggested Susan Isaacs as a subject for a biography.

I should like to thank Jane Ridley, my mentor during the whole of the time I was conducting research and writing this biography.

I should like to thank Karina McIntosh, Susan Isaacs’s niece by marriage, who knew Susan and her husband well during her childhood and adolescence and who shared many of her memories with me over numerous interviews. Bridget Williamson, Karina’s daughter, gave me access to the collection of books owned by the Isaacs and to additional papers and photographs.

I should like to thank Professor Jack Pole, a pupil of the Malting House School in the mid-1920s for granting me several interviews and to Dr. Susannah Elmhirst-Isaacs for sending me her recollections of her time at the school.

I should also like to thank the following who have provided a great deal of assistance in many different ways: Arnon Bentovim, Malcolm Pines, Juliet Hopkins, Robin and Inge Hyman, Jonathan Miller, Lucy Rickman-Baruch, Hannah Steinberg, John Munsey-Turner, David Birchall, Colin Leese, Kenneth Robinson, Liz Roberts, the late Willem van der Eyken, Inge Hyman, Hanna Segal, Yvonne Connelly, Jill Barton, Moira Taylor, Brenda Maddox, Mary-Jane Drummond.

I should particularly like to thank the following who generously gave me large amounts of their time conscientiously reading and making most useful comments on complete, penultimate drafts of the book: Linda Lefevre, Juliet Hopkins, Jane Ridley, Barbara Tizard, Polly Shields and Robin Hyman.

I should like to thank the staff of various Library Archives, but especially Sarah Aitchison at the Institute of Education and Allie Dillon at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

I should like to thank my wife, Nori, for her encouragement and support during the writing of this book.

Finally I should like to thank Nick Midgley and Laura Tisdall for comments on the text of the Second Edition and Alessandra Tosi for her editorial support.

Preface

© 2023 Philip Graham, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297.15

When Susan Isaacs died in October, 1948, the obituaries in the quality press were unanimous not only in her praise but in the top ranking they gave to her importance in the fields of education and psychoanalysis. The London Times (13 October 1948) enthused:

her teaching has probably influenced educational theory and practice in this country more than that of any living person. Her contribution to psychoanalytical theory, especially to the analysis of children, has also been notable.

Shortly afterwards (3 March 1949) The Times published a letter from various prominent individuals, headed by R. A. Butler, a former Conservative Minister of Education and soon to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, announcing the launch of a Susan Isaacs Memorial Fund and asking for contributions.

The leading science journal Nature (4 December 1948) was more precise in its compliments:

Dr. Isaacs’s gifts were based on a combination of intellectual and emotional factors […] her outstanding intellectual characteristic was an extremely rapid grasp of the matter in view and an ability to classify and summarise it, to present it with remarkable clarity and to discuss it from various angles. Her exceptional capacity for instantly translating her thoughts and impressions into verbal expression served as a powerful instrument for all her other gifts.

There were numerous similar eulogies in both the educational and psychoanalytic professional journals. For example, John Rickman (1950), a leading psychoanalyst, wrote a seven-page obituary in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in which he referred to Susan Isaacs as ‘an intellectual delight’ pinpointing her ‘supreme contribution to her times’ in the way she acted as a psychoanalytic bridge between the two professions of medicine and teaching, ‘interpreting the one to the other’.

Nor did Susan Isaacs’s status among informed commentators decline with time. Adrian Wooldridge (1994) reviewing the whole field of psychology in England from 1860 to 1990 refers to her as the most influential English-born child psychologist of her generation. Her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, proclaims her to be ‘the greatest influence on British education in the twentieth century’ (Pines, 2004).

Yet her name, let alone the nature of her contributions to education, psychology and psychoanalysis is so little known that when I have been asked whose biography I am writing the name usually elicits polite disbelief that anyone could write about someone so obscure. Mary Jane Drummond, a leading expert in nursery education, comments after listing her achievements — ‘It is not the least remarkable aspect of Susan Isaacs’s unique contribution to educational progress that it remains so undocumented by other educationalists in this country’ (Drummond, 2000). A few teachers trained in the 1960s recollect having to read her books; to a few psychoanalysts the name produces a flicker of recognition, but no more. There has only been one previous account of her life. In 1969 Dorothy Gardner, her pupil and successor as Head of the Department of Child Development at the Institute of Education, London, published a book entitled ‘Susan Isaacs: the First Biography’ (Gardner, 1969). Clearly Dorothy Gardner adored her teacher and the book is more of a hagiography than a considered appraisal of a woman’s life and work. As well as suffering from its reverential tone, some of the information it carries is inaccurate in important detail and much is misleadingly incomplete. Nearly twenty years later an American educationist, Lydia Smith, wrote an account of Susan Isaacs’s work ‘To Understand and to Help’ (Smith, 1985), but this did not add to the already published biographical material.

When I began this biography, some sixty years after Susan Isaacs’s death, re-consideration of someone so widely and over such a long time period thought to be such a significant figure seemed clearly desirable. Though the concept of child-centred education had been around for many years, it was she, the first Head of the Department of Child Development at the London Institute of Education and the author of key textbooks in teacher training from the 1930s to the 1960s, who forcefully introduced it into mainstream British education. The approach continues to elicit violently conflicting ideas and emotions not only among educationists but among all those who take an informed interest in educational matters — and who does not?

Among those in the child psychoanalytic field and those mental health professionals who mainly look to psychoanalysis for their understanding of child behaviour, Melanie Klein’s influence remains paramount. Yet who realises that Melanie Klein might very well have been extruded from the British Psychoanalytic Society but for the intervention of Susan Isaacs who, during the 1930s and 1940s Klein regarded as her closest friend and associate? Andre Green, a leading French psychoanalyst, has described the record of the so-called Controversial Discussions that decided Klein’s fate as ‘the most important document of the history of psychoanalysis’ (Perelberg, 2006). The discussions held by members of the British Psychoanalytic Society were spread over ten sessions of which the first five were entirely taken up by a key paper on phantasy written by Susan Isaacs and the following three by an article on regression of which she was co-author.

If asked to name the first British pioneer of direct observational studies of children in schools, now common place, no psychologist today would be likely to give the name of Susan Isaacs, yet she it was who, in the 1920s long before ethological observation became a recognised approach to the study of children’s relationships and behaviour, first recorded, minute by minute, the speech and actions of schoolchildren in their natural setting. Who knows that it was she who first formulated serious criticisms of the studies of Jean Piaget, the foremost child psychologist of his time, forcing him to re-consider his approach? It was not until the 1970s, over forty years later that developmental psychologists re-discovered the objections she had been the first to raise.

Not only was her work ground-breaking in the fields of education, psychoanalysis and psychology, but as an ‘agony aunt’, answering readers’ questions in the Nursery World, she had a strong influence on the way middle-class mothers brought up their young children in the pre-Spock era of the 1930s in Britain. In 1937, in the United States, her extremely successful baby book won the Annual Award given by Parents Magazine, the most popular periodical for parents published in the world, for the best book for parents published in the previous year. Finally, she was deeply involved in controversies, no less active today than they were in her time, around the quality of parenting, children’s rights, physical punishment, the care of deprived children, and the capacity of lone parents.

Her historical significance in the fields of education, psychoanalysis, child psychology, child welfare and upbringing can thus hardly be exaggerated. As I made progress on this book I was repeatedly struck by the contemporary importance of an understanding of her ideas. My sense of the relevance of this biography grew rather than diminished as her story unfolded.

There is an important sense in which I might be regarded as doubly disqualified from writing a life of Susan Isaacs, for I am neither an educationist nor a psychoanalyst. I can, in defence, plead a number of compensatory advantages. As an academic child and adolescent psychiatrist, my professional work has brought me into close touch with the fields of both psychoanalysis and education. I have worked, happily I think, with psychoanalytic colleagues from the Kleinian, Freudian and Independent groups. I even once had the chairman’s responsibility for introducing Anna Freud to a vast audience of psychiatrists eager to hear what she had to say. On the educational side, my research has taken me into many mainstream schools as an observer both formally interviewing schoolchildren about their lives and informally listening to teachers in their staff rooms. I have worked with educationists on various committees including one (chaired by Mary Warnock), on children with special educational needs. At one time I served on the Management Committee of the Institute of Education, London, where Susan Isaacs had earlier pioneered the teaching of child development. So my double disqualification is, I hope, tempered by some relevant experience. Further, the fact that I do not, by virtue of my professional work belong to any particular school of thought either in education or in psychoanalysis does, I hope, allow me to take a more dispassionate view of her ideas than might otherwise be the case.

Knowing as little as I did about Susan Isaacs when I began researching for and writing this book it turned out that I had been extremely fortunate in my choice of subject. Not only was it a learning experience in more ways than I care to admit, but I was lucky to discover that there was much original material that had not been available when Dorothy Gardner wrote her biography in the 1960s. Sadly this did not include any previously undiscovered diaries kept by Susan Isaacs herself or any letters written by her. But Nathan Isaacs, her second husband, was a prolific letter writer, many of his letters casting an indirect, though unexpectedly piercing light on his wife’s personality and the life they led together. These letters that I discovered, partly held in recent years at the Archive of the Institute of Education and partly privately owned, have enabled me to make much more sense of the personal reasons why Susan Isaacs embarked on her various crusades. Further, the courage in recent years of the British psychoanalytic establishment in making available for general consumption verbatim accounts of the extremely bitter exchanges between the rival schools of psychoanalysis before and during the Second World War has enabled me to describe the historically significant part Susan Isaacs played at this time. All these advantages were not available to Dorothy Gardner when she wrote the first and only previous biography. They alone amply justify another book about this intriguing woman, the worlds in which she lived and the influence she exercised in so many different spheres of life.

Preface to Second Edition

© 2023 Philip Graham, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297.16

Before agreeing to publish a revised edition of my 2009 biography of Susan Isaacs, Open Books Publishers asked two experts, one in the field of the history of education and the other in the field of the history of psychoanalysis to review the book and make suggestions regarding a revision. The reviewers made a number of most helpful suggestions as to how the book could be brought up to date by considering recent relevant material. In the postscript to this section, I have taken account of these suggestions and incorporated other recent material.

Introduction

© 2023 Philip Graham, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297.17

In psychoanalytic terms, for a boy or young man, the death of his father represents his final victory in the ‘Oedipal’ struggle for the exclusive love of the son’s mother. For a girl or young woman her father’s death represents the loss of her very first sexual love. William Fairhurst, a devout Methodist, and the father of Susan Isaacs, died on 2 May, 1909 and was buried three days later according to the rites of the Christian church. From the considerable amount we know of the family, who was present or absent at the funeral and their very different feelings towards William, the scene before the funeral can be reconstructed. It must have been something like this:

As the family gathered in Bromley Cross, a suburb of Bolton, Lancashire, on the morning of 5 May,1909, in the large, book-lined living room of the family home, Monksfield, it is likely that it was twenty-year-old Alice, the youngest daughter, who was the most obviously distressed. She might well have sat sobbing on one of the large armchairs, both her hands held by her married older sister Bessie, who had come over alone from her own house a few hundred yards away early that morning. The oldest of the brothers and sisters present, Enoch, or Eny as he was known in the family, had come up from London by rail to Bolton in the last hours of William’s life and had taken responsibility for the funeral arrangements. He was outside checking the number of carriages, the drivers and their horses. Annie, William’s second wife, was in the kitchen, where she had been most of the previous day, preparing food for the guests who were to come after the funeral. Meanwhile Susie Fairhurst, later to be better known as Susan Isaacs, twenty three years old and the next youngest sister, sat in her room upstairs, reading a book that she frequently put down to reflect on the past, on her turbulent relationship with her father and on whether his death would mean that there was no longer sufficient money for her to continue her studies at the University of Manchester, where she had spent only part of one academic year

.

Gradually, other relatives would have arrived. Three of William’s brothers, one accompanied by his wife, came from their homes in Ormskirk and from nearby in Bolton. A brother of William’s first wife, Miriam, who had died eighteen years previously, came from Manchester. Assorted cousins arrived from Liverpool and Southport. They chatted quietly, sipping the tea that Annie brought in. Susie came downstairs, dutifully feeling she needed to share in the hospitality, however confused her own feelings might be. The talk would have been about William’s last

illness. He had been ill before with stomach trouble, but had previously always recovered well. In his final short

illness, he had suffered a burst duodenal ulcer that had caused peritonitis. His friend, former neighbour and family doctor, Andrew Cosgrove, had brought in a medical colleague and they had both fought to save his life, but the condition was inevitably fatal. Acutely painful and unpleasant, the

illness had lasted less than a week. They would have talked too about how the news of their father’s death was to be conveyed to the two oldest sons, William and Archie, and to the other sister, Miriam or Mirrie, all of whom were abroad

.

Just before two o’clock Eny came in to usher everyone into the carriages. In front was an open landau carrying the coffin and filled to overflowing with wreaths and other floral tributes. Then came the carriage carrying Annie and her grown-up step-children, followed by further carriages with the rest of the family. The sedate horses, black plumes fixed to the backs of their heads, resplendent on this fine spring afternoon, were led by bearded men in black top coats and black top hats. The procession would have made its way slowly down Grange Road, with open country to the left and large houses, mostly screened by trees, to the right, into Turton Road, built-up on both sides and then on for a further couple of miles to the vast, recently completed

Methodist King’s Hall in Bradshawgate where the service was to be held

.

As the members of the family entered, they must have been surprised by the size of the congregation. They were greeted at the front of the Hall by Herbert Cooper, the Minister who conducted the service. Susie would have sat with her sisters, Alice and Bessie, next to their stepmother, in the front row. As the service unfolded, it must have raised in her feelings of great ambivalence, if not downright hostility and anger. For agnostics or atheists such as Susie a religious funeral service inevitably elicits conflicting emotions, especially when it is a parent who has died. The talk of everlasting life is contrary to everything an agnostic leaning towards atheism believes, yet the temptation to entertain the possibility of life after death is almost irresistible. Whether, as Psalm 130, the hymn that had inspired John Wesley on the afternoon of his conversion, was sung, Susie sang the words ‘I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, And in his word I hope’ or kept her mouth tightly shut, the service must have been difficult for her as religious funerals always are for non-believers

.

Hardly less emotionally difficult for Susie must have been the experience of hearing the Minister, Herbert Cooper lavishing extravagant praise on her father, the man who ten years earlier when she was only fourteen years old, had cut short her education and refused to allow her to proceed with it because she had voiced agnostic views

.

For the rest of the events of that day we can turn with greater certainty to the obituaries in the local papers. In his funeral oration, Cooper was extravagant in his praise. William Fairhurst, journalist, sportsman, but above all Methodist, had been an active member of numerous Methodist chapels, an esteemed editor and sub-editor of local newspapers, as well as prominent in local and national football and other sporting organisations. Represented at the funeral, as well as the publishers of his newspapers, were the Bolton Mission Committee, the King’s Hall Brotherhood, the Egerton Wesleyan Trust, the Burtenshaw Wesleyan Trust, and the Burtenshaw Wesleyan Society. From the sporting world came representatives of Bolton Wanderers Football Club, the Lancashire Football Association and the Bolton and District Cricket Association. In his address, the Minister referred to the dead man as ‘a real Christian gentleman, the true soul of chivalry, quite fearless in advocacy of the right, and singularly unselfish. It would be impossible to associate him with […] anything mean or ungenerous or unworthy of a Christian gentleman. He was broad-minded and large-hearted, and, in his public work, had a high sense of his responsibility, living in his daily work in the fear of God. He was intolerant of all that was wrong and his passion for righteousness never failed […].’

The claim that her father was ‘broad-minded and large-hearted’ must have struck Susie as preposterous, while the frequent references to his Christian beliefs and values can only have confirmed her religious scepticism. After the service closed with the Lord’s Prayer, the bearers of the coffin of panelled oak with silver mountings carried it to the waiting carriage outside the Hall. The vast congregation of several hundreds of people, led by the members of the family, walked behind it to nearby Tonge cemetery. After a short interment service, the coffin was lowered into the ground ‘[…] in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life’, a hope that Susie will not have shared however sure and certain others may have been.

In May, 1909, when her father’s funeral took place, Susie Fairhurst was nearly twenty four years old and could fairly be seen as a New Woman. She would have been regarded with approval by George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and all the luminaries of the new thinking that marked the beginning of the twentieth century. As well as her atheist beliefs, she was socialist in her politics and a member of the Fabian Society. A supporter of the Suffragette movement, her commitment was to a career and not primarily to marriage and motherhood. She was coming to the end of a year’s training to be an infant school teacher at the University of Manchester. She had so impressed her teachers that, even before the academic year had ended, she had been recommended to enter for an Honours Degree course in Philosophy. She was ambitious and had already conceived the idea of a career in a University Department of Education. For her the death of her father meant the personal loss of a parent. It was also a small milestone in the passing of an era.

Though it took place eight years after the death of Queen Victoria, William Fairhurst’s funeral, with its heavy formality, had been a Victorian occasion, marking the end of the life of a locally eminent Victorian. His daughter was part of the early twentieth century movement that rejected Victorian values and beliefs. The Victorian way of life was typified by the Victorian paterfamilias and the patriarchal family he headed in his own autocratic fashion. Arnold Bennett in his novel, Anna of the Five Towns, describes Anna’s father, Ephraim Tellwright, a late nineteenth century Staffordshire businessman and Methodist lay preacher in such terms.

The women of a household were the natural victims of their master: In his experience it had always been so. In his experience the master had always, by universal consent, possessed certain rights over the self-respect, the happiness, and the peace of the defenceless souls set under him, rights as unquestioned as those exercised by Ivan the Terrible […]. He belonged to the great and powerful class of house-tyrants, the backbone of the British nation […].

Like all stereotypes associated with the Victorian age, the Victorian autocrat has been overdrawn. Some have suggested that the nurturant, companionable side of the Victorian father and husband has been neglected by those who have written about the period. But the subordinate role of women, and the treatment by Victorian men of their wives and children as their property to deal with as they wished, kindly or brutally, is not in doubt. At school, though again there were exceptions to the stereotype, the Victorian schoolmaster inculcated knowledge by rote learning and depended on the cane to ensure obedience. After school, for most people, paid work meant long hours in manual or clerical drudgery in jobs lacking safety or security with holidays the privilege of the few. Apart from teaching, as Susan Fairhurst was to discover, the professions were virtually closed to women, so there were firm limits to the realistic career expectations of intelligent girls.

The early 1900s saw a dramatic acceleration in the journey away from Victorianism towards a new set of beliefs and values. Susan was well aware of all these currents of change. As an atheist she was an active participant in the increasing secularisation of life in Britain. As long ago as the early 1880s, after a long and bitter struggle, Charles Bradlaugh had been allowed to affirm rather than take the oath of allegiance on election as Member of Parliament for Northampton. He had been partly responsible for the formation of the National Secular Society. According to Eric Hobsbawm, ‘[…]intellectually western religion was never more hard pressed than in the early 1900s, and politically it was in full retreat.’

In 1884, the Fabian Society, to which Susan Fairhurst belonged, had been founded with the support of the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw as a middle class socialist group aiming to ‘transform the country not by radicalism or revolution but by permeation’, as Sidney Webb put it. Out of their conviction that there could be a science of society, they founded the London School of Economics to act as an academic centre for such an endeavour. Later, in 1913, they were to be largely responsible for the publication of the New Statesman, a weekly political magazine intended to stimulate wide discussion of socialist ideas.

The Labour Party had emerged as a political force for the first time in the 1906 General Election when it had won 29 seats. Much of their support lay in the north-west of the country and Bolton had elected a Labour Member of Parliament in that election for the first time. In the Westhoughton Division, where William Fairhurst was a member of the Liberal Party, the Labour candidate, with Liberal support had beaten off the Conservative challenge.

While the Webbs and the Liberal politicians focused on the most deprived sections of the population and the reform of the Poor Law, social injustice was also widely felt among the middle classes when it came to the position of women in society. Frustration at the inferior status of women was nothing new, but in the second half of the nineteenth century the sense of injustice sharply increased and boiled over into direct political action in the first decade of the twentieth century.

By the early twentieth century the New Woman, determined to make a career for herself regardless of her role as wife and mother, had firmly arrived. Increased openings for their employment had opened women’s eyes to the negative discrimination they experienced. Reduction in family size and the abundance of servants gave middle class women more time for activities outside the home. The political activities of the New Woman and the efforts of the men who supported her crystallised in the campaign for votes for women. The early pioneers of the Suffragist (later Suffragette) movement, Richard Pankhurst, his wife, Emmeline and his daughter Christabel, lived and agitated in Manchester, only a few miles from Bolton where Susie lived. Christabel Pankhurst was one of the first women graduates of Victoria University, Manchester where Susan was just completing her first year. By 1909 the movement had become more desperate in its activities. This was the year when Suffragettes were first imprisoned for civil disobedience. Susan was a member of the Women’s Suffrage Movement though she was not involved in any militant activities.

Psychology and, in particular, educational psychology were slow to develop in Britain, but there was no hostility to the subject. This was not the case for the more disturbing psychoanalytic ideas put forward by Sigmund Freud. By 1909, Freud had mapped out the main features of his new theory of the mind. The importance of unconscious mental activity, the various defence mechanisms the mind used to defend against unconscious emotions that were unacceptable to the conscious mind, the importance of sexual erotic pleasure in early emotional development, the development of the Oedipus complex and incestuous fantasies in the three-to-four-year-old boy and of penis envy in the girl of this age, and the ways in which mental disorders in both adolescents and adults arose from dysfunction that was readily explained and indeed treatable using this framework, had all been described.

Although Freud’s ideas had originally been developed as an attempt to explain and more effectively treat mental disorders in adults, they had implications not only for the treatment of children with such problems, but for teachers and parents educating and bringing up normal children. Indeed, it was in 1909 that he published his account of his analysis of Hans, a five-year-old boy, who was suffering from phobias Freud thought to be due to unconscious sexual feelings for his mother. Freud had previously, in 1907, published an article on the sexual enlightenment of children.

Round about this time Freud attracted a teacher, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, to his psychoanalytic group. Eventually Hermine gave up teaching and became a psychoanalyst, but in the meantime her presence stimulated much discussion of the possible role of psychoanalysis in educational practice. Freud himself was cautious, saying that he wanted to avoid drawing conclusions, even less to give directions about education on the basis of current psychoanalytic knowledge. However at a meeting of his group in 1909 he suggested he would welcome a paper from Hermine on the impressions a teacher might have on the subject.

There was considerable controversy as to whether psychoanalysis, into which Susan Fairhurst later in life put so much of her energy, could be considered a science. Freud himself was not totally consistent on this matter. In 1900 he wrote to a colleague, ‘I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador, an adventurer[…].’ but later in life he was much clearer that psychoanalysis was indeed a science. It is, he wrote, in ‘The Future of Illusion’ in reality a method of research, an impartial instrument, rather like the […]. calculus. Psychoanalysts are and remain objective, and to be objective was to be scientific; hence psychoanalysis was a science.

Whether scientific or not, in the early years of the twentieth century the reception of Freud’s ideas by the scientific community and by the relevant medical specialists such as neurologists and psychiatrists was largely sceptical. It was therefore important to Freud that he should receive some recognition from the academic community. This happened quite unexpectedly in 1909 when he received an invitation to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and to accept an honorary law degree at that University. The occasion went off extremely well and his lectures were well received. His citation for the Doctorate of Law read ‘Sigmund Freud of the University of Vienna, founder of a school of pedagogy, already rich in new methods, leader today among students of the psychology of sex, and of psychotherapy and analysis, doctor of laws’. So 1909 is the year when psychoanalysis achieved respectability and status and was recognised as a new school of pedagogy.

Psychoanalysis was to play a major part in Susan Fairhurst’s later life, but it was for educational innovation that she was to be mainly known during her lifetime and for some time after she died. The early 1900s were a time of change not just for the organisation of British education, but for the introduction of new ideas into the field. Though there is not a single example of a sympathetic teacher in the novels of Dickens, the rote learning and rod-driven discipline of Victorian education, so characteristic of schools of that era, were not universal. The first infant school in Britain was established in 1816 by the mill-owner Robert Owen in New Lanark, in Scotland where his son continued to run the school after Robert died. A little later David Stow described his infant school in a book published in 1836, ‘The Training System adopted in the Model Schools of the Glasgow Educational Society’. He contrasted the ordinary infant school of the time which tended to stress repetition and ‘the old rote work’ with the teachers he trained whose task was to help children to acquire ideas, show kindliness to one another, and gain experience through play. Other exceptions to the rule were the nursery and infant schools run along lines advocated by Friedrich Froebel, a disciple of Pestalozzi, who himself had been directly influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Froebel had a mystical view of child development and regarded the teacher’s task as to foster harmonious development, best achieved through self-discovery. The Froebel child-centred education movement was especially strong in Manchester where there was a Froebel Training College. Nevertheless the approach of what Stow had described as the ‘ordinary infant school’ largely prevailed throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

By the last decade of that century if not the wind of change, at least a gentle breeze was blowing down school corridors into a small number of staff rooms bringing new ideas. This came from two directions. From the United States a fresh approach was pioneered by John Dewey. In 1894, at the age of thirty five, he went for ten years to the University of Chicago to the Chair of Pedagogy. Here and at Columbia, New York, where he was for the next decade, his best work was done and he developed his ideas on education. In 1895 he opened the Laboratory (Lab) School which was founded on his radical ideas about the purpose and process of education. He defined education as ‘the art of giving shape to human powers and adapting them to social service’. Education must begin with ‘a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests and habits’. Knowledge best emerged from setting children problems and getting them to think. He was thus an early protagonist of ‘child-centred education.’ In contrast to some progressive educators, Dewey accepted the need for a certain amount of repressive discipline, though he saw this as a minor feature of the running of a school.

In his educational programme Dewey placed emphasis on the need to associate academic learning to real-life experience. Thus he linked cooking to chemistry, and meteorology to the passage of the seasons and to the rhythms of working life. He believed that singing, drawing, and manual training, play and dramatisation should permeate the school not just in the infant years but right through from school entry to school leaving. The children in Dewey’s laboratory school were closely observed and their progress carefully monitored. While it would be misleading to suggest that the students formed part of any sort of controlled experiment, it is clear from the use of the term ‘laboratory’ and from the fact that the school formed part of an academic department of Pedagogy that here was an attempt to introduce a scientific approach into the study of education. Dewey’s work became known in England largely through the efforts of John Joseph Findlay, one of the two newly appointed Professors of Education at the University of Manchester, whom Susan Fairhurst had recently heard lecture.

The second direction in which new ideas were detectable in the early years of the twentieth century was from the first wave of the progressive school movement. The founders of this movement shared a belief that education had more to offer than classics, games, chapel, and the prefect system. Education was required to be more practical, to harness the imagination and to be alert to the need for social development through co-operation and problem solving. These progressive schools rejected memorising and rote learning and promoted learning by doing. They discarded competitiveness and the acquisitive spirit, rejected authoritarian approaches and tended to be libertarian and socialist in their philosophy. Although they were seen as experimental, their founders did not make any attempt to show scientifically that they suited the needs of children better than traditional schools. There was, all the same, an implicit assumption that they would come out well in any sort of comparison with traditional schools.

Early examples of these schools in Britain were Abbotsholme, founded in 1889, Bedales founded in 1893 and King Alfred School, founded in 1897.

The children who attended these schools often had emotional problems and tended to have parents who were professional or in creative occupations. The fathers had often had unpleasant experiences at traditional boarding school themselves. They were obviously a selected group, but the new, pioneering philosophy of the schools became widely known and influenced teachers and other educationists such as Susan Fairhurst herself.

While these progressive schools and the Froebel schools largely catered for middle class children, child-centred education for poor children was pioneered by Margaret McMillan and her sister Rachel in the very early years of the twentieth century. Margaret was an activist in the Independent Labour Party (ILP). She campaigned for nursery schools for the poor in Bradford and later founded such a school herself in Deptford, Kent, a seriously deprived borough in south-east London, soon providing care for the under-fives. She developed a theory of the regenerative and political power of children made healthy, clean, and beautiful by good nutrition and a physiological education that paid equal attention to their physical and intellectual development. By seeing the potential of their own children thus revealed, working-class parents would be moved to embrace socialist principles and vote for the ILP. Susan was greatly attracted by this combination of socialist principles and progressive education.

Thus in 1909 at the time of her father’s funeral, with religious belief in slow decline, the new field of scientific psychology was rapidly expanding. Findings from the social sciences were being deployed in the arguments about the reform of the conditions in which the poorest sections of the population lived as well as in the debates on votes for women. At the same time, though much more slowly, scientific approaches were nosing their way into education. Psychoanalytic ideas, scientific or pseudo-scientific, were beginning to be used to bring insights into the process of learning.

At the time of her father’s death in May 1909, when she herself was at the relatively late age of twenty three, Susan Fairhurst had nearly completed a year’s training to be an infant school teacher. She was about to start a university degree course in Manchester, with the world in which she lived in the process of rapid change. Contrary to popular belief, Edwardian England was not the staid, comfortable, self-satisfied country so often portrayed as embodied in the person of its overweight, pompous king. Instead the rapid decline of religion and widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution, the growth of socialist thinking, the emergence of the Labour Party as a political force, the strong push towards the emancipation of women, the expansion of educational opportunities, and the beginnings of a psychoanalytic movement that would revolutionise the way people thought about how their minds worked — all these made the end of the first decade the most exciting of the twentieth century, a time in which to be young, intellectually bright and alert to what was happening in the world was the most exhilarating experience. Susan was all three of these and would take full advantage of the circumstances at the point she reached mature adulthood.

1. Damaged Roots

© 2023 Philip Graham, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0297.01

Susan Isaacs, born Susan Sutherland Fairhurst, on 24 May 1885, spent the first twenty-three years of her life in Bolton, a Lancashire mill town in the north-west of England. Although not very different in the size of its population, about a quarter of a million, the Bolton into which she was born in the 1880s was a very different place from the Bolton of today. Most strikingly, it was a manufacturing town in which the pattern of employment was dominated by the cotton industry. The majority of men, women and children over the age of thirteen worked in the mills for low wages. Although family size was reducing, the average number of children in each family was around four to five and most people lived in cramped accommodation with no inside toilets or hot water. Hygiene and medical care were poor; about one in six children died before their first birthday; now the figure is more like one in a hundred. Then the middle- classes were largely made up of mill owners and their managers, together with shop keepers and others engaged in trade. The small number of professional people such as doctors and solicitors were a cut above the rest of the middle class socially, while teachers and nurses, though still seen as middle class, were generally poorly paid and lived in more modest circumstances.

The town may have been materially poor, but there was a much stronger interest in politics and religion than is the case today. Thousands of people would cram into the town hall to hear a visiting cabinet minister talk about tariff reform, a topic of great significance to a town whose prosperity was already threatened by the import of cheap manufactured goods. There was similar lively interest in proposed reforms of the education system, with strong beliefs about the role of the established church in governance and in the curriculum. Correspondingly, church attendance was high with around 60% of the adult population going to church every Sunday, mostly to Church of England services, but also to a great variety of nonconformist chapels.

Looking back in her fifties at the town in which she had been brought up, Susan saw beyond the ugliness and squalor, providing an idyllic perspective on the surrounding countryside and seeing this as somehow permeating the town itself with a certain dignity and even beauty. She wrote (Gardner, 1969, p. 15):

The streets of the town

were

grey and grimy, with their long rows of slate-roofed cottages, uniform in pattern, the doors opening straight on to the street without a green leaf of a space between […] yet there was a certain dignity in the very bareness and stark simplicity of the streets. They belonged to the bare moors with which they were surrounded […]. They clung together with a neighbourly warmth, and their solid grey stone and slate, and stark lines, were not so alien to the moorland heights, […] From a hillside, it was of course the mills and chimneys which dominated the landscape. The little houses clustered round these great square buildings whose tall chimneys pierced the smoke and mist, each belching out its own addition to the general grime. But what sunsets, what silvery light the smoke and fog would bring to these moorland views.

When she returned in the 1930s to visit her home town, she found her memories of the moors had not exaggerated their beauty. She went on (Gardner, p. 16):

In the time between, I had seen many mountains and valleys, many lovely landscapes in other parts of England and the continent of Europe. And the brightness of these experiences had dimmed my memories of my native county, had led me to think of it always as of mills and chimney, of grime and smoke, of machines and hurrying workers. I looked again on these — not so grimy now, not hurrying so fast. But I saw also that it

was

here that I first learnt what a good landscape was. I saw how noble these moors are, what grand open lines they show, what dignity and breadth their dark heather has. And as if for the first time, I saw how pleasantly the valleys turn, how charmingly they are wooded, how much in keeping the little stone houses appear […] I could see again the countryside as I knew it as a child — and see that it

was

good, in spite of the factory chimneys and the crowding streets of the towns, and that it

was

here that I first learnt to love noble hills and space and freedom.

Susan came from an upwardly mobile family, whose parents had achieved middle class status from a mainly working class background. Her mother was christened Miriam Sutherland at her birth in November, 1847. Although Susan’s sister, Alice, believed she came from Sale in Lancashire, and a family friend thought she was Scottish (Sutherland is indeed a Scottish name), she was, in fact, born in Southwark in south-east London, though then in the County of Surrey. Her mother’s maiden name was Susan Hawkins so Susan Fairhurst was named after her maternal grandmother. At some point Miriam’s family must have moved to the north-west of England where she was brought up and educated. At the time she married she was living in Hulme, a suburb of Manchester. Her father, called William like her husband, was a painter and decorator. She and Susan’s father were married in December, 1870, in the Union Chapel, Chorlton, a parish neighbouring on Hulme, in a Baptist ceremony when she gave her age as 22 and he was 23 years old.

After marriage Miriam moved with her husband to Bolton, where he was working as a saddler. She herself worked as a milliner. The young couple lived in Duke Street, in the centre of Bolton, near his place of work. Soon after marriage she became pregnant with her oldest child, William, born in 1872, followed by Enoch in 1875. She had eleven pregnancies, of whom eight survived beyond their first birthday, Susan being the seventh. Of the surviving children, after William and Enoch came Archie, born in 1876, then Bessie in 1878, Miriam in 1881, Harry in 1884, then Susan in 1885 and after Susan, four years later, came Susan’s younger sister, Alice, in 1889.

By the time Susan’s older sister, Miriam, was born in 1881, the family had moved to a larger house, 238, Turton Road, on a main road in the northern suburbs of Bolton. Then, a little later, they moved closer to the centre of Bolton to a still larger house, 32 Bradshaw Brow, where Susan was born. Both these houses were quite large, with four to five bedrooms, situated on busy roads into the town. At the time the family lived in them, the houses faced open country, though that is no longer the case.

Susan’s mother was known as a highly energetic person, an efficient, well-organised woman, capable of doing several things at once (Gardner, 1969, p. 17). This was a necessary skill for a woman with a large family in the days before labour-saving machines when even home-loving men did virtually nothing to help at home. In the early years of her marriage when the children were young, she had very little help around the house. In 1881, when she had five children under the age of ten, the family had one servant, compared with two living at the house next door where there was only a doctor, his wife and their one-year-old child.

Susan’s mother obviously had ‘presence’. Her daughter, Bessie, recalled her (Gardner, p. 17) as ‘a very dignified woman, not too tall, always immaculately dressed even at the very beginning of the day’, and as ‘an exceptionally fine, intellectual and helpful companion to her husband.’ She was musical, playing the piano well, a talent she passed on to her daughter.

Much more is known about Susan’s father, William Fairhurst, who became a prominent citizen of Bolton. He was born in 1847 in Ormskirk, a small town to the north of Bolton. The son of a book-keeper, he was educated at Ormskirk Grammar School. At the age of eighteen he left Ormskirk for Bolton and found work there with a Mr. Abraham Entwhistle, who ran a saddlery business. This was a large firm that expanded while he was working for it. It is not clear whether he worked making saddles, fitting and selling them or keeping the books.

While working for the saddlers, he taught himself shorthand and, equipped with this skill, when he was twenty five years of age, a year or so after his marriage, he obtained a job as a journalist on the Bolton Evening News. Tillotson and Son, the publishers of this daily newspaper also owned the Bolton Journal and Guardian that came out on Saturdays, so he worked on this as well. Around 1880 he was appointed sub-editor, later senior sub-editor, to both these newspapers and worked as such until his death in 1909.

The job of a provincial newspaper sub-editor is distinctly more limited today than it was in the late nineteenth century. Nowadays sub-editing consists largely in proof-reading, processing copy, correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes and designing page lay-out. As his obituary published after his death in 1909 makes clear, William Fairhurst’s position on the Bolton Evening News, Bolton Guardian and Journal was much more demanding, and today would be performed by a deputy editor or an assistant editor.

As a journalist he possessed keen perception, and the faculty of rapidly selecting everything of interest to newspaper readers, gifts invaluable to all engaged in the profession of catering for the reading public. The task which confronted him every morning of making choices from a wilderness of material of items of varied information, embracing the most important incidents in the national and world-wide events of the day, and preparing telegraphic, telephonic and other intelligence in fitting form for publication was a very heavy task, and he discharged it with conspicuous ability, as our columns have borne testimony over many years. His prescient judgement, mastery of detail, ready facility for assimilating new ideas, and power of efficiently carrying out purposes and plans have impressed themselves upon the issues of the paper from day to day. (

Bolton Evening News

, 3 May 1909)

Further, at the time William Fairhurst was employed as a journalist and sub-editor, provincial newspapers were not merely, as they largely are today, indeed as the Bolton Evening News is today, almost entirely purveyors of information about local news. They carried substantial information, opinions and views about the great national issues of the day. Debates in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords were described in some detail. Editorials commented on matters such as tax reform and proposals for changes in tariffs in goods imported from overseas. Foreign news was also covered, including accounts of the more sensational murder trials in France and Germany.

When Susan Isaacs was asked later in life where she got her considerable energy from, she replied that without doubt it was from her mother. If that was indeed the case, her mother must have been a remarkably dynamic woman, for not only was her father responsible for the sub-editing of a daily evening newspaper and a large weekly that appeared on Saturdays, but in 1884, the year before Susan’s birth, he founded, established and anonymously edited until his death, a sporting newspaper entitled The Football and Cricket Field. A natural sportsman, as a boy and young man he had played a great deal of both football and cricket, so he already had a strong interest in sporting matters.

When Fairhurst died, the whole of the front page of the Football and Cricket Field (8 May 1909) was dedicated to an appreciation of the founder and editor for 25 years. Unlike many of its predecessors and imitators, The Football and Cricket Field had a relatively long life of over thirty years from 1884 when Fairhurst started it to 1915, six years after his death. Those who wrote about Fairhurst at the time of his death laid emphasis on his integrity and the high moral tone of his journalistic contributions. He believed in ‘Christianity which aims to provide a sound and well-developed body as the fitting basis of a vigorous and joyous soul.’ Unlike today, in the late nineteenth century there were strong links between chapel and association football. For example, In 1874 Aston Villa Football Club was founded by members of the Wesleyan Chapel in Aston, Birmingham.

Fairhurst played roles in sport other than through his journalism. In his youth he had played for Bolton Cricket Club. He was frequently invited to referee major football matches and games of cricket at a time when referees were selected on the basis of agreement on a name between the two teams a few weeks ahead of the game. A few weeks before he died he was honoured with an invitation to present the Palatine Trophy, played for by Lancashire clubs, to the Captain of Blackburn Rovers, the victors in the 1908/9 season.

The newspapers that Fairhurst edited had very high standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Reading the three newspapers for which Fairhurst was responsible today over a hundred years after they were produced, one is struck by the quality of the product. No matter what the subject, the literary style is lively and interesting without being vulgar or condescending. Typographical errors are undetectable; the proof readers’ attention seems never to have wandered. Evidently these high standards were also evident in Fairhurst’s behaviour towards his children’s speech and writing. Alice, Susan’s younger sister, recalls many meals of bread and water after the detection of grammatical errors in her speech. Particularly heinous grammatical crimes were sentences ending in prepositions. Doubtless Susan suffered similar punishments for grammatical misdemeanours.

Although not active in politics, Fairfield was a member of the Westhoughton Division Liberal Association. As well as his participation in football and cricket, he was a keen cyclist, though how he found the time to pursue this activity is unclear. All in all he must have been a formidable father, his energy and high standards setting an example it was difficult to emulate. Alice, his youngest daughter found him lovable, but his sons and Susan herself found him to be authoritarian and much less sympathetic.

William Fairhurst came from a Methodist background as did many with his social background in the north of England. He was a lay preacher at the local Methodist chapel and Sundays were dominated by chapel activities of one sort or another. He was an associate Trustee of the local Egerton and Burtenshaw Chapels. Her father’s religious beliefs and adherence to the Methodist church had very significant consequences for Susan’s education and upbringing.

In many respects, William Fairhurst was a typical member of the Methodist church. Most were artisans, the cream of the working class, upwardly mobile, hard-working and thrifty. Politically they tended to subscribe to the beliefs of the Liberal party, as did he. They were regular church-goers and their social activities centred round the chapel they attended. These included talks from visiting preachers and missionaries, followed by questions and discussion of the talks that had been given. But there were also musical events, organised outings for children and their parents and later, Sunday football and cricket for the young men. The Methodist ‘class’ was an important setting in which debate, mainly but not entirely on biblical subjects, took place. Such ‘classes’ were originally centred in the home where discussion was led by the spiritual leader, always the father, but in Fairhurst’s time such classes more often took place in the chapel or school linked to the chapel.

Fairhurst did not have narrow religious interests. He was a highly cultured man who placed great value on literature, art and music. Through his publisher employers, Tillotson and Son, he obtained a number of literary and political periodicals, including the Review of Reviews, founded by W. J. Stead. The walls of the Fairhurst home (Gardner, p. 31) were lined with books, not just on revivalist religion, but on politics, the arts, history, travel and, of course, sport. Methodists sometimes have a reputation for living a culturally sterile life focussed entirely round methodical study of the bible. Of course, some Methodist families such as that headed by Alderman Roberts, in which Margaret Thatcher was brought up fifty years later, fit this stereotype. But some Methodist families of which Fairhurst’s was one, managed to combine deep, uncompromising religious belief with a lively, secular cultural life.

At the time of Susan Fairhurst’s birth, all her older brothers and sisters were still at home. The nearest in age to her was her brother Harry who was only about eighteen months older than she. She was breast fed and her infancy was unremarkable until, when she was eight months old, Harry caught measles that was complicated by the onset of pneumonia (Gardner, p. 18). Measles was a serious illness then, as it can be now, and he died on 10 January 1886 after a few days illness. This was not an uncommon family tragedy at the time, but Harry had been a particularly happy, affectionate and much loved child. Susan’s mother became depressed and the breast feeding came to an end. This sudden weaning took on great significance when Susan underwent psychoanalysis later in life. Over the next four years, with now only one child under five to look after, her mother was able to give her a good deal of attention. Afterwards, Susan recalled happy times with her mother and felt guilty that she had deprived her dead brother of such care.

Perhaps in reaction to their authoritarian father, (though exactly how authoritarian is, as we shall see later, open to question), two of her older brothers, William and Archie, now became troublesome (Gardner, p. 22). The older of the two, William, of whom she was very fond, suddenly left home at the age of eighteen when Susan was three years old to join the Merchant Navy. Later Susan said that she experienced the loss at his departure as a bereavement. She recalled that she had felt responsible for his leaving home, sensing, as she recalled later, that she had in some way driven him away. In reality it is much more likely that he left home because of the oppressive family atmosphere and difficulties with his father.

Shortly after William’s departure from home (Gardner, p. 19) Susan’s mother became pregnant with her younger sister, Alice, who was born four years after Susan. The birth was normal, but immediately after it her mother became physically ill, probably with a progressive form of arthritis, and after a few months, was permanently confined to bed. At this point much of Susan’s care was taken over by her older sister, Bessie, whom she sometimes subsequently referred to as her mother/sister. Her mother’s illness resulted in a well-ordered household becoming chaotic and unpredictable.

Susan now saw very little of her