Authors: Gitta Sereny
Mr. Hart told her about Red Bank a few days before she was moved.
“He told me that I was ” going back up to the smokey mills”. I asked what did he mean and he said, ” Oop north” sort of taking the mickey out of my accent, you know. It was only then I realized I had an accent for [people who lived] down south. He told me about Red Bank, but he didn’t say where it was …” She laughed.
“And that it was going to be all boys.”
part Two red bank february 1969 to november 1973
forgetting red bank, 1969 to 1970
It was on 4 February 1969 that James Dixon and his wife Jean travelled south to pick up what was to become as Mr. Dixon told me in 1970 their most challenging, but also their most taxing charge.
Mary always spoke of Mr. Dixon in touchingly proprietary terms:
“He had on his checked tweed jacket with his fawn trousers and his brogues,” she said.
“Mrs. Dixon was like a little butterball, small, cuddly, jolly, with a soft round face and what I think is called an English complexion. She was in a flowery print dress. Mr. Dixon was tall, about six feet two, I think. I had to look up at him. He had a weatherworn sort of face, a handle-bar moustache that made one smile and kind twinkly eyes. My introduction to them was very formal. He was very military; all his analogies were very military but, you know, you looked at Mr. Dixon and you knew he wouldn’t tell a lie. The world should be full of Mr. Dixons.”
The leaving formalities, she remembered, took quite some time.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dixon arrived fat Cumberlow Lodge] around ten in the morning, I think, and there was a lot of palaver, hours of it, before we left. Mr. Dixon spent a long time with Mr. Hart at least, it seemed very long to me.”
The seven-hour ‘or so’ car journey to Lancashire, she said, was at first very exciting.
“Everything you know, the houses, people in the streets, the traffic, it was like … oh, I don’t know … freedom … no, not freedom I think I knew I wasn’t going to be free, like free, you know. But it was … seeing ordinary life. You know, it made me feel more … ordinary.”
Did you stop for food on the way?
“They stopped at service stations on the motorway for petrol and I suppose bought things to eat, but I don’t remember it. Mrs. Dixon came to the toilets with me. Of course, I was an unknown quantity for them.
I suppose they could have been afraid I’d run away; and Mr. Dixon well, he wasn’t a young man. I mean if I’d run, I don’t know that he could have caught me. “
Did it occur to you to run?
“Oh no, not at all. I liked Mr. Dixon right away. I wouldn’t have run away from him.” She thinks she slept in the car for quite a while.
“When I woke up it was dark outside and when they said we were nearly there, I felt real excited.”
Did the Dixons tell you anything about Red Bank?
“As we got closer, Mr. Dixon said that I’d find it was ” a tightly run ship” and that that there was no preferential treatment.
“By that,” he said, “I mean we are all equal, staff and children: we all eat together, the same food, and we work together.” He said I would find that people talked a lot to each other and made decisions together.
But he never told me that it was all boys until just as we were going round a corner before arriving. Then he turned around, with a laugh and I suspect a look of glee in his eyes, and said: “By the way, do you know it’s all boys? And they are expecting a big blonde with a thirty-six- inch chest. They’ve got a surprise coming, haven’t they?”
I saw Mrs. Dixon nudging him and shaking her head. I didn’t know how to feel. “
Red Bank Special Unit is the secure part of what was, in 1969, still referred to as an ‘approved school’. But in the early 1970s the relevant government departments were beset with battles between the adherents of two opposing styles of approach one might say the disciplinarians and the carers. It was then that ‘approved schools’, as institutions for children who were hard to manage or who had offended against the law, calling forth images of isolation and Victorian methods of discipline, became ideologically unacceptable and were renamed ‘community homes’. The optimistic, and certainly
1969 to 1970 /145
idealistic, credo of the period was ‘freedom’ both in a general sense, from government interference for those who worked in such institutions, and for the adolescents who had previously lived under the harsh discipline which since their inception had traditionally governed most approved schools. The intention was that these community homes, now under the administrative as well as the financial control of local government, would somehow become part of the community, thereby ending the children’s isolation and providing them with role models outside the limits of institutional life.
It is fair to state now that this did not succeed. Firstly, because individual local governments were neither financially nor administratively geared to such responsibilities, and, secondly, because the complex vocational and in the widest sense educational needs of children for whom such facilities were intended could not possibly be met by community efforts but required a strictly professional approach with expensive facilities and highly trained teaching staff. Over the next decade, most former approved schools were closed, and the adolescents they catered for were either returned to families and local schools which had already proved unable to deal with them, or were left to the care of various services of council and state, more often than not ending in unemployment offices and the courts.
At the time of writing, therefore. Red Bank Approved School, which, in a purpose-built ‘classifying’ (or assessment) centre and vocational school, provided considerable space, comfort and a fair degree of training or education for about 500 boys, no longer exists, but the special unit to which Mary was sent still functions.
The special unit, in those earlier years deliberately situated in the very centre of the approved school complex so that it looked out on daily life and thus avoided visual isolation, was planned for twenty six boys requiring a high degree of security and was locked at all times. Once inside, it was a pleasant environment, full of light, with vivid colours on the walls, and modem furniture. There were lots of long narrow windows which could be opened to let in the fresh air, and in winter the whole building was centrally heated. On the ground floor were the library, sitting-rooms with comfortable armchairs, an airy dining-room with many small tables, and a number of classrooms with desks in blond wood where the children were tutored in groups of three to six according to age (“May’s probably getting better schooling than ours ever will,” her Aunt Cath said to me in 1971).
There was also a well-equipped art room with long tables, exhibitions of paintings and drawings (Mary pointed out one of hers when I was there in 1970) and a pottery kiln.
Within the perimeter walls of the unit was a garden, a greenhouse and a shed for pets. Outside it, in the grounds of the school, was a swimming pool, which the boys from the approved school had built and which the children from the special unit had the use of every day in the summer.
On the second floor were two dormitories, each for four senior boys, and individual bedrooms for the others.
“I was told later, by the deputy head, Mr. P.,” Mary said, ‘that when it was decided to send me to Red Bank they sectioned off seven rooms for girls. But in the nearly five years I was there, only five girls came, all a lot older than I was, and only one of them stayed as long as three months; the others left after a few weeks. “
At the time of Mary’s arrival, and when I visited in 1970, there were eighteen teaching staff, predominantly men, but later a few young women came, and the domestic staff of twelve were all female. Among the teaching staff were Ben and Carole G. ” who met and fell in love while working there. For both of them, Red Bank was their first job.
Ben started in August 1970, a year and a half after Mary arrived, and Carole in 1972. Both of them now hold responsible administrative positions working with troubled children.
“We’ve both been on countless courses since then,” Ben said, ‘but and I think this goes for both of us when we came to Red Bank, just after completing our teachers’ training, we really knew nothing about the needs of such children. And to be honest, while many of the other staff had, of course, vastly more experience, none of them had, well, formal training, either in special education or psychology, and that includes Mr. Dixon, who really was the most exceptional and inspiring man. “
“Yes, I’m not surprised that May remembers him with so much love,” Carole said.
“Many of the boys loved him too.” She smiled.
“But he was … well, perhaps a little naive. He knew that many of these kids were very disturbed … some of the boys probably quite as badly as Mary. But he thought that love conquers all and, of course, it can do a lot. Or let’s say that without the atmosphere he created at Red Bank, nothing can be done. But all the love in the world can’t give people like us the skill to help children unlock their troubled minds.
For that you need teaching and training. “
“We didn’t realize that then,” Ben said, ‘but we know it now. But, let’s be fair,” he added, ‘even as it was, the place did benefit quite a number of boys: it was structured, and there were very precise rules to support that structure.”
Red Bank remains very clear in Carole and Ben G. “s minds, not only because it is where they began their life together, but because it is essentially where they decided what to do with their professional lives. After leaving Red Bank, both of them worked in other schools for children with problems, but they are now established in a large local authority in the West of England, each heading different departments, one dealing with special schools and personnel, the other with the specific problems of particular children. Once they had a child of their own, they both said, they could no longer work day in, day out in places such as Red Bank.
“I did it from the age of twenty for seven years,” Carole said, ‘and Ben from when he was twenty-one.
But having a child changes you. You are more vulnerable, and you become aware that your child needs protection from that, too. You think more deeply about yourself, your actions and your reactions. “
James Dixon selected all the personnel for Red Bank himself, they said.
“And it seemed as if he very deliberately chose people of different ages, backgrounds and very different personalities,” said Ben.
“Almost as if he was trying to supply the children with a microcosm of society. Of course, almost everything at Red Bank was due to Mr. Dixon’s own personality. And because such men, or women, are very rare, as an individual you can try to emulate what they try to do, but such a set-up can’t just be copied.”
“It had a kind of ” purity” about it in terms of what it offered the kids,” Carole said.
“It was untainted, if you like, by anything they might have experienced before.”
“Because he was such a good man, it made one feel that bad things couldn’t happen,” Ben said.
“Of course, they did happen, as we see from May’s experience with that housemaster, but in an environment such as the one Dixon created, the effect of such a shock on the community as a whole would have been minimal rather than, as one might have expected, major and enduring.”
Even when they were there, they said, there were other children at Red Bank who they realize now were as damaged as Mary and who, because of the deficiencies in staff training and lack of specialist knowledge, were not helped in the ways they should have been.
“But you have to look at the other side of the coin, too,” Ben said.
“Whatever was lacking, they did have this period of sanctuary, of affection and warmth in a carefully structured environment. And they had the strong moral influence James Dixon doubtlessly exerted. May’s search for self-knowledge now is the proof of it. It did help them to grow.”
“Mr. Dixon always explained everything very openly,” Mary said, ‘specially if he felt resentment of the rules. Except when I was locked into my room, at night and for half an hour or an hour’s rest after lunch, I was never allowed to be alone, even to go to the toilet. ” She shrugged.
“It bothered me a lot at first, but then Mr. Dixon explained, and I accepted it. After a while I hardly noticed. In retrospect now, I think perhaps it even made me feel safe … looked after, you know.”
What struck her most when she arrived was the smell of polish.
“It was so clean and pretty, so different from everywhere else I’d been, and of course anywhere I had lived.” The Dixons took her into the common-room, “And I could see what he’d meant by ” surprise”,” she said.
“Even the staff looked amazed seeing this little scrap he’d brought in. He said: ” This is May that’s what she likes to be called. ” After that, Mr. Dixon took her to the library and Mrs. Dixon brought in some scrambled eggs.
“I couldn’t eat. I felt sick after that long drive, the petrol fumes, and the smell of polish. He said, ” All right, but you won’t get anything else. ” They took me upstairs, and I was really surprised how they unlocked and locked every door behind them as we went through.”
Surprised? I interrupted. Why was that surprising?
She was startled by my question.
“Well,” she said, ‘it was a school, wasn’t it? They took me to my room and Mr. Dixon told me I’d be locked in, everybody was.
“No preferential treatment,” he said again. And he said Mrs. Dixon would introduce me to the housemother, Miss Hemmings, and I was to go get a shower and settle down for the night. I asked him how long I was going to be there for and he said, “We’ll see. A lot depends on you,” and that, anyway, he was tired and didn’t have all the answers. “
Miss Hemmings had told her the schedule: up at 7 a. m. ” shower, bed-making, go downstairs and before breakfast at eight line up for shoe parade and finger-nail inspection.
“It was all very shipshape,” Mary said.
“Of course, Mr. Dixon was ex-navy and it showed.”
Did she still wet her bed?
“Oh yes, that went on for years. Miss Hemmings already knew about it when I arrived and they’d put one of those rubber sheets with a bell on the bed and she said to ring if I woke up wet in the night and somebody would bring me a clean sheet, like. Throughout the time I was there, nobody ever said a word about it if the bed was wet. I or Miss Hemmings would strip it in the morning and she’d take the sheets away.