On the strength (to me, the weakness) of a radio programme
which I recorded at Finchden and an obituary notice which I
wrote for 'The Times', I have been asked to contribute an
introduction to the series of articles which make up this
special issue of 'New Era' about the life and work of George
Lyward. I am the least qualified of all the contributors: I
met him only a few times and our early meetings were in
circumstances which could hardly have been less propitious.
I went to Finchden, in 1971, because, since reading Michael
Burn's book, perhaps fifteen years earlier, I had wanted to
do some sort of documentary about the place.
The first words George Lyward said to me, when I telephoned to ask if I
could come and discuss the idea, were "Not on your Nelly!" I
gathered that some TV people had recently invaded the
establishment and had not endeared themselves by an
impetuous approach and a series of clumsy questions. I did
not allow myself to be discouraged: we, in the media have
thick skins. The trouble is that the thickness is a poor
qualification for describing anything as sensitive and
elusive as the life of Finchden Manor. Eventually, G.A.L.
said grudgingly that I might come over and discuss the
project provided that there was no implication whatever that
it should therefore be allowed to go ahead.
I did not realise fully that a Man from a Medium (any
medium) was about as suspicious a person as could possibly
be encountered at Finchden - and a radio man perhaps the
worst of all, since he was after getting people to commit
themselves to words. Happily unknowing, but happy to have an
appointment, I got in my small car and drove across country,
on a cold, February afternoon, from Surrey to Tenterden. I
did have the sense to conceal my recording machine,
microphone and the other tools of my insidious trade under
an overcoat on the back seat.
On the way, I began imagining what I should find on my
arrival. I felt sure there would be a strong feeling of the
1930s. I saw Lyward as a bearded figure, wearing sandals and
a dark shirt, sitting on a tubular chair in a clearing of
books, chainsmoking Woodbines and listening to Alban Berg,
as boys outside threw cricket balls at his study
windows!
How very different was the reality! I arrived in the late
afternoon and rang the bell. The door was courteously opened
and I said I had come to see Mr Lyward. "Oh, you want the
Chief", said the boy who had admitted me. I was shown into
the long, low, heavily beamed room which was 'Chief's'
downstairs - and more or less public - domain. He had
another room upstairs where he was inviolate and where only
the staff could find him, and then mostly on the telephone.
You could always go to the lower room, provided you knocked
on the door; and to knock was something no Finchden boy ever
neglected to do. In contrast to his frigid approach when I
had telephoned him, 'Chief' clasped me by the hand and waved
me, with a big sweep of his arm, to the nearest chair. It
was teatime. There were some boys there already and,
hurriedly, a another cluster was invited to come and meet
me. Away went most of my shyness and certainly all my
images. The tea was the loveliest Lapsang Souchong. It was
served in china cups and there were well-cut savoury and jam
sandwiches. They disappeared at great speed and more were
produced. The boys did it all. Order and courtesy and good
manners: these were the last things I had expected to
find.
I have described them on a superficial level; but I soon
found they went much deeper. True, the boys' part of
Finchden is anything but gracious and has been known to
horrify the kind of visitor who likes to see boys polishing
fire buckets. The outward refinements were a perquisite of
being with The Chief. You went into another world when you
entered the private part of the house. But the inner
courtesies were much more widely found. I went, later, to
one of the Finchden dances and was amazed to watch a long
established ritual at the end, reverting to a forgotten,
perhaps a Victorian age. The boys, standing together, sang
'Good-night, Ladies" to the girls (who had come from
Tenterden and around and some from much farther away); and
they bowed, low and formally, as they sang. This, by
teenagers in the 1970's, done unselfconsciously and without
so much as a hint of a Monty Python mockery, seemed to me an
amazing manifestation of the kind of thing Lyward could
cause other people to do. He had this chivalrous, formal
side (some would call it 'square') and it existed alongside
all the freedom and unfolding of his therapeutic work. It
was (and I hope it still is) a pillar which upheld the
structure of the community and it also - very craftily -
endeared the place to its potential opponents. When tea was
cleared away, there was a general sitting around and much
talk. I suppose a psychiatrist might have called this a
'Group Therapy Session'; but it seemed not in the least like
that. I remember my astonishment as The Chief put his arm
from time to time round the shoulders of whichever of the
boys was sitting next to him and sometimes he held the hand
of another, quite tightly. How many schoolmasters would dare
do this and how many modern schoolboys - or parents - a
would not draw false and fashionable inferences? Only a
great and courageous character, I feel, could today give
this kind of personal security to the boys in his charge.
The Chief, I am sure, had the bigness which every adolescent
boy longs - but usually fails - to find in his own father. I
am tripping up - as I was constantly told off for doing
during my visit - in my use of words. Finchden is not a
School and you must not call it that. It is just Finchden.
Once, I referred to a member of the staff as a 'Master'. I
was rebuked with looks of horror. I even asked a boy, who
admitted he had a good brain, whether he was developing it.
He was shocked and puzzled. "Am I developing it? Does one
develop one's own brain?"
That first evening there was a sort of concert in the
Chief's room. Possibly it was put on for my benefit but, as
far as I could see, it just happened. People began to arrive
with guitars, and one boy had a violin. The 'group' did
quite a few numbers of their own making and they included a
really beautiful song, in the pop idiom, with a tune I have
hummed ever since. It could have gone straight to the Top
Twenty. Later, I got the group to come to a BBC studio
(where they were rather inhibited) and record it for my
programme. How I wish I had dared to produce my UHER machine
to record it there and then, along with the other tunes, and
the talk, on that memorable evening. But I think this might
have alienated George Lyward for ever; and then I should
have had nothing and - much more serious - should perhaps
never have come to know him. As things were, I was invited
to return, in a few days' time, when he would allow me to
make a tentative start of my 'radio portrait'. The situation
was not that Finchden had had a look at me and decided I was
all right. It was that, even in the tiny space of time I was
there, I had come to be all right - or more all right. I am
quite sure also that Lyward saw to it that the boys, and not
he, were my scrutineers and that their approval was the
criterion.
So I duly returned. I still had to wait a day or so before
the Chief would talk to a microphone. He clearly had a
horror of this and all the time I felt I was a surgeon,
hovering to perform an operation - and, in my case, without
an anaesthetic.
Several contributors, and particularly Barbara Smith - refer
to the inadequacy of words: and I shall not enlarge upon
this theme. Certainly a tape-recorder was, to George Lyward,
a kind of refrigerator which froze words into icicles, where
they remained, rigid, suspended and meaningless. "It's no
good," he said to me after my first attempts to get him to
talk to the jutting microphone. "I just can't say anything.
It doesn't mean anything ..." But he did say this :
"I have lived for 41 years with thieves. They've either
broken the law of the land or they're so maladjusted, as
it's called, along with their cleverness - often as the
result of using it defensively - that they have stolen in
all sorts of ways - same very subtle. When they are very
sick, the demands they make on one's time and energy-the
intrusions upon one's private life - make them the biggest
thieves of all. It all sounds as though I'm up against these
modern young. I'm not up against them. I think this is where
they've reached in their reaction against Society or against
adults or against an educational system which has tried to
shape them without very much regard for what was, as it
were, trying from within to give them their own indivdual
shape."
That was typical, I felt, of the way in which Lyward
combined warmth and love with a total lack of sentimentality
and nonsense. I thought that, to thank him for his
hospitality (in its widest sense) I should give him a
present before I left Finchden and I wondered what it should
be. I remembered he had told me he was very fond of
wholemeal bread and I went to Tenterden to buy flour and
yeast; and then I borrowed his private kitchen to make him
some. The two loaves were a great success; and he asked me
whether I would teach one of the boys how to bake more of
them so that the supply could continue. I chose someone and
gave him a lesson; and I told Lyward proudly who my pupil
was. "Oh", he said, with mock indignity. "You would, of
course, go and choose a bed-wetter!"
Of the many sides of Lyward which emerge from the articles
in this issue, I think two emerge strongly and often. One is
his nonlinear, unmeasuring use of TIME, to which we are so
unaccustomed in Western Society. It was perhaps his most
powerful therapeutic tool. To a broadcaster it was certainly
the most difficult - and the most fascinating - thing to
accept. The other point is The Chief's own vulnerability. He
had never forgotten what it was like to be young. Most
people do. Most people who have suffered greatly and come
through their suffering have also forgotten or denied, the
quality of the experience. Lyward, never. He dearly loved
the pop song, of which I wrote earlier, and here is a part
of its lyric:
"So don't worry if you feel your heart is
weak
And the words of love are difficult to speak,
For the world is full of trials to overcome
And the song will sound again
- and even louder when we've won.
And we'll all get together again
And sit in a circle in the wind and the rain,
With our friends all beside us to hold back the pain
And we'll sing to the sun and the sun will come
again."
Reprinted in the 'New Era', July/August 1973, p.164.
Readers may also care to be referred to Raymond King's
article 'George Lyward - some recollections' 'New Era'
Sept./Oct. 1973, p.166, and to M. Burn 'Mr Lyward's Answer'.
Hamish Hamilton, 1956.
David Dunhill was educated conventionally at a prep.
school and at Wellington college, Joined a paper in
Wiltshire as a reporter and, after serving in the Middle
East and latterly on a Forces Radio unit, went to the BBC
and stayed 25 years, mostly as an announcer. Just before midnight on September 29 1967, it was David who bade farewell with a crack in his voice to the Home Service, "two of the best words in the British language". He was closing down the network before its reinvention at 6.35am the next morning as "Radio 4". He subsequently worked as a
freelance broadcaster and writer, taught
broadcasting and was the father of four children.
