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QUESTIONING THE RHETORIC OF BRITISH BORSTAL REFORM IN THE 1930s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2019

MELANIE TEBBUTT
MELANIE TEBBUTT*
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
*
Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West, Manchester, M15 6LLm.tebbutt@mmu.ac.uk
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Abstract

In 1938, the Reverend Digby Bliss Kittermaster, who became chaplain at Rochester Borstal after retiring as a housemaster at Harrow public school, started a diary in which he recorded everyday interactions with inmates and staff. The reputation of the borstal system was at its height in the 1930s owing to Alexander Paterson's reforms, based on the structures and character-building ethos of British public schools. Young people's voices were rarely heard in this progressive discourse of borstal reform and Kittermaster is unusual for articulating them, recording what he heard, teasing out the contradictions of Paterson's reforming aspirations and the reality of humiliation and intimidation that borstal boys often experienced. Kittermaster's public school background made him well placed to question the rhetoric of the public school reform model. His complex personal perspective suggests how humane emphasis on individual potential was subverted at Rochester by coercive structures of traditional prison improvement. Kittermaster's growing frustration at his own powerlessness supports a more nuanced interpretation of how the borstal system has usually been depicted in the Paterson era of reform, especially in relation to damaging mental and emotional costs to inmates and staff, which have been largely neglected in the scholarship of borstal in the 1930s.

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The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , June 2020 , pp. 710 - 731
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Heather Shore and the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments on this work. I should also thank the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex, for permissions to quote from archival material.

References

1 Rev. D. B. Kittermaster, ‘A borstal diary’, University of Sussex, Mass Observation Archive (MOA), topic collection (TC) ‘Juvenile delinquency 1946–7’, 11/1/A. The diary is dated in the archive as 13 Feb. 1945–14 Aug. 1946, probably owing to being filed with correspondence and research material for a Mass Observation book, Report on juvenile delinquency, published in 1949. The dates should be 13 Feb. 1938–15 Aug. 1939.

For work on young offenders which uses chaplains’ reports and diaries, see Rogers, Helen, ‘Kindness and reciprocity: liberated prisoners and Christian charity in early nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Social History, 47 (2014), pp. 721–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houlbrook, Matt, ‘Fashioning an ex-crook self: citizenship and criminality in the work of Netley Lucas’, Twentieth Century British History, 24 (2013), pp. 10–30, at p. 3CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Young people in borstal were described as ‘inmates’ or ‘offenders’ rather than prisoners. They served a ‘period of detention’ rather than a sentence. See Reidy, Conor, ‘Institutional power and the Irish borstal boy, 1906–21’, Irish Historical Studies, 38 (2012), pp. 36–51, at p. 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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21 J. C. W. Methven in Times, 21 June 1928, p. 11. Methven was a borstal governor and an assistant prison commissioner: see Maclean's Magazine, 1 Jan. 1934, p. 13.

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24 It was also a ‘certified home’ for boys on licence from Reformatory. Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 1.

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26 Kittermaster, ‘Early days at Shrewsbury House’.

27 Wellington Journal, 8 June 1907, p. 12. The Akbar was managed by the Liverpool Reformatory Association for Church of England boys.

28 Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 2.

29 Kittermaster, ‘Early days at Shrewsbury House’; Christopher Tyerman, History of Harrow, p. 457.

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35 ‘Report of an inquiry into Heswall Nautical School’, p. 15; HC Deb. 23 Feb. 1911, vol. 21, cols. 2159–2202, at col. 2191.

36 Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 4.

37 His wife was the only child of George Latham Bennett. Coventry Herald, 23 and 24 Aug. 1912, p. 2. Bennett may have been Captain Bennett of the Akbar, who was described as ahead of his time in wanting to show the boys more kindness. He resigned his post in 1907: Liverpool Echo, 29 June 1985, p. 10.

38 The friend was Cyril Alington, an ordained minister, who became a housemaster at Eton College in 1904, head of Shrewsbury School in 1908, and head of Eton in 1917: Tim Card, ‘Alington, Cyril Argentine (1872–1955)’, ODNB.

39 Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 1.

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52 Hayner, ‘English schools’, p. 702; New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, p. 359; Fox, English prison, p. 336; Times, 17 Sept. 1951, p. 5.

53 Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 1.

54 Ibid.; autobiographies of Borstal inmates, typed ms, 15 Aug. 1938, MOA, TC ‘Juvenile delinquency 1946–7’, 11/1/D.

55 Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 1; Times, 17 Sept. 1951, p. 5; Jewkes et al., Handbook on prisons, p. 44. The diary in the MOA is a typescript, probably based on handwritten notes which were subsequently prepared for publication. The final page comprises a hand-written list of original names of inmates and staff and pseudonyms. This article uses these pseudonyms.

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67 Ibid.

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69 Ibid.., 29 May 1938, pp. 22–3; 27 July 1938, p. 28; 10 Oct. 1938, p. 42.

70 Ibid.., 23 Feb. 1938, p. 7.

71 Ibid.., 29 May 1938, pp. 22–3.

72 Ibid.., 16 Dec. 1938, pp. 62–3; Kittermaster, ‘Treatment of juvenile delinquency’, p. 5.

73 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 24 Mar. 1938, pp. 10–11.

74 Ibid., 18 July 1938, p. 26.

75 Coldrey, ‘“The extreme end”’, p. 97.

76 Menis, ‘More insights’, p. 991.

77 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 27 July 1938, pp. 27–8.

78 Ibid., 16 Aug. 1938, pp. 32–3.

79 Ibid., 8 Nov. 1938, p. 49.

80 Ibid., 16 and 21 Feb. 1938, p. 3.

81 Ibid., 21 June 1938, pp. 23–4.

82 Ibid., 23 Feb. 1945, p. 9.

83 Ibid., 22 May 1938, p. 20.

84 Menis, ‘More insights’, pp. 995, 997.

85 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 30 June 1938, p. 25.

86 Ibid., 22 Feb. 1938, p. 5.

87 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1938, p. 55.

88 Ibid., 22 May 1938, p. 20.

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95 Ibid., 22 Feb. 1938, p. 5.

96 Ibid., 23 Feb. 1938, pp. 8–9.

97 Ibid., 23 Feb. 1938, p. 9.

98 Ibid., 15 Oct. 1938, p. 43.

99 From 1933, approved schools, for children under seventeen, replaced reformatories and industrial schools.

100 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 16 Aug. 1938, pp. 32–3.

101 Ibid., 14 Feb. 1938, pp. 1–2.

102 Ibid., 4 May 1938, p. 17.

103 Ibid., 22 Nov. 1938, p. 57.

104 Ibid., 29 Mar. 1938, pp. 12–13.

105 Ibid., 29 Mar. 1938, p. 13.

106 Ibid., 20 Apr. 1938, p. 15.

107 Ibid., 9 Dec. 1938, p. 61.

108 Ibid., 4 May 1938, p. 16.

109 Ibid., 22 May 1938, p. 20.

110 Ibid., 22 May 1938, p. 19.

111 Ibid., 4–6 Apr. 1938, pp. 13–14.

112 Ibid.

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117 Willcock to Kittermaster, 24 May 1947, MOA, TC 11/2/A. This was probably Dr W. H. de B. Hubert of St Thomas's Hospital, appointed in the 1930s as the first ‘visiting psychotherapist’ at Wormwood Scrubs. In 1939, Hubert, with Sir William Norbert East, chief medical inspector of prisons, published The psychological treatment of crime, an influential report which recommended various improvements, including psychiatric ‘facilities’ for prisoners: see Gray, W. J., ‘The English prison medical service: its historical background and more recent developments’, in Wolstenholme, G. E. W. and O'Connor, Maeve, eds., Medical care of prisoners and detainees (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 129–42, at p. 131Google Scholar; Shapira, Michal, The war inside: psychoanalysis, total war, and the making of the democratic self in postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2013), p. 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

118 The benefits of such intervention were recognized in 1932 by the Departmental Offenders Committee, which drew attention to the medical condition of offenders and the likelihood that ‘certain delinquents’ might be ‘amenable to psychological treatment’: Gray, ‘English prison medical service’, pp. 130–1.

119 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 21 June 1938, p. 24.

120 Ibid., 5 May 1938, p. 18.

121 Ibid., 12 July 1938, p. 25.

122 Norval and Rothman, Oxford history of the prison, p. 143.

123 Ibid.

124 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 4 Mar. 1938, p. 8.

125 Ibid., 9 Aug. 1938, p. 30.

126 Ibid., 9 May 1938, p. 18; 21 June 1938, p. 23.

127 Ibid., 14 Aug. 1938, p. 32.

128 Ibid., 5 Nov. 1938, p. 48.

129 Ibid., 5 Nov. 1938, p. 49.

130 Daily Mirror, 26 Sept. 1950, p. 3.

131 Cited in Menis, ‘More insights’, p. 995.

132 Ellen Maria Cook, ‘Understanding adolescent shame and pride in a school context: the impact of perceived academic competence and a growth mindset’ (Ph.D. thesis, Southampton, 2015), p. 20.

133 Reidy, Conor, ‘“The most dangerous, reckless, passionate…period of their lives”: the Irish borstal offender, 1906–1921’, in Cox, Catherine and Riordan, Susannah, eds., Adolescence in modern Irish history (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 82–102, at p. 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

134 Kittermaster, ‘Borstal diary’, 23 June 1939, p. 88.

135 The lasting effects of boarding schools on mental health have been similarly neglected. See Schaverein, Joy, Boarding school syndrome: the psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

136 Houlbrook, ‘Fashioning an ex-crook self’, p. 1.