Elizabeth Lloyd's "The Story of a Community"
This is a remarkable eye-witness narrative of the Community's first 55 years, from its beginnings as a Nursery School through its self-recognition and then eventful history and development as a Community.
In the three chapters of her Introduction Elizabeth Lloyd (b. 1912) brings together personal accounts and memories of Caldecott's first two decades by staff who were there from its earliest days in London to its move to The Mote in 1932, where Elizabeth herself joined the staff in February 1936. She then lived and worked as a member of the Community for the next 32, almost 33 years, retiring in December 1968; and in Parts I, II, and III she shares the Caldecott story of those years from the vantage point of personal experience, drawing on the notes and "copious journals" she kept and her intimate knowledge of the Community really from childhood - "As a small child", she says, she had regularly visited her aunt Ruth Rowson at the "earthly paradise" of Charlton Court, so perhaps from as early as 1917, when the Community moved there and Elizabeth was five.
It is one of the major losses to the history of 20th century residential child care that Elizabeth's original notes and journals were either lost or destroyed by her, and that no one was there with a tape recorder when she was writing. But what she has given us is a genuinely powerful insight into the Impossible that was made possible time and time again, from the smallest details of daily living to the encounter of the Community of women and children with a world of fundamental turmoil, as if the Community were an everyday living of wrestling with the angel, successfully. With, of course, caveats, as Elizabeth carefully weaves through the writing.
It was written in 1976-77 (see quotes below), and was circulated in a cyclostyled format, scans of which from Archive Weekends at the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre were OCRed and proofed by Barry Northam with the help of Eileen Northam, and translated here to the Web by Craig Fees, who apologises for any mistakes which may have been introduced in that process.
Part I, Chapter III, "It is interesting to read, as I did the other day in this year of 1976..."
Part III: Chapter I, "The well-known furniture designer, Chippendale, was living and working at the time and from him Sir Edward bought furniture; two very handsome tables are still in use in the house in 1976."
Part III, Chapter III, "Now, of course, in 1976 it would get very few"
Part III, Chapter IX, "it is certain that those two imaginative gifted women, and those who worked with them and created this Community, would have said that the differences between the children of 1911 and those of 1977 are only superficial."