THE END OF AN ERA:
But it was the sixties and much of the old order was about to crumble. The successful Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, open necked shirts, short trousers and hair were to be put on the shelf for a couple of decades. The Beatles, Flower power and assassinations dominated. Television was a powerful influence already. And Society's values were rapidly changing before our eyes.
This coincided with the end of the Children's Departments. Those rather straight laced, respectable middle class children's officers were to be replaced, after Seebohm, by hippy, jeans-clad, roll-your-own Social Workers in the Seventies. These changes also coincided with the retirement of the older staff from the Community. Leila Rendel even accused one of being 'a rat'.
The fact was that the whole world was turning upside down and the Community was reflecting that process. One day while attempting to sit at her dressing table, Leila Rendel missed the chair. Her large frame never recovered from the resulting fall and she died in hospital 10 days later. we were totally numbed.
I was by now a Director and I was kept so preoccupied with keeping the enterprise going that I hardly had time to worry about anything beyond immediate survival. At the end of her time, at an extraordinary staff meeting, a vote of no confidence in the Directors and in my appointment as a Director was narrowly defeated, but it left its mark.
More staff left; and as the old staff were quite irreplaceable by new young staff, gaps appeared everywhere and even the young adults who joined sometimes took off in the middle of the night, too overwhelmed by it all. The difference in calibre between the old and the new was impossible to reconcile. We simply had to restructure if the Community was to go forward into the Seventies. While the world was in a state of anarchy, I was just thankful to be inheriting a badly leaking ship in an age of change, rather than the pride of the fleet.
Nevertheless over the next two years I, as one of two Captains (Ethel Davies was about to retire), spent most of my time plugging the leaks myself or with teachers from our school, who slept-in at night and taught the next day. It was a close run thing.