East End Review

Tag: Bow

Sylvia Pankhurst: East London suffragette may get a statue in Bow

East London Suffragette: Sylvia Pankhurst. Photograph: Roman Road Trust

A statue of Sylvia Pankhurst could soon take pride of place on Roman Road.

Plans are in place to erect a statue in Bow of the radical feminist who founded the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1913.

The Roman Road Trust, a community development organisation, wants the Pankhurst statue to be located on the junction of St Stephen’s Road and Roman Road.

It would form part of a wider public art trail focused on East End women such as Annie Besant, who played a prominent role in the Bow matchgirls strike of 1888.

“A lot of people don’t realise that Bow is the heartland of Sylvia Pankhurst,” said Tabitha Stapely, CEO of the Roman Road Trust.

“Due to the bombing in the war and various council initiatives to tidy up the area afterwards, there are no buildings or sites left of where Sylvia worked on Roman Road.”

“We want people to know the history, feel part of it and engage with it. So all these things have been leading up to the idea of celebrating her work with a statue.”

Radical speaker: Sylvia Pankhurst outside the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Old Ford Road, Bow. Photograph: Roman Road Trust

But a statue is only the start of the Trust’s ambitious plans to celebrate Bow’s heritage.

“What we want to do is even bigger,” Stapely said. “Bow was an area that was very very deprived 110 years ago, but it attracted a lot of amazing visionary women. What we’d like is to see them all celebrated.”

The statue and art trail is part of the Roman Road Neighbourhood plan, a legal document that sets out planning policies for a given area, written by its residents and businesses.

Although other campaigns for statues – such as those for Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Seacole – have rumbled on for years, Stapley is optimistic a Pankhurst statue and art trail will be a reality in four years’ time.

“We already have a lot of ducks in a row, we’ve got backing from key Tower Hamlets councillors, and we have a good working relationship with Poplar Harca who own a lot of the land around Bow Road,” said Stapely.

Councillor Josh Peck, Cabinet Member for Work and Economic Growth, has already thrown his support behind the campaign. “Bow was the centre of Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaigning but our area’s role has largely been lost to history. It’s time we properly commemorated her work here,” he said.

Some of the many Bow landmarks in the history of the women’s suffrage movement in East London include the former site of Roman Road Baths, where Pankhurst used to hold meetings of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as Arbers on Roman Road, the printing works that published Sylvia Pankhurst’s feminist newspaper Woman’s Dreadnought.

Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst are commemorated with a statue and plaque by Victoria Tower Gardens, but no such honour has previously been afforded Sylvia, who opposed her family over the First World War and commitment to socialism.

Another statue of Sylvia Pankhurst is planned for Clerkenwell Green in Islington in time for the centenary of the Representation of the People Act in 1918, which gave the vote to some women.

The Roman Road Trust has published a history of Sylvia Pankhurst in Bow.

May 25, 2016
The Divided Laing review – inside the mind of a psychiatrist

Alan Cox and Oscar Pearce in The Divided Laing. Photograph: Adam Bennett

Part of the appeal of madness for dramatists is the way that uncontrolled unconscious appetites and desires are thought to lurk so closely underneath the conscious, rational, socially acceptable world of everyday life, threatening to burst through at any minute.

Against the Apollonian forces of order and moderation struggle the wild and terrible Dionysian passions; behind the flimsy face of every unassuming Dr Jekyll is a ravening Mr Hyde.

Patrick Marmion’s new play at the Arcola, The Divided Laing, turns this fertile dichotomy on its head. It’s 1970, and the doors of perception are wide open: at any given time, someone on stage is either drunk or high on acid, or fighting, or all three.

The setting is Kingsley Hall, the counter-cultural anti-asylum set up by Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D. ‘Ronnie’ Laing as a place where, as Laing saw it, any sufferer of mental illness could come and be treated as “a person to be accepted, not an object to be changed”.

Madness – and its embrace as valid, perhaps superior, experience – is the order of the day. But manifesting at every turn are the Apollonian, Jekyll-style forces of sensible, normal, well-adjusted life, appearing in various guises: as policemen and pub landlords; as the suggestion of new ‘house rules’ for Kingsley Hall; as Laing’s elderly mother, insisting he return to the five children he has abandoned in Glasgow; and as a medical seminar happening in 2015, visited by Laing during an acid trip to the future and which through its multi-disciplinary, detailed, considered and intelligent discussion of the case in question, sounds the death-knell for everything he stands for.

At heart, The Divided Laing (subtitle: The Two Ronnies), is a sort of domestic farce, with Laing and his followers and patients staving off one crisis after another as they await the arrival of Sean Connery, who’s coming for dinner. (According to Marmion, this really happened, and it’s a nice detail – James Bond is British culture’s Dionysian hero, always drinking and chasing girls, never following the rules, always saving the day; Laing as imagined here is similar, and continually introduces himself with the formula “the name’s Laing, by the way. R. D. Laing.”).

It’s a laugh several times a minute, and if some of the historical irony of the 2015 trip stands out as a bit cringe (“they have this thing, what do they call it, ‘Google’”), it’s because Marmion’s good ear for a comic cadence is usually so perfectly shared by the play’s brilliant cast, with Alan Cox, for instance, as Laing, so accurately landing the gulp for air in a resigned, hyper-erudite line like “he means, Mary, is it too late to resist the glacial slide towards medicalised psychiatry and universal state funded compliance reinforced by a fiscal model of the patient as economic unit – or not?” as to make it laugh-out-loud funny.

The real life Laing died 26 years ago, at the same time as Communism was collapsing. Mourning for Kingsley Hall, as for the Eastern Bloc, is misplaced; but it is also foolish to look back triumphantly on both failed experiments and think how naïve their instigators must have been.

That overestimates our own wisdom. Marmion has done us a good turn with this play, as a reminder that all our radical clarity will in its turn appear comical.

November 25, 2015
Was R.D. Laing a mental health pioneer or a dangerous maverick?

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Illustration: Paul Coomey

It is 50 years since the Philadelphia Association housed itself at Kingsley Hall in Bow, and 45 years since the Hall closed its doors amid local residents’ discomfort and a sense that things had got out of hand.

For the five years in between, the East End was witness to a radical experiment in treating mental illness, orchestrated by a charismatic group of doctors who eventually attracted the name ‘anti-psychiatrists’ for their rejection of mainstream psychiatric practices, most especially the use of drugs in treatment and the traditional power relationships with patients that characterised the profession.

Doctors and patients lived under the same roof at Kingsley Hall, and were collectively known as ‘residents’. Non-doctor residents were encouraged to make symbolic expressions of their illnesses through art, especially painting, and through talking to doctors in long conversations that respected the way patients used language, and engaged with it on its own terms. In the psychiatric world outside, lobotomies had only recently ceased to be the rage and it was not yet unknown for civil rights activists and feminists to be compulsorily confined to asylums.

The driving force behind the Kingsley Hall institute was the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Born into a poor family in Glasgow in 1927, he was successful at school and went on to study medicine, qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951. Called up to National Service, he served as an army psychiatrist for two years before returning to Glasgow, where he first worked with schizophrenic patients. He developed new approaches to treatment, which laid less of an emphasis on controlling patients and more on doctors and nurses spending time with them.

Having moved to London to study psychoanalysis, he published The Divided Self, an account of his new theories, in 1960. The book presented case studies of some of his patients and argued that mental illness could be seen as the outcome of a struggle between a ‘true’ inner self and a false self presented to the world, and that madness, far from being a medical condition, could be a logical response to the contradictions of the surrounding world. It’s still in print.

“Is love possible?” he asked in a BBC interview. “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person, do persons even exist?”

Kingsley Hall was to be a place where people could live without these contradictions. The most famous resident was Mary Barnes, a prolific and accomplished painter who developed her artistic career at Kingsley Hall in the sixties and continued to produce work until her death in 2001. With Joseph Berke, her therapist, she produced a book, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, and Laing contributed copy to her exhibition catalogues.

“There was a lot of colour there,” says Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail theatre critic and author of a new play opening at the Arcola this month about the closing months of the Kingsley Hall experiment. “Laing styled himself as a Glaswegian street fighter almost, a really colourful, charismatic person who was ferociously bright. And he gathered around him some extraordinary characters,” explains Marmion.

Joe and Shree by Mary Barnes, painted in Kingsley Hall. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop

Marmion’s play is set in the Hall’s last crisis days, Laing’s administrative headaches exacerbated by the return of one of his colleagues from “an acid trip to the future” in which he has seen how low the reputations of everyone involved are to sink. Laing became a symbol for a new counter-cultural approach to mental illness throughout the sixties and seventies, and it is as a symbol that his legacy has been judged.

Despite distancing himself from the term, it is he who has become most closely associated with the label ‘anti-psychiatry’, although better candidates might be his colleague David Cooper, who coined it, or Thomas Szasz, the American psychiatrist whose books include The Myth of Mental Illness. Anti-psychiatry has been widely and justly debunked, most forcefully by the left-wing academic Peter Sedgwick in his 1982 book PsychoPolitics, in which he pointed out that the movement’s critique of established mental health services was being used to justify huge cuts to funding. By the eighties, mentally ill patients were at much greater risk of neglect than of over-zealous medical intervention.

However, the symbol of Laing is changing again and being disentangled from anti-psychiatry. He is increasingly celebrated now as an early champion of compassionate treatment for the mentally ill, and also as a poet (his book of dramatic verse Knots was made into a play in 2011, while the half-centenary celebrations have recently seen live performances of his other well known collection Do you love me?). Marmion’s play is in this mode. His favourite Laing quote, which appears in the play, is Laing’s saying that patients were “not objects to be changed but people to be accepted”. The time may have come for us to again accept R. D. Laing.

The Divided Laing is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 18 November – 12 December. www.arcolatheatre.com

Kingsley Hall today. Photograph: Russell Parton

November 12, 2015