Richard Crocket Archive

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Reference number	CROCKET
Level of description	Collection
Date(s)	Creation: 1897-2006
Extent and medium	131 boxes (approx)
Category	Personal Papers
Scope and content	┆Personal Papers of Richard Crocket including diaries, manuscripts and papers alongside papers relating to he Ingrrbourne Centre.
History	Richard Crocket was born in 1914 in Scotland, UK. His mother was a teacher and his father a doctor and university lecturer. Crocket attended the University of Glasgow where he was awarded a degree in medicine in 1937. After a brief placement in surgery, he was appointed assistant physician at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital (previously Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum) and completed a diploma in Psychological Medicine by 1939. His colleagues at Glasgow included Jock Sutherland, Henry Ezriel, Susan Davidson, and Ferguson Rodger. In 1940 Crocket took a position as a locum psychotherapist at the Cassel Hospital (located in Swaylands, Kent at the time) working alongside Dr Tom Main. With the relocation of the Cassel to Stoke-on-Trent, Crocket joined the Royal Air Force, commencing his six years of service in 1941. During this time he publishing his first professional paper, co-authored with RD Gillespie ("Observations on the Incidence of Neuroses in R.A.F. Ground Personnel", Glasgow Medical Journal, 1945). After demobilization he returned to Scotland to practice psychiatry at St. Andrew's Hospital. He found the strict hierarchical regime of the non-NHS hospital difficult to work within. This dissatisfaction led him to contact the eminent psychiatrist David Kennedy Henderson which in turn lead to a two year placement at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders, Morningside. During this time, Crocket became a member of the Royal Medical Psychological Association. In 1950 he left the Royal Edinburgh for the University of Leeds where he became a tutor in psychiatry allowing him to depend his academic and theoretical understanding of the subject area. Four years later in 1954, he was appointed consultant in charge of a psychiatric unit located within St. George's District General Hospital at Hornchurch in Essex. St George's (often referred to as 'Ward G3'), was an outpost of the local mental hospital, Warley Hospital at Brentwood. Crocket made significant changes to the management of Ward G3, which he remained the Ingerbourne Centre for Psychological Medicine. One of his first actions was to appoint Hamish Anderson to the post of Senior Hospital Medical Officer. Anderson had previously worked with Dr George Macdonald Bell, the first psychiatrist to implement a fully open door policy for mental health patients at Dingleton Hospital, Scotland. Anderson brought the ideas of Bell to Ingerbourne, successfully implementing a programme of group work for both patients and staff. Crocket initially work behind the scenes only to defend the radical changes Anderson was implementing, pacifying the Regional Medical Officer, Regional Psychiatrist, and Superintendent of Warley Hospital. However, Crocket soon became a full convert to Anderson's group work methods, actively participating in the new therapeutic community. Drawing on his academic background, Crocket began to develop theories around the practices being trailed at Ingerbourne. He published his first reflective paper "Doctors, Administrators, and Therapeutic Community" in The Lancet in 1960. Although Crocket's work at Ingerbourne paralleled the work of other pioneers such as Maxwell Jones (Dingleton Hospital, Scotland and Henderson Hospital, London), the Centre evolved in its own way with little external influence. Crocket continued to work at the Ingerbourne Centre, first as Consultant and later as Director, until 1979. During the last two years of his stewardship of Ingerbourne he was also the lead psychiatrist at the Paddington Day Hospital. A well-known contributor to the early phases of the therapeutic community movement among his contemporaries, Crocket was an active member of the Therapeutic Community Round Table and its successor, the Association of Therapeutic Communities. His writings and theories about the dynamic psycho-therapeutic community at Ingerbourne and the development of therapeutic communities more widely remains largely unpublished. Crocket died in [2006?].
Name of creator(s)	Richard Crocket
Access status	MIXED
Conditions governing access	Some materials are closed to public access.
Language	ENG