Obituary

Arthur Barron joined the Hampstead Training Course in 1948, with the second group of students accepted for training, four years before the Clinic was opened in 1952. His professional life was devoted to the care and treatment of the most deprived, socially and emotionally neglected children in our society. His earliest work experience, in the innovative ‘Q Camp’, must have shaped the direction of his future work. ‘Q Camp’ was an environmental treatment centre for young men aged between sixteen and twenty-five with severe social and emotional disorders, run by David Wills. There was considerable interest from a small group of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists working at that time at the Institute for the Scientific Study and Treatment of Delinquency (the forerunner of the present Portman Clinic). They were concerned to discover how community living in a general atmosphere of freedom and understanding could facilitate the social adjustment of these young delinquents and perhaps make them more amenable to psychotherapy. This project ended prematurely with the outbreak of war, but in 1945, under the leadership of Arthur Barron, the ‘Hawkspur Camp’ was set up on similar principles to those of ‘Q Camp’ but for younger boys aged from eleven to fifteen.

In a paper ‘The institution as substitute home’ (New Era, Vol. 29, ), David Wills writes about the ‘rare gifts’ needed by workers in this field who provide substitute parental care. ‘Such people need to have a very real sense of vocation…. They must be…without false dignity or pompousness or exaggerated ideas about the importance of adults compared with children - they must have the rare virtue of humility.’ Arthur Barron had these gifts and virtues.

During the war Arthur had worked with evacuees and refugee children, especially those who could not cope with the break-up of family life and ended up in hostels for ‘maladjusted children’. He recognized the traumatic effects of separation on these children a