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Clare Winnicott had a seemingly inexhaustible fund of stories; here is the story of how she and Donald first met. In 1941, during the Second World War, Clare Britton, aged 35, had recently completed the psychodynamically based Mental Health Course for social workers at the London School of Economics and was working in the Midlands for the Regional Health Authority. Donald Winnicott was making weekly visits as consultant psychiatrist to five hostels set up in Oxfordshire to house young evacuees who were too disturbed to be billeted out into private homes. Clare recalls her briefing from her boss: ‘There's a difficult doctor working in that area. He comes down once a week. He doesn't believe in social work, because he likes to do it all himself. But it's really in quite a mess, and you must go and straighten the whole thing up’ (pp. 128-9).
Clare's approach to the task is a model for psychotherapists working as community based consultants. The staff were frustrated that Dr Winnicott was not telling them what to do. Clare suggested: ‘Well, let's never ask him what to do. Let's do the best we can in the present situation, and then, when he comes again, tell him what we did and see if he's got any comments to make on it and if we can therefore learn something from what we did’ (p. 129). Not content with enabling both the hostel staff and Winnicott to form an effective working relationship with each other at one remove from the children, Clare saw there was more to be done to shift Dr Winnicott into a more appropriate and effective position: 'One thing I did was to stop him eating all the children's rations in one meal! The staff were inclined to save all the best food for him, and I just slipped in one day, “I suppose you know