Paul Pengelly 8 June 1937 to 4 June 2022

Paul Pengelly, a past staff member of what is now called Tavistock Relationships (TR), died aged eighty-four on 4 June 2022 following a brief illness. After National Service in the Royal Navy, undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Oxford and Cambridge, and a time as an Anglican Minister, he began his social work career in the Probation Service. As a Senior Probation Officer he undertook the Tavistock Clinic's Advanced Social Work training (1970-1971) and, having established ongoing training links with staff of the Institute of Marital Studies (IMS) (as Tavistock Relationships was once called) was himself recruited onto the staff in 1978 at a time when most new staff came from a public sector social work background.

His career at Tavistock Relationships spanned sixteen years until 1994 when he left to work part time as principal psychotherapist for the Bournewood Mental Health NHS Trust (1994-2002) with special responsibility for providing couple therapy. After leaving TR he served between 1997 and 2009

as a trustee of the parent organisation, The Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology. His private practice developed in this period involving some co-therapy work with Diana Daniell and he only relinquished therapeutic work in 2006 when retirement beckoned.

This brief outline does scant justice to the major contributions he made to the corporate life of TR and the Tavistock Clinic, to his important work as a trainer both within the organisation and beyond, and to his published work.

I first got to know Paul well when the two of us attended a Leicester Group Relations Conference in 1979. Whilst I floundered in this emotionally bewildering milieu, it was clear to me that Paul had a capacity to think organisationally, relationally, and intrapsychically without being upended. This ability to think in a multi-layered way was central to the Tavistock tradition and, in all the work that Paul subsequently unde