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DEAR SIR,
I hope you will allow me to pay tribute to a member of the British Society who rendered a very unique service to psychoanalysis.
Dr Tom Hayward died on 21 July 1985, aged 76. He is survived by his wife, by two sons (one a doctor), a daughter and six grandchildren. For many years he was a consultant psychiatrist at Shenley Hospital, North of London. He was an Honorary Member of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
If you asked Tom Hayward when his birthday was, he would reply: 'I was born on Lord Mayor's Day'. Brought up and educated in England, you might nevertheless wonder on which day Lord Mayor's Day fell. Tom's almost poker-faced expression of mild surprise that you did not know left you feeling that you should have known. I came to understand that this was his way of reminding you of the democratic institutions of this country, of their historical roots, and that they were not to be dismissed lightly.
The youngest son of a large family, he grew up in the impoverished circumstances of farming in Essex. In the early years of this century the farming communities were indeed impoverished, when not bankrupt. He recalled how, as a boy, a very strange man knocked on the kitchen door. Tom's mother let him in, fed him, gave him shelter for the night, and returned him to the mental hospital in the morning. Tom had asked who the man was and was told to mind his own business and go to bed.
Very many years later, one Saturday night at Shenley Hospital, a duty doctor was instructed on the telephone by a consultant psychiatrist to throw a woman out of the hospital. She was the distraught, perhaps mad, mother of a patient. The doctor, at a loss to know what to do, telephoned Tom. He came up to the hospital, fetched blankets from a ward, took the woman to his consulting room, made up a bed on his couch and tucked her in for the night.
Tom Hayward made no bones about the primary importance of nursing the psychotic patient and of the nursing relati