James Robertson 1911 — 1988

James Robertson, who died unexpectedly on New Year's Eve 1988 after a short illness, will be remembered particularly for his immense achievements for the welfare of children in hospital. There will be few who are not familiar with his series of films on young children suffering separations from their mothers in varying circumstances.

Jimmy Robertson did not have an easy start in life and was always impecunious until the later stages of his career. But he had great determination and natural gifts. Starting off in the tenements of Glasgow and leaving school at fourteen, he achieved his education by his own efforts, taking a Social Science Diploma at a working men's college in Birmingham. It was at Cadbury's Bournville factory that he met his future wife, Joyce. Jimmy had strong convictions and was a pacifist in the second world war and worked, as did Joyce, with Family Service Units in the East End. He joined Anna Freud's war-time nursery, where Joyce was then working, not initially as a social worker, but as a firewatcher and general “man about the place”, but he gradually took on more social work duties. Lack of money was for a time an impediment to his training as a Psychiatric Social Worker but he eventually gained a place at the London School of Economics on the merits of an essay he had written.

When I first met Jimmy in 1948 at the Tavistock Clinic, he was the first member of John Bowlby's research team, investigating the effects on young children of separation from the mother. I joined this initially small team a year later and for a time had to share a minute room with Jimmy in the old Tavistock building. Jimmy tolerated this intrusion into his small domain with customary good humour and fortunately we were both engaged on field work for much of the time. Jimmy was observing first hand the reactions of young children being left in hospital without parents. In these “post Bowlby”, “post Robertson” days, it is difficult to remember that children used to be hospit