Christopher Beedell

Roger Clough

Christopher John Beedell, child psychologist, was born December 14 1924, and died August 24 2001. A pioneer in the theory of residential child care, his goal was to enable students to understand the behaviour of both children and their carers.

Christopher Beedell was a child psychologist and a pioneer in the theory of residential child care whose book Residential Life With Children became a classic.

Born in Somerset, and brought up on a farm in Devon, Chris was educated at Bishops Stortford School. During the second world war he registered as a conscientious objector, and spent a short time in Wormwood Scrubs before going to Bangor University to study chemistry.

It was at that point that he picked up a library book, published in 1941, The Hawkspur Experiment by David Wills, about an experimental youth camp in Essex. Wills was a pioneer of residential therapeutic work, and Chris was so inspired by what he read about Hawkspur that by the end of 1944 he was working there himself as a student helper.

This experience made a significant impact on his understanding of what could make residential living valuable and, in today's vocabulary, therapeutic.

At University College London, he went on to gain a first-class degree in psychology, while also spending time producing and directing plays. He then did a short stint as an actor at the Old Vic, where he handed spears to Alec Guinness.

In 1950, however, he moved to Bristol, starting work as a child psychologist at the child guidance clinic before his appointment as a lecturer at Bristol University. He stayed at Bristol until his retirement, when he was senior lecturer in social work, in 1985.

In his early days at Bristol, one of his first tasks was to develop a course for senior staff working in the newly emerging field of what is now known as residential child care. It was to become the focus of his life's work.

He was a great believer in the potential of children to grow and change: they needed to be understood and the conditions established in which they could discover their capacity. At the heart of his highly regarded book, Residential Life With Children (1970), is the notion that children need to be held, nurtured and so helped to develop and maintain personal integrity. The task for staff working with troubled and troublesome children was to create those conditions.

Chris made a major contribution to the theorising of residential practice. Others had written about their own work. But his book was the first to set out to capture the art and science of residential life: the creativity and the importance of practical detail, the “doing of good in minute particular", to adapt one of his favourite quotations from William Blake. He described the environments in which children could prosper and the methods that staff could use.

Much more recently, in 1992, he submitted evidence to the Warner committee into the selection and recruitment of staff in children's homes. He worked out some critical tests: Does the person like children? Can they play and be comfortably alongside children? Are they, at core, independent enough to withstand the batterings of children who are at the least adrift and may be very damaged and bewildered?

In addition, he was a great educator. The Bristol course, as it became known, was one of only two established by the Home Office to provide leadership in residential care. The tasks he set for students were models of how to help people search for understanding of both children and their own practice. He did not let things go, pushing himself and others to understand. Students were expected to use events to understand the behaviour of both children and staff, to understand themselves and to plan. Residential work consists of far more than reacting to children's behaviour.

A third area of his working life was as a consultant, colleague and friend to different residential establishments. Most significant of these was the Mulberry Bush School, in Oxfordshire, a special residential therapeutic school; he was a notable supporter of its founder, Barbara Dockar-Drysdale.

His last years had significant losses. He desperately missed Gill, his wife and lifelong companion, who died in 1997. He had been ill with prostate cancer for some years, and was frustrated that he lacked the energy to follow up his ideas. For example, he wanted to pursue an idea that what makes a “good" institution is “space for loving kindness"; and in this context we discussed why it was that St Peter's hospice, Bristol, where he spent occasional weeks, and where he died, was such a place.

The joys of his life were his four children, Jonathan, Joanna, Charlotte and Phoebe, all of whom survive him.

There are not many people of whom one might say, “I worked differently because of him." Chris was one.

This feature: The Guardian, Thursday 6 September 2001