Community living

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 7th January 2009

Kate Chisholm reviews recents radio broadcasts

This was irresistible listening for the beginning of the year, when it’s still possible to believe that things might change, although at 11 to 11.15 p.m. it was broadcast far too late for those of us who semi-hibernate in the winter months. Thanks to iPlayer, I managed to listen to all five in one go, which took us from Robert Owen’s experiment in New Lanark at the beginning of the 19th century, through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the eugenics of Nazism, to the free sex (and emotional pain) of the Bloomsberries, the aesthetic ideals of the Bauhaus — and the Panacea Society of Bedford. Here the residents aspire to the discipline of ‘overcoming’, which is to turn yourself into a person who is comfortable for others to live with. In this way your neighbours will be prevented from sinning by becoming annoyed with you, as will you also, by not being annoying. What a brilliant rule for life. So simple, and yet so effective. One to try at home.

In State of Mind on Radio Four (Wednesday), presented by Claudia Hammond, we heard from those who had lived not in utopian, but in involuntary community — in the mental health institutions that existed from the Victorian Lunacy Act until the 1970s. If you were not ill already, they seemed designed to make you so, herding people together in vast turreted buildings, with slitty windows, behind which were dormitories with sometimes as many as 40 beds, locked doors, no escape, and no contact with the outside world. Not everyone was ill to begin with, just troubled, or unlucky, or, as one woman was told, ‘too remote’, She was incarcerated in a ward thoughtfully named ‘F6’ — Female 6.