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Display of digital documents on our online catalogue                                                

Here at Archives and Special Collections, we’ve a pretty exciting development to share: we have now completed the processing and cataloguing of our first born-digital archive collection (other than oral history interviews and lecture recordings) that is also fully available to view online!

The past year’s lockdown has been a good opportunity to focus on our digital records - both digital versions of records that are still safe in the store-rooms on campus, and those that were created digitally. At the start of 2021 we received an accession of a fully born-digital collection of papers from Archives friend, and retired speech and language therapist, Linda Armstrong relating to the history of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT), and the speech and language therapy profession in general (Collection reference: GB 249 ARM).

Full catalogue, and documents, is available here: https://atom.lib.strath.ac.uk/papers-of-linda-armstrong-relating-to-the-history-of-the-royal-college-of-speech-and-language-therapists

The papers comprise lists and analytical articles relating to the history of the College and the profession, such as early members, conferences, the changing name of the profession, and analyses of the College publications. The records themselves were researched by Linda Armstrong, and some collaboration with Jois Stansfield, between 1999-2021 using the papers of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists: both those held at our archive, and those still held by RCSLT.

What is particularly exciting about this collection is that Linda, who created the records, is happy for them to be accessed online and so once we processed the files through our digital preservation software, we were able to attach copies of the documents themselves to our online catalogue, so when you search for these items in the catalogue, you may also access them directly.

Digital preservation work-flow for Linda’s files

We have seen an increasing demand for digital access to our collections in the last few years, and especially during lockdown in the past year. For many reasons, it is very difficult to provide online access to our physical collections as well as to some of our digital collections. The cost and time involved in digitising large amounts of paper records is huge, and so we can only do this on a small scale. Also, some digital files cannot be shared online due to sensitivity and data protection or copyright issues. It has been very exciting, therefore, to process a collection that can be made fully available online.

Image ref: RCSLT/11/2

The papers themselves make a great companion to the papers of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, for which we recently completed the catalogue and will be a great source for those studying the history of speech and language therapy.

We would like to thank Linda Armstrong very much for depositing the collection, making it fully accessible, her help during its cataloguing, and for her research into the history of the College and profession. Last year we featured many of her fascinating blog-posts in honour of the anniversaries of the College and of teaching speech and language therapy at the University.

This may seem like a simple question but there have been many different lists of their names over the decades. Dr Linda Armstrong and Professor Jois Stansfield think they may have the definitive answer.

Towards the end of the second world war, the amalgamation of the British Society of Speech Therapists (BSST) and the Association of Speech Therapists (AST) produced the College of Speech Therapists. This unification had been under discussion before the outbreak of war. The Board of Registration of Medical Auxiliaries (BRMA) forced the issue in 1942. It would only deal with one qualifying body for any profession and had opted in speech therapy’s case for BSST, thereby excluding the other organisation’s members from its register.

Linda searched unsuccessfully for a list of CST’s Founder Fellows (FF) in various minutes and other documents from the time (now held in Strathclyde University’s Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists’ (RCSLT) historical paper collection):

Speech (BSST’s journal), including reports from BSST AGMs and lists of its Members and Associates

Speech Therapists’ Interim Committee minutes

minutes of the Remedial Section of the Association of Teachers of Speech and Drama (AST from 1943)

AST annual report

CST Provisional Council, Council and Executive minutes

First CST AGM 6.1.45 (the formal inauguration event of the unified professional body).

Other potential written sources from the time, which aren’t in the RCSLT collection include BSST’s Council/Executive minutes, BSST’s monthly Bulletin, AST membership lists and Joint Council minutes.

Linda had great hope that CST’s original Memorandum and Articles of Association would reveal which of the members signed them (and they would be the FF). However, that document isn’t in the Strathclyde collection. Fingers were crossed that the Company Secretary has a copy and that it could be accessed once RCSLT HQ staff return to work after Covid lockdown. Minutes of CST Council from 14 September 1973 revealed a blow to this prospect. An accompanying paper notes that the FF names aren’t listed in the first Articles. Thwarted!

The lists of CST’s FF compiled over the decades didn’t help either, eg those in Bulletin in 1959 and 1974, letters from eminent members in the 1970s, the Annual Report 1990-91, the 1995 RCSLT History and the last published and available RCSLT Directory of 2004. These mostly contain different numbers, some different names and occasionally differentiate Founder Fellows from Fellows Enrolled on Foundation. They repeatedly offer eighteen though as the number of FF. CST’s 1943-44 Provisional Council minutes however show that it consisted of only eight members:

Eileen MacLeod, Beryl Oldrey (Hammond) and Winifred Kingdon Ward from BBST

Silvia Pick (Hudson-Smith), Honor Baines (Boome) and Joan van Thal from AST

the secretaries Amy Swallow and Elizabeth Wood respectively.

The only contemporary written evidence Linda found in the RCSLT collection to confirm who were the FF is from the two sets of minutes of the Remedial Section of the Association of Teachers of Speech and Drama (reconstituted as AST later in 1943 – but that’s another story). They elected six members to be their CST FF in mid-1943.

[Extracts of Remedial Sub-committee minutes. Ref: RCSLT/1/1.]

Linda collated information from 14 different contemporary and more modern sources (up to 1995) and plotted all the names which were identified at least once. This produced 35 names, five of whom we know definitely weren’t FF.

Meanwhile, Jois searched the National Registers of Medical Auxiliary Services – Speech Therapy, published annually by the Board of Registration of Medical Auxiliaries under the auspices of the British Medical Association (BMA). In the 1944 edition speech therapists are designated as FCST or LCST for the first time, i.e. Fellow or Licentiate of the College of Speech Therapists. 27 FCSTs are listed - according very well with Linda’s list of 30 possible FFs from RCSLT sources.

[ Image reproduced courtesy of: British Medical Association. Citation: The National Register of Medical Auxiliary Services. Speech Therapists (NRMAS-ST). 3rd edition (London: BMA, 1944).]

The register confirmed that two of Linda’s list of 30 weren’t FF.  That just left the question of Dr Boome, elected FF in 1943. He was a medical doctor and so wouldn’t have appeared as a speech therapist registered with BRMA. He must have been given an award by CST as he led, championed and supported speech therapists so much at the time (he even married one!) and wasn’t one of the doctors awarded Honorary FCST in CST’s early days. His obituary in CST’s journal is clear that he was a FF.

Our current best guess then is that there were 28 FF (named below) – the 27 practising speech therapists listed in the 1944 register as FCST plus Dr Boome. It’s ironic that this list was derived from a BMA document, not from a CST one!

 CST’s Founder Fellows

BSST      Margaret Elizabeth Badcock (married name - Eldridge).

AST        Honor Mary Stanhope Baines (Boome)

AST        Dr Edward James Boome

BSST      Ethel Edna Brewitt

AST        Joan Dakin

AST        Aileen Annesley Dance 

BSST      Ethel Mary Dolman

BSST      Muriel Walton Ferrie

BSST      Dorothy Marion Fleming

AST        Daisy Gwynneth Harries

BSST      Winifred Kingdon Ward

AST        Ida Margaret Shadforth Knight

AST        Grace Elizabeth Lloyd

BSST      Lionel Logue

BSST      Eileen C MacLeod

BSST      Anne Hutcheson McAllister (who founded the Glasgow School of Speech Therapy)

BSST      Muriel Mary Morley

BSST      Beryl Oldrey (Hammond)

BSST      Mabel Victoria Oswald

AST        Silvia Phyllis Pick (Hudson-Smith)

AST        Dorothy Mary Roe (MacDonald-Heffernan)

AST        Hester Rosser

AST        Dr Leopold Stein

BSST      Amy Swallow

BSST      Arthur Percy Tolfree

AST        Joan van Thal

AST        Joyce Lucy Wilkins

BSST      Doris Wilson

Those in bold above sat on the first CST Council – ‘the 18’?

Dr Linda Armstrong tells us about the history of the Jansson memorial lectures, a biennial speech and language therapy lecture series that ran from 1962-1999, in her latest guest blog-post. 

Miss Gladys Astrild Jansson (1886-1960) was one of the early professionally-trained UK speech therapists. I knew of her more from a long-lasting lecture series in her name than from other aspects of her life or speech therapy career and so was interested to learn more about her. On her death on 25 July 1960, she left £500 in her will to the College of Speech Therapists. That amount in 2020 would be worth over £11,500. College’s Council decided to fund the delivery of a series of lectures by eminent speakers from the interest accruing from investment of the bequest. The series lasted from 1962 to 1999.

Although the first lecture was a stand-alone event, later lectures were often tied in with the AGM, a refresher course, conference or other celebration. For example, the third in 1966 was planned to coincide with the College’s ‘Coming of Age’ celebrations (21st birthday). Its cost was equivalent to about £600 today.

I’ve not come across any evidence yet of a lecture being given in 1986 and only partial information for the one in 1978. Some of early lectures were audio-recorded (the recordings are still held by College). Many in the series were published in the professional journal and can be read at Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections. Most of the speakers were male. Betty Byers Brown was the first – and only – speech therapist to give the Jansson Lecture.

What of Miss Jansson herself though? I was very lucky to find that one of the Jansson lectures began with an extensive biography of her life and career. Its publication in the British Journal of Disorders of Communication (Wyke, BD (1969) Deus ex machina vocis – an analysis of the laryngeal mechanism of speech. British Journal of Disorders of Communication 4(1), 3-25.) also shows her portrait and photograph (pictured below). She was very well-educated in London and travelled abroad as a young woman, both to France to learn the language and later to recover from illness in Switzerland. In the first world war she worked as a nursing volunteer. This sounds much like the story of many of the very early UK speech therapists who were from very comfortable backgrounds.

Miss Jansson was an associate member of the British Society of Speech Therapists (BSST) from 1936 and a member of the College of Speech Therapists from its foundation in 1945. I was amused to see the first part of her address in a 1936 list of BSST members shown in the journal Speech was ‘Havering’. To a Scot (…and to fans of The Proclaimers), this word has connotations related to a form of communication, so in some ways it seems very fitting - but probably doesn’t match Miss Jansson’s conversational style. Of course, our addresses wouldn’t be given out in this public forum now.

Before training as a speech therapist under Miss Kingdon Ward in the early 1930s, she ran a school. She was a member of what became the College’s Research Committee in the mid to late 1940s. Miss Jansson spent her long clinical career in Bath, the first speech therapist in the area.

Miss Winifred Kingdon Ward wrote such a very touching appreciation in Bulletin, I’ve reproduced part of it here: 

Miss Jansson ‘was one of the oldest of our speech therapists, and was one of those who helped to blaze the trail for later generations. … She had a charming, wild-rose complexion, which gave her face a look of freshness, and which lasted right on into her later years … remarkable staying-power … Her constitution was that of a highly nervous, over-tense person, which made life difficult for her to cope with … she not only showed herself to be extremely quick in imbibing facts … she possessed very considerable knowledge of psychology and allied subjects, gained both from her studies and from observation. Her intellectual ability was of a high order, while at the same time she showed an exceptional degree of insight into her patients’ difficulties. …When the London Hospitals School (..) of Speech Therapy was founded in 1942, Miss Jansson was appointed Lecturer in Social Science … This was the first introduction of the subject into speech therapy training courses. … Those of us who had known ‘Jan’ for so long … will greatly miss her. … That she was almost unknown to the younger generation of speech therapists is, I think, mostly due to her quiet unobtrusiveness and self-effacement. She simply was not capable of pushing herself in any way, to her the work, and that only, was the thing.’

Our Speech and Language Therapy friend, Dr Linda Armstrong, has been continuing her research and has uncovered the fascinating story of ‘Betty’ Stark, adventurous speech and language therapist 1940s-1970s.

I’ve just had the most interesting ‘journey’ finding out more about Betty Stark … while staying at home. There is information about the first fifteen or so years of her professional career in various types of Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists’ documents held at Strathclyde University Archives and Special Collections (committee minutes, the journal and Bulletin). To find out more about Betty in recent weeks though, I’ve been to the 2002 exhibition ‘On top of the world: Scottish Mountaineers at Home and Abroad’ at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, to Scotland’s People at the National Records of Scotland, to the Himalayas and to the headquarters of the American Speech and Hearing Association in Maryland (currently in coronavirus lock-down like us) - all without opening my front door.

Her name is probably not familiar to many of today’s speech and language therapists, in comparison with some of her contemporaries. Nevertheless, Betty Stark’s contribution to the profession - and her mountaineering achievements - should be remembered and applauded.

Betty was born Rachel Elizabeth Stark and used various forms of her first names throughout her life. In the mountaineering world, she seems to have been known as Betty. In the 1940s and 50s she was known, at least professionally and in publications, as Elizabeth. By the late 1950s and on her emigration to USA, she was published as Rachel E Stark. I don’t know why her first name adapted over time, but wonder if it was tied in with her developing and changing professional identity. She maybe continued to be called Betty informally.

The Glasgow School of Speech Therapy (now part of the University of Strathclyde) is 85 years old in 2020. Betty was one of its early graduates. Its historical records are also held at the University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections. She studied there in the final years of the second world war and became a Licentiate of the College of Speech Therapists in early 1946. By 1950, she had acted as editor for two issues of Bulletin and in the following decade published articles in the College of Speech Therapists’ newsletter on disparate topics. For example, one from 1953 uses both audit and research to examine the effectiveness of three sessions of speech therapy per week. This built on previous work by Maud Wohl in Dunbartonshire. Today’s paediatric speech and language therapists will recognise the benefits and challenges of delivering this type of service. In 1958, an evaluation of the effectiveness of speech therapy for children with dysfluency focuses on prognostic indicators. In the same year, she shows lyrical and humorous talents in a poem called ‘A Cautionary Tale’ about how Jock Tamson (here a tape-recorder hirer!) won over a phonetician with a bag of conversational lozenges. This was published in November, not on April 1st.

Mountaineering was one of her hobbies. In 1955, Betty was part of a group of three Scottish women who climbed a then unnamed peak of 22,000 feet in the Himalayas, without oxygen and supported by porters and Sherpa guides. She spoke about this experience to speech therapists on at least two occasions. At the Scottish Area meeting in November 1955, Dr McAllister (Director of the Glasgow School) 

remarked that very early in her acquaintance with Miss Stark she had discovered these qualities of courage, enthusiasm and leadership which she had brought to bear on the expedition. (Bulletin No. 58, December 1955)

Image above copyright HarperCollins- reproduced with kind permission of archive.

Betty also gave a presentation supported by coloured slides at College’s 1957 AGM. The expedition was partly funded by Collins, who published an account of it in the book ‘Tents in the Clouds’ co-authored by Betty. When I contacted Collins (now HarperCollins) to ask permission to use the picture of Betty from it in this blog-post, I was delighted to find out that a recent intern in their archives department had chosen this book to write about in a blog last year!

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/word-lovers-blog/new/from-the-archives-the-cloak-and-dagger-expedition,556,HCB.html 

Betty’s mountaineering achievements continue to feature in exhibitions, talks and mountaineering blogs long after her death.

Betty’s award of Fellowship of the College of Speech Therapists in 1963 was for her thesis ‘The incidence and nature of stammering in educationally sub-normal children’ [now children with learning disabilities]. By that time, she had already emigrated to the USA. I’m not sure of the reason for this but within a few years she had received a Masters degree in speech pathology from Northwestern University and a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma Medical Centre, so it may have been for career development. At that time, most speech therapists in UK qualified with diplomas and none had yet graduated from a degree-level course. Her post-graduate studies would have been quite exceptional here in the mid-1960s.

I’ve only found one article by Betty in College’s professional journal. It appeared in 1978 when the journal was called the British Journal of Disorders of Communication and was about her innovative work in infant speech development. She specialised in speech and language development and disorders in children, writing many articles and editing at least one book on this fundamental aspect of speech and language therapy work.

Article image:  BJDC (1978) 13/1, 41-47.

She had a long and illustrious research and academic career in the USA, including at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and the Kennedy Institute of Baltimore. Latterly, Betty was Professor of Audiology and Speech Sciences at Purdue University from 1987 to 1991. Her name continues to be lent to a professorial post there (Rachel E Stark Distinguished Professor).

We are delighted to present another guest blog-post from Dr Linda Armstrong, who continues to research the history of speech therapy in the UK. 75 years to the day the first conference of the College of Speech Therapists began, Linda revisits the programme.

I find it almost unbelievable that the infant College of Speech Therapists was able to hold a four-day conference in London while the second world war was still ongoing. The pioneers of the speech therapy profession were definitely following the government’s advice to keep calm and carry on! The last bomb fell on Britain only at the end of March 1945. Blackout conditions were still being enforced and conference planning was not plain-sailing:

The preparations for the conference were made while V-weapons fell around us; in one case at least the Committee all dived under the table with remarkable precision and synchronisation of movement and emerged a few seconds later to continue the business without comment.

I was able to plot the planning of the first national conference of the new speech therapy professional body through the minutes of College’s Provisional Council. These form part of the RCSLT historical records now held by the University of Strathclyde’s Archives and Special Collections. The genesis of this conference was at a meeting of the Provisional Council at the beginning of February 1944, when the desirability of a speech therapy conference in spring 1945 was agreed. The matter was held over for further consideration to the next meeting – the committee had many other pressing matters in getting the new College up and running. It formed a conference committee, which reported their progress to the Provisional Council. By the beginning of October 1944, the Provisional Council agreed the final programme and for the conference organising committee to send out invitations and to proceed with all arrangements.

The conference venue at the Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole Street, London was not too shabby! [Image wikimedia commons]

Besides speech therapists, there were delegates from the fields of medicine and education. Unfortunately none of the available sources show exactly how many people attended the conference or where they came from around the UK.

King George VI sent a telegram in reply to one sent by the College offering a loyal message. The first Chairman of College, Miss Eileen MacLeod, read it out at the beginning of the second day of the conference. It was received with applause. This reflects the early association that the College had with the royal family, many decades before it was afforded royal status.

Two of the papers presented on the first day were, ironically, on the history of speech therapy. Today’s speech and language therapists will recognise other topics covered in the presentations, e.g. normal voice and aphonia, aphasia and dysarthria, cerebral palsy, group therapy, speech development, even if the terminology used differs. Of course, the range of client-groups then was narrower than now.

I see from the programme that the conference dinner was in a French restaurant in Soho on the evening of the first day, about a mile from the conference venue. I wonder if there was no afternoon session that day to give the delegates time to get ready for the dinner. Apparently most of the delegates attended it. Hopefully nobody tripped or fell afterwards in the blackout.

Many excellent and witty speeches were made by distinguished guests, and all enjoyed the opportunity of meeting one another socially.

[Image of Chez Auguste reproduced with permission of:  Mary Evans / Photo Union Collection]

One of the main differences between the 1945 conference and more modern ones is that the sessions chairs were all male medical doctors. It was good to see, though, that most of the presenters were speech therapists. Some of the papers given were published later in the College’s journal Speech and can be read at the University of Strathclyde’s Archives and Special Collections. Other papers are given in full in the conference report.

The report style, too, is different from today. It consists of a short descriptive summary of each session including the papers presented and the discussion they promoted. However it also tells us that there was a very busy bookstall between sessions, presumably with a much smaller range of books than speech and language therapists can now access. There was discussion in Bulletin, the College’s news sheet (now a monthly magazine) about the cost of a copy of the report. The second issue of Bulletin in June 1945 carried a summary of the conference, while the fifth outlined why the cost of the report had risen from 2/- to 5/- (25p). Issues of Bulletin can also be accessed at Strathclyde University.

The length of time each speaker was given ranged from half an hour to an hour, which might seem a luxury these days. Audio-visuals included blackboard sketches and charts as well as a film on tongue movements shown at the Academy Cinema on the Saturday morning of the conference. An audiometer was demonstrated, no doubt cutting-edge equipment at the time.

It’s amazing really that the conference organisers managed to pull together and pull off this conference in war-time! At the end of the conference, the proposed vote of thanks was carried with acclamation. 

Hot off the press: our latest collection description to be made available on our online catalogue is that of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists! This comes just in time for the 75th anniversary of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists this year! This year also sees the 85th anniversary of the teaching of Speech and Language Therapy at the University.

You can find the catalogue at this web address: https://atom.lib.strath.ac.uk/royal-college-of-speech-and-language-therapists-records

The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) is the UK speech and language therapists’ professional body that provides leadership and sets and maintains standards for the education, clinical practice, and ethical conduct of UK Speech and Language Therapists. The body was established in 1945 when the Association of Speech Therapists and the British Society of Speech Therapists joined forces.

The history of the profession is a fascinating one with diverse roots including the dramatic arts as well as the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from head wounds and ‘shell-shock’ following WWI. The collection, donated to the University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections by the College in 2017, is a great record of the beginnings of the organisation and its development. Minute books date to as far back as 1942, charting the formation of the College, and continue right up to 2002 recording the key directions and decisions of the college through the decades.

Another set of interesting records are copies of examination papers for the Diploma of Licentiateship from 1948-1988, showing us the questions candidates were examined upon. An extensive run of the organisation’s journal can also be found within the collection, starting at the first ‘Journal of the British Society of Speech Therapists’ in 1935 and spanning up to the ‘Journal of the College of Speech Therapists’, 1981 editions. This provides brilliant evidence of over five decades of research in the field and represents a large volume of speech and language therapy discoveries.

The collection is of further significance to Strathclyde as a founder member of the College, and its first President, Dr Anne McAllister can be said to have kick started the Speech and Language Therapy Profession in Glasgow, and indeed Scotland. After Dr McAllister graduated MA from the University of Glasgow in 1917, she trained as a teacher at Stow College and was appointed lecturer in Phonetics there in 1919, and subsequently at the teacher training college at Jordanhill. She and a colleague set up the first University Speech clinic in Scotland in 1927 and the case load grew so rapidly that she started courses for the training of speech therapists in Glasgow. She established the Glasgow School of Speech Therapy in 1935 and was Director until 1964. After Jordanhill merged with the University of Strathclyde in 1993, The Glasgow School of Speech Therapy eventually became the Speech and Language Therapy course at the University.

Researchers are welcome to browse the catalogue and come and access the collection in our reading room. Please e-mail: [email protected] and we look forward to booking you in. Information on how to access our collections can be found here: http://guides.lib.strath.ac.uk/archives/access