ABSTRACT
The Tavistock in War Westfield College It was accepted, since the world learnt about the destructiveness of modern bombing, that our premises in the heart of London would not remain tenable for very long. It was therefore decided to evacuate on the outbreak of war to a suburb not likely to be a bombing target. An arrangement was made in good time with Westfield Women's College of the University of London in Hampstead that in the event of war we would occupy, furnished, one of their halls of residence, the University as a whole being scheduled for evacuation to various provincial centres. This was carried into effect. Most of the Committee records and some of the spare furniture were stored in a small office on the Store Street site which housed our Appeals Department. This was the one regrettable decision. Whatsoever was stored there was unfortunately destroyed by a later bomb. This is the main reason why the records for this history are so scanty; no correspondence, minutes of Council or of Committee meetings of pre-I939 survive. But our clinical records and some of our furniture were transferred on the very first day of the war by the co-operative effort of staff members, who somehow or other contrived to remain anonymous. We all suspected that a major share was taken by Ronald Hargreaves, by Winifred Doherty and by several others of the younger staff members, as well as by our secretarial and domestic staffs. The plan was that those staff members not designated under the National medical man-power plan for the Emergency Medical Service or the armed forces could choose to live as a community in the hostel-like building at Westfield, where by day their bedrooms would be their consulting-rooms, a common refectory would feed them, and where there were one or two largish rooms available for conducting any teaching activities and also
Our caretaker and cook, Mr and Mrs Harland, our loyal good friends since Tavistock Square, and their daughter, Mrs Betty Davis, agreed to transfer with us. Those electing to move in as residents were male and female members of our staff, including one or two of our refugee colleagues from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In 1939, within a few days of the outbreak of war, we received Dr Erwin Popper from Prague and his wife, Yana, at this stage an archaeologist, who soon took over the functions of house-mother. Dr Popper contributed to clinical work and later became also the consulting psychiatrist to the Czech Army in exile. Westfield was their first 'home' in England.
