The Prophet of Psychiatry: In Search of Reg Ellery

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Preface

Madness has been part of the human condition from the very start. The activities that were distinctly human involved altered states of consciousness, hallucinations, time and space travel and communing with spirits in other dimensions. To the first awe-struck humans, the capacity to do these feats was neither an illness nor a handicap, but a gift from the gods. This was not a view that was to sustain when we forsook hunter gathering, but settled down to farm life and then built cities.

The old flat dry brown land was host to humans over 40,000 years ago. They came from the north and they settled, their souls searching for the spirits in the land. This only changed 200 years ago when the European arrived, dragging in their wake the wretched incarcerates of the rotting Thames prison hulks. If they were not mad before, many became mad in the terrible conditions they encountered. As convict scum, if they became madly violent or tried to kill themselves, they got more of the same: prison. The new settlers hacked and slashed out a society modelled on the old society they had left behind. Slowly they began to establish mad houses, called asylums, run by mad doctors called alienists. And the very old people of the land saw this and wondered about the way they dealt with restless spirits.

By 1923, psychiatry was scarcely a promising career and if you were told that a newly graduated doctor, lacking any better option, had taken a position as medical officer at the most notorious asylum in the country, you would be justified in having some doubts about his medical future. This is the story of one of those psychiatrists – one who was the most prominent of his day and displayed exceptional talent and creativity, now largely forgotten, his life was a palimpsest of his times, frequently putting him in the centre of events around him. It is not just the story of an eminent doctor, but one who displayed all the strengths and weaknesses that being human entails.

Such was the state of play in May 1923 when Reginald Spencer Ellery, the subject of our study, commenced his psychiatric career. What lay ahead could not have been predicted except as a dead certainty for professional obscurity.

That, however, is only the predicted narrative. He was different to the others. With an intense sensitivity from an early age, recognised only as a bidding to some higher order, after a more than usually callow youth, he received his calling under the most difficult of circumstances. Subjected to a judicial crucifixion, he emerged with steel and began the process of giving his message to those who would listen. It was a long and hard path, with many setbacks and, in the end, he was an isolated if not forgotten figure, a typical fate. But his message endured. He was the prophet of psychiatry.

The Prophet as Youth: The Father is Man to the Boy

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

James Joyce

Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint and heard great argument, about it and about, but evermore came out the same as in I went

Omar Khayam

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He came into the world in the afternoon of 12 August 1897 delivered with a pair of forceps by a general practitioner at Watson Avenue, Rose Park, an inner suburb of Adelaide. He was named Reginald Spencer Ellery (the second name was that of the philosopher) and received all the attention that would be given to a first son. During his life, he always called himself Reg. Four years later, the first-born son was followed by his sister Mavis³.

The Ellery family line originated in France – the name is synonymous with Hillary, meaning laughter – but the family were long settled in Cornwall. His grandfather, James Albert Ellery, married Julia Anna Moore and did well as a publican at Mount Gambier, ascending to be a council member and a racehorse owner.

Albert Ellery’s first son, Torrington George Ellery (mostly known as TGE⁴), was born on 23 June 1872, to be followed by six siblings. There is a village in North Devon named Torrington, which may have been the origin of his first name⁵. He was educated at Norwood Grammar School and Whinham College, North Adelaide, where he won a silver medal for classics and was Dux of the school. As an indication of his drive and ability, TGE got a law degree studying at night over seven years while working in an iron-monger’s shop. Melbourne Punch was to describe TGE as a notable exception to the rule that the very brilliant youngster seldom makes good in the rough world of maturity⁶.

TGE married Mabel Alice Wood on 10 September 1896. From a typical Australian background of the time, her family emigrated from England a generation earlier.

TGE became assistant to Thomas Worsnop, the Adelaide City Council town clerk, in 1890. Within a short time he replaced Guy Boothby (who went to London to become a novelist) as Private Secretary to the Mayor. Following Worsnop’s death in 1898, he became chief clerk. Worsnop’s successor Adam Wright was dismissed for embezzlement the following year, at the age of 27, TGE became Town Clerk of Adelaide, being selected over forty-seven applicants.

Punch said the position of Town Clerk required a person who must be a man of personality and distinctive ability. He must be possessed of initiative, recourse - an organiser, an administrator; and more than that, a business director of the city trading enterprises. TGE demonstrated all these qualities, following a reformist approach intended to place the city ‘well abreast of modern ideas in municipalisation’⁷. The Adelaide Register wrote that his ‘work is his hobby, and he is never so happy as when engaged upon it’⁸.

TGE left his mark on the city with improvements to the state roads as President of the Good Roads Association of South Australia; conversion of the horse tramway system to electricity that was recognised as a model service throughout the Commonwealth; installation of a refuse destructor for incinerating household garbage; a steam disinfector station for disinfecting the belongings of infectious disease sufferers; a central authority to control the quality of Adelaide’s milk supplies; the council’s health department employed a trained nurse employed to educate citizens about hygiene; and the city’s unhygienic privately-owned slaughterhouses replaced in 1913 by modern public abattoirs, erected and managed jointly by the city and suburban councils⁹. The new abattoirs were rather hyperbolically acclaimed as ‘the greatest civic enterprise in Australasia’. An exponent of the Greater Cities movement, TGE campaigned to amalgamate the city council with the surrounding local government bodies. Overcoming the parochial interests of the metropolitan councils, however, proved insurmountable and his vision never materialized.

Offered the post of town clerk of Sydney in 1901, TGE declined, suffering from insomnia¹⁰. Just why Melbourne appears to have superior soporific qualities to Sydney remains unclear and it is more likely that he had an episode of depression.

In a manner that was to characterise much of his son’s career, TGE created an environment of confrontation and controversy. This came to a head when charges were laid against him by disgruntled Adelaide butchers adversely affected by the abattoirs he instituted and, again presaging the future, were the subject of a Royal Commission into the matter. The Commissioner’s findings summed up the situation: the butchers found TGE’s manner autocratic and had difficulties negotiating with him, but the evidence did not support the charges against him¹¹. To be the subject of a Royal Commission, as his son was to find, is not a matter to be lightly shrugged off. It resulted in a darkening of [TGE’s] spirit and a break down in his health, proving to be the last straw before he moved on to another job in Melbourne.

In August 1915, TGE was appointed Town Clerk of Melbourne¹². Over the next eight years, he presided over unequivocally the finest municipal service in Australia. During his tenure, he improved milk and fish supplies, control of markets and rat destruction. He advocated municipal unification to improve control of utilities such as the tramways and electricity. He confronted noxious trades and the congestion and overcrowding in inner city areas—a cause pursued in a paper he contributed to the Australian Town Planning Conference in Adelaide in October 1917¹³. TGE was become vice-president of the Institute of Hygiene and Bacteriology and a fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute, London.

Widely respected for his ability and initiative, TGE inevitably set himself on a collision course with anyone who stood up to him. TGE did not suffer fools lightly; indeed, he did not suffer fools at all. The sign on his office door gave a clear indication of his attitude: Go to hell, I’m busy¹⁴. His authoritarian management style with reprimands, salary reductions, demotions and dismissals antagonised many staff.

TGE, no fan of the Irish Catholic ascendency, clashed with Archbishop Mannix over the St Patrick’s Day procession, concerned that it would cause civil unrest¹⁵. His most spectacular stoush was with no less a figure than John Monash, then heading the State Electricity Commission. The Melbourne City Council wanted to protect a source of revenue that was affected by SEC prices. TGE ran an Electrical Defence Committee to conduct a propaganda campaign against Monash. The ferocity of the dispute forced the state parliament to investigate the allegations against Monash and the SEC¹⁶. After forceful arguments by Monash, the select committee gave the SEC its complete support; TGE and the lord mayor, J. W. Swanson, came off a distinct second. It was another example of the Ellery tendency to crash, rather than crash through.

An voracious reader, TGE built up a large private library, which included numerous works on municipal law and administration and practical sanitary science. Something of a compulsive writer, constantly submitting articles to magazines like the Bulletin, he had a library of 3000 books which his son explored with interest and was later to replicate in spades.

His son called his father ‘combative, ambitious, largely self-educated and of iconoclastic frame of mind’. His unpopularity at work stemmed from being an unconventional thinker who had done a lot of reading, a freethinker who abandoned religious faith as an illusion. His rationalism and scepticism arose in adolescence when he asked his Sunday-school teacher: If God made the world, who made God?¹⁷. TGE’s intellectual heroes were Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley and the eponymous Herbert Spencer¹⁸. The latter was a man who built his entire philosophical system on the application of the laws of natural science to society, and his supreme law was the law of evolutionary progress.

TGE, highly intelligent, well read and assertive in his opinions, was frustrated by a role that he felt was well below his intellectual capacity. And in regard to the latter, he was very much a man of his time and place, espousing an intensely chauvinistic nationalism for the newly federated country. This was a view that Australia’s future depended on more people – but people of the right kind. The wrong kind, of the other hand, threatened to infiltrate the bloodline and dilute the basic stock. Just what sort of people constituted the wrong kind was indicated by his references to the book by Stoddard on The Rise of the Coloured Empires ¹⁹. In this, he was not alone; the same work was quoted by the character Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (the author listed as Goddard). There are a number of letters to his friend B A Roach in Adelaide, replete with literary allusions and melodramatic descriptions of the looming threat to the nation coming from those threatening from outside.

Ellery, with typical whimsy, described the home environment as a mixture of piety and pravity dominated by his father’s rational agnosticism and his mother’s passive acceptance of TGE’s views. She contented herself with teaching him his prayers and left it at that. Despite this, Ellery during childhood had mystical experiences when a vaguely inarticulate prayer to an unknown god would unfold in his mind. This led to him assuming an imaginary role of a clergyman, standing on the box at the front gate as if it were a pulpit and addressing an imaginary congregation.

Ellery went to East Adelaide State School until he was ten, an experience the future communist did not enjoy, describing it as a hoi polloi establishment where he was exposed to poverty and rough behaviour. Then as would be expected for any scion of the Adelaide establishment, he went to the prestigious Collegiate School of St Peter, usually called St Peter’s College.

Founded in 1847 as an Anglican institution, St Peter’s was the school in South Australia, if not Australia, judging by the number of Nobel laureates, Rhodes scholars and (not necessarily in the same order of credit) politicians and sportsmen²⁰. It was set out on grand lines following the tradition of English public schools. Ellery’s time there was to have a significant influence on him; his later comments reflect the mixture of ambivalence and sentiment that characterised his attitude towards so many institutions. It was run on religious lines that he felt was more orientated to the maintenance of power of the church than the teachings of Jesus Christ. The ethos was intended to produce young gentlemen who adhered to the concepts of virtue, chivalry and honour. Muscular Christianity manifested in a preoccupation with sport, as well as a macho bullying culture amongst the boys. This, to some extent, was fed by sexual frustration. Contact with suitable girls was only permitted at the chaperoned dances, but you could take them to the picture house on Saturday afternoons and then grabbed under their garments in an erotic enterprise governed alike by their incitement and their qualms²¹. Sex was constantly in mind of all the boys, fed, he said, by masturbation, tentative homosexual excursions, dirty jokes and indecent drawings on lavatory walls. Nevertheless, the manly virtues excluded the theft of maidenly chastity²².

In Cow, Ellery was to state that he despised the public school ethos, seeing the alliance of school, sport and church as an arm of the state to produce obedient future soldiers; the enforcement of sport was largely for the benefit of male teachers attracted to the developing bodies of their adolescent male charges. Yet he could not deny its influence on his mindset. It was constant in virtue, enduring in grace and … like a changeless goddess. As a moral force, it replaced his parents in protecting, nurturing and inspiring him.

His closest school friend was Rex Boundy who shared his interest in poetry and to whom he was to remain close for the rest of his life. Another friend, Ricky Cox, was always up to pranks, providing a model for later provocative behaviour

A master, for instance, once pinned up a list of classical annotations he wished the class to learn. By judicious culling from Lempiere and other sources, the young prig compiled a better one and pinned it up beside the official list - much to the boys’ delight and the master’s chagrin.

TGE, who had strong views on education, wanted his son to receive practical instruction to prepare him for adult life, such as astronomy, geology and drawing, rather than scripture and classical languages. He took up the issue with Reverend Henry Girdlestone, the headmaster of St Peter’s College, who refused to budge until Ellery’s final year when he was able to jettison Latin for physics, but ancient Hebrew history was still mandatory.

While Ellery found most schoolwork tedious, he enjoyed subjects like English, especially poetry. This was an indication of the literary focus that was to dominate his life. At some point, he realised the implications of his father’s large library and dived in to explore the contents: From this point he wanted knowledge more than anything else

Some stimulation was provided by his coach, Ida Heyne, a middle-aged teacher from Adelaide High School. A guide and a friend, he looked forward to the weekly sessions he spent with her:

She made the work interesting. But most of all she taught him an appreciation of English literature, showed him beauty in his own tongue that had previously passed unnoticed. In some way she touched a spark in him which soon became a living flame of love for the glories of what is perhaps the Englishman’s greatest heritage²³.

Two months earlier Miss Heyne had reported to TGE that Ellery’s progress in English and French were very satisfying…²⁴ He responded with a letter, thanking Miss Heyne for having awakened in him an undying interest in English Literature - an interest that was lacking in me before; through the poet Coleridge, the study of whose masterpiece we have just completed²⁵.

In his last year, he shared a desk with Howard Florey, who was to get the Nobel Prize for his work in penicillin. Two weeks before the end of Sixth Form occurred an incident that gives an indication of his attitude and the problems he was to get into during his life. Ellery claimed he accidently disrupted one of Reverend Girdlestone’s classes. Girdlestone took this badly, thinking Ellery was highly amused and inviting him to his study for a caning. Feeling this would be an undignified end to his senior year, Ellery declined the offer, and left the school

with a somewhat precipitate haste, unwept, unhonoured and unsung… with a smile in his heart which grew and spread over his whole countenance and, [which] as he left the old school’s precincts, became a merry chuckle when he thought of Henry Girdlestone waiting in his study for a timid tap at the door that would never come.

His father, not for the last time, had to intervene and spoke to the school, although he agreed with his son that a final-year student should not be subjected to such an undignified experience at the end of his year. Mancell (Ellery’s wife) later said that he was heart-broken at missing-out on the year’s valedictory ceremonies and missing the last chapel weighed heavily on him all his life²⁶.

On this note, he put his schooldays behind him.

Ellery proceeded to enrol at Adelaide University in 1915. He chose medicine, a course that seemed as remote to his literary tastes as bricklaying. The reason for the choice, he was later to claim, was his father’s insistence. As a self-made man, TGE regarded medicine as having the highest status of all the professions and, as he was funding the endeavour, that decided the matter. Noting Ellery’s doppelgänger attitude to the establishment all his life, his disavowal wears a little thin, and more likely that the idea of being a doctor was appealing to him and he did not consider the implications of what it implied any further.

Furthermore, it was an unsettling time for him. In August 1914, TGE had taken the prestigious position of Town Clerk of Melbourne and moved there with his wife²⁷, staying first at the Menzies Hotel (later known as the Windsor) before moving to 32 Martin Street, Elsternwick.

The Prophet at Study: The Dilettante Years

The medical school is full,

Of recruits there’s a terrible crop, sir,

And the end of the year will see many a tear,

And they’re nearly all to flop, sir.

Vera Jennings

…this was the nineteen-twenties, the age for youth to prove new freedoms and equalities, and these young people at their easels were, in the Melbourne of that time, the representatives of bohemia, the intellectual avant-garde of an era waiting to be proved.

George Johnson, My Brother Jack

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Signed up as a first-year medical student, Ellery’s arrival at university was overshadowed by a development that was to affect thousands of young men – the war. It was everywhere and impossible to ignore. More and more men, some of whom had been with him at school, were wearing khaki in public, and more than a few of them were never to return. Seeing friends in uniform was one thing; after Gallipoli, with its huge casualty lists, the situation was impossible to ignore and nothing was ever to be the same again in Australia.

Campus life at Adelaide University was limited, provincial and incestuous. As another psychiatrist, Aubrey Lewis, who commenced his studies there found, it was deeply conservative, parochial and prone to bigotry²⁸. Having led a protected life in the bosom of an indulgent family, boarding with one of his mother’s relatives, Ellery was more than a little unsettled.

With all of this going on, he was not going to be an academic highflyer and failed all his subjects except chemistry – oddly, as it is usually the most difficult to pass. This left him no option but to head off to Melbourne and move back in with his parents. In order to enrol at Melbourne University Medical School, he had to pass a foreign language examination, so he spent the summer holiday having French tuition with Joe Knowles, an amiable Bohemian, who helped him achieve his goal. On that note began the extended university stay that was to have such an influence on his life.

From its early days, Melbourne University leaned towards the sciences, medicine and engineering – hence its name of the Shop – and the demand for these courses escalated after the country went to war. For an idealistic young man with literary ambitions, an intense desire to learn the new ideas coming from overseas, he was in the right place at the right time. Melbourne University was regarded as the most dynamic campus in the country, a reflection of the progressive attitudes of the city. Radical ideas, in the guise of modernism, had been circulating in student circles and were accelerated by the war. Once it became evident that the British Empire and its dominions were locked into an appalling war of aggression against the Huns and their allies, the appeal of pacifism soared. For radicals, a war between competing empires was meaningless in moral terms. What was needed was a new world in which the corrupt and repressive old order was swept away. While communism already had an appeal, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 had the polarising effect of a lightening bolt toppling a church spire in one flash. The future, to anyone who was idealistic, passionate and committed to egalitarian goals, had arrived in no uncertain terms and anyone who could not go along with this was hopelessly reactionary or terminally repressed.

Vera Jennings relates how the students were affected by the war; the publication of the daily casualty rates in the papers was in everybody’s mind²⁹. All social activities aimed to raise funds for the Red Cross. There were no reserved occupations and men rushed to enlist when they turned eighteen. She describes the highlights of time as the award of a degree to Edward, Prince of Wales and a lecture by Ernest Shackleton in 1918. Students would be found at the Wattle Café, Blue Bird or Mia Mia restaurants. Cars were rare in those days. Transport to the campus was in the old tramcars which were slow but reliable. In attitude, the students were thoroughly British and a trip home meant going to the UK. Drugs of addiction were not heard of – there was a fuss when it was discovered that caffeine and aspirin was used before examinations.

Following the Armistice, the university returned to full life after its virtual hibernation during the war years, stimulated by the returned servicemen. It was a short-lived period of optimism that was to come crashing into ruins within a decade. The cultural trope was modernism, sweeping the old art before it. It went hand in glove with the new art and the new view of human nature. It was no longer acceptable to write about what one observed, or paint what one saw, what counted was the interior – what was happening in the mind of the artist or the subject. After Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Joyce wrote Ulysses, nothing was ever the same again. There was a blossoming of new cultural societies; a Public Questions Society was founded in 1918 and the Literature Club the following year.

It was into this academic fishpond that Ellery inserted himself in 1916. Far from being disconcerted by his provincial origins, his confident, articulate manner and physical appeal immediately attracted attention. He immersed himself in campus literary life, reading Rimbaud, Wilde and Rousseau. He adopted the image of an Oxonian dilettante, bohemian in outlook, speaking and writing in an overblown, highbrow style, presumably in homage to Oscar Wilde (or Sebastian Flyte?). In a short time, Ellery became a BMOC¹.

Arthur Angel A A Phillips³⁰, who started at The Shop in 1919, described him as a foreign acquaintance (meaning someone in another faculty) characterised by his readiness to cock elegant snooks at the bourgeoisie from whom he came³¹. Ellery, he stated, adopted a bohemian pose, wearing elegantly casual clothes and deploying airs and graces which were nearer to Oxonian practice than to the no-nonsensicality of Melbourne. Ellery was that rare hybrid, a medico who practised the art of writing³². He wrote Wildean verse - which was distinctly out of fashion at a time when the literary set were taken with war poets such as Wilfred Owen. Phillips was underwhelmed by Ellery’s writing. Years later when he encountered Ellery’s books, he noted that he still sprinkled his rhythmically structured sentences with colourful epithets, even when working in this field where a grey objectivity of manner is almost obligatory³³.

Campus social life was intense and Ellery threw himself enthusiastically into the rounds of drinking and partying. This included relationships with the opposite sex which, as far as can be known, were fleeting but enjoyable. Looking back on that time, Ellery had no doubt:

Leisure was the happy hoyden in those days. In her beguiling presence the distractions of a new city could not be easily put aside, more especially on warm evenings when textbooks seemed drier and more difficult than usual, and there was a hankering after patchouli and its promise of pleasure.

As Phillips observed, while his studied bohemian style may not have appealed to all, especially conservative males, there was no doubting his charismatic appeal and attractiveness to women.

In this sybaritic environment, it is no surprise that Ellery reprised his Adelaide first year by failing the same subjects again, having to do supplementary examinations over the summer holidays, one of the most dreary prospects imaginable for any student who wanted nothing more than to enjoy the lengthy break. However, ten weeks of intense but dreary effort to master the world of the microscope, the pulley and the herbarium succeeded in breaking the first-year nexus. He had finally broken in to medical school.

He commenced that great ritual of medical school life, the dissection of a body, something that had no great appeal.

Occasionally, in the dissecting room, someone would hurl a female breast at another student and thereby start a meat fight. He wanted to do the same thing with his pen. To throw an udder at an archbishop [as his father had perhaps] or disconcert a prima donna with a bad smell.

A greater attraction was Professor Alexander Osborne’s physiology lectures. Osborne, who was to be a significant figure in Ellery’s life, was an entertaining teacher, spicing up his lectures with witty comments such as responding to the late arrival of a student named Link with: The arrival of the missing Link. Aside from this, second-year studies had little appeal to Ellery, but there was the advantage that examinations were not required and he could, for once, enjoy the summer break.

With this unpromising beginning, why was Ellery doing medicine?

The medical student had always wanted to be a writer. All his happiest moments were associated with writing. Most of all he wanted to impress people - to shock them; to stagger them