Remembrance: William Rivers and Lois Vidal

Two people with close relationships with Bethlem Royal Hospital had fascinating, and very different, experiences in the First World War. W (William) HR Rivers worked at Bethlem briefly in 1893 as an unpaid clinical assistant as part of his early work in the field of psychiatry. These assistants were usually trained doctors seeking specific psychiatric experience shortly after completing their degrees, but Rivers was actually already an accomplished professional and academic who had worked at St Barts and had been elected as a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. His time at Bethlem was cut short by illness, but formed the bedrock of his understanding of psychology. He went on to lecture at Cambridge and was founder and editor of the British Journal of Psychology.

Rivers is today best known for his appearance in Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ trilogy of novels, which fictionalise the work he undertook at the Craiglockheart military hospital near Edinburgh in the First World War. Here he met and worked with the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, amongst many other servicemen he had to restore to ‘fitness’ for combat. Although aware of what were ‘modern’ psychological treatments for the time, which often revolved around ideas of rest, exercise and routine, Rivers was also a compassionate and sensitive doctor who sought to tailor his treatments to his patients as individuals, bringing a humanity to his practice.

Lois Vidal had been a patient in Bethlem as a teenager, and grappled with mental health issues throughout her life. She remained in touch with her doctors at Bethlem, especially John Porter Phillips, even when not in the Hospital, often seeking reassurance and advice from them. Her autobiography, Magpie, written in only a couple of days, records an extraordinary life of adventure, accompanied by dramatic exultations and deep depressions. We hold a copy in the Museum.

However, it doesn’t record much of her activities in the First World War, except in vague terms of working in administration just behind the front lines in France and getting into and out of various different scrapes- a feature of the book as a whole that reads as quite a revealing aspect of Lois’ attitude to life. Recent research has suggested that Lois was actually working in the Secret Service, the forerunner to Mi5- she was undoubtedly clever and resourceful enough for this to be true. Sadly, after the War she was not able to move beyond her increasingly severe depressions, coming back into Bethlem a number of times in the 1930s and dying in Coulsdon Hospital in the late 1940s.