Cynthia Pell

Cynthia Pell was born on the 28th of March 1933 into an affluent family. Her father was a structural
engineer. During her early childhood she lived in Finchley, then at their second home in Herne Bay.
In 1940 the Pells moved to Dorset to avoid the German bombs that were falling on London. When
Cynthia was eleven she joined her sister at boarding school, Hall School, at Wincanton, in
neighbouring Somerset. In 1948 Cynthia won a painting competition in a national Sunday paper. Her
school exam results were exceptional and her family had high hopes for her art career as first she
attended Bournemouth Art School then at Camberwell. In her second year she met Ron Weldon, who
besides being a painter was a jazz musician who played the trumpet. After their parents disapproved
of a holiday the couple planned to spend together Ron and Cynthia married. Cynthia became distanced
from her mother.i

In in 1955 Cynthia and Ron stayed in France for a few months living with three friends in a farmhouse
at St Montant, in Provence. A small artistic community, including Evelyn Williams, they spent their
days painting. Cynthia painted portraits of the local inhabitants, and made field trips to sketch their
farmhouses, painting from her sketches back at the farmhouse. On a day out with a visiting friend
Cynthia sketched French Gypsies in Avignon. The artists lived a frugal life. Towards the end of their
stay they lived off the charity of farmers who brought them vegetables that Cynthia cooked.
Back in London Cynthia showed her work at the Beaux Art Gallery. Now ill but undiagnosed, she
burnt unsold work on the pavement. She started to lose weight.ii She left Ron. Fay Weldon wrote her
account of what happened when she moved in with Ron Weldon. She did not have to but she did, in
her semi-autobiographical book,’Mantrapped’iii.
‘’Poor Cynthia, in retrospect! It had been her home, her bed, her cupboards to clean and her step
daughter, not mine, to care for. But what real attention did I give her? None. I would drink my morning
coffee, made sinfully and wastefully strong – now I was out from under my mother’s eye I had a taste
for excess – from the little brown cups Cynthia’s mother had made her as her wedding gift to that
happy couple. The Pells were wealthy; Cynthia’s mother was artistic and able to afford a kiln. I
relished the sense of victory. In the Fifties women were in competition; we had little sense of
sisterhood. So I moved the clothes from the closet, and was glad when Ron took down the painting
rack in which both their paintings sat, gathering dust. Friends said – though they seldom mentioned
her in my presence – that she painted better than he did. He painted on the backs of her canvases for
a while and then gave up altogether’’.

I thought it was very honest and candid of Fay Weldon to write that. Fay Weldon was a single mother
in an era when people were even less tolerant than they are today. She goes on to say that her writing
is not therapy, but when she wrote another short story ‘A Knife For Cutting Mangoes’iv she did not
realise she was writing from her own experience. Again Fay Weldon presents an honest account of a
women who has moved into another woman’s home after a marriage break up. The woman in the
short story is scornful of her predecessor, justifying her contempt with the evidence she finds, ‘she
even had a knife for cutting mangoes’ she says, never once saying where ‘Chloe’ is. Chloe has walked
out saying keep the lot, but what Fay Weldon wrote about Cynthia Pell raises issues still relevant
today. Patients still forfeit their property, artists still lose work when they are admitted to psychiatric
hospital, and even lose their human rights. Not all do, but some do.

After her marriage broke up, Cynthia travelled around France then stayed with her sister, who had a
flat in Paris. When her sister went away and left her to look after the flat Cynthia let her American
boyfriend Ben stay with her. There were rumours of drug use. When Cynthia returned to London she
lived alone in bed sits in Fulham and Putney. Perhaps self-medicating, she took pep pills and sleeping
tablets that probably aggravated her illness. She lost more weight. Cynthia was thin, claiming to have
spent months living on a diet of apples. Eventually Cynthia Pell was admitted to St Bernard’s
Hospital, formerly Hanwell, in 1961. While Cynthia wrote to her father, her relationship with her
mother broke down completely.v
In 1960 the mental health service was full of optimism for the first community care initiative and for
the new antipsychotics that they thought would enable patients to leave, and live outside, the hospital.
Under the direction of Enoch Powell then Minister of Health some patients were discharged back into
the community. At St Bernard’s the Deputy Medical Superintendent Dr Donald Blair took to the new
initiative and in 1962 published ’Modern Drugs for the Treatment of Mental Illness’, considering it
to be the only book on the subject. vi Cynthia, diagnosed bi-polar, was prescribed various
antipsychotics and the anti-depressant Tofranil. She was also given ECT.vii By 1964 Dr Blair was
writing to the British Medical Journal, full of praise and optimism for St Bernard’s industrial therapy
department, one of many introduced in the old asylums to prepare patients for employment in the
outside world. Here patients could earn a few pounds by working in a sheltered factory environment.
The work was usually simple assembly or packing. St Bernard’s also offered conveyer belt, store
keeping and clerical work.viii How were patients supposed to save for their new life in the outside
world on the paltry wages paid? But Dr Ronald Blair was supportive of most other psychiatric
therapies, and Cynthia painted, drew and wrote letters while at St Bernards. Both her sister Barbara
and her friend and artist Evelyn Williams took Cynthia in for weekend leave and then when this
became impractical visited her at St Bernard’s, but they were distressed by what she saw. ix The
community care programme met with unforeseen problems.

Placed in hostels, group homes and bedsits, patients often neglected to take the anti-psychotic
medication that was supposed to be liberating them from the hospital regime. The medication had
unpleasant side effects. But patients were not coping in the community on or off medication. Patients
suffering from bi-polar disorder still returned to the hospital after a manic phase in the community
for the rest cure that post manic phase illness demands. Cynthia became a victim of the unforeseen
revolving door syndrome and was in and out of hospital throughout the sixties. Cynthia attempted
suicide, gradually becoming more and more institutionalized, often referred to the locked ward where
nurses would insist that patients took their medication whether they wanted it or not.x
The industrial therapy departments failed to deliver the promised follow on employment. Employers
were reluctant to hire patients in the community. By the seventies the community care programme
was a mockery of its intentions. The industrial therapy departments became places where patients
could work and socialize but few moved on to outside employment. xi Patients were returning to the
wards putting an unforeseen demand on hospital resources. Much later in 1993 Enoch Powell would
admit that the community care programme had been a disaster, blaming a lack of funding.xii
Having come down in the world from her middle class upbringing, marriage, and trips to France,
Cynthia, once a young attractive promising young artist, had spent over ten years in a twilight world
of bedsits and psychiatric wards by March 1973, when she was admitted to Bexley, the hospital that
would become her final home. After six months Cynthia was transferred to the new experimental
admission ward ‘R1’. Cynthia would lie on her bed sleeping during the day. Some nurses found her
difficult and even hostile. Though she could be disruptive on the ward, at night she would watch over
the patients for the night nurse or spend time in the boiler room. Cynthia’s reaction to structured
therapy was one of non-participation. Art therapist Britta Von Zweigberck endured the psychological
wall of abuse that Cynthia put up and gradually won her trust and encouraged her to paint. Britta
supplied Cynthia with art materials, who, with her art training and portraiture and life drawing
experience, was able to draw from life on the ward. Though again frequently referred to the female
locked ward, (‘E1’ at Bexley), Cynthia continued to draw and paint on the ward even if it meant
working in the bathroom and lavatory to get some peace from the volatile atmosphere of the day
room.xiii It is difficult enough to paint and draw on the open wards, life on the locked wards could be
a nightmare and Cynthia communicates this in her portraits of patients on the ward, which are often
informed by her own nightmarish compositions from the previous decade.
Though this alone is a remarkable achievement, preserving such work is another. Britta regarded
Cynthia’s work as reports from a battlefield and looked after her pictures, and it is only because Britta
Von Zweigbergk looked after her work that her later work survives. Now that Bexley hospital is
closed and demolished, Cynthia Pell’s Bexley drawings may be the only record of life on E1, the
locked ward. The data protection act requires patients’ psychiatric records to be destroyed after 8
years. Cynthia Pell drew and painted honestly, maintaining her own style against the odds throughout
her life. Cynthia Pell took her own life in July 1977. She was 44 years old.

In the book Cynthia Pell 1933-1977 her pictures are divided into three eras, and the Bexley Hospital
Drawings brings a fourth. In the first book the still lifes, her holiday drawings of the French
countryside, and the pictures of local gypsies whose trust she won, are concerned with realism, but
what seem to be paintings from her troubled post marriage era when she was estranged from her
mother are products of imagination, perhaps painted straight from her disturbed unconscious mind.
The Bexley Drawings include paintings of patients on the ward. But it is obvious that her work has
not progressed as expected. Far from emerging as a major voice in the art world as predicted, Cynthia
became a marginalised artist. There is a progression evident in Cynthia Pell 1933-1977. Her still life’s
and her portraits inform her work from the imagination. Though Cynthia Pell’s Bexley work is a
synthesis of her early work, and she has reverted to drawing and painting from life, some of her
pictures seem more rustic than her early work, even regressive, though they still retain a sense of
beauty. Her work from the 1960’s is thin on the ground, so it is impossible to see whether the change
in style is gradual or not. Britta Von Zweigbergk kept her portfolio of work but it was only because
she was listening to the radio at a specific time in 1999 that she heard a programme with a feature
about Cynthia Pell which prompted her to get in touch with the artists involved, who helped her show
and document Cynthia Pell’s work, some of which has found a home at the Bethlem Museum. Other
patient artists have not been so fortunate. Artists lose work when they are revolving door patients,
casualties of the ill planned community care programmes and unchecked prejudice.

Britta Von Zweigbergk also writes about Cynthia Pell and the art therapy department at Bexley
hospital in ‘The Village on the Heath’ the book she wrote with Michael Armstrong. In it she describes
Cynthia Pell as ‘a shadowy observer – a social commentator on the politics and the reality of life in a
large psychiatric hospital’. Though Cynthia was obviously a rebel she was also an old school artist
who drew and painted what she saw, some of those paintings from an inner space that must have been
at times as unpleasant as events she witnessed on the psychiatric ward. Cynthia Pell’s Hospital
Drawings are insightful, hopefully they will inform and raise awareness for those who have never set
foot in the old asylums, the very people who often need to be re-educated, the ones whose opinions
are formed from hearsay and misinformation, through no fault of their own. The work that remains is
enough to tell her story, and for that we have to be grateful. Barbara Pell, describing her sister Cynthia
’’Cynthia was one of the few who followed her beliefs to their ultimate conclusion: rebellion against
the organisation of the modern world which leaves the greater part of mankind suffering hunger,
illness and hopeless despair. Sharing her beliefs I am not courageous or honest enough to join her in
absolute non-participation. We should admire her person as we admire her art.’’xiv

Bibliography

Cynthia Pell 1933-1977 Natalie Dower and Evelyn Williams

The Bexley Hospital Drawings Natalie Dower and Evelyn Williams

The Village on the Heath Britta Von Zweigbergk and Michael Armstrong

Mantrapped Fay Weldon

Through A Dustbin Darkly short story by Fay Weldon

A Knife for Cutting Mangoes short story by Fay Weldon

Original Talent in a Young Painter The Times review article by David Thompson

Psychiatry in Pictures The British Journal of Psychiatry article by Robert Howard

i
Cynthia Pell 1933-1977. The pages are not numbered so I have numbered them from first page in the book which is
also the title page. Barbara Pell. Pages 3-5
ii
Cynthia Pell 1933-1977. Evelyn Williams. Page 29
iii
Mantrapped by Fay Weldon Pages 120-121
iv
A Knife For Cutting Mangoes Short story by Fay Weldon
v
Cynthia Pell 1933-1977 Barbara Pell Pages 4-5
vi
Modern Dugs for the Treatment of Mental Illness. Donald Blair. 1963 Staples Press
vii
The Bexley Hospital Drawings Britta Von Zweigberbk Page 9
viii
Industrial Therapy in Psychiatry British Medical Journal 7 November 1964 p 1202
ix
Cynthia Pell 1933-1977 Barbara Pell and Evelyn Williams Pages 5 and 29
x
The Bexley Hospital Drawings Britta Von Zweigbergk Page 9
xi
From Work Psychiatry and Society edited by Wulfraud Ernst – Work is Therapy? The Function of Employment in
Psychiatric Care in Psychiatric Care after 1975 - Industrial Therapy after 1975 by Vicky Long ‘As levels of
unemployment rose and psychiatric hospitals closed, the system of Industrial Therapy collapsed. The industrial sector
declined, employment opportunities for people with mental health issues fell, and the costs of employing people in
sheltered workshops came under fire. The employment of people with mental health issues was now viewed as an
industrial problem – a regrettable yet natural consequence of the labour market rather than a social-medico problem
which required intervention from mental healthcare professionals.
xii
Like the Roman - The Life of Enoch Powell Simon Heffer Faber and Faber 1998 ‘He stressed that those known to be
criminally insane should never have been included in such a programme; Broadmoor and Rampton were still there for
them. The problem he claimed to have identified from the moment he had envisaged the policy in 1962, but which none
of his successors had managed successfully to tackle, was that of funding. ‘The new forms of care were going to require
more and not less money than the old, inasmuch as they were decentralised and more intimate as well as more human.
The Health and Welfare Plan of 1963, which had followed the Hospital Plan of 1962, had had the subtitle ‘The
Development of Community Care’. It had assumed, drawing on the local authority plans which then existed, capital
expenditure on community care of £200 million in the following ten years and an increase of 45 per cent in staff. These
things had not happened.’
Earlier in the book Heffer writes about Powell in 1962,
‘Enoch Powell called for volunteers to help in the MH service to be godmothers to patients in the community, escorting
them to the shops or the cinema and helping them lead normal lives.’
xiii
The Bexley Hospital Drawings – Britta Von Zweigbergk Pages 10-11
xiv
Cynthia Pell 1933-1977 – Barbara Pell Page 5