Dr Elizabeth ("Betty") Tylden (1917-2009) and Dr George Douglas Morgan (1899-1985

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Material on the work of Dr Tylden: files, reports, publications, lectures, articles, correspondence, re maternity care and obstetrical services, drug and alcohol dependence, abortion, drugs, drug clinics, mental health, care of health of hospital staff, parents and children, and her involvement with government committees and other official bodies, and with other organisations.

Includes material relating to Lambeth Drugline, 1980s-1990s

Also some of George Morgan's papers: principally to do with wartime nutrition and wartime and post-war nutrition centres.

Elizabeth Tylden was born 1 Aug 1 1917 and brought up in rural South Africa, where her father, military historian Major Geoffrey Tylden, had been granted a land settlement following service in the Boer War. Went to the Godolphin School, Salisbury, and took a medical degree at Girton College, Cambridge. During World War II she worked with William Sargant on cases of individuals affected by the Blitz and soldiers suffering from 'battle exhaustion".

In 1946 she married George Morgan, a fellow psychiatrist: in the early 1950s they joined together with other professional couples to buy St Julian’s, a large country house near Sevenoaks, as a pioneering scheme to provide housing with associated nursery facilities so that she and other professionally-trained wives and mothers could continue their careers.

She had a particular interest in women’s mental health and family relationships, especially around drug dependence and alcoholism. In the early 1960s she and her husband establishing Stepping Stones, the country’s first supported “Care in the Community” psychiatric day hospital scheme. She worked part-time at University College Hospital, establishing the first drug abuse clinic there. She retired in 1985 but continued in private practice until 2004.

She was also known as a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness in particular in cases of child sexual abuse, and as an authority on the psychological repercussions of cult involvement.

George Douglas Morgan was born 15 May 1899. After serving in the Army during World War I he went to Clare College Cambridge and took the mental and moral sciences tripos, graduating in 1924. He then became a lecturer in psychology at Bedford College, but then decided to train as a doctor, which he did while supporting himself by evening lectures at the City Literary Institute (which he continued to undertake for the next 30 years). Qualifying MRCS, LRCP in 1930, he specialised in neurology at the Maida Vale Hospital for Nervous Diseases and Charing Cross Hospital. He then became an assistant medical officer to London County Council, in which capacity he was able to use his training in psychology as well as medicine.

After World War II, he was appointed to Bromley Hospital, where he met Elizabeth Tylden, who became his second wife. His unconventional multidisciplinary approach was the foundation of their innovative Stepping Stones psychiatric day hospital project.

At the point of acquisition to PETT (27/09/2001 and 08/02/2002), some of the material in the Tylden archive was offered by PETT to Wellcome, and an Elizabeth Tylden archive was established at Wellcome. Aside from the first accession which was transferred via PETT, subsequent accruals to Wellcome were made directly by Tylden between 2003 and 2004, with the last accrual (2826) from MB3 reuniting the collection together at Wellcome Collection.