Hampstead War Nurseries was a wartime shelter for children and their families who had been bombed or displaced during World War II and existed between 1941 and 1945. It was established by Anna Freud and her life partner, American child psychoanalyst Dorothy Burlingham in January 1941 to provide a home.
Formation In June 1938, the psychoanalysts Anna Freud and her father Sigmund Freud had moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead in London from Vienna, after the Nazi Anschluss. With the death of her father in September 1939, Anna Freud became heavily involved in the community of psychoanalysts in London. When the Luftwaffe Blitz of London began in September 1940, many children were left homeless and some without a family or only a single parent. When the scale of the problem became apparent, Freud decided to open a temporary wartime shelter for displaced children. In October 1940, Freud and Burlingham were presented with a sum of money from friends and began planning to open a children's nursery. Several months later in January 1941, Freud and Burlingham were sufficiently preprepared to establish the "Children's Rest Centre" at 13 Wedderburn Road in Hampstead. Additional funding for the unit was provided by the American Foster Parents Plan for War Children charity known as Plan. A requirement of the funding was that monthly reports had to be prepared for the charity, and the first of these recorded that 25 children whose ages ranged from 6 months to 9 years had been provided with shelter. In 1974, a complete set of reports covering the period the nursery was opened, were published by Freud and Burlingham. Most of the early group of children who initially arrived at the centre, came from the East End of London that had been badly bombed.
Operating model and staffing The operating model for the Hampstead nursery, had already been established before Freud arrived in London. It was based on what was proved to be workable, at what was known as the "Jackson nursery" founded in Vienna between 1937-1938 by an American child psychiatrist Edith Banfield Jackson and run by Freud and Burlingham. It was classed as an "experimental day nursery for toddlers", experimental, as at that time, nursery for children at that age was unknown.
As well as Freud and Burlingham, who were the directors of the Hampstead unit, several staff members of the Vienna nursery who had fled the Nazis, also worked in Hampstead. Amongst those were the paediatrician Josephine Stross, Liselotte Frankl, an Austrian psychologist and Austrian-British psychoanalyst Ilse Hellman. Hedy Schwartz was a nursery assistant who educated the children in the Montessori method of education. James Robertson worked as the fire watcher at the nursery and as a general maintenance man. Robertson also acted in the role of a father figure to many of the children without fathers.
New nurseries In March 1941, the charity took full responsibility for financing the nursery and suggested to Freud that she should open two new nurseries, one for very small children and one to be specifically used for evacuation of children, in the country. In June 1941, Freud opened a new residential nursery in a large house at 5 Netherhall Gardens in London and moved in the following month. The new nursery was explicitly staffed to only accept children up to 2.5 year old and was able to sleep up to 50 children. Formerly known as the Babies’ Rest Centre, it became the new house while the first nursery was known as the old house. By July 1941, 29 young children were staying there. In August 1941, Freud took possession of what was termed the Country house, a 1930's style mansion, at New Barn, Lindsell, Essex. By August 1941, 18 children had moved to the new house.
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