Arthur Hyatt Williams died 17/8/09, a few days short of his 95th birthday, after some years of illness. Arthur to his relatives, Hyatt to his colleagues, was born 23/9/14 in the Wirral near Liverpool. His mother had been a teacher who had had to give up teaching to get married and have a family, as was the rule in those days. His father was a Mersea tugboat skipper, but was out of work for much of the Great Depression.

An only child, at school he was perceived as a trouble maker but it was at this time, on long country rambles and trips to Liverpool museum, that he developed his life-long interest in natural history.

He was disappointed ‘only’ to get the medicine scholarship, but because of poverty had no choice. And whilst a medical student with a keen interest in cross-country running, he met his future wife-to-be, Lorna Bunting, then a biology student and later a biology teacher. They married in 1939.

After qualification in Medicine at Liverpool, he did General Practice Locums and then volunteered for service in the far east, where he ran an army field ambulance, and specialised in psychiatry, learning and passing the army Hindustani exam in order to do so, as he found using an interpreter didn’t really work to let him understand the illness.

Lorna, his first wife, studied medicine during the war, and after the war they set up home in Maidstone, where he was a consultant psychiatrist at Oakwood Hospital. It was during this time that he wrote his MD thesis on the difference between mental breakdown in British and Indian troops. He started psychoanalytic training, qualifying in 1952.

During the 1950s, he travelled daily all over Kent as part of his Hospital Board work, work on taking outpatients in various other hospitals, and giving GP and other seminars.

The family, now of 4 boys, moved to Hampstead in 1958 to facilitate him having analysis with Melanie Klein. And after her death, in 1960, he continued it with Hanna Segal. During this time he was a visiting prison psychiatrist specialising in murderers, and in 1962 was taken on the staff at the Tavistock Clinic, where he would later become chairman of the adolescent department from 1969-78. And in retirement would regularly supervise and lecture – notably his Bion lectures.

During the 1950s and 1960s, there were annual family camping holidays of different levels of sophistication. 1959 was a tent holiday to Denmark, because of the psychoanalytic congress, where he read a paper the night before a thunderstorm flooded his clothes.

And later, in 1964, they bought a flat in the Scillies, and later a house, because of the garden. Buzza Ledge, where they holidayed several times a year.

His first wife having died of illness, he met his second wife Shona Tabor in 1971 whilst interviewing her for training at the Tavistock. Shona was then A GP treating students at Sussex University with 2 daughters. They were married in 1972, setting up home first in Hampstead and later in Islington. They gave joint family therapy, as well as seeing individual private patients.

Shona loved his house in the Scilly Isles and many holidays were spent there with his two step-daughters. At that time they also bought a cottage at Middle Barton where they spend most weekends.

Shona died of illness. In 1987, Arthur married Gianna Polacco Henry, an Italian from Rome, a practicing analyst and psychotherapist living and working in Hampstead. Teaching trips to Italy and a country villa outside Rome became his pursuits, together with Summer walking holidays. In London, they set up home in Golders Green, together with the younger of Gianna’s 2 daughters.

Arthur Williams had five analysts in turn, including Mr Klein, and he remained convinced of the growth enabling function of tolerating the depressive position. In relation to his work with murderers, he would say that not a single day should go by without re-negotiating the guilt. He would joke that every day he would plot his own position on the paranoid/schizoid –depressive position continuum. And he was able to help troubled teenagers by the same process of encouraging tolerance of the pain of the depressive position, rather than falling for the false gods of drink, drugs and promiscuous sex.

He was a clever wordsmith, prone to hammering out humorous badinage, which sometimes lapsed into schoolboy humour. But he was a firm believer that there was no problem that couldn’t at least be ameliorated by a thoughtful listening ear.

He had a natural love of children and an empathy for the often alienated teenager.

by Adrian Hyatt Williams