THE REES-THOMAS DONATION has been closely concerned with our work as a member of the Executive and Training Committees. There, and President of the Federation of as Mental Health Workers, she has taken a particular interest in questions of training, and we know it to be her wish that her gift should be used primarily for training, though she has attached no strings to her bequest.

DARWIN was once in the of Commons called "a gifted amateur subject to no control". That was in the days when two unpaid Commissioners on the Board were required by statute. The term was friendly but slightly derogatory. Yet how much the present shape of the mental health services owes to gifted amateurs like Ruth Darwin and her mother before her. To the voluntary organisations they have brought inspiration and reassurance.

RUTH House

For ten years we have hoped for a in which our many courses could find a base. With this gift we shall be much nearer to translating our dreams into reality. But more than

college

Perhaps today, the Cambridge drawing-room of the period before the

first world war,

where

a

small

band of Cambridge ladies concerned

this,

themselves with national services for the feeble-minded, seems very far One wonders whether these away. meetings in which he took a sympathetic part were sometimes in the mind of Ruth Darwin's father, as he left home for the workshop where he designed and made precision instruments for his scientific colleagues in researches delicate engaged requiring instruments not to be had commercially. Yet these small beginnings of the Cambridge Instrument Company (as it is today) and the first steps of the Cambridge Mental Welfare Association were to lead to a remarkable landmark in the future of voluntary work for mental health in 1962. For in this year Ruth Darwin and her husband William Rees-Thomas decided to give 28,500 shares in the Cambridge Instrument Company to the National Association for Mental Health to be used as a capital sum to further the Association's work.

we

courses

can

and

now contemplate certain meetings which will not

(as all our courses have had to do in the past) need to be self-supporting from participants' fees. This security gives the Association a great responsibility as well as a great opportunity. It has always tried to live dangerously: to do what needed to be done and find the money somehow. It will still do so. But it can go forward greatly encouraged that Dr. and Mrs. ReesThomas have thought fit to confide so large a trust into its keeping.

Generous gesture In

this generous be blinded to the patient and devoted work for the mentally disordered to which it is in some sense the crown. Ruth ReesThomas would say that she was fortunate in being in the position to make such a gesture, but only someone who has spent a lifetime in caring for the socially underprivileged would wanted to this gift, have make and would have understood what it the

gesture,

Undreamt opportunity This gift, which is worth about ?50,000, gives to the future life of the Association undreamt opportunity. Mrs. Rees-Thomas, since her retirement from the Ministry of Health,

we

dazzle

of

must

not

means.

M. F. A. 60

The Rees-Thomas Donation.

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