George Ronald HargreavesOBE, FRCP, MRCS was a civilian and military psychiatrist.
Early life
Hargreaves was born in Yorkshire to James Arthur Hargreaves, and was the eldest of four children. He was educated at Mill Hill School and then studied medicine at University College London, where he was involved in the students' dramatic society. Hargreaves then attended University College Hospital Medical School, where he had the opportunity to become house physician and house surgeon. Hargreaves was unable to take up this appointment because the death of his father required him to take paid work to support his younger siblings, but he was also averse to postgraduate training and examinations. Instead of pursuing Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, therefore, he began a career in psychological medicine at Hill End Hospital, St Albans whilst simultaneously working as a clinical assistant to Bernard Hart at University College Hospital. He then worked at Cassel Hospital, Penshurst, Kent. In 1933, Hargreaves married Eva G. Byrde, with whom he had four daughters. In 1938, Ronald was appointed full physician at the Tavistock Clinic and Eva was granted a diploma in anaesthetics.
Military work
When World War II broke out, Hargreaves enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a specialist in psychiatry. Whilst waiting to begin work, he read up on Army history, regulations, structure and training. He paid particular attention to Fortescue'sHistory of the British Army and a book on Army psychiatry written by the American psychiatrist Thomas Salmon at the end of the First World War, and used the expertise gleaned from these works to impress Army personnel who were sceptical about psychiatrists. He began work as the Command Psychiatrist to Northern Command under Sir Ronald Adam and later worked in the War Office. Hargreaves and his Tavistock colleagues were particularly interested in selection, and only a few months after joining up, Hargreaves was experimenting with the use of Raven's Progressive Matrices as a way of screening out unsuitable recruits. His work on psychological methods of selection and allocation helped to bring about the creation of the Directorate for the Selection of Personnel, a General Service Selection scheme, and War Office Selection Boards. As well as his work on selection, Hargreaves also participated in work on neuroses. His research into causes of psychoneuroses in soldiers demonstrated that men with no predisposition to psychological breakdown were still at risk. He argued that more attention should be paid to the circumstances of the breakdown, rather than purely focussing on background and patient history. He shaped the work conducted at Northfield Military Hospital by encouraging Harold Bridger to follow up on the group therapy work that Wilfred Bion and John Rickman had initiated, and by passing information on the Northfield experiments to Karl Menninger for the Journal of the Menninger Clinic. Hargreaves also liaised with the United States Army and the Canadian Army, who he advised on the use of psychological staff when visiting North America in 1943 as Consultant to the Army.
