John Rawlings Rees

John Rawlings Rees, (25 June 1890 – 11 April 1969) was a British civilian and military psychiatrist.

Early life Born in Leicester to the Methodist minister Reverend Montgomery Rees and his wife Catharine Millar, John Rawlings Rees experienced frequent relocations during his early life as his father moved from manse to manse. After a period spent at Leeds, most of Rees education took place at Bradford Grammar School. He then attended King's College, Cambridge, where he studied Medicine and Natural Science and played water polo.

Following his degree, Rees worked at the Victoria Park Chest Hospital, studying tuberculosis. Rees was finishing his medical education at the London Hospital when the First World War broke out. He joined the Friends Ambulance Unit in 1914, and later became a medical officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he was awarded the Belgian Knight of the Order of the Crown for his work with Belgian civilians.

During the war, Rees oversaw his colleagues' experiments with group psychotherapy, 'therapeutic communities', morale, rehabilitation, and selection tests.

Rudolf Hess affair The work which occupied most of Rees time during the war was the case of Rudolf Hess. Together with Henry Dicks, a fellow member of the Tavistock Clinic group, Rees was charged with the care of Hitler's Deputy at the secret prison locations where he was held following his capture after landing in Scotland. Over the four-year period from June 1941 to Hess' appearance at the Nuremberg trial, Rees apparently established a relationship with Hess: Hess' diaries record many meetings with Rees, referred to at this time as Colonel Rees, in which Hess accused his captors of attempting to poison, drug, and 'mesmerise' him. In 1945 Rees was a member of the three-man British panel (with Churchill's personal physician Lord Moran, and eminent neurologist Dr George Riddoch) which assessed Hess's capability to stand trial for war crimes.

End of the war and Operation Phoenix As a result of his war work, Rees was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1946. He received awards including the Thomas Salmon Memorial lectureship of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1944, the William Withering lectureship at the University of Birmingham in 1945, and shared the first new Lasker Award with Brock Chisholm in 1945. This group orchestrated "Operation Phoenix", making plans for Tavistock to rise from the ashes of war. After the war, this group, including Rees and five others, formed the Interim Planning Committee of the Tavistock Clinic. This committee was chaired by Wilfred Bion, meeting twice a week to formulate a new way forward for their work at Tavistock, based on war-time experience. There is an annual Rees lecture in memory of Rees' wife, Mary Hemingway Rees, "among the first staff members at the Tavistock Clinic when it was founded in 1920" and "one of the founders of the WFMH" with her husband.

Rees retired from his post in 1962, though he continued to act as a consultant. He died at his London home on 11 April 1969.

Footnotes

Selected bibliography The Social Engagement of Social Science: a Tavistock Anthology Vol 1 (1990), E. L. Trist, Free Association Books, Fifty Years of the Tavistock Clinic, Henry V Dicks (1970), Routledge, The Shaping of Psychiatry by War (New York: Norton, 1945) The Case of Rudolf Hess; A Problem in diagnosis and forensic psychiatry (1948), by John R. Rees, Henry Victor Dicks Hess, the Missing Years, 1987, by David Irving, Macmillan Press (many references indexed to Rees) .