Psychiatrist in the Chair

The Official Biography of Anthony Clare

Brendan Kelly, Muiris Houston

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781785373299
• eBook ISBN: 9781785373312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Born in Dublin in 1942, Anthony Clare was the best-known psychiatrist of his generation. His BBC Radio 4 show, In the Psychiatrist's Chair, which ran from 1982 to 2001, brought him international fame and changed the nature of broadcast interviews forever. Famous interviewees included Stephen Fry, Anthony Hopkins, Spike Milligan, Maya Angelou and Jimmy Savile, each of whom yielded to Clare's inimitable gentle yet probing style.

Clare made unique contributions to the demystification and practice of psychiatry, most notably through his classic book Psychiatry in Dissent: Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice (1976). This book, the first, official biography of this much-loved figure, examines the man behind these achievements: the debater and the doctor, the writer and the broadcaster, the public figure and the family man. Using extensive public and family records, we ask: Who was Anthony Clare, really? Were there just one Anthony Clare, or many? What drove him? And what is to be learned from his life, his career, and his unique, sometimes controversial legacy to our understanding of the mind? This is the remarkable story of a remarkable person.

1

Background and Education
(1942–66)

‘My earliest memory of Tony Clare is of a 6-year-old boy in an orange overcoat and wellingtons sitting on the floor of a Number 13 bus, laughing his head off. There was rainwater on the floor and his older sister Jeanne was telling him to get up and stop being a baby.’1 Ross Geoghegan’s first memory of his friend Anthony (‘Tony’) Clare is vivid, warm and memorable. It evokes a happy, energetic childhood in post-war Dublin, an upbringing that provided Clare with the right balance of core values, personal discipline and human curiosity to ensure an interesting life ahead.

The year was 1949 and Clare and Jeanne were on their way to school in the Loretto Convent on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin’s city centre, which chiefly enrolled girls but also educated boys to the age of 8. Just two years later, Clare and Geoghegan would be inseparable classmates in Gonzaga College, a new Society of Jesus (Jesuit) school for boys in Ranelagh, south Dublin. The school was located close to both their homes (in Clare’s case, just over the back wall) and its extensive grounds offered plenty of space for the new friends to get to know each other over the following summer.

Little did either boy know at the time what their futures would hold: one, Clare, was destined for a career in medicine and broadcasting in the UK and Ireland, and the other, Geoghegan, for a future as a mathematics professor in New York. For then, both boys just enjoyed the summer.

Family Background

Anthony Ward Clare was born on 24 December 1942 in Hatch Street Nursing Home (‘The Hatch’) at 15 Hatch Street Lower in Dublin’s city centre, just around the corner from the original UCD campus in Earlsfort Terrace, where Clare would later study medicine.2 Clare was the youngest of three children; Jeanne was almost 2 when Clare was born and Wyn was 6.

Clare’s father, Ben, was a mild-mannered, popular solicitor, the youngest of a family of seven children, with three sisters and three brothers. He was educated in Belvedere College, another Jesuit school in Dublin. Three of Ben’s brothers fought in the British Army and one died in service: Leo and Freddy survived the First World War; Alfred died in the Second World War.3 Alfred helped to set up an Irish battalion in South Africa4 and stories of his uncles’ wartime exploits had a big impact on Clare as he grew up. Geoghegan remembers a 10-year-old Clare with strong pro-British views. In their games, Clare would be a high-ranking British general in battles against the ‘Mau Mau’ in Kenya:

This whole thing was a secret. We were Irish boys and other boys would have ridiculed us. Indeed, I was uncomfortable with so much pro-British stuff, but I was impressed by what Tony seemed to know about places and details. I vaguely knew that Kenya was in Africa – a place for which regular collections were made outside our church, collections to help the ‘black babies’ and the ‘foreign missions’.5

Clare’s mother, Agnes (Aggie) Dunne was a formidable presence and an especially ‘emotionally formative’ influence on Clare, according to his future wife, Jane.6 Clare recalled being ‘pushed’ as a child, especially by his mother,7 who had left school aged 14 years.8 Clare felt that his mother found it difficult to let him grow up, possibly because he was the youngest child and only son.9 Aggie, in turn, felt that Clare married too young (at the age of 23 in 1966) but, as Clare later commented, he never knew if anything he ever did was good enough for Aggie.10 Ruth Dudley Edwards, historian, writer and friend of Clare, recalls that ‘Tony was full of doubts. He said once that if he became Pope his mother would think he hadn’t gone far enough in the Church.’11

At the time of Clare’s birth, the family lived in Tudor Road, owning a small, semi-detached house on a short, narrow road in the leafy Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. The Tudor Road house was not especially Tudor but it had a solid, reliable aspect, tucked away in one of the more desirable areas of the city. It was very close to the future Gonzaga College, which Clare attended when it opened in 1950.

Shortly after Clare’s birth in Hatch Street Nursing Home, a nurse allegedly dropped him to the floor, leaving him with a scar on his left shoulder for the rest of his life. A court case followed and the nurse was disciplined. Clare was made a ward of court and stayed in the nursing home for a further six months. Clare stated that Aggie later wondered if this affected his bonding with her. It certainly heralded the start of a somewhat fraught relationship that was never entirely resolved. Jane notes that Clare ‘didn’t cry when his mother died and he felt bad about that’.12

Many years later, one of Clare’s sons, Peter, recalls visiting his grandparents when he was a child:

I remember Dad wanting us children to visit his parents with him and there being no takers. They were my grandparents and we got on well, but while Mum’s parents, Sheila and Sarsfield Hogan, were close and warming, there was a sense of distance and a coldness to my Dad’s parents. I would accompany Dad to his parents’ house. He’d always say, ‘We won’t be long’, to reassure me or perhaps himself.13

Childhood and Education

Despite the difficulties in his relationship with his mother,14 falling into a paddling pool as a toddler (and getting fished out),15 and being bullied on his way to piano lessons,16 Clare’s childhood in post-war Dublin was a happy one. His daughter Rachel recalls that ‘Dad grew up listening to the BBC.’17 Little did the young Clare know that he would go on to co-create and present one of the BBC’s most celebrated programmes, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, on BBC Radio 4 (1982–2001; Chapter 5). Rachel adds that, ‘for him, it was an honour to work in the BBC and he was truly engaged in what he was doing there. He really enjoyed the communication, the engagement.’ And Clare’s love of radio can be traced to his earliest childhood, watching his father listen to opera on Saturday afternoons and hearing dramatic news reports from all over the world, even as a child.

Throughout these years, Clare enjoyed an especially close friendship with Ross Geoghegan – a friendship that continued through university and all of his adult life. Crucially, both boys attended Gonzaga College, founded in 1950 as a day school for boys under the direction of the Jesuits. Clare greatly enjoyed his time at Gonzaga and his school reports show a reasonable, if not spectacular, level of application to schoolwork. There was a constant refrain that he would do better if he did not talk so much and did not distract his fellow classmates – a clear indicator of the oratory and rhetoric that would come to define so much of Clare’s later life. Once Clare started talking, he never stopped.

Clare excelled in English and arithmetic, but not algebra or geometry. Languages were not a strong suit either. He enjoyed sport, especially tennis which he played for most of his life,18 and he won prizes for running. Gonzaga had not yet built up a reputation for success in rugby and, being of slight build, Clare did not enjoy the game very much.

Throughout his school years, Clare remained close to his older sister Jeanne: ‘He was always there for me,’ she recalls.19 As children, Clare and Jeanne played together and cricket was a big interest for both; Jeanne remembers accompanying Clare to Gonzaga where she was included in the games. She also remembers her brother reading newspapers forensically from the age of 10, especially the rather highbrow Observer.

Clare and Geoghegan cemented their friendship with endless after-school discussions on the relative merits of Ireland and England, and whether the British influence in Ireland had been good or bad. ‘The one good outcome of all our silly debates, spread over several years, was that we both learned to put together an articulate argument for our age level and to think fast on our feet,’ Geoghegan recalls.

Clare and Geoghegan were allowed to join the Gonzaga debating society, ‘An Comhdháil’, when they were aged 14.20 Clare’s maiden speech concerned the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain tried and failed to roll back the seizure of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s radical President Nasser. An otherwise dull debate was enlivened by Clare’s opening sentence, as he pounded his fist on the table and declared: ‘Nasser is without doubt an out-and-out scoundrel.’ Clare had an intuitive awareness that catchy sound bites have the greatest impact and tend to be remembered. Discursive and argumentative by nature, he took to the recently formed debating society at once and the school quickly became known for its clutch of very able speakers, with Clare and Geoghegan to the fore.

This was all highly consistent with Gonzaga’s general ethos during those early years, which had a major impact on Clare. One of the key personalities in Gonzaga at that time and one of Clare’s most lasting influences was Fr Joseph (Joe) Veale, a Jesuit priest who taught English and religion to Clare and Geoghegan from 1954.

To understand Clare, it is necessary to understand Veale. He was, as Jane notes, ‘a very formative influence’.21 The son of a civil servant, Veale attended school at Synge Street in Dublin and entered the Jesuits at the age of 17.22 He studied English at UCD alongside writer and broadcaster Benedict Kiely (1919–2007), before becoming a teacher at Belvedere and then Gonzaga.

In 1957, Veale posed a number of rhetorical questions about Gonzaga in an effort to centre the fledgling school’s philosophy on a series of key goals: What kind of boy do I wish to form by the time he is 18?23 How shall we educate him so that he may be able to continue to educate himself, so that he is prepared and equipped to take his place in modern Ireland, to be a responsible citizen, to earn his living, and to use his life for personal fulfilment and for the benefit of others? And, Veale wondered, how could the school enable the boys to live effectively by a teaching that says blessed are the poor, blessed are they that mourn, blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice?

The importance of these questions, and their answers, shaped Veale’s teaching in the 1950s and had a decisive influence on Clare not just as a child but throughout his entire life – a life characterised by intense engagement with public debate, profound curiosity about human nature, and an endless desire to understand and help others. Clare also echoed Veale’s intellectual hunger and ability to move between different fields of endeavour: Veale’s approach to religious studies at Gonzaga, for example, included generous doses of sociology and philosophy, while Clare’s professional work spanned medicine, management, oratory, journalism and broadcasting. For Clare, as for Veale, there was no question that could not be addressed through careful thought, rigorous argument and rational application.

Both Clare and Geoghegan remained close to Veale after they left Gonzaga. On the fiftieth anniversary of the school in 2000, Clare wrote movingly about Veale in the Sunday Independent, pointing to his teacher’s firmly held principles of communal responsibility, collaborative action and moral responsibility – principles that Clare still held dear almost five decades later.24

But perhaps the greatest gift that Veale gave to Clare during the Gonzaga years was a love of words, both spoken and written. In a 1957 article titled ‘Men speechless’, published in the Jesuit jour...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Who Was Anthony Clare?
• 1.  Background and Education (1942–66)
• 2.  The Making of a Psychiatrist (1966–76)
• 3.  Writer: Psychiatry in Dissent (1976)
• 4.  Psychiatrist, Scientist, Professor (1976–89)
• 5.  Broadcaster: In the Psychiatrist’s Chair (1982–2001)
• 6.  Return to Ireland (1989)
• 7.  Work, Life and the Crisis in Masculinity (1989–2007)
• 8.  The Psychiatrist in the Chair
• Endnotes
• Anthony Clare: Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates