The Creation and Early Work of the Parliamentary ‘Ombudsman’

  • Glen O’Hara
Chapter

Abstract

In October 1950, the medical doctor and publisher Donald Johnson was committed under the Lunacy Act in the Oxfordshire town of Woodstock. Johnson vividly recalled his experience in his 1956 autobiography, A Doctor Returns:

‘I am doped’, I had told the doctor when he had called to see me — and indeed, he wrote it down in evidence against me. My illness had started with giddy turns and curious bouts of automatic talking when I had sat down in a chair and given forth oracular pronouncements, lasting several minutes at a time; words, for which I had been a mere passive vehicle, had formed themselves on my lips and been uttered for the benefit of anyone who happened to be there to listen to them.

Given such behaviour — though ignoring the strange coincidence that his wife, Betty, fell ill the same night — a doctor was summoned to his hotel to commit him. It took Johnson six months to secure release from the institution into which he had been placed, months during which he gradually recovered from ranting about the Duke of Edinburgh, and his wish to eat only apples. He gradually came to realise that ‘my reputation as a sane person, my reputation as a competent man of affairs’ — the most important elements for a man seeking a public career — were under threat.1

Keywords

Civil Servant Discretionary Power Select Committee Automatic Talking Auditor General 
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Glen O’Hara 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Glen O’Hara
    • 1
  1. 1.Oxford Brookes UniversityUK

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