A good friend has died, and how I feel about it is nobody’s business but my own. But the fact that he was a client of mental health services, on and off, for over forty years, yet managed to transform his life during his last twenty years is something that should be both acknowledged and celebrated. As his physical health declined, his mental state and that of many around him improved for the better. If asked for an explanation he would have named Jesus. For me, a non-believer but I hope an observant outsider, it was the church as a community which provided much of the answer.
We were unlikely friends, as different as chalk and cheese; he was from a working-class background with little formal education and had become a renowned biker; I’m middle class, over-educated and a believer in walking as the only proper means of movement! What we shared was a history of confinement. He often left the door of his flat open, so did I. He claimed it was to be welcoming to visitors - I once used that explanation too. But really it was a fear of not being able to get out of the door. What forged a connection between us however was a willingness to learn new things, and that requires an increasing openness towards others. It is the lack of such a capacity or willingness amongst those in mental distress, and perhaps their helpers too, which may account for the low success rate of mental health services.
Chris was in his early-fifties when we met in 2006 and never expected to reach sixty, he’d spent a total of twenty-five years either in prison or other secure environments - once sentenced to twelve years for aggravated assault, serving eight, five of which had been in Dartmoor. Son of Sergeant Robert ‘Tiger’ Newton, late of the Indian Army and sometime policeman, who installed discipline with his fists, Chris found himself on psychiatric drugs whilst still a child, diagnosed schizophrenic as a young man, and until he became a Christian, drank heavily and used street drugs. Workers were still telling him he would never live independently in the community up to a year before he achieved precisely that.
We first met at a regular social activity organised by the Community Care Trust (now absorbed into the charity Step One) when he moved to Teignmouth in south Devon. He hardly spoke at first and would often sit in a corner with his back to the rest of the group. Then one day he surprised me. Leafing through some photos he’d just picked-up from the printers, he mumbled something about a church event he had been to, saying: ‘If you don’t give, you’ll get nothing back’. I remember the first time he invited me to his flat. After ten minutes or so of intense talk he apologised and said he’d have to stop. I assumed it was because of the emotional nature of what we were talking about, but I was quite wrong, it was because he was not used to talking, full stop. The muscles that make speech needed a rest! Soon however he was talking to anyone, throughout the day.
Within a year or so of living independently in the community, our conversations on the street would be regularly interrupted by locals, with no connection to the world of mental health, who would enquire after his wellbeing. At first his life centred around the Baptist church, later he found greater acceptance with the Church of England. (On a practical level, Chris was often preoccupied at this time by how much he should cover-up, or not, the tattoos from his biker days as ‘Chopper’ Newton!) To me, his spirituality seemed to be all about letting go of that ‘preoccupation with self’ that comes with chronic mental distress. Once you have got yourself together you can start being of use to others. The writer Karen Armstrong argues that the spiritual is making others, or other things, the central focus of your life, allowing transcendent experiences which go beyond our usually limited perception of others, guided by what seems a ‘golden rule’ of all faiths - doing to others as you would have them do to you. Inevitably there came a point when Chris felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, the frustrations of giving more than he was getting back. After all, his God was a spirit within people, not an otherworldly presence looking down, and clearly not everyone felt that.
Early Good Friday morning 2009 saw us sitting in a bus shelter sharing our frustration at how, as we changed, others didn’t seem to want to follow, in particular two of our peers who lived just a stone’s throw away. One was clearly disabled by the system of care he had received over thirty years, the impact of which was noticed in the odd moments when his previous personality broke through. The other person just seemed to be on a ‘single track’, blocking-out anything that challenged or contradicted a set pattern of behaviour. Why wouldn’t they change? What had we done differently? It didn’t seem to be about a lack of capacity to act differently, rather that unwillingness to learn new things. An unwillingness to test or experiment, to risk and be prepared to look a fool from time to time. For example, Chris explained he had recently been through a bit of a crises, but hadn’t thought about drink at all, but a little later when all was well and he was socialising in a pub, he’d rapidly became agitated and had to leave.
Whilst he found that being supportive of other people with mental health problems was a strain, he felt he was much more effective working with the religious charity Prospects (and later the breakaway group Count Everyone In) which supported people with learning disabilities. Indeed, he had me join a sponsored walk and attend, for the first time in many years, a religious service which he helped put together specifically for people with various disabilities, the first of its kind to be held at Exeter cathedral. He also worked for a while with MENCAP, going into Doctor’s surgery’s and educating them on how to communicate more effectively with people with learning disabilities. Chris described himself as schizophrenic (for which he accepted a moderate level of medication) but regarded it as largely a thing of the past, more pressing were his learning difficulties, for now he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he could learn a lot more. Nonetheless, he knew that it was his relatively minor ‘learning difficulties’ that allowed him to connect with, and be useful to, those with major learning difficulties. Furthermore, for the boundaries are always blurred, to help some others with ‘learning disabilities’.
Early on in our friendship he determined that he should finally learn to read and write in order to better study the Bible. More surprisingly still, he chose the ancient method of copying out those passages he had come to know from hearing them spoken. About a year into the enterprise (self-taught, but with the occasional help of a number of us who just happened to be around at the time) he became conscious of the quality of language in different versions of the bible. I found myself in the somewhat surreal situation of sitting with him in our favourite café trying to explain 16th century history and the appearance of English translations - he’d already worked-out for himself that it was the language of the King James that he wanted. This went hand in hand with his learning the basics of Makaton, to better aid communication with those with learning difficulties/ disabilities and his inclination to learn to draw. Now, by the time I met him he only had sight in his left eye, with the limits in depth perception that brings!
We undertook a number of trips together, two of which come to mind as important. First, in 2008 we visited Broadhempston Community Woodland. Transport was provided by a local mental health worker and as we skirted the edge of Channing’s Wood (an ‘open’ prison) Chris commented: ‘That’s one I was never in!’ From the start he enjoyed the undeveloped new woodland planted just twenty-five years previously. As we set off to climb Beacon Hill it soon became clear that he knew more about the trees than we did. For between spells of confinement he had clocked-up a total of twelve years as a casual agricultural labourer, migrating with the seasons on his bike from Cornwall to Scotland. The woodland was being developed as resource for people with all kinds of disabilities and disadvantages, but Chris was quick to point out that the rules and regulations that come with any money intended to help the disabled, often leads to the spoiling of the very experience on offer.
The other trip that sticks in my mind was to Paignton in 2009, for it seemed to mark some kind of transition. It was when we were sat having a meal in a relaxed ordinary way that I realised how unique it was for either of us to be comfortable enough to sit in a crowded café for forty minutes. There really is a thing called normality and those who have it often take it for granted so much, they come to deny its very existence.
Also, in 2009 Chris came top of the list for an allotment after a year of waiting. The location was between a housing project and an industrial estate, but its situation was different. Lifting one’s gaze from the ground, you could see to the southern part of the estuary, look to the west and you could see all the way up the valley to the moor, and an ever-changing horizon. He cultivated with a success that bemused his neighbours and quite without the orderliness that preoccupied them. It was on the few occasions when I helped-out, that, even more than being with him, one could see, spread out in front of one, almost like a map, his chaotic mind. Patches of temporary order emerging from place to place within a disorganised whole. Yet the whole was hugely productive, and produced flower and vegetable displays at a number of events. Most notably his displays for the annual flower festival of St. Michael’s church in July 2009 and 2010, displays which were conspicuous because they lacked the formality of style of all the others. They were personal and intimate, one depicted a flowing river, another; photographs of those people with learning disabilities who had helped on the allotment.
But Chris had another life of which I knew little. In time he became a frequent visitor to Bristol where his ‘family’ lived. He had lost contact with his remaining blood relatives many years before, but formed an attachment to two women, one of whom he came to think of as his mother, the other his daughter. I was lucky enough to attend the wedding of the latter and hear her account of Chris’s life since they had met over twenty years earlier.
He also had a life of physical illness. He had suffered from bowel cancer and had a total of six operations over the years, and also underwent various other invasive procedures for related complications. There came a point when he decided enough was enough and began to refuse most of the treatment being offered. He lived for more years than he expected. He’d fixated on sixty as a target age to be reached for several years before he actually achieved it. I myself felt the need to start writing this tribute before his sixtieth – he has died at the age of seventy-two.
For about five years from around 2010 we would talk for an hour or so two or three times a week in a local cafe. As he became more articulate, I demanded more of him. I watched as he became aware of how others, and therefore himself, had grossly underestimated his capacity for intellectual growth. I didn’t find it easy that he framed nearly all his talk in religious terms, over and over I pointed out that I disagreed and that somehow if he wanted to spread a message he had to take-on the reality of non-belief amongst so many of the community. Just as he’d learnt to control the anger that had got him into so many fights in the past, so now he learnt to temper his desire to spread the word to anyone who would listen.
In time his spiritual life deepened further, through the Church of England he connected with the Society of St Francis. In May 2018 he was ‘professed’ into the Franciscan Third Order. Now I don’t know what that means, but I know it meant everything to Chris.
Christopher Robert Newton 1952-2025
