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Catherine Hollingworth

Brechin, Scotland, 1904 - 1999

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About MeSpeech Therapist and Child Drama Pioneer.

Catherine Hollingworth was born and brought up in Brechin. She attended the Royal Academy of Music and qualified in the 1920s in elocution.

Catherine rejected the perceived interpretation of elocution as a social climbing tool, she was more interested in the emerging disciplines of Speech and Drama and Speech Therapy. Using drama, she sought to help children with speech impediments as well as people who had suffered trauma or abuse. Prior to World War II she was active in both these fields in Scotland and England.

During the 1930s she put on several shows as well as continuing her work with children. In 1928 her Forfarshire production of Joe Corrie’s ‘Hewers of Coal’ won the Scottish College of Dramatic Arts National title. She worked with many of the leading experts in speech therapy in the 1930s. She and a group of like-minded people founded the British College of Speech Therapists in order to provide some structure and discipline to the emerging field.

In 1941 she was appointed by Aberdeen Education Department as the city’s first ‘teacher of speech’. This was a truly innovative appointment, being the first such post created in Britain. Consequently, for the years to come Aberdeen became a by-word for excellence in speech therapy and child drama. After five years the new Speech Therapy Department had dealt successfully with thousands of cases, thus the concept of child drama became firmly established both as a curricular and extracurricular activity in the city. Of the work of the department in this period Catherine commented: ‘We had no blueprint, it had to be created as we went along’.

She and her colleagues partly worked in classes (she is remembered by many as the ‘speech wifie’) as well as in a theatre setting. She and her colleagues organised several loosely based ‘Festivals of Children’s’ Theatre’ and from these grew the need for a permanent base for this sort of theatre work. Consequently, she founded the Aberdeen Municipal Children’s Theatre at 31 King Street, again a first of its kind. By the 1950s the department and the theatre were receiving international acclaim. Many of the sorts of problems that her work helped to deal with were lack of efficient vocal communication, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence, emotional difficulties and physical and mental difficulties.

She received several awards in recognition of her pioneering work: these included Fellowships of the College of speech therapists, the Royal Academy of Music and the Educational Institute of Scotland. Whilst in 1965 she received the OBE, she retired a few years later in 1968 and died in 1999.

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