Formerly Physician Superintendent, Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge

When I went to Fulbourn Hospital on psychiatric placement, Friday mornings began with a group session for all medical staff, students included. At my first meeting, the atmosphere was tense with criticism of the medical superintendent, David Clark. Never having seen David before and unable to recognise him, I found myself saying: ‘It seems we have an emperor with no clothes’. There was a communal intake of breath and then a big man sitting ramrod straight in his chair let out a guffaw of laughter. It was David, of course, who had no problem at all about being taken to task by a callow student.

Months later, I had to be dragged away from my placement, convinced by what I had learnt from the emperor that psychiatry was what I wanted to practise for the rest of my life. It was an experience shared by generations of similar students who came to Fulbourn expecting little and left inspired by the ethos of humanity, group endeavour and therapeutic optimism that were the watchwords of the social psychiatry movement, of which David was the leader.

The irony was that David himself first came grudgingly to Fulbourn in 1953, soon after completing his psychiatry training under Sir David Henderson at Edinburgh, Professor Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley, and S. H. Foulkes, the founder of group analysis. He arrived hoping for the interview experience alone and became to his surprise the youngest medical superintendent in the UK, in charge of 1000 patients, many of whom had been cooped up for years in a segregated, high-walled, old-style lunatic asylum. Within 5 years, there were no locked wards, male and female nurses were working for the first time together on the wards, in therapeutic workshops and industrial units, and the hospital and community were opening up to each other through half-way houses for patients and open days for visitors.

Although the diagnostic process remained important, it was to be set within social relationships between patients, between patients and staff, and within the hospital as a whole; the morale of the community mattered as much as individual treatment and, in turn, was key to the welfare of everyone involved. Out of David's practice came seminal books – Administrative Therapy (1962, written on sabbatical at Stanford University, California, and bearing the influence of Carl Rogers and Erik Erikson, off whom he had the chance to bounce his ideas) and Social Therapy (1974, translated into seven languages), which became the ‘bibles’ of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, which he helped to found and was its first chairman.

Not surprisingly, David became a world-renowned figure, appointed as a World Health Organization's consultant who travelled through many countries, including Argentina, Poland, Peru and Japan, advising on the establishment and running of mental health services. But unlike contemporaries who would drift away to richer pickings in the USA, David always returned to the wards of Fulbourn Hospital, the scene of his greatest work, to whom he remained loyal until his retirement from the National Health Service in 1983.

In contrast, there were sides to David's life that few knew about. Born into a Quaker family on 28 August 1920 (his father, Alfred, was part of the Somerset shoemaking Clarks and became Professor of Pharmacology at University College London), he was appalled by the Hitler youth camps he was taken to when he was placed with a German family to improve his language skills at the age of 16. He joined the Army at the outbreak of the Second World War and was parachuted into Germany to set up field ambulances. He freely told his friends and family that he did not expect to survive this most dangerous of missions; but did so. In the immediate aftermath of war, he became a medical officer in the transit camps for refugees, where he was deeply affected by what he saw of Belsen. He was sent to Sumatra to supervise the evacuation of 2000 Dutch citizens from a Japanese internment camp, and to Palestine, where he had his first experience of psychiatry. David was reticent about his war exploits but was persuaded in his retirement to set them down in Descent into Conflict (1995).

David married Mary Rose Harris, in 1946, by whom he had three children. After their divorce, he married Margaret Farrell, in 1983, herself fondly remembered as a teacher and practitioner in the Cambridge psychotherapy department. He is survived by Margaret, his siblings, children, five stepsons and countless ‘children’ of his inspirational practice. Over the latter part of his life, David saw great changes in psychiatry. There is a hint of sadness in his last book, The Story of a Mental Hospital: Fulbourn 1958-1983 (1996), for the passing of an era in which social and organic treatments sat happily alongside each other and which had enabled David, his colleagues and their patients to tear down some of the walls surrounding the hospital grounds with their bare hands. But his respect for the human being inside every diagnosis remains, whatever the approach.

Like his family, David rejected formal religion but Quaker values imbued the whole of his personal and professional life. He died on 29 March 2010, and when we gathered for his memorial service in the Friends House, in Cambridge, there were people from all walks of life who had come to voice their debt to a man who placed as much emphasis on patrolling the trackways of Suffolk as he did on the most prestigious award.

David, you were an emperor. It was just that, like all truly great men, you chose not to wear the finery.