Many thanks. No, I don't think she was married, but if she was, she used the name Nöel Kathleen Hunnybun in all her professional work. What I have managed to find out about her is:
Noël Kathleen Hunnybun (1889/90-1984) was an early trained psychiatric social worker: one of a group of five selected for a Commonwealth Fund scholarship in 1927 for training in the USA at the New York School of Social Work. She had gained valuable experience working as an assistant for the London County Council’s School Care Committees.
Pre-war she was very active in the child guidance movement and in the development of her professional association, the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers. She gives a frank account of her work on evacuation of children from London during the Second World War followed by a spell placing children in homes. The many war time privations are taken in her stride.
Then post-war she was engaged by John Bowlby as his senior social worker at the Tavistock Clinic and this led to her being a major force in academic and practice teaching. When money is needed to launch a new course she simply writes to “a millionaire I met in America”.
She wrote about her work and regularly submitted material for publication. There is an impressive list of pamphlets and articles to her credit in the 1940’s and 50’s and her co-authored The Caseworker’s Use of Relationships, first published in 1962 and then re-issued, was read by at least two generations of students. Several interviewees comment on the importance of the Social Casework in Britain book edited by Cherry Morris and published in 1950 and it is interesting to note, in terms of Hunnybun’s influence and powers of persuasion, that she claims to have “instigated” the book: a very believable claim in that she had published a chapter on Psychiatric Social Work in Great Britain in a collection edited by J. R. Rees the previous year.
