War Office Selection Board

The introduction of psychological testing to help select officers was a very slow process in Britain. Before the war psychiatrists and psychologists had written to the War Office to offer their services as psychological testers.7 This offer was ignored. The first tests were only introduced when military men sought help from their local psychological experts. One of the reasons why psychiatrists headed the British Army’s officer selection programme was because J.R. Rees, the Consulting Psychiatrist to the British Army at Home, had ensured that his colleagues from the Tavistock Clinic were on hand.

In April 1940, Brigadier J.R. Rees was given approval to appoint Command Psychiatrists to work with the different Army Commands in Britain. He appointed a number of Tavistock colleagues: (George) Ronald Hargreaves was allocated to Northern Command, Thomas Ferguson Rodger to Scottish Command, Leonard Foster Browne to Eastern Command, Wilfred Ruprecht Bion to Western Command, and Henry V. Dicks to London District Command.8 The Tavistock staff themselves believed this structure was key to how the war work progressed: the prominent role of the psychiatrists in… early experiments and in subsequent developments followed from the way in which they had developed their work in the army.9...

Wilfred Ruprecht Bion is the key figure in management history accounts of the WOSBs. This rebellious soldier-turned-psychiatrist, they suggest, produced revolutionary theories that changed high-level recruitment around the world. However, Bion only became involved in the WOSBs when methods had become formalised and the first WOSB was created; he did not participate in the first tests. Long before anything as formal as a WOSB existed, Eric D. Wittkower, Thomas Ferguson Rodger, and John Mostyn Bowlby investigated dysfunctional officers and conducted experiments to try and find methods that would weed them out, whilst also discovering the hidden potential of others. J.R. Rees ensured that this early work in Salisbury and Scotland was shared amongst the Army psychiatrists.

From the Science of Selection to

Psychologising Civvy Street:

The Tavistock Group, 1939-1948

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/55057/1/149From%20the%20Science%20of%20Selection%20to%20Psychologising%20Civvy%20Street-%20The%20Tavistock%20G.pdf