Finchden Manor

George Aubrey Lyward OBE (1894 – 22 June 1973) was a British educationist and psychotherapist who founded and led Finchden Manor, a "community for delinquent, disturbed or disturbing boys" in Tenterden, Kent, UK.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1970.

He featured in the BBC Radio 4 series Great Lives in May 2012, nominated by singer Tom Robinson. Robinson had attended Finchden Manor after a suicide attempt when aged 16, and said that Lyward saved his life.

Lyward grew up in the Clapham Junction area of south London. His father was an opera singer but left home while Lyward was very young, and his mother worked as a primary school teacher. He had three sisters. He won a scholarship to Emanuel School in Battersea, and there became a prefect, Head of House, and a sergeant in the Officers' Training Corps, and played rugby in the first XV despite a history of childhood polio which had left him with a weak leg.

After leaving school he taught in two prep schools and at Kingston Grammar School and then returned to Emanuel as a master, before winning in 1917 a choral scholarship to study at St John's College, Cambridge where he took a history degree. In 1918 he obtained the post of house-tutor at The Perse School in Cambridge in order to supplement his modest choral scholarship funds. In 1920 he started studying for ordination at Bishop's College, Cheshunt, but abandoned this two weeks before his planned ordination.

He taught again at Emanuel, then in 1923 moved to Trinity College, Glenalmond to work with the sixth form students, developing his ideas about teaching this age group. In 1928 a broken engagement led to a breakdown and treatment by Hugh Crichton-Miller, who later asked Lyward to help with some of his own boy patients. This work led directly to Lyward's work at Finchden Manor.

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