Frederick Matthias Alexander (20 January 1869 – 10 October 1955) was an Australian actor who developed the educational process that is today called the Alexander Technique – a form of education that is applied to recognize and overcome reactive, habitual limitations in movement and thinking.
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Alexander was born on a large, isolated farm at a settlement called Alexandria on the northern bank of the Inglis River, near the present-day town of Wynyard, Tasmania, the oldest of eight children. He was a precocious child, and, suffering from respiratory problems, was taken out of school to be educated privately. As his health began to improve at around age nine, he developed an affinity to horses, eventually becoming adept at training and managing them. He also developed a love for theatre, particularly Shakespeare, which would lay the foundations for his future career.[1]
At age sixteen, financial pressures forced Alexander to forsake his rural life, moving him to the mining town of Mount Bischoff. He worked at a variety of jobs in the daytime, and in the evenings entertained himself studying drama and teaching himself the violin.[1]
After three years he moved to Melbourne, continuing his dramatic and musical training under the city's best teachers. During this period he spent his time visiting theatres, concerts, and art galleries, in addition to organizing his own amateur dramatic company in his spare time. After his money ran out, he worked odd jobs to support himself. However, a combination of recurrent illness, distaste for commercial life, and what was then a violent temper ensured that he never held any job for very long.[1]
In his early twenties, he decided to devote himself to a career as an actor and reciter. He soon established an excellent reputation, giving recitals and producing plays. His specialty at the time was a one-man show of dramatic and humorous pieces heavily laced with Shakespeare.[1]
In 1897 Alexander rented a teaching room in Melbourne's first skyscraper, a landmark building at 49 Elizabeth St , known as the Australian Building. He was assisted by Lilian Twycross[2] who was also his student and performed in the recitals that he set up for his pupils at the Athenaeum Hall on Collins St.
In the 1890s, Alexander began to progressively lose his voice during his performances as a Shakespearean orator. Over time, it would become increasingly hoarse. As his career depended on his ability to project his voice, he faced the possibility of having to retire. He sought advice from voice coaches, doctors and specialists without results, and finally attempted to resolve the problems himself.
Alexander felt that his physical actions were to blame for the problem, and so he arranged mirrors so that he could observe his actions in detail as he performed. As he did this, he discovered his physical use of his body was not as he perceived it, and the resolutions to his tensions and misuses were not what he expected. The detail of his discoveries are documented in his third and most popular publication, The Use of the Self, published in 1932.[3] After discovering this, Alexander found that his asthma symptoms were greatly reduced, to the extent that it was no longer a concern.[4]
Alexander continued to develop his theories throughout his life, developing such concepts as the primary control, verbal visualization, avoiding reaction during speaking, and using modeling in teaching. He wrote several other books and instructed many students.
There are now many books written about, and expanding on the Alexander Technique.[5]
Many famous actors, writers, politicians and philosophers were his students.
Items on sale at the auction of the Alexander Estate[6] include signed photographs from artists, actors and actresses:
Other actors who consulted him were Constance Collier, Oscar Asche and Matheson Lang.[8]
While living and working in South Africa, Professor Raymond Dart, along with his two children, had lessons in the Alexander Technique.[9]
The English novelist Aldous Huxley was strongly influenced by F. M. Alexander and included him as a character in the pacifist theme novel Eyeless in Gaza published in 1936.[10]
Gertrude Stein's brother Leo called the Technique: "the method for keeping your eye on the ball applied to life".[11]
The conservative philosopher and artist Anthony M. Ludovici was a pupil of Alexander's.[12] Ludovici, sceptical at first, was sponsored by an admirer, Agnes Birrell, to have a course of lessons. He was the author of the first book on the Alexander Technique not by F.M. Alexander.[13]
George Bernard Shaw was also a student of the Alexander Technique. Sir Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize winner in physiology a strong supporter and Edward Maisel,[1] T'ai chi ch'uan Past Grandmaster, Director of the American Physical Fitness Research Institute and a member of the President's Council on Physical Fitness wrote an introduction and made the selection from F. M. Alexander's writings published as The Resurrection of the Body.[14]
Moshé Feldenkrais had lessons with Alexander.
Politician Sir Stafford Cripps, at the time he was British Chancellor of the Exchequer, consulted Alexander. He and his wife Dame Isobel Cripps were both his supporters.
General Sir Archibald James Murray had lessons. He was Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force at the outbreak of WW1.
In 1945, Anthony Brooke, the Rajah Muda of Sarawak, had lessons with Alexander.
Alexander celebrated his 70th birthday in the company of Lord Lytton.[15]
In 1973 Nikolaas Tinbergen devoted about half of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to a very favorable description of the Alexander technique and its benefits, including references to scientific evaluations. Tinbergen and his family had been students of the technique.[16]
Alexander's first rooms in London, in 1904, were at the Army & Navy Mansions in Victoria Street, London, where he built a thriving practice. In 1920 he moved a short distance to continue practicing at 16 Ashley Place, with the help of two teachers, Ethel Webb and Irene Tasker. From the start of the First World War in 1914, in order to maintain a constant practice, most years until 1924 he spent the Autumn and Winter in the United States.
In 1914 Alexander married Edith Page, an Australian who was the widow of one his best friends, Robert Young, and in 1924 he bought their home 'Penhill', a house with 20 acres (81,000 m2) of grounds, at Bexley in Kent, where he started the "little school" for children where his method was made fundamental to the school curriculum. It was not a happy marriage and he and Edith had no children. However Alexander had a son with Gladys Johnson, the caretaker of Penhill: Gladys, known as 'Jack.' Jack had married Owen Vicary, Edith's nephew, and after Jack and Owen had separated in 1925 and Edith had moved out of Penhill in 1929, Alexander and Jack became close; their son was born in 1931 and passed off as Owen's son, named John Vicary.[17]
The first training course was started at Ashley Place in September 1930. and continued alongside his own practice until 1940. When the war came he lived and worked in the United States from 1940 until 1943, which was a difficult time as his teachers were disappearing into the services. Fearing that the technique would be lost, he returned to London in 1943 and successfully restarted the training course.
It was this libel case, a drama drawn out over a period of some seven years, which dominated the last decade of Alexander's life.[18]
In 1935, Irene Tasker, one of Alexander’s first students, arrived in Johannesburg, deciding to teach the technique in South Africa. Her address to the annual conference of the Transvaal Teachers Association on the subject initially attracted much interest from teachers, soon spreading to others, and she set up a school to teach the Alexander Technique to children. In 1942 her work attracted the attention of Dr Ernst Jokl, Director of Physical Education to the South African Government, and a writer on the physiology of exercise. Jokl asked Tasker to demonstrate the Technique to him, which she did (with witnesses, including Norman Coaker who later gave evidence in the court case) but declined to give him a course of lessons, instead suggesting that he go to see Alexander himself. Jokl, not being able to go to London, read Alexander’s books. In April the next year, in an address to the annual conference of the Transvaal Teachers Association, its President praised the Alexander Technique and criticized the established regime of physical education then given to children. Jokl, seeing this address as an attack on his profession, responded in a paper called 'The Relationship between Health and Efficiency' which he read to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. He then had his paper published in ‘’Transvaal Educational News’’, with a reply defending Alexander’s work. In March 1944 Jokl wrote an article in the South African government journal Manpower (Afrikaans Volkskragte) entitled 'Quackery versus Physical Education' which described the Technique as, among other things, 'a dangerous and irresponsible form of quackery'. In August of that year Alexander was shown the article by Tasker, and responded with a letter to the South African High Commissioner in London asking for a public withdrawal of the remarks and an apology. Having had no reply a year later Alexander then issued a writ for libel against Jokl, Eustace H. Cluver and Bernard Maule Clarke (the co-editors of Manpower) suing for £5000 damages for alleged defamation. Alexander was dismayed that the South African authorities announced the case would be defended, but however he expected a case to be won quickly.
As witnesses on both sides were British, it was easier for evidence on both sides to be presented before a Commission in South Africa House in London, but due to delays this did not happen until July 1947. Alexander and Jokl attended all the hearings. Alexander's witnesses included Duncan Whittaker, Dr Peter Macdonald, Lord Lytton, Sir Stafford Cripps, Dr Dorothy Drew, his personal physician J. E. R. McDonagh, and his friend Andrew Rugg-Gunn FRCS. Jokl's witnesses were Nobel Prizewinners Edgar Adrian and Sir Henry Dale, Brigadier Wand-Tetley, heart specialist Dr Paul Wood, bacteriologist Dr Freddie Himmelweit, Sir Alfred Webb-Johnson, Samson Wright, Lieut-Col S. J. Parker and Robert Clark-Turner. The trial was scheduled to be in South Africa in the autumn of 1947, but there was delay due to the defence counsel Oswald Pirow having another matter to deal with, and the case was re-scheduled to the following March.
Alexander wanted to go, and booked a stateroom in a Union Castle liner for himself. But that was not to happen. He was worried about the case, distraught over the death of his friend Lord Lytton in October 1947, and that autumn he had a fall which may have contributed to his having a stroke in December. A week later he had another stroke, was left with the paralysis of his left hand, leg and face, and doctors had little hope for him. He had to cancel his trip to South Africa. However, he made a remarkable recovery within a month, it was said by applying his own technique to himself. He wrote to Irene Tasker in South Africa, in a clear hand, telling her how much better he was.
In February 1948 three of his medically qualified students, Dr Wilfred Barlow, F.R.S., Dr Dorothy Drew M.R.C.S (Eng), L.R.C.P (Lon) and Dr Mungo Douglas flew to Johannesburg to give evidence to the Court. Douglas did not give evidence: his place was taken by Norman Coaker, K.C. who lived in South Africa and, like Jokl, had seen Irene Tasker. There was great interest in the case. The papers reported all the proceedings, and every day the court was crowded.
On 16 February the action for £5,000 damages for alleged defamation opened before Mr Justice Clayden in the Witwatersrand Division of the Supreme Court. Mr H.J. Hanson, K.C.[19] and Mr Abram Fischer (instructed by Messrs V. C. Berrangé and Wasserzug) appeared for the plaintiff, and Mr O. Pirow, K.C. and Mr M. van Hulsteyn (instructed by the Government Attorney) appeared for the defendants. In an introductory address Mr Hanson said that Alexander's technique and ideas had received favourable comment from such eminent people as Sir Charles Sherrington, John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Sir Stafford Cripps and others. In his books Alexander taught what he had observed in his investigation into the use and mis-use of the body. He taught people to understand their own use, to unlearn the wrong way, as in the example of a person sitting at a desk having a tendency to hunch the shoulders by tensing muscles unnecessarily. Mr Hanson told the court that Alexander had recently had a stroke and would therefore not be able to give evidence.
Dr Barlow was Alexander's first witness. He described how he had hurt his shoulder in sport at Oxford, had tried various ways of remedying it, had read Alexander's books and realised that a problem was that people who used their muscles in the wrong way could come to regard that use as the right way. He went to London, saw Alexander, became of student and later a qualified teacher of the method. He had seen for himself in St Thomas' Hospital in London how the technique could help in the treatment of bad muscular co-ordication or misuse, and quoted supporting text from recognised publications such as The Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the American Medical Association's Journal.
Mr Pirow, for the defence, proposed that his case was that the article (by Jokl and others) represented an evaluation of Alexander's four books, which claimed to set out the technique and its philosophy, and contained not only mainly testimonials and sales talk advertising the technique, but in regard to his alleged discoveries of conscious and/or primary control, claims and statements representing dangerous quackery.
Pirow was expert at persistent cross-questioning, throwing leading questions at all Alexander's witnesses. Pirow asked Dr. Barlow: "Do you seriously contend, in the matter of conscious control, that anyone following fully its principles would become entirely disease free?" Barlow: "No-one suggests that man will become immortal." "Let us leave immortality out of it, and get down to fundamentals. Are you, as a trained medical man, prepared to accept as a reasonable possibility the suggestion that by the carrying out of the exercises of psycho-physical guidance by way of conscious control, one can get complete immunity against disease?" - "It might be possible...animals living in a wild state when they come to the end of their days do not suffer from many of the prevalent diseases." "So that by following the technique man would become like an animal or buffalo?" - "I am merely giving you my impression about the diseases which affect animals." "Do you seriously suggest that, as a result of psycho-physical quidance under conscious control, resistance to infectious disease might be better?" - "Well, yes." And Barlow said it was from his own medical experience. Pirow asked what conscious control was, about inhibition and their effects, to which Barlow was able to give confident answers.
Witness Dr Dorothy Drew, a London doctor, had become a convert to the Alexander Technique because of the benefit she had found to herself after undergoing a course. She had had been injured in a car accident when she was a medical student, and during the war her health deteriorated. She had read Alexander's books in the war and became a pupil of Alexander's. At first she felt pain, but began to feel increasing benefit. Alexander's sole interest was in repairing her body mechanics, and her health had improved. She had sent about 200 patients to Alexander, supplementary to medical treatment: she always showed them his books and let them decide for themselves whether to see Alexander.
Norman Coaker, who had been present at Jokl's demonstration lesson with Irene Tasker, was the next witness for Alexander. He described how his two sons had been helped by Alexander lessons: his second son with an injury from a fall onto stone, and his elder son with chronic bronchitis.
Tasker was Alexander's last witness, and at one point she found it difficult to give evidence and face Pirow's cross-questioning. Jokl himself was the last witness for the defence. The trial finished in March, and Mr Justice Clayden delivered his judgement over a month later. Alexander was awarded £1000 damages plus costs.[20]
A year later the defendants appealed against the verdict and the damages. It was dismissed with costs, and the tone of the judgment was worded more in approval of Alexander than it had been originally.[21]
Alexander continued to work until his sudden death in 1955. His funeral was at South London Crematorium, Streatham Vale.[22] The practice at 16 Ashley Place was taken over by one of his assistants, Patrick Macdonald.
First-generation teachers, those who were taught by Alexander himself, giving the year when they commenced training. The first (three-year) training course was started in his rooms at 16 Ashley Place, Victoria, London, in 1931.[23] The courses ran until his death in 1955.
Alexander was always known as "FM" to his students.
The four books of F. Matthias Alexander exist in many editions, being reprinted and revised, published in the UK and US, and not all editions are shown.
Lists
Selection of publications
Applications of the Alexander Technique