Many thanks to Jen Elkeles of London who raised this question and then suggested my answer might form a helpful blog post.

There are several strands to this story. It begins with a lesson I was having with Peggy Williams, at her flat in Highgate, at a time when I’d already been teaching for quite a few years and assisting the Carringtons every day. During my original training at Lansdowne Road, Peggy (who trained with FM in the post World War II period) had been a three day a week teacher in the training for my first two years, then she pretty much stopped coming in as Dilys took on a much bigger role in the training.

It particularly struck me during this lesson with Peggy that she was aiming to take me in and out of the chair almost vertically, particularly the movement out of the chair. Peggy was very small, small enough to easily have a hand at my neck and head and the forearm placed against my upper thoracic spine as I was sitting there. Her front hand was probably somewhere around my neck/throat/chin area. She would encourage me to stay back with her forearm and then shoot me up almost vertically over my feet.

I hadn’t thought much about this before, but at this particular moment I realised it was different to the way Walter or Dilys Carrington would usually take me out of a chair, and I wanted to know why. So I asked her why she did this vertical thing and her immediate reply was “Well, it’s what FM did.” She then added that Walter used to do it this way but had changed and she didn’t know why. I also asked Peggy what was the point of this verticality from the student’s perspective. In other words, what am I, the student, learning from this process? Particularly since it’s just physically, mechanically, not possible to rocket yourself vertically up like that unless you have the feet wide apart and drawn back until they’re practically underneath your body. And Peggy in the lessons with me was not requiring my feet to be like that.

Peggy seemed initially a bit puzzled by the question of what was I learning. But after a bit of hesitation she said that it was a challenge to my ability to inhibit and direct while allowing myself to be moved in such a seemingly difficult way. Indeed I had experienced occasions when she would begin to take me out of a chair like that and I would interfere by beginning to pull forward or beginning to push with my legs, and she would immediately stop the movement and leave me sitting in the chair, while pointing out my interference. So there was indeed some significant learning there to inhibit and direct against the challenge of allowing myself to be moved that way, without interfering by trying to help and without losing the lengthening and widening, the organisation of my head, neck, and back. Perhaps that’s what teachers mean when they say that moving someone in this vertical fashion promotes a strong back

Peggy also added that she enjoyed taking people out of a chair that way because she saw it as a challenge to herself to maintain her own use while doing something very demanding – particularly someone of her small size working with someone much bigger than herself.

So of course the next time I had a lesson with Walter I took the opportunity to ask him about this. I said that Peggy had told me that he, Walter, used to take people much more vertically in and out of a chair and that she didn’t know why he had changed. In a very firm voice he said to me: “Well John, I’ll tell you what I think about that now.” I picked up from the firm voice and the emphasis on the word now, that he was not going to tell me what he used to think about it when he was employing the more vertical method. Walter went on to say that he thought aiming to keep people more vertical when going in and out of a chair risked causing them to use their legs more to control the movement, and that had a negative effect on their overall use. He said that he now felt it was more important to keep the student in balance so they did not have to overuse the legs to support their body and maintain balance. Walter went on to say that keeping the student in balance was more relevant to how they could use themself well in daily life when they didn’t have the help of a teacher.

This issue of the use of the legs also came up in another way during my time as an assistant to the Carringtons. Walter had mentioned to the class that he once heard FM say to someone who was overusing the legs “I want you to let go your legs as if you’ve been shot!” Unfortunately, this then had the effect that I found, when doing chair work with some of the students there, that they would drop like a stone into the chair in an almost alarming, and potentially dangerous way. If I asked them why they were doing this, they would reply it was because of the quote Walter had used from FM. That tendency later went away, but somewhere around that time I recall in a lesson I had with Marjory Barlow she commented that some of the people she was seeing from the Carringtons really seemed to “lack tone in their legs”.

I also recall Walter saying that FM sometimes said to people “don’t push with your legs.”, or “don’t stiffen your legs”, or even (perhaps in a moment of desperation!), “don’t use your legs”. Reflecting on this, it seems to me that a simple way of determining appropriate use of the legs lies in the way FM describes primary control in his last book, UCL. There, he writes that the primary control can be a criterion for judging whether something one is doing is helpful or harmful: the criterion being whether or not it is interfering with good employment of the primary control – the head, neck, back relationship. (UCL, Mouritz edition 2000, page 8.) In my experience, I’ve often found that when people aim for the vertical movement in and out of a chair, the consequent way of using the legs does seem to impede the possibility of keeping the back widening and therefore fully available for breathing. Maintaining a vertical line through the head and spine is one thing: achieving that without gripping the back ribs to help maintain that verticality is quite another, and more difficult, practice.