“I do not know who it was who introduced [Aldous] Huxley to Alexander. It could have been any one of his friends. “Going to Alexander” was a fashionable thing to do in the circles in which the Huxleys moved… Sometime in the fall of 1935 Huxley began having daily lessons in what Alexander called “the Use of the Self.” His general condition soon began to improve and by the end of the year he was speaking in public. In February,…
“As I remember, F.M. did not talk much when he was teaching. In his teaching practice he had made it a rule that all new pupils were only accepted if they read the books first. Whether this really worked out I never discovered, but it was obvious that by getting a pupil to have some idea of what to expect from lessons with him, this ruling saved him the trouble of having to explain what he was doing and what…
“Have I ever told you how FM came to use his hands in teaching? No? Well, after FM recovered his voice, he earned part of his living teaching drama students. I remember him telling me: ‘It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t be able to do what I told them. But they just couldn’t understand what I was talking about. So when they pulled their heads back, I just put my hands on and made an adjustment.’ Later on,…
It was serious work but he wouldn’t let us get heavy with it. Sometimes he would come into the room where we were all waiting, and he’d look all ‘round at our faces and he’d say, “Go and walk ‘round the block. You’re no good to me looking like that. You’re too serious, too grim.” So we often had to go and take a walk.Marjory Barlow (“Taking Time – Six interviews with first generation teachers” – p71)
In modern Australia there can be some status attached to having a convict ancestor. This was not the case in F.M. Alexander’s time. Alexander’s four grandparents were convicts, transported to Tasmania in the 1830s and 1840s when just teenagers or in their early twenties. One stole a dress. Another destroyed a threshing machine in an uprising of agricultural workers. Once in Tasmania, all survived and prospered, and in 1869 their grandson Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in north-west Tasmania. In…