FROM dairy worker, to punk keyboard player to psychotherapist, Darrel Hunneybell has had a varied career.

Born in Lockwood he moved to Waterloo at an early age and now lives in London, where he spoke to the Examiner about the circuitous route he took to helping people with a variety of psychological problems.

After finishing at Rawthorpe High the influence of a family member set him on a musical path.

Now 48, he said: “My uncle Phillip got me into the Clash probably at around ‘78 or ‘79.

“A few years later I was at the bar in the West Riding on a Friday night and Mark Lawton and Gary Westwell from The Prisoners came up to me.

“They checked if I could pretend to play the piano on the bar with my fingers and asked me to join the band.

“Maybe I looked right but it was nothing to do with musical talent.

“We eventually performed on Bubblin’ Under on the BBC, which recorded us in Bradford. In the end though the momentum just dried up.”

Having worked milking cows Darrel realised that a career rethink was in order, and headed to Greenhead College to re-take his O-levels. He retrained and began work in Storthes Hall.

He said: “It was enormous, you couldn’t really call it a mental institution it was an old-fashioned asylum.

“It was absolutely enormous, it was spread over a massive area with so many staff, it was like a village on a hill.

“Looking back, places like that served a function at a particular time in history. When I started closure was already on the cards.

“You wouldn’t run anything like that these days, to have bedrooms with 15 people in them where the currency for the patients was cigarettes.

“In ‘87 I went to London to see my brother and ended up staying. I worked in psychiatry at Guy’s Hospital and then travelled for 18 months in India, Australia and New Zealand, I was interested in the geography and wanted to see Everest and stand on the Equator.

“When I returned I wanted more autonomy, it seemed that patients had to be more and more disturbed to be taken into an institution, which made working in those places more disturbing.

“I decided to specialise in the aspect of the job I liked, talking to people and helping them.”

His work has focused on men’s groups and dealing with people who maybe can’t adapt to changes in their roles such as separation or job loss. He also deals with people who have been traumatised by boarding school.

He said: “Some may be able to handle being sent away at 13 but to put a child of seven in one of these places is abandoning them.

“They are simply not mentally ready for it. Some may survive the process but others don’t, so I work with people who have been left with real problems – they’ve been institutionalised.”

From his office in Highgate he can look back at a varied route to a job he loves.

He said: “When I worked on the dairy farm it suddenly dawned on me that if the cows needed milking you couldn’t really go too far away. I worked out that if I stayed in the job the furthest I could ever travel would be Leeds.

“Luckily I was able to get to Greenhead and re-take those exams – it was definitely one of my better decisions.”