Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.  Wow, looks like im on version 0.4.1 so i’ll upgrade shortly.  This is my implementation, perhaps I misunderstood the examples?

class TanhControl(T.autograd.Function):

    @staticmethod
    def forward(ctx, input):
        ctx.save_for_backward(input)
        return calcForward(input)

    @staticmethod
    def calcForward(input):
        return T.tanh(input)

    @staticmethod
    def backward(ctx, grad_output):
        input, = ctx.saved_tensors
        if ctx.needs_input_grad[0]:
            grad_input = grad_output.clone()
            grad_input = calcBackward(input)
        return grad_input

    @staticmethod
    def calcBackward(input):
           return 1 - pow(T.tanh(input),2)