Chapter 1 - continued

With more disabled people accessing at least basic education, but still feeling marginalised and rejected by a society which was otherwise becoming more affluent and equalitarian for the majority of citizens, the green shoots of a new militancy began to emerge amongst disability organisations.

In 1960 a national rights demonstration, led by the Physically Handicapped Association, took place in Trafalgar Square in London. The demonstration called for pension rights for disabled people and a delegation from South Staffordshire Disabled Association left Wolverhampton on that day with its local contribution to a national petition being presented to the Prime Minister.

Mr Pitcher, MBE, of the Darlaston Fellowship of the Disabled recalled this event, where the collective belly of disabled people was “filled with fire”:

“That day in 1960, the pathfinders, agitators, pressure groups were all there in Trafalgar Square, London. Persons in their thousands, not to ban the bomb, but demanding the right of the disabled to be integrated and to stand in society as equal, to have a good standard of living with a suitable pension to cover that ideal.

“Megan Du Boisson raised the banner that day, rallied us to the cause, filled our belly with fire and we marched on No. 10 Downing Street singing The Old Rugged Cross, handing the petitions in. The flame had been lit and the stalwarts still march on, maybe getting feeble, but knowing they played their part.”

The campaign, which started with the London rally in 1960, was given leadership in England by Megan Du Boisson, a disabled woman, and in Scotland by her counterpart, Dr Margaret Blackwood.

In 1965, Megan Du Boisson and Berit Thornberry founded a new national organisation called the Disablement Income Group which would take a leading role in campaigning for pensions and welfare benefits for disabled people as well as publishing information, conducting research, lobbying Parliament around income issues and generally highlighting the poverty endured by disabled people in Great Britain.

Megan Du Boisson was killed in a car accident on her way to the fifth annual general meeting of the Disablement Income Group in 1969. After her death, Du Boisson’s role was celebrated by activists in the West Midlands with a centre for disabled people on Beacon Way, Walsall, being posthumously named the Megan Du Boisson Centre in her honour.

The Disablement Income Group was not the only organisation in which disabled people were becoming actively involved. Len Tasker recalls being involved in the Coventry branch of the Disabled Driver’s Association and was one of a small delegation of disabled people who held a meeting with Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1973 to discuss mobility issues:

“The purpose of the meeting was to press the Prime Minister and the Government to abolish the dangerous three-wheel invalid tricycles that were issued to the disabled and replace these with allowances to enable those disabled who were eligible to have hand-controlled cars.

“Included in this important delegation were Mairwyn Meyrick, secretary of the Coventry Group at that time, her husband Alf and myself. It was from historic meetings such as this that the Mobility Scheme was born to raise the standard of living for thousands of disabled people throughout Britain.”

Also in attendance at the 1973 meeting with Edward Heath, was motor racing driver Graham Hill who added his support to the campaign for greater mobility support.

But poverty and mobility weren’t the only issues of concern to disabled people in the early ‘70s. In 1970 a group of disabled students in Berkeley, California, USA, called “the Rolling Quads” started what subsequently became known as the independent living movement.

Activist Ed Roberts and his associates firstly formed a Disabled Students’ Program on the UC Berkeley campus in 1970 and a year later established a Centre for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley for the community at large. In 1972, with a $50,000 grant from the city’s Rehabilitation Administration, they converted a cockroach-infested two-bedroom apartment into a user-led centre from which disabled people could support their peers to achieve independent living.

Events such as these would inspire disabled people on this side of the Atlantic to explore similar ideas. On Wednesday, September 20, 1972, a disabled person named Paul Hunt wrote a letter to the editor of The Guardian newspaper, inviting others to become involved in setting up a new national group around independent living in Britain:

Sir, - Ann Shearer’s account of the CMH conference of and not on the so-called mentally handicapped, challenges our patronising assumptions about such people.

It also has important implications for anyone who genuinely wants to help other disadvantaged groups.

For instance, practically every sentence in her article could apply with equal force to the severely physically handicapped, many of whom also find themselves in isolated and unsuitable institutions where their views are ignored and they are subject to authoritarian and often cruel regimes.

I am proposing the formation of a consumer group to put forward, nationally, the views of actual and potential residents of these successors to the workhouse. We hope, in particular, to formulate and publicise plans for alternative kinds of care.

I should be glad to hear from anyone who is interested to join or support this project.

– Yours faithfully,

Paul Hunt

The very blunt description contained in Paul Hunt’s two paragraph letter of residential care institutions being the “successors to the workhouse”, might have seemed sensational to the average reader, but struck a chord with hundreds, maybe thousands, of disabled people all over Britain, many of whom were indeed living in the situation he was highlighting.

His letter received a huge response from other disabled people and was to lead to the rapid development of a united, self-determined movement of disabled people in Britain with an agenda embracing not only the key issues around income and independent living, but an end to discrimination.