Chapter 1 - The roots of change

In the early part of the 20th century, life for working class people in Britain was harsh and opportunities were very limited. In his study of poverty, Life and Labour of the People in London, published at the turn of that century, social reformer Charles Boothe wrote that 30 per cent of the people of Britain’s capital city were living in poverty.

Around the same time, Seebohm Rowntree published a similar study, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, which reported that 43 per cent of the population of York were likewise living in poverty with 15 per cent barely able to survive.

In British cities like Birmingham, the vast majority of citizens lived in small back-to-back houses, in courtyards where living conditions were tough for everyone. In 1901 Birmingham had an infant mortality rate of more than 220 infant deaths for every 1000 live births.

The charitable organisation Birmingham Settlement was founded in Newtown, Birmingham, in 1899, as a product of the groundswell of public outrage in response to statistics like those and to the reports of social reformers like Rowntree and Boothe.

The early 1900s studies of Rowntree, Boothe and other social reformers presented a great challenge to policy and decision makers, with both academics and politicians questioning Britain’s aspiration to rule gloriously over a global Empire whilst the people in its own towns and cities lived in deprived and unsanitary conditions.

If living conditions for ordinary working class people were harsh at the beginning of the 20th century, then the quality of life and the expectation level of disabled people were especially low.

Britain’s 19th century industrialisation and urbanisation movement led to a greater segregation of disabled people. They were increasingly being viewed as not only excess to requirement in terms of the ascendant capitalist principles of manufacturing progress, mass production and profit, but their very existence was being rationalised as harmful to mankind.

The scientific enlightenment – associated with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, first published in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859 – gave gradual rise during the late Victorian age to a darker school of thought called eugenics.

The study of eugenics was based on a belief that the human species could be improved by discouraging reproduction by people presumed to have inheritable “defects“ and “undesirable traits“ or, conversely, by encouraging reproduction by people perceived to have inheritable “desirable traits.”

Later in the 20th century, eugenics theory would provide a scientific foundation not only for government-sanctioned sterilisation programmes across Europe and the USA, but would become the core ideology of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany during the 1930s and ‘40s.

Even if gas chambers, concentration camps and human experimentation in Nazi Germany represented the most extreme and evil manifestation of eugenics theory, the basic tenet that disabled people, along with other specified minority communities, were inferior, abnormal and carried the risk of polluting the gene pool of the entire human species became the acceptable underlying basis for society’s dominant response to disability throughout the early 20th century.

Disabled people were increasingly rejected from the work force and became viewed by society as being the “deserving poor”, as opposed to the “undeserving poor” whose ranks included the work-shy and the physically-able unemployed. However, the description of being “deserving” was not the blessing it might imply – the reality was that disabled people were deserving of meagre charity rather than employment, deserving of long-term institutional residence as opposed to independent living and deserving of specialised medical scrutiny as opposed to wider social acceptance.

Institutions for the long-term residence of disabled people in Victorian and early 20th century Birmingham included the Royal School for Deaf Children (founded in 1812), All Saints Mental Asylum in Winson Green (founded in 1845), Birmingham Royal Institution for the Blind (1846), the Birmingham Workhouse at Western Road (1852), Birmingham Institute for the Deaf (1869), Marston Green Cottage Homes (1878), the Workhouse Infirmary (1888), the Joint Poor Law Colony at Monyhull (1908) and St Margaret’s Great Barr Colony (1918).

Not all of these institutions were dark and foreboding, some may have seemed progressive for the era, but the list does demonstrate the trend towards institutionalised residence across all groups of disabled people.

A change in social attitudes towards disabled people occurred during and after the Great War of 1914-1918 when it is estimated that more than 2 million soldiers across the armed forces of the British Empire were injured and returned home with a range of impairments including limb amputations, severe burns, head injuries, profound hearing impairment, visual impairment as well as mental health conditions caused by the shock of relentless trench warfare.

Rehabilitation hospitals, centres and even villages such as Enham (established by King George V in Hampshire in 1919), were set up around the country to support those who had become disabled during the course of armed service in the name of freedom.

To some degree the post war period augured a more community-based response to disabled people and in Birmingham, the Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society was formed in 1919 followed in 1920 by the launch of the Midland Societies for the Blind and similar groups. But, even with the ranks of those disabled people collectively known as the “deserving poor” being swelled by the heroic newly disabled, as a minority group in Britain disabled people remained, on the whole, desperately poor, marginalised and without social or economic opportunity.

Years after the Great War had ended and servicemen had long since become disillusioned by the broken promise of the so-called “land fit for heroes”, disabled First World War veterans begging on British streets were a common sight.

In 1987, John Hall, a disabled war veteran from the Second World War, wrote an article in the West Midlands Council of Disabled People’s magazine about his memories of seeing disabled people begging on the streets of Malvern in the 1930s:

“In the 1930s when I was a schoolboy living in Malvern, Worcestershire, I had my first encounter with disabled people, an experience which made me very sad. In the main street an ex-merchant Navy hero from the First World War with no arms and only half his legs squatted on the pavement every weekday selling matches and shoelaces. He received no pension and had no other income.

“I was old enough to not only know that his experience had been horrific, but also to treat him as a human being, with respect.

“I also recall blind George, who walked daily more than two miles to play a small organ at St Anne's Well, a building on the way to the top of the Malvern Hills, which is still standing. Although totally blind, he gave great pleasure with his music to thousands of people and, quite rightly, his name has been commemorated with a plaque as a permanent memorial. He was a good musician and always bright and cheerful, a man of tremendous strength of character.”