Chapter 2 - continued

But, if the resolve within the WMCDP seemed radically loud and proud back in 1981, a still stronger battle-cry was to sound in 1985 when Bob Findlay, a disabled activist, brought together a small group of local disabled people to form the Birmingham Disability Rights Group.

Bob Findlay was just 21-years-old and unemployed when he too had read Paul Hunt’s letter to The Guardian back in 1972. Born in Bedfordshire in 1951, Bob had been disabled since birth and remembered his childhood as being fairly isolated. Tutored at home in his early years, Bob was sent to boarding school when he was six-years-old, firstly to Northampton and later to one in Tonbridge, Kent:

“I missed out on basic family life which was further compounded when I was sent to the boarding school in Tonbridge run by the organisation now known as Scope, but formerly known as the Spastics Society. I never really liked school – I just seemed to lack confidence in my own ability. I've always had a big gob and I was questioning them all the time – so I wasn't popular.”

Bob’s feelings of disaffection and isolation grew heavier whilst he was at school and he recalled being the only person in the sixth form who was never picked to be a prefect. At the age of 17 this was devastating:

“Looking back I could probably have done the school for psychological abuse. I once wrote some poetry for a girl at school and the teachers confiscated it because they felt it to be offensive – I had expressed feelings about ‘love’ and ‘caring’ so it had to be censored.”

In spite of his dislike of and sense of alienation at school, Bob attained eight 'O' levels, but flunked his 'A' levels due to the pressures he felt he was under. A short spell at a Spastics Society further education college studying computer programming, which Bob describes as ‘a wrong choice’, came to an abrupt end when his father died in the early 1970s – it was a big knock and Bob now found himself unemployed and seeking direction.

Around this time Bob contacted Paul Hunt and became actively involved in the establishment of the Union for the Physically Impaired Against Segregation alongside Vic Finkelstein and other activists:

“I became involved with Paul Hunt, the founder of the modern disabled person's movement. I responded to Paul's legendary ‘letter to The Guardian’ and then I joined the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). If it hadn't been for Paul I would never have got involved in the disability movement and wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. Paul was my guru.”

Bob’s involvement with UPIAS was, however, short-lived. The development and public expression of his own ideas on disability from the perspective of the socialist critique very quickly proved to be, in his own view, too radical for those around him:

“I was becoming more interested in socialist ideas and I wrote a paper on disability and capitalism for the UPIAS newsletter. My critique set out to show how capitalism creates the structures which exclude and oppress disabled people.

“I, therefore, argued that disabled people need to make links with other oppressed groups, such as gay people and black people. But this was far too radical for people to deal with, so in the end I left UPIAS and got involved with socialist groups like the International Marxist Group.”

Bob's Left-wing commitment and beliefs were soon to get him into trouble. Having completed a BA degree in History and Sociology at Essex University in 1976, Bob had commenced his MA at the same university. However, the course was cut short when his extra-curricula political activities were exposed by a crusading national newspaper who published an article headlined Carry On Revolting about the Left-wing student who, they implied, was receiving a grant from the tax-payer to do a “PhD in agitating and revolting”.

Suddenly Bob was to feel the shadow of social ostracism, as universities around the country now closed their doors to him. Only the University of Birmingham would offer him a place to do his PhD:

“I studied at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Edgbaston, collaborating on the publication of a book – The Empire Strikes Back – a study of racism and race relations in the late 1970s which set out to show how state intervention at that time was based on racist structures and policies.”

When Bob first arrived in Birmingham his interest in disability rights issues was secondary to his passion for the wider politics of the Left. But, within a few years, he would start to make fresh contacts with other disabled people and, through those relationships, would bring together a new organisation to campaign for the rights of disabled people in the UK’s second city.

One of those people was Maria Mleczko, a disabled woman who nowadays reflects that what she had most in common with Bob Findlay was being “a maverick” and, like Bob, her sense of rebellion as a young disabled person was born out of the frustration of other people controlling her life and limiting her own choices.

Born in Leicester to Polish parents, when Maria left school her mother became worried about her future prospects and persuaded her to move to Birmingham to live in residential accommodation and to work in a sheltered workshop:

“I came to Birmingham in 1969 to work in a sheltered workshop called Meadway Works in Garretts Green Lane. We made wheelchairs, did laundry and we also did capstan work and printed Christmas cards for ‘the disabled’. It was run by the Spastics Society.

“A friend and I got told off once (because when someone new came, they bring you round, ‘isn’t it lovely?’ to sell it) somebody actually asked us what we thought and, without thinking about it from the workshop’s point of view or anybody else, we actually told them what we thought. We didn’t like it!

“But we were here and we put up with it. Ideally we still wanted to be at home. If you think about it, most of us had been away from home – I had been away since the age of four. It might be different now, I don’t know, I am not young enough to know. But, deep down, I wanted some kind of home life. So when she asked me I must have been feeling particularly sad. ‘I don’t like this place’, we both told the visitor! We got told off!”

Most of Maria’s work colleagues also had cerebral palsy, although she liked the fact that there were also some non-disabled employees. On the whole, she felt pleased to have a job and, in spite of her out spoken views at times, generally enjoyed the work.

However, because the work was sub-contracted from larger Birmingham companies such as Lucas, contracts had a tendency of being sporadic, there were periods when things were quiet and the employees were still paid whilst doing very little.

Such periods brought home to Maria the token gesture nature of sheltered workshops:

“I was on the assembly section and used to put things from one box into another box – that sort of thing. So it was all right when you had a job. When you didn’t have a job you still had to go to work because you were paid to go, it got a bit boring. We used to say to them ‘I am bored’ and they would reply ‘but you are being paid’.

“They didn’t seem to understand the principle, from my perspective at least, that getting paid isn’t the only thing – you need to feel proud and happy. You didn’t want to be falling asleep!”