Chapter 5 - continued

Another individual who brought the personal perspective of wider diversity to the BDRC was Tim Philips. Tim joined the board of trustees of the BDRC in 1996. He had just completed a Diploma in Social Work Studies and landed his first job with Birmingham Social Services which had opened up offices in another part of the Bierton Road site.

In the early ‘90s it is fair to say that, being a wheelchair user, Tim was not typical of the average social worker, although he probably did represent a growing number of disabled people who were considering a career on the other side of the ‘professional / service-user’ divide.

Neither was this Tim’s first contact with BDRC. After giving up a secure job with the Electricity Board in 1990 to pursue a career in social care, Tim had decided to gain some community work experience for a year before embarking on his Social Work diploma.

Working in the office of Birmingham Disability Rights Group at Southside as it entered the final phase of its campaign to attain the Disability Resource Centre, Tim was introduced to the philosophy and terminology of the social model of disability:

“Basically, whilst working with the Electricity Board, for me it was around personal development through employment. It wasn’t really until 1990-91 when I took a year out to have that original association with the BDRG that I actually came to know about the social model as a philosophy and the medical model as another philosophy.

“I think it was certainly absorbing. Certainly, I remember having conversations and discussions with Terry Vincent as well, so I think she gave me some context of the two models verbally as well as written. She was doing a research project at the time and I was able to hear it at first hand from Terry, but also the discussions in board meetings. I was able to pick it up through those kind of avenues really.”

In common with Robin Surgeoner and other people mentioned in previous chapters, Tim was a disabled person whose life had always been affected by different ways of looking at disability and, whilst the social theory was enlightening, ultimately it backed up what he already knew from personal experience:

“What happened after you left the hospital – say after a spinal injury or spinal damage or whatever – in terms of a transition to become a disabled person or more severely disabled person? The medical change was effectively left at the door of the hospital unit.

“What we understood in being more aware of the social model within the BDRC is that the social model became relevant at the time you left the hospital or an injuries unit. How do you fit into society as a whole? How can you, as a disabled person, access fairly all of the things that a non disabled person accesses without seemingly any concerns?

“I was able to ally my experience as a non-disabled person as a child being at school until my 17th year (the year when I acquired my disability through an historical back problem) together with my knowledge of being a disabled person in subsequent years. There is an element, as a non-disabled person, of taking things for granted.

“You go to school, you can access for example the swimming baths, cinema, all those things. As a disabled person, all of a sudden these things have become an issue.

“Back then it was difficult to access a lot of public facilities because, as a wheelchair user, you were seen as a fire risk. I remember in 1978 going with my brothers to the old ABC Cinema on Bristol Road to watch an Elvis film (I am a big Elvis fan and he had died a year or so earlier) and being turned away because the film we wanted to watch was on the middle screen which was up steps.

“I did not go to a cinema again until the first of the regional Multiplex screens opened in Solihull, I think it was 1979 or 80. For the first time you were able to arrange to go to a cinema with the family or a friend and you were not getting turned away because, now, it was all flat and accessible.

“From those early years of the late ‘70s when I made my transition there are now a lot more buildings and facilities which are accessible to physically disabled people.

“In terms of the medical and social models, I was able to relate to being a non-disabled person as well on a more lengthy basis and see that, yes, it is all very well coming out of hospital with the medical staff saying to you ‘we have done our bit’, and then as an out-patient what happens to you after that? How do you pick up a meaningful life?”

Long before Tim learnt the terminology of the different models of disability, he had, therefore, experienced the full range of personal emotions engendered by being on the receiving end of exclusion and marginalisation. What membership of disabled people’s organisations was giving to people like Tim in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was the realisation that things didn’t have to be that way and the resolve to do something about it on a myriad of different levels.

The reason Tim had not been able to watch Elvis Presley at the movies had far less to do with him being an individual with mobility impairment and much more to do with the fact that the cinema was inaccessible. To reference another slogan of the disabled people’s movement, it was no longer about changing or curing the individual person, but now it was about altering the environment and changing the attitudes and practices of society.

The social model of disability simultaneously confirmed for tens of thousands of disabled people and their growing army of allies that, contrary to the prevailing logic of the past few centuries, the non-participation of disabled people in society actually had a lot more to do with discriminatory design and practice than with the impairments and health conditions of individuals.

As both Bob Findlay and Ken Davis have pointed out, whilst disability organisations up until the early 1980s had drawn attention to specific symptoms of discrimination, most had continued to contribute to the status quo of the medical and charitable models. For the first time in history organisations led by disabled people were now challenging and changing that status quo.