Chapter 7 - The man from the Council

During the late 1990s Birmingham Disability Rights Group went through a renaissance period largely thanks to a small group of members who stayed faithful to the need for an organisation to represent ‘the voice’ of disabled people in Birmingham.

Three of the people who not only kept the group going, but for a period re-energised it to an extent that it might have flourished into the 21st century were Robin and Tracy Surgeoner and Paul Green. Paul’s creative talents were largely responsible for a rebranded version of the group’s original newsletter, Building Bridges.

Coming from a background of both disability and wider community arts (having been associated with Trinity Arts Shop on Coventry Road in Small Heath in the early 1980s amongst other local projects), Paul Green injected a new passion into BDRG conveyed through the pages of Building Bridges.

The newsletter now took on more of a street fanzine format, with lively and challenging debate and commentary about local and national issues, copious offerings of poetry and creative writing, and acquiring a new visual impact which the previous incarnation of the newsletter had not achieved.

In April 1996, the editor of Pinpoint magazine, which some might have considered to be the rival publication of Building Bridges, praised the new look BDRG magazine:

Building Bridges


Brum’s campaigners keep up the pressure!

Thank you to Paul Green, an active member of Birmingham Disability Rights Group, who recently sent us a complimentary copy of Building Bridges, BDRG's new look newsletter, which Paul himself edits. Despite being put together on an absolute boot string, Building Bridges succeeds in being an extremely stimulating and challenging publication containing plenty of radical text, complemented by some strong and confrontational visual images.

This edition of Building Bridges contains minutes from BDRG's recent Emergency General Meeting at which members discussed the proposal to form a Coalition in Birmingham. The report seems to indicate an overall impetus to regenerate interest in the Disability Rights movement in the UK's 2nd City and, whilst not totally throwing out the idea of a Coalition, BDRG members seem keener to build-up the campaigning reputation of their existing organisation.

The rest of the newsletter builds on the growing reputation of Birmingham's large, active group of Civil Rights Campaigners with much coverage of last October's DAN ‘We Will Ride’ action in Birmingham; I particularly like the photographic image on page 5 showing a very casual group of almost nonchalant looking protesters sitting on the steps of their local public (and, needless to say, inaccessible) railway station, flanked by five policemen who themselves look as if they would rather have been on-duty up the Villa on that particular afternoon.

One can almost hear the words, "Hey Sarge', don't the Special Education Department have their own Riot Squad Division?" This image should surely be made into a poster.

Other challenging articles within the pages of Building Bridges? John Gordon dares to raise the debate about the medical use of cannabis and Geraldine Anderson provides an interesting autobiographical account of her work as a Counsellor and Disability Equality Trainer. BDRG is described in Paul Green's editorial as an angry beast with both teeth and claws and Paul concludes with an invitation to disabled people to join the organisation and ‘celebrate your right to be angry, demand your right to your rights!’.

BDRG is based at Bierton Road Disability Resource Centre in South Yardley.

But by the latter years of the 20th century, Birmingham Disability Rights Group was in decline. The group’s founder and the person who principally conceived the idea of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, Bob Findlay, offers a retrospective analysis of why the group eventually disintegrated:

“I always stayed around the periphery of the BDRG in its last years. One of the sad things (and I don’t often use words like “sad” because I might be accused of medical model type sentiments) but individuals die (if you have got an impairment then chances are you die) and two of the greatest losses for BDRG were first of all Dave Nugent who was a huge, huge loss in my opinion.

“Dave wasn’t very political, but he brought us a humanity and a drive that very few of us ever had in my opinion. And the other one, a young woman named Lois Thomas. Lois came from Manchester and was very much part of the hard line Manchester lot. She got up lots of political noses very quickly, but once you got to know Lois she was gold.

“She was committed, she had passion and I think that she would have grabbed BDRG by the testicles and dragged it into the 21st century! I have got a lot of me in her (if I dare say it in that sense).

“Lois had a passion and vision that I felt was ebbing away from BDRG, not because the people involved at the time weren’t committed (I think that they were), but I think that they were jaded, jaded by a history and legacy of where the movement as a whole was going, had gone.

“But also their personal lives – like Robin and Tracy who had a young kid to bring up and all that takes a toll on your ability to keep banging your head against a brick wall with very few resources. It was not the first or last time that an organisation in the disability movement would hit the buffers in that way.”

If there was a void left by the waning of Birmingham Disability Rights Group, it was soon to be filled with the grand entrance of the new kid on the block, Johnny Crescendo, aka Alan Holdsworth. Alan was appointed Birmingham City Council’s Disability Equalities Manager in 2000.

Shortly before his arrival in Birmingham, Alan, a founder member and leading figure in the Disabled People's Direct Action Network, had been recommended to receive an Honorary Degree by Professor Mike Oliver, a respected author on disability rights, and had also been photographed on the front pages of national newspapers at DAN demonstrations, handcuffed to buses and daubing red paint on the railings of Parliament.

Alan’s appointment augured a new era in Birmingham and, if it didn’t send waves around the city, it certainly raised many eyebrows in surprise, not least his own. With his characteristic sense of audacious irony and in his more popular guise of Johnny Crescendo, he introduced himself to an appreciate audience at the 2000 Independence Festival at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre with the opening gambit “hello, I’m the man from the council”.