Chapter Two: When the personal became political

Two of the people who responded to Paul Hunt’s Guardian letter were Ken and Maggie Davis. Following a car accident in the late 1960s and unable to find accessible accommodation in which to move, Maggie was living in a hostel at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a situation about which she was not entirely happy:

“Because the accident flipped me from being an able-bodied person to a disabled person in a split second, I became very aware that there was something very wrong with society because it doesn’t want me.

“I suddenly realised that I wasn’t wanted anymore and that got me thinking. I’d known Ken through a friend in the hostel. A friendship started and then we decided we’d like to be together, but we had no where to go. So that meant we had to start thinking up some sort of solution in the community. It seemed really so simple to us – all you needed was somewhere to live and somebody to help you with the physical things you couldn’t do, yet there was just no where.

“There weren’t even home helps. Probably the best you could do was a community nurse coming in. So that’s how we started working towards getting a place outside.

“It was whilst I was in the hostel and becoming very angry because I was getting persecuted for speaking out, that I saw Paul Hunt’s letter in The Guardian in which he was saying that ‘if anyone’s in the same situation as me’, because he was at Lee Court suffering the same sort of persecution and oppressiveness, ‘please get in touch with me’ and it felt as if somebody was holding out a hand of survival. I wrote to him and he wrote back and then obviously more people had contacted him and that really was the beginning of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation.”

From an interview between Maggie & Ken Davis and Pete Millington – Proud To Be Disabled documentary film 2004.

Maggie and Ken were typical of many disabled people up and down the country whose thoughts, lives and personal aspirations were to be changed radically, firstly by the catalyst provided in Paul Hunt’s letter and then by subsequent events such as the formation of UPIAS.

As Ken Davis explained:

“UPIAS was a very important development for me personally. It radicalised me significantly and helped me, in the process of discussion that went on in that organisation, to resolve the difficulties I’d been having with the world I’d suddenly been pitch forked into as the result of the accident.

“It helped me really to get my head together about what needed to be done. So once I was straightened out, it made life a lot simpler with regard to knowing what to get on and do about it.”

From an interview between Maggie & Ken Davis and Pete Millington – Proud To Be Disabled documentary film 2004.

Another person who played a leading role in the development of UPIAS was Vic Finkelstein, a disabled person who had been jailed in South Africa for his protests about the apartheid regime. Ken and Maggie recall rigourous intellectual discussions with Vic Finkelstein, Paul Hunt, Dick Leaman from Lambeth and many others which clarified a lot of the emergent ideas around the political and social situation of disabled people. For Ken and Maggie this period represented a significant step and a turning point in their lives.

The new organisation, UPIAS, was seen as a departure from existing disability organisations such as the Disablement Income Group and the Disability Alliance, both of which were focussed around the single issue of gaining a national disability income.

According to Ken Davis the analysis within UPIAS was one of social exclusion, the problem being not to give people more money to carry on being oppressed in a society which was designed to serve and perpetuate able bodied people’s interests, the task was a far wider political one.