Forward

Forward - The History of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre

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Image from the front cover of Forward, drawn by Crippen

Crippen's cartoon shows the Forward statue which was formerly located in Centenary Square Birmingham, with the various characters featured in the original sculpture replaced by representations of disabled people

Copyright details

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First published 2010 by Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, Bierton Road, Yardley, Birmingham, B25 8PQ, UK, with funding received from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Copyright © Birmingham Disability Resource Centre 2010

The rights of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre and the contributors of this book, to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher (Birmingham Disability Resource Centre). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Illustration and Front Cover: Crippen (http://www.daveluptoncartoons.co.uk/ )

Editing and design by: Hazel Wood of Hazelwood Associates (http://www.hazelwooduk.com/ )

Printed by: Westpoint Printing Co Ltd, Fazeley Street, Birmingham, UK.

Also available online in PDF format

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Acknowledgements

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One: The roots of change

Chapter Two: When the personal became political

Chapter Three: Defining moments and Building Bridges

Chapter Four : Spirit of perseverance

Chapter Five: Rights now!

Chapter Six : Doing it for ourselves

Chapter Seven : The man from the council

Chapter Eight : Empowering services

Chapter Nine : Forward!

Acknowledgements

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Resourcefulness is etched into the very heart of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre. Its founders and supporters were people of enormous resourcefulness and determination in their quest for equal opportunities, education and dignity. This book is dedicated to them and to all those who have had to strive to be recognised for their abilities and their potential.

We would like to place on record our appreciation to everyone for their support in helping to give this centre and its people its rightful place in history, not only in Birmingham, but in the UK as a whole.

Special thanks must go to Hazel Wood for her work in editing and designing this book and to Ray Gormley for his stalwart work as audio technician and interviewer. They have both contributed extra time and dedication to the project.

We are grateful to The Heritage Lottery Fund which recognised the importance of this project and ¬for its financial assistance. We would also like to acknowledge the wealth of contributions and support we have had for this book from the following:

Mary Barker        David Barnsley     Andy Beaton

Stuart Bishop          Yvonne Boddey   Sir Albert Bore

John Boular             Jerome Chen Bacchus

Carl Chinn             Anita Cole           Julie Cole

Tom Comerford      Ken and Maggie Davis

John Ellis                Clenton Farquharson

Carl Freeman         Ray Gormley       Mandy Hawker

Mike Higgins          David Heap            Linda Laurie

Demelza Llewelyn Dave Lupton (Crippen)

Maria Mleczko      Sarah McMahon  Clive Mason

Debbie Nunn         Susan O’Shea        Tim Philips

George Rowley       Alun Severn           Louise Simmons

Sue Smith               Robin Surgeoner       Len Tasker

Mohammed Vaseem    Daniel Vincent          Terry Vincent

Katherine Walsh      Bob Williams-Findlay    Hazel Wood

Irene Wright

Preface: The Heritage Lottery Fund

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The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) distributes money raised by the National Lottery to heritage projects throughout the UK. These projects include multi-million-pound investments in well-known buildings and sites like Birmingham Town Hall and Hadrian’s Wall, and also smaller grants making a big difference to communities and community groups such as the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre.

One of our strategic aims is “to help more people and a wider range of people, to take an active part in and make decisions about their heritage”. This includes helping disabled people themselves and disabled people’s organisations to make grant applications. It was, therefore, with great pleasure that HLF was able to fund the project which has resulted in this book.

The history and heritage of disabled people and disabled people’s organisations has for too long been a ‘hidden history’, but in recent years, with HLF funding, many disability organisations have been able to research, record and share their unique heritage with a wider audience. Much of this has been possible using oral history techniques with the recordings being held as a permanent record in archives and libraries for present and future generations to learn from.

An important aspect of these histories is how disabled people themselves have influenced and brought about changes in society’s attitudes towards disability, leading to disabled people gaining equality of access and the inclusion in society enjoyed by non-disabled people.

The Birmingham Disability Resource Centre’s project not only ensured that disabled people took an active part in exploring their own heritage, but also has highlighted the active role disabled people have played in influencing attitudinal change.

Heritage Lottery Fund

March 2010

Foreword by Professor Carl Chinn, MBE

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I never knew my Granddad Perry when he was able to walk. Our Granddad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 1950s and one of the last times he was able to walk unaided was when he escorted Our Mom down the aisle on her wedding day in 1954.

Soon after, the MS took such a hold that Granddad lost the use of his legs and his right arm. But he never lost the use of his mind or his memory, nor of his wit or his good humour. I recall that when we were out with Our Granddad in his wheelchair that people would often look over him to Our Mom and ask “How is he?” Mom would answer angrily, “Ask him yourself. He is Arthur and he can talk for himself.”

I grew up with disability, but did not recognise it as such because Our Granddad was such an important member of our family and he was always treated as such. Nor did I recognise that Our Nan was disabled. But she was. She had lost her index finger on her right hand in an accident on a power press in a factory.

Looking back, Nan’s physical health had also been badly affected by the poverty in which she had grown up in the 1920s. Her feet were misshapen because of the charity boots she’d had to wear and she always had problems with them. But, like Granddad, we never thought of Nan as disabled because she was another key figure in our family.

Disability touches every family and every neighbourhood in Birmingham at some time. Whether this be a parent, a sibling, a friend or a neighbour who may have been born disabled or become disabled later in life. Sadly, in the past, not so many Brummies had disabled playmates at school or disabled colleagues in the workplace, this was because for a large part of the last century our society was less enlightened and many disabled people spent their school days and adult lives living in institutions.

But, throughout those years, there were many disabled people who have fought not only for their own independence, but for the independence of others. They have struggled to free themselves from institutions and go into the community to live full and active lives, to be respected as equal citizens and to be able to contribute to our proud city in the modern age.

This is a most significant history book. It tells the story of the fight for independence by what started off as a small group of disabled people in the city, but who went on to successfully campaign for and to set up their own centre at the former Bierton Road School in Yardley in 1992.

Eighteen years on, the centre is still going strong and still supporting Birmingham’s disabled citizens through information and support services.

The board members, staff and volunteers of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre continue to work with tireless dedication to make our city accessible to all Brummies, regardless of age, disability or caring responsibilities and they should be rightly proud of the inspiration they provide to all of us as we move our great working city forward and into an age where every citizen can access work, leisure, housing and education opportunities.

Introduction by Pete Millington

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In September 1992, a new centre opened in a section of the ground floor of an old public building in Birmingham which once used to be a school.

The school itself opened in 1928 and was known as Bierton Road Council School. Its intake of 86 pupils came from nearby Yardley Primary School. There are still many local people from South Yardley today who have memories of their school days from 1928 right up until it closed in 1985.

One can only imagine the excitement and trepidation for both children and teachers alike on their first morning at this brand new building with its magnificent and resplendent Birmingham City Council coat of arms positioned over the entrance hall from the main playground.

We can but speculate whether the children gained inspiration for their educational studies from gazing up at the sculpted objects which are, to this day, displayed on either side of the heraldic shield of the coat of arms, as they entered the school each morning or following play time.

On one side of the coat of arms are tools of industry, including an imposing anvil from the smith’s foundry, representing Birmingham’s industrial heritage and on the other side are the implements of leisure and the arts, representing the city’s cultural tradition. Or, perhaps, the pupils of Bierton Road were inspired by the city’s optimistic and self-assured motto, Forward, which was adopted at the very first meeting of the council in December 1838 and has, henceforth, adorned the base of its coat of arms.

What we can say with certainty is that very few disabled children would have passed under that beautiful crest in the decades between 1928 and 1985. In 1928 there were scant opportunities for disabled children, least of all access to academic education.

In the early part of the 20th century, if disabled children did not die in infancy or were forced to beg on the streets in order to survive, the majority were destined to spend their lives in long-term institutions, hospitals, workhouse infirmaries and even asylums. The luckiest of them might have attended a more forward thinking charitable institution where therapy and occupational training replaced academic study.

Even the guarantee of education for disabled children, provided by the 1944 Education Act, contained no mention of inclusion into mainstream schools like Bierton Road. Whilst there is no doubt that the introduction of special schools offered a great improvement from what had gone before, disabled children were still destined to spend their lives away from their peers with no prospects of gaining qualifications in readiness for the big wide world.

Perhaps there is some irony, therefore, in the fact that the new centre, opening on the old Bierton Road school site in 1992, was going to be one of the country’s first support centres not just committed to the inclusion of disabled people in wider society, but actually set up and run by disabled people themselves.

The conversion of a ground-floor wing of the school into a fully accessible centre known as Birmingham Disability Resource Centre was even funded by the same city council whose forward-looking motto and coat of arms acknowledging the firm foundations of industrial and cultural heritage still embellishes the front entrance hall at Bierton Road.

The most important story behind the launch of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre is that of the pioneering disabled people whose own vision of an inclusive future led to a seven-year campaign of lobbying, negotiating with, and working alongside, the local council. For the most part these were ordinary disabled people who had banded together in 1985 to form the Birmingham Disability Rights Group to raise awareness about disability and to campaign for greater access and equality of opportunity.

Most were people whose own personal experiences were not so greatly dissimilar to those of disabled citizens of the early 1900s – segregation, isolation, rejection, disadvantage, life on low income, medicalisation and discrimination.

Here is our own attempt to document, celebrate and recognise the legacy of the disabled people and their allies who set up Birmingham Disability Resource Centre. It is a celebration of the achievements of all those who have been associated with both the Rights Group and the centre in its 25-year history. In 1986 concepts like equal citizenship and social justice for disabled people were virtually unheard of and the vision of a centre in Birmingham run by disabled people for disabled people was an unachieveable pipedream.

This historical record would not have been possible without financial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund (West Midlands) which has recognised the importance of heritage to disabled people by funding the 18-month oral history project which has provided the material for the book.

This is much more than just a history of a building; a history of bricks and mortar. It is the story of Birmingham’s role in the wider change brought about by the international disabled people’s movement. A change based on inclusive living principles, user-led direction of services and the liberating “social model of disability”.

This is by no means the end of the road in this history of social transformation, but, if we are to continue to move forward, it is essential to pause every now and then to reflect on the rich and resourceful heritage we have been gifted from the past.

Chapter 1 - The roots of change

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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.”

Chapter 1 - continued

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In the bleak, impoverished years of the 1930s, disabled people started to seek solidarity through self-help type social groups which evolved into fully regulated clubs, societies and associations. The Cripple’s Car Circle and the Birmingham and District Social Club for the Hard of Hearing both started in 1930 and in 1932 the Birmingham and Midland Limbless Ex-Service Association was formed.

The trend for peer-participatory, sometimes even user-led disability associations is exemplified by an example of a group formed in Coventry in 1938. Three young disabled men in Coventry formed the Coventry Cripples’ Social Club. Len Tasker, one of the three original members, recalls life for disabled people in the early part of the 20th century:

“At the beginning of the 20th century the plight for the disabled was pretty desperate. No employment and begging in the street by playing musical instruments or trying to sell matches, reels of cotton and other small items was a common sight. The younger disabled who had no support were put into 'Institutions'.

“There were very few opportunities to enjoy a social life and entry into a place of entertainment and other public places was an impossibility for those confined to wheelchairs. They were considered a risk in case of emergency.

“However, the 20th century was to see amazing changes. It was the disabled themselves who rose up and were at the centre of this peaceful revolution. It was in 1938 that three Coventry disabled men got together and decided to try to form a social club for the disabled as no such facilities existed in the city at that time.

“The disabled trio, little realising the tremendous effect their actions were to have in enriching the lives of hundreds of people over the next 62 years, decided to give the title of their pioneering venture ‘the Coventry Cripples’ Social Club’.

“They were Eric F Gray, Harry Trustlove and Len Tasker. Other disabled friends joined them and the first meeting place was Sydenham Place. Then came 1939 and the Second World War, the terrible blitz in 1940 and the two awful blitzes in 1941. These nearly put an end to the club, but the members persevered in their efforts by meeting at the British Legion Club every Sunday morning. Although only about six members would turn up, it kept the club alive.

“In late 1941 the members discovered a bombed house at 13, Priory Street, which, they considered, would make ideal headquarters. The owner was contacted by the club's president, Councillor Harry Weston, and the premises were offered to the members free of charge, provided they repaired all the bomb damage and maintained the building.

“This wonderful offer was joyfully accepted. And, so, 13 became our happy headquarters for the next 14 years. In 1945 the club's title changed to the Enterprise Club For Disabled People, the proud title which it still holds today.”

Local groups like Coventry’s Enterprise Club went from strength to strength during the 1950s and 1960s, giving disabled people increased access to community-based activities such as social events, hobby and craft based activities and disability sport.

Some of these groups forged links with national user-led organisations such as the Invalid Tricycle Association (later becoming the Disabled Drivers Association), formed in 1947. Even so, most local groups remained on the periphery of mainstream society and were either self-supporting or raised funds through charitable appeals.

The charity model response to disability had its roots in the large national institutions such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Royal National Institute for the Deaf. However, from the late 1940s onwards there was a sudden increase in charities set up by parents and carers, such as Mencap (founded in 1946), Mind (1946), Leonard Cheshire Homes (1948) and the Spastics Society (1954).

The 1944 Education Act had established the legal requirement for all British children described as “handicapped” to be educated in special schools or classes and by the 1950s this provision was becoming very specialised with an ever-increasing range of schools and colleges for children with different types of impairment.

In September 1948 a school for children with cerebral palsy opened in Victoria Road, Harborne, in Birmingham. The school was called Carlson House and was set up with support from Paul Cadbury of Birmingham’s chocolate manufacturing family, whose own daughter Margaret had cerebral palsy.

Birmingham-born David Barnsley was one of the first pupils at Carlson House and describes its early development:

“Paul Cadbury gathered together a group of people prepared to support his venture and to put up some finance. People like Ken Quayle, of Quayle Carpets in Kidderminster, as well as others. They also gained the interest of Birmingham’s Education Department which agreed to put up some money.

“They purchased a large house at 13a, Victoria Road in Harborne. It had a large garden and stables and, from 1945, the building was made suitable for the education of children with cerebral palsy.

“In those days parents didn't get grants, so they banded together. I recall going as a child of about 5 or 6 to 13a Victoria Road for weekends when my parents helped with the working parties who were converting the house. There was a covered way from the house to the stables with 17 windows along the side, which gives you some idea of the size of the area. It was converted into the physiotherapy department. Physiotherapy and speech therapy were offered on a daily basis.

“The criteria set for admission to Carlson House was based on a certain IQ level and children were vetted to see that they would benefit from what was offered. I recall that the kids used to be collected each morning by pre-war Austin taxis supplied by the All Electric Garage in Harborne – they were of dubious vintage – even the journey from home was exciting because of the tendency for the vehicles to break down at least every seven days.

“The spare car came to pick you up and then that would break down too! The back number plate would be put in the boot. It was a dubious choice between which car was most broken down!

“The cars became symbols, we were attached to them and recalled them by their registration plates. There was ‘ADA’, ‘EA’ and a rather sophisticated and beautiful Armstrong Sydney Sapphire with an unfortunate number plate ‘CAC’! And that is how we got to school.”

From an interview between David Barnsley and Peter Millington / Pinpoint Magazine – Winter 2003 edition.

Chapter 1 - continued

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The more specialised and, therefore, selective developments in special school education were increasingly seen by parents and, retrospectively in many cases, by pupils themselves, as being an exciting new opportunity.

Access was not based on wealth or class-based privilege, however, the longer term expectations of disabled people still remained limited.

Two years after the National Assistance Act 1948, Birmingham Corporation published its Handbook of 1950 which set out the new duties of the local authority towards its disabled citizens. Welfare services in 1950 were based at 102 Edmund Street and the Chief Welfare Officer for Birmingham was F. Kimberley. The Handbook reads:

“The National Assistance Act, 1948, formed part of the new social legislation to bring the Poor Laws to an end on 5 July, 1948. On, and from, that date the former Public Assistance Committee was superseded by a Welfare Committee appointed by the city council.

“The council was no longer concerned with monetary assistance to persons who were without the resources to meet their requirements or whose resources must be supplemented in order to meet their requirements, and hospital nursing and treatment of the chronic sick, responsibility and, therefore, having passed to the National Assistance Board and the Regional Hospital Board, respectively, on the same date.”

The main strategic objective of Birmingham's Welfare Committee in 1950 was to provide residential accommodation for “people who, by reason of age and infirmity or any other circumstances, are in need of care and attention which is not otherwise available to them”.

In addition to residential care, arrangements were being operated to further promote the welfare of:

“persons who are blind, deaf or dumb and other persons who are substantially or permanently handicapped by illness, injury, or congenital deformity, or such other disabilities, as may in future be prescribed through instruction and employment of methods for overcoming the effects of their disabilities and the provision of workshops and residential hostels.”

The Handbook also introduced the idea that the local authority would have discretionary power to provide its services in partnership with voluntary organisations which the council would subsidise or even employ as their agents, provided that those voluntary organisations “are registered in accordance with the provisions of the Act”.

The 1950 Handbook also provides a list of Special Welfare Services which were largely aimed at people with sensory impairment. Of approximately 1,400 blind people on Birmingham's register in 1950, many were being encouraged to take up training at the Birmingham Royal Institution for the Blind in the following trades: bedding and upholstery; mat and coal-bag making; boot repairing; light engineering; knitting; brush making; basket making; piano tuning and repairing; typing.

A Home Workers' Scheme was also being developed which split trades into gender specific groups with men being encouraged to take up trades such as piano tuning, chimney sweeping, firewood chopping and shop keeping, whilst women were encouraged to be music teachers, typists and machine knitters. Where blind men were instructed in basket making, blind women were instructed in fancy basket making.

Even the advantages of some intensively resourced Special Education schools did not generally enhance future opportunities for disabled school leavers.

When David Barnsley left Carlson House School at the age of 18 in 1959 his teachers helped him to acquire immediate employment at the Lucas factory in Great King Street. But the initial novelty of finding employment as a disabled school leaver would be quickly worn away as David discovered that the manufacturing sector, like most areas of employment in those days, was largely inaccessible and fundamentally discriminatory:

“The school staff were going around local businesses looking for employment opportunities for school leavers from Carlson House and they went to Lucas's in Great King Street. Mrs Marlow was the school's second headmistress — she met with Lucas's and said they had a prospective school leaver with 'O' levels, so I was sent for interview and was given the job. I left school in July 1959 and started work at Lucas's on 7th September 1959. I was scared stiff before the interview, but they were quite pleasant.

“They said I could have a job in ‘suppliers accounts’. Unfortunately I fell foul of the fact that I was rather slow. You had to put all the goods inwards and open invoices in alphabetical order and match them by 300 a day.

“A bloke came round with a book to check if you were doing it properly and it never occurred to me to lie like everyone else – they never counted them anyway, so I was deemed to be too slow and given all the dirty little jobs in the office to do instead.

“I stuck at it though because £5 17s 6d was a lot of money in those days, of which my father took £3 for accommodation and the petrol and oil for my trike was five and four pence a gallon. So even though they gave me all the dead filing to do, at least I had a job.

“You'd see the supervisor taking people to one side and he'd tell them they'd got a rise, saying ‘but don't tell anyone’ and then they'd all go into the gents and find they'd all got a rise of 5s 5d. They put me on packing for a while which no one else ever did before or after me. I was packing orders which should have been grade 8 money, but I was still paid at grade 5 money.

“For the next few years people would come in and ask me how to do things and I'd tell them because I'd been there a long time, but then they'd get good high-powered jobs and I'd be stuck on grade 5 money.”

From an interview between David Barnsley and Peter Millington / Pinpoint Magazine – New Year 2004 edition.

Chapter 1 - continued

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With more disabled people accessing at least basic education, but still feeling marginalised and rejected by a society which was otherwise becoming more affluent and equalitarian for the majority of citizens, the green shoots of a new militancy began to emerge amongst disability organisations.

In 1960 a national rights demonstration, led by the Physically Handicapped Association, took place in Trafalgar Square in London. The demonstration called for pension rights for disabled people and a delegation from South Staffordshire Disabled Association left Wolverhampton on that day with its local contribution to a national petition being presented to the Prime Minister.

Mr Pitcher, MBE, of the Darlaston Fellowship of the Disabled recalled this event, where the collective belly of disabled people was “filled with fire”:

“That day in 1960, the pathfinders, agitators, pressure groups were all there in Trafalgar Square, London. Persons in their thousands, not to ban the bomb, but demanding the right of the disabled to be integrated and to stand in society as equal, to have a good standard of living with a suitable pension to cover that ideal.

“Megan Du Boisson raised the banner that day, rallied us to the cause, filled our belly with fire and we marched on No. 10 Downing Street singing The Old Rugged Cross, handing the petitions in. The flame had been lit and the stalwarts still march on, maybe getting feeble, but knowing they played their part.”

The campaign, which started with the London rally in 1960, was given leadership in England by Megan Du Boisson, a disabled woman, and in Scotland by her counterpart, Dr Margaret Blackwood.

In 1965, Megan Du Boisson and Berit Thornberry founded a new national organisation called the Disablement Income Group which would take a leading role in campaigning for pensions and welfare benefits for disabled people as well as publishing information, conducting research, lobbying Parliament around income issues and generally highlighting the poverty endured by disabled people in Great Britain.

Megan Du Boisson was killed in a car accident on her way to the fifth annual general meeting of the Disablement Income Group in 1969. After her death, Du Boisson’s role was celebrated by activists in the West Midlands with a centre for disabled people on Beacon Way, Walsall, being posthumously named the Megan Du Boisson Centre in her honour.

The Disablement Income Group was not the only organisation in which disabled people were becoming actively involved. Len Tasker recalls being involved in the Coventry branch of the Disabled Driver’s Association and was one of a small delegation of disabled people who held a meeting with Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1973 to discuss mobility issues:

“The purpose of the meeting was to press the Prime Minister and the Government to abolish the dangerous three-wheel invalid tricycles that were issued to the disabled and replace these with allowances to enable those disabled who were eligible to have hand-controlled cars.

“Included in this important delegation were Mairwyn Meyrick, secretary of the Coventry Group at that time, her husband Alf and myself. It was from historic meetings such as this that the Mobility Scheme was born to raise the standard of living for thousands of disabled people throughout Britain.”

Also in attendance at the 1973 meeting with Edward Heath, was motor racing driver Graham Hill who added his support to the campaign for greater mobility support.

But poverty and mobility weren’t the only issues of concern to disabled people in the early ‘70s. In 1970 a group of disabled students in Berkeley, California, USA, called “the Rolling Quads” started what subsequently became known as the independent living movement.

Activist Ed Roberts and his associates firstly formed a Disabled Students’ Program on the UC Berkeley campus in 1970 and a year later established a Centre for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley for the community at large. In 1972, with a $50,000 grant from the city’s Rehabilitation Administration, they converted a cockroach-infested two-bedroom apartment into a user-led centre from which disabled people could support their peers to achieve independent living.

Events such as these would inspire disabled people on this side of the Atlantic to explore similar ideas. On Wednesday, September 20, 1972, a disabled person named Paul Hunt wrote a letter to the editor of The Guardian newspaper, inviting others to become involved in setting up a new national group around independent living in Britain:

Sir, - Ann Shearer’s account of the CMH conference of and not on the so-called mentally handicapped, challenges our patronising assumptions about such people.

It also has important implications for anyone who genuinely wants to help other disadvantaged groups.

For instance, practically every sentence in her article could apply with equal force to the severely physically handicapped, many of whom also find themselves in isolated and unsuitable institutions where their views are ignored and they are subject to authoritarian and often cruel regimes.

I am proposing the formation of a consumer group to put forward, nationally, the views of actual and potential residents of these successors to the workhouse. We hope, in particular, to formulate and publicise plans for alternative kinds of care.

I should be glad to hear from anyone who is interested to join or support this project.

– Yours faithfully,

Paul Hunt

The very blunt description contained in Paul Hunt’s two paragraph letter of residential care institutions being the “successors to the workhouse”, might have seemed sensational to the average reader, but struck a chord with hundreds, maybe thousands, of disabled people all over Britain, many of whom were indeed living in the situation he was highlighting.

His letter received a huge response from other disabled people and was to lead to the rapid development of a united, self-determined movement of disabled people in Britain with an agenda embracing not only the key issues around income and independent living, but an end to discrimination.

Chapter Two: When the personal became political

2010-03-23T02:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 2 - continued

2010-03-23T02:42:00.000-07:00

Around this time, the members of UPIAS began to talk about the social model of disability, as Ken explained:

“It came out of a very significant meeting which was held between the Union and the Disability Alliance and the publication which emerged at the conclusion of that meeting actually set down in words, for the first time, a social definition of disability that hadn’t been seen, as far as I am aware, any where else before and it was that, reworked and re-enacted in different organisations that flowed from that point.

“In 1976, the publication of Fundamental Principles was that analysis of the meeting between UPIAS and Disability Alliance, it formed and shaped the character of the movement from that point on. Not that there weren’t later influences that were equally powerful, but the social definition of disability that developed in the union was a milestone in the history of disabled people.”

A few years later, Ken and Maggie Davis would become founding members of the Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People during International Year of Disabled People (IYDP) in 1981. The coalition was born out of a conference in Derbyshire in February 1981 on the theme of Full Participation and Equality, which was the slogan of IYDP.

Ken Davis explained how local disabled people in Derbyshire decided to take over the county’s plans for the International Year:

“DAD, the Derbyshire Association for the Disabled, was a kind of umbrella of lots of village-based social clubs for disabled people and the main disability organisation in the county which influenced, to some extent, the county council’s policies on disabled people. It suggested that Derbyshire’s main event for the International Year should be a countywide craft competition to find out the best disabled basket weaver.

“That just seemed to be too much of a joke in the context of the slogan of the International Year, full participation and equality. Oh yeah, like who weaves the best basket?

“So, there were a lot of things going on that led to the coalition emerging and with the small organisation DIAL Derbyshire which had brought together the opportunities for disabled people locally to speak to each other.

“We were taking every advantage of that and we were bringing together a nucleus of people who were sufficiently keen to advance the idea of the formation of a Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People.”

Closer to home in Birmingham, in 1977 another new disability organisation was formed called the West Midlands Council for Disabled People (WMCDP).

The WMCDP was launched at Prospect Hall, in Selly Oak, by a small group mainly made up of professional disabled people such as Professor Edward Marsland, who was the vice chancellor of Birmingham University and a wheelchair user, Ruth Rolfe of the West Midlands Council for Preparatory Training, also a disabled person and members of the medical profession in the West Midlands such as Dr John Harrison, a gerontology consultant whose remit included the medical direction of the region’s rehabilitation service for younger disabled people based at Moseley Hall Hospital.

Shortly after its first meeting in Selly Oak, the WMCDP moved into offices at Moseley Hall Hospital where it would stay for the next 20 years, maintaining a close relationship with the health service and, in particular, with the rehabilitation service for large amounts of that time.

With its leadership resting initially within this, perhaps unique, alliance of health and education professionals, many of whom it is fair to say were disabled, the WMCDP in the 1980s could not have been described as an organisation of disabled people in comparison to the Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People, a grass-roots group that had grown out of the frustration and anger of disabled people, based around the principles of independent living and fully embracing the social model of disability.

Even so, many ordinary disabled people in the West Midlands were drawn to this rare beacon which offered advice, information and support across all types of impairment and on social issues such as welfare benefits and access to education, as well as the traditional medical and charitable approach to disability which was still dominating wider society.

Early members of the WMCDP included Hugh and Mary Barker. Here Mary describes the background to their involvement with the new organisation:

“I was working as a nurse for St John Ambulance and had gone to help out at the Polio Fellowship group in Westbourne Road in 1955 when I first met Hugh. We struck up a relationship and married in 1960.

Throughout the 1960s we were involved in the Polio Fellowship. When we were going out together, Hugh lived in Quinton Lane. He had one of the original old trikes in those days and I used to cycle all the way back to Dawlish Road from Hugh's house in Quinton in about 10 minutes so that I wasn't late home!”

From an interview between Mary Barker and Pete Millington published in Pinpoint Magazine May/June 2002 edition

Some years later, in 1977, Mary and Hugh attended the inaugural meeting of the West Midlands Council for Disabled People (WMCDP) at Prospect Hall. Hugh was a wheelchair user so, as a married couple, they had already developed a keen interest in disability issues, especially access issues around which they shared a strong belief that society could and should be made more accessible. Mary and Hugh decided to attend the WMCDP meeting having seen it advertised in a local newspaper.

“Hugh was one of the original executive members in the early years. The Chair back then was Professor Marsland and some of the other people I remember included Dr Beasley, John Harrison, Albert Weadle, Peter Low and Tommy Glasgow. Linda Foxall was the secretary and Theresa Jackson (Samuels) was the only paid member of staff.

“The work that everybody did in the early days of WMCDP was quite pioneering in terms of people with disability living and working in the community. With money that came from people with forward looking ideas in this field, a committee was formed with three-quarters of them being people with a disability.

“It wasn't an easy time and getting to places was always a big problem. Disabled people often had to rely on their carers to help them to get to places on time. The seeds were being sown in those days for the things that people with disabilities have today.”

The first newsletter of the WMCDP was published in February 1981 and, just like Ken and Maggie Davis and their colleagues in Derbyshire, the editor of the publication, which was called Pinpoint, took inspiration from the fact that it was International Year of Disabled People and that not a great deal was happening.

The title of the front page editorial of Pinpoint was Time To Disturb The Public and alongside it was the logo of International Year of Disabled People:

“What is happening! We read such headlines as ‘old and disabled hit by ban on centres’, ‘Social Services cuts influence the services to the old and disabled’, ‘Home helps and Meals on Wheels to be reduced’.

“This is 1981, the year designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Disabled Persons and in this country known as the International Year of Disabled People. One of the aims of the year is to increase public understanding of what disability is and awareness of the problems it brings.

“Such headlines as these only add further in reducing the quality of life of those people who need a greater degree of support for their well being. Surely we should be building not destroying.

“The second aim of the year is ‘the participation, equality and integration of disabled people’. Integration means the absence of social barriers, being treated like everyone else, the absence of segregation. Some of these barriers have occurred throughout history when it was easier to put ‘oddities’, be they homeless, poor or disabled, in an institution, our consciences were then absolved by our ‘charity’.

“It is only since the experience of the First World War that we have come to realise that disabled people can think and express themselves as well as those with no apparent disability.

“The ultimate goal would be that disabled people must have the same opportunities and equal rights as the rest of us. The right to go to work, the right to enjoy leisure time to the full and to go where they want, when they want. In fact the right of choice.

“If we are to communicate the message of the International Year, disabled people must not be seen to be seeking special treatment or privileges. They must express their views without any tendency towards self-centredness and consistently aim to overcome the problem within people of inherent ignorance. The public must be disturbed and made aware during the International Year of Disabled People.”

Another editorial on the inside page of Pinpoint, authored by Ted Marsland, Chair of the WMCDP, explained the reason for a local organisation working on behalf of all disabled people:

“There are many excellent organisations that provide advice and help for people with particular forms of handicap and others which provide a more general form of service, but those who work for the disabled in the West Midlands would, I think, readily admit that there remains a need for an effectively co-ordinated distribution of information on aids and services for the handicapped.”

Another article, Many Hands Make Light Work, written by Dr John Todd, also acknowledges this seemingly new trend for umbrella partnerships around service provision to disabled people with a nod in the direction of the participation of disabled people themselves:

“The council was seen as a group of people who either represented statutory or voluntary bodies concerned with disability, and who themselves were disabled or had a general interest in their problems.

“The early aims were to make statutory and other bodies more aware of disability, to make information available about services in the West Midlands and to encourage an educational programme for those people who may be involved.

“In the four years since the council started, it has certainly made people more aware of the needs and is now able to set up an information service; it will continue to run seminars on specific subjects. Much remains to be done particularly in support of other voluntary organisations, but this takes time and money.”

Chapter 2 - continued

2010-03-23T02:39:00.001-07:00

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!”

Chapter 2 - continued

2010-03-23T02:38:00.000-07:00

Another disabled woman destined to become a founder member of Birmingham Disability Rights Group with Bob Findlay and Maria Mleczko was Katherine Walsh.

Brought up in Birmingham, Katherine had decided not to put up with being a second class citizen from an early age. As an individual she embarked on a letter writing strategy to point out discrimination, poor access and general injustice.

“I think it has always been an issue for me. Right from the age of about 18 I was writing off to the ministry about wheelchairs and stuff because you never seem to have the right to choose what kind you had at all. I have always done the letter writing to MPs, so in that sense it has developed from that really.”

In the early 1980s, Katherine went to London to study a degree course at university and then took on a one-year training course to train as a teacher. There Katherine formed allegiances with other like-minded disabled people through which she realised the power of collective campaigning:

“I was in London in the mid-1980s and I got involved with the students union. We campaigned about access to the students union because it seemed it was a right for everybody else to be able to share social facilities at the university, but not, however, anybody in a wheelchair.

“From that we set up the campaign, Sian Vasey got involved because she was nearby in Camden and we set up a working group with different unions, staff and students with disabilities and we did quite a few different things. We got the disability responsibility tacked on to somebody’s job. I don’t know if they were thankful for it or not. Probably not.

“After we left, one person stayed on in the students union and they were able to get the access improved, which is what we had started out to do. So it was quite an eventful year – although probably not in terms of the actual course that I did!

“I did meet quite a lot of people and found attitudes towards disability in London quite different to those in Birmingham. A lot more flexibility, certainly amongst the people that I worked with. They were more receptive to changing ideas.”

As well as the campaigning work that Katherine was directly involved in at university, she also became aware of external organisations in London and wider national issues and campaigns:

“I met Bert Massey during that year at university and we invited him to speak – I think it was probably one of his early years in RADAR. I think people, non-disabled people, liked listening to him. We took over the lectures on the morning that he came.

“I wasn’t very knowledgeable about disability issues and language and stuff at the time, but he seemed OK. I was in the process of learning as well.

“Really and truly there wasn’t a lot of knowledge about disability issues or looking at the situation for teachers – particularly special needs – amongst anyone at the Institute of Education, which was housed in an inaccessible building.

“My feeling was that here I am in the GLC area and the Inner London Education Authority which had published the Fish report. It was supposed to be the most progressive about disability and yet, when it came to teaching practice, they couldn’t find anywhere for me to go, except somewhere where the head of department didn’t really want me. They just wanted a token gesture of a disabled person in the school to say that they were keeping up their Equal Ops, that is what I felt about it.

“That seemed to me to go right the way through the education system. That if they could have somebody on a temporary part-time basis to do a little bit of work, they had fulfilled their requirements for Equal Ops. There is a lot of noise made about special needs and access to schools for disabled children or children with disabilities and they have never thought in terms of anybody being a teacher or anything like that. That wasn’t thought of at all.”

During this period of time, whilst Katherine was campaigning for greater access at university in London and Maria was becoming increasingly frustrated by the limitations of work in the sheltered workshop at Garretts Green, Bob Findlay had begun to consider the idea of setting up a disability rights group in the city.

Living permanently in Birmingham, Bob's active interest in disability politics had become rekindled by 1983. His personal experience of discrimination led him to look around the city for a group to join, but nothing seemed to stand out:

“I remember at that time there was the West Midlands Council for Disabled People. I regarded them as a well-meaning group of disabled and non-disabled people, but working very much within a ‘charity model’ of disability. Instead I joined the national Liberation Network for People with Disabilities and then, pulling together a small group of disabled and non-disabled people, we set about starting up a new group in Birmingham.”

Fate was on their side, a funding opportunity came through the Inner City Partnership Fund and as Bob and a colleague, Marion Bowles, sat down to draft a funding proposal, in a flash of inspiration Bob came up with a name for the group and Birmingham Disability Rights Group (BDRG) was born.

Following the International Year of Disabled People in 1981, a number of key events occurred which were to add further momentum to what was increasingly being termed ‘the disabled person’s movement’. The following year many of the UPIAS organisations came together to form a new umbrella organisation – the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP).

Chapter 3 - Defining moments and Building Bridges

2010-03-23T02:23:00.000-07:00

In the same year an agency in America, the Committee on Restrictions against Disabled People, recommended that the US government adopt Anti-Discrimination Legislation whilst in the UK, well-known Member of Parliament Jack Ashley, who was deaf, made the very first attempt to introduce Anti-Discrimination Legislation into British law. Jack Ashley’s efforts were not successful, but they inspired a growing, and relentless, campaign which eventually led to the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995.

Also in 1982 the United Nations (UN) adopted a World Programme of action concerning Disabled People and the following year the UN General Assembly proclaimed a Decade of Disabled Persons to 1992. In 1984, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was amended to specifically include the rights of disabled people and so it was that by the mid-1980s, the disabled people’s movement was not only firmly established in Great Britain and North America, but had now taken on global dimensions.

Bob Findlay summarised how many disability activists and academics now view the early 1980s:

“So the early ‘80s were for disabled people, the equivalent of the late ‘60s for the radical agendas around Vietnam, black power and women’s liberation. I would say that the early ‘80s was actually a defining moment for that political culture to suddenly come on over.

“The International Year got people thinking and it certainly showed some shred of light that people picked up on. But here it was more about rights of individuals to begin with, one disabled person and one non-disabled person who was very supportive, actually sitting down and you know saying ‘yes this sounds sensible’.”

To coin a well-known phrase of environmental activism which was first attributed to David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth in 1969, rather pertinently in the context of this book, most probably originated in concept from the writing of a town planner named Patrick Geddes in 1915, in the early ‘80s Birmingham was about to become a very good example of a place that was ‘thinking globally and acting locally’.

After leaving the University of Birmingham and working with young people in Brierley Hill, in the West Midlands borough of Dudley, Bob Findlay landed some work as a researcher looking at the needs of disabled people in Birmingham:

“What the project did was to make me realise how much ignorance and prejudice existed in society around disabled people.

“One day when I went to visit the Trade Union Resource Centre in the Jewellery Quarter, I got a ticket for parking too long on a yellow line. That infuriated me and again galvanised my feelings that disabled people are not only discriminated against, but oppressed by the system.

“That had been my view for about 15-20 years, but I had felt that I couldn’t go down the route that UPIAS had gone, because it was too inward looking so I switched off and took, if you like, my eye off the ball. But my own personal experience of getting this ticket, of constantly going for a job, not getting interviews etc really started to hit home.”

In 1983, returning to live and work in Birmingham from his short spell in Brierley Hill and driven by both his own personal experience and by the wider findings of his research, Bob took a hard look around to see what existed for disabled people. Largely unimpressed, it dawned on him that something new was going to be needed if disabled people in the city were to achieve greater freedom and rights:

“In fairness to the West Midlands Council for Disabled People, I think it was trying to break out of the individual tragedy model, but was surrounded with people who were still very greatly into that.

“It was more geared around what I think we all know as the traditional building blocks: care, information, benefits. Very much the independency model of what we can do for disabled people without actually analysing why disabled people would be excluded or marginalised within the mainstream sector.

“So an organisation existed and was recognised which, in its own way, was a very traditional charity-type model. I felt that that was not going to resolve the issues that I felt were being raised by society’s attitudes and practice for all disabled people.”

Bob’s personal thinking in terms of the direction of the emergent disability rights movement and what could be developed locally in Birmingham, continued to be based around the Marxist viewpoint, an analysis in which for him very firm links could be made between the emerging disability movement and his recent research around racism, race politics and trade unionism.

“There are several things that came together as a set. If you recall I said I had visited the Trade Union Resource Centre when I got my ticket so I got them immediately on board to support my individual campaign against the ticket.

“I also discussed with them what was wrong with society and why disabled people got such ‘a shit deal’. I asked a colleague with whom I went over the pub ‘why isn’t there a movement of disabled people under your umbrella?’ He replied that he had read about BCODP, so I said ‘OK I will try to find out more about them’.

“Curiously enough, a few weeks later I picked up a copy of Disability Now (I am not sure what it was called then) and there was an advert in there about a meeting in London. It was a meeting of a liberating network of people with disabilities.

“I went to the meeting and learned that they were establishing a disability nerve centre in London which I thought ‘that sounds like what I want to do in Birmingham’. Then during a discussion on social oppression I thought ‘that’s funny that’s what I wanted to do’ and I immediately got involved in the network.”

Following an advertisement in the Birmingham Evening Mail, Bob went to see a funding advisor named Marion Bowles who was providing mentoring support to new organisations on behalf of Birmingham City Council. Marion helped Bob to complete a grant application to provide the funds needed to launch Birmingham Disability Rights Group.

Bob’s next objective was to hold meetings around the city to promote the idea of a new group and also to measure the general feelings of disabled people in the city at the time. Would other people share his frustration and anger and, if so, would they share his aspiration for a new group run by disabled people?

It was a long haul. Personal computers and desk-top printers were not widely owned in the early ‘80s, even so, Bob managed to produce a leaflet about the group and a flyer which could be used to promote meetings. He booked the group’s first meeting at Tindal Street School in Balsall Heath and began distributing the promotional flyers everywhere and to everyone he met.

In spite of Bob’s greatest evangelical efforts, the first meeting of Birmingham Disability Rights Group was not a terribly great success:

“I booked a room and I waited there on the night and nobody else came! So BDRG didn’t get off to a very good start!”

Undeterred, Bob continued to distribute leaflets and slowly began to meet individuals who were expressing an interest in the group. Within a few months BDRG membership grew from three people to five then to 12 and soon to 50, as slowly the word of mouth went round that once a month a group of disabled people were going to meet to discuss various ideas, the main one being a campaign group, but at the centre of it all would be the establishment of a disability resource centre.

Chapter 3 - continued

2010-03-23T02:20:00.000-07:00

One of the earliest members of the BDRG, Maria Mleczko, recalls her initial involvement:

“That is what started me off, because I actually got fed up with the way people treat us. Not everybody, but the majority. You know, if you are with your carer they will talk to the carer and not to you first. Sometimes when you ask for something they look at you as if to say that you shouldn’t have it. So I got involved – I was quite innocent when I was 19 and 20.

“Originally it was just a monthly meeting and we talked about demonstrating, about public transport and whatever issue was around at the time.

“I can’t remember how I first got involved. When it started they used to do a lot of mailing and there were things in the library. Once a month we met in various meeting rooms in Birmingham, a couple of times it was the voluntary place in Digbeth.

“I remember feeling quite scared actually because, like anything, when you join a new group a lot of people are experts and they are all talking and, initially, you are thinking ‘I don’t think that this is for me’.

“So you gently have to be led in – even if it is something stupid. I remember Bob saying to me ‘say something – even if I disagree with it, say something to me, as you have got to learn to try to express yourself’. Bob made quite a good impression on one, I would say, as he started the ball rolling. I often wish that he was around to kick a few people now.”

An early BDRG flyer of 1985 invited potential members to attend monthly meetings and to join the new organisation. The flyer was illustrated with cartoon images representing disabled people in both positive and negative situations, including images of wheelchair racing and disabled people living independently, alongside images of people being discriminated against and being given poor access to public places.

The editorial of the flyer was written in a very forthright manner, terms which seem perfectly reasonable 25 years later, but, at the time, were without doubt very radical:

“Over the last few years, a new uncompromising mood has developed where people with disabilities have seen it as important to reject the passive acceptance of our situations. Instead, we have started taking a pride in ourselves and our bodies and coming to see ourselves as handicapped, not by the nature of our conditions, but by a society which is still not prepared to cater for our needs or regard us as equals.

“It is time to destroy the myths and assumptions made about people with disabilities. It is wrong to reduce people to an all-inclusive label: The Disabled.

“We are people who happen to have disabilities which may or may not affect our lifestyles. We believe society’s division between those classed as disabled and those who regard themselves as normal or able-bodied is based upon values which are oppressive to the majority of people within our society.

“Such divisions lead to false expectations, the under-evaluation of people’s capabilities and the denial of basic rights and needs.”

The flyer went on to deal very directly with inferences from the wider community that disabled people organising their own groups must have chips on their shoulders, but also emphasised that the BDRG was ‘not anti able-bodied people’.

Ultimately though, what was very radical, both in a local and national context, was that the BDRG was going to be run by disabled people:

“We feel it is important that BDRG is run by people with disabilities and that meetings where policy is made are not open to the able-bodied. Full membership is open to people with disabilities which includes voting rights and associated membership for our able-bodied supporters.”

Amongst the intended activities of the newly-formed Birmingham Disability Rights Group, expressed on this early flyer, was to publish a newsletter which would keep members informed and ensure that those unable to attend meetings could, nevertheless, participate in decision making. Within a few months Bob and his growing team published Building Bridges, the newsletter of BDRG.

Produced in its early years on a very tight budget, sometimes two or three sheets of typed and photocopied A4 paper held together by a staple in the top left-hand corner, Building Bridges generally made up in content what it lacked in design impact.

The editorial of the September 1986 edition drew parallels between apartheid, which still existed in South Africa at that time and the experiences of disabled people in Britain. Such a powerful comparison may still be difficult for many people to understand, even today:

Britain's Apartheid?

Many of us must have seen the awful pictures from South Africa and felt that terrible pain of helplessness when we see what is happening there. We, the majority of us, have no idea what it is like to live in such an oppressive environment, but most of us have witnessed a form of oppressive apartheid in Britain.

People with disabilities are still treated like second-class citizens. We see access and opportunities denied us. Some are exploited as cheap labour or refused enough money to meet our needs. We are, therefore, an oppressed group living in a society which fails to allow us a voice and adequate resources.

BDRG was formed to help to change this situation and to fight for equal opportunities and rights for all people with disabilities. We feel that it is time to let the public know the truth about our position within society.

We believe we should organise a lobby of a council meeting where we can explain to the city councillors why we feel we live under a form of apartheid.

All over Britain local groups of disabled people were expressing similar ideas to those written in Building Bridges. Sheffield-based rights activist Linda Laurie explained her moment of enlightenment as a disabled person:

“I met somebody, who I suppose was my mentor, his name was Simon Brisenden, unfortunately he is no longer with us, but he was an amazing person, a disabled guy, a writer and poet. I went along to a meeting, I think I was cajoled into it by him.

“At that meeting people were speaking from Hampshire Centre for Independent Living and they talked about the social model of disability and about the discrimination against disabled people being a civil rights issue and it was just like ‘wow, well yes of course it is’. Once I knew about the social model and began to learn about it, there was really no going back, you can’t accept being treated as a second class citizen any longer.”

Chapter 3 - continued

2010-03-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

The Building Bridges newsletters of the late 1980s provide a fascinating record of the BDRG’s activities, campaigns, meetings, members and workers from 1986 onwards. Bob’s articulate, outspoken and candid campaigning style inspired others in the group to take up issues in a very public way, writing letters, organising events and lobbying external organisations and individuals. Some key activities included:

November 1986: BDRG members join a television discussion on language and disability on the LINK programme; Maria Mleczko and Alun Davies attend a national conference on Centres for Integrated Living.

December 1986: Alun Davies and Bob and Brenda Findlay attend a national meeting of the Liberation Network of People With Disabilities.

March 1987: A protest from BDRG about medical model representation of disabled people by the Manpower Services Commission is taken up by the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People.

May 1987: BDRG attends a lobby of Parliament on the issue of the Disabled Persons Act.

September 1987: BDRG supports a disabled couple fighting for custody of their child in the High court; BDRG challenges the use of the term “spastics“ by a member of the royal family and by The Sun newspaper which repeated the term in its headline when reporting the incident; BDRG criticises the use of the term ‘disabled people’ by the LINK television programme and the underlying politics.

October 1987: BDRG sets out why it is a political organisation and, therefore, does not seek charity status.

December 1987: BDRG enters into a debate with Birmingham City Council around the right of a local disabled couple to buy their adapted council house.

February 1988: BDRG challenges West Bromwich Albion on its assumption that all disabled supporters must be wheelchair users; A debate continues between Anne Rae of BCODP and Bob Findlay of BDRG about the use of the terms ‘disabled people’ (preferred by BCODP) and ‘people with disabilities’ (preferred by BDRG); BDRG joins a debate around the closure of Martineau House, a seaside school, by Birmingham City Council.

April 1988: Discussions begin with both the Birmingham Evening Mail and BBC Radio WM about the use of language to describe disability.

Throughout this increasingly intensive period of campaigning on different issues by BDRG members, one underlying issue remained a constant, right from the Group’s very first meetings and newsletters. This was the aim to establish a Disability Resource Centre run by and for people with disabilities.

In November 1986, BDRG published a special edition of Building Bridges calling for a lobby of Birmingham City Council:

SUPPORT BDRG GIVE A VOICE - TO PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Help Build the Lobby

We are now only days away from holding our first major public event as an organisation and there is still much to be done. BDRG is holding the lobby to increase public awareness of the needs of people with disabilities to give ourselves a voice and to press for a new Disability Resource Centre.

Our lobby will only be a success if we, the members of BDRG, make it worthwhile. The more people we have there the greater will be the impact. Members should try to attend if at all possible and we must try to get our friends to join us. Some people will need transport – please let us know as soon as possible so that we can arrange it.

It has not been possible to get a show off the ground and a display of posters and photographs still needs putting together. We have organised a meeting between a BDRG delegation and city councillors to be held:

One o'clock in Room three at the Council House.

We are also hoping for support from national organisations of people with disabilities. Placards are being prepared with these agreed slogans:

DISABILITY IS AN ISSUE

PUT PEOPLE FIRST

SPEAK TO US NOT FOR US

WHAT'S “NORMAL” ANYWAY?

ATTITUDES HANDICAP PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

WE NEED A DISABILITY RESOURCE CENTRE

DISCRIMINATION KEEPS US APART

Maria and I are keen to know who among our members are able to attend the lobby so we can finalise our plans. Please let us know if you are coming.

The time has come to stand up and be counted – can we count on you?

Bob Findlay explained the development of the ideas behind the Disability Resource Centre:

“Just to put things together, I went to London and met a network who were discussing a resource centre; but I want to make it clear that although I thought that was a good idea it wasn’t simply ‘nicking’ the idea from somewhere else.

“My raison d’etre (which I think is still valid today) is that if disabled people are isolated and marginalised and not actually visible then how the hell do you bring them together? How do they know each other exists outside of being bunged into a day centre or isolated in their residential home or whatever? So I thought the Resource Centre would have three functions.

“One, to raise the visibility of disabled people to announce to Birmingham ‘hey we’re here!’ to both disabled and non-disabled people.

“Secondly, to bring in this trade union aspect, I saw it as an organising centre, ie a physical locality where disabled people could come and self-identify, self-organise and, therefore, start to develop a positive self-image of who and what they were.

“And thirdly, of course, is that by having a centre which has various activities that would build the confidence and the ability of the local disabled people to take some control over their own life. Very much a worked out view of what role the Resource Centre would have.

“You had the material badge of the Resource Centre, but the social political aspect and the campaigning and the awareness raising would be done by the Group. That was, if you like, the two-pronged attack.

“So, from 1985, we began to sell our idea to the council, to our organisation and to disabled people and in September 1986 we began our feasibility study by holding a day-long meeting in a day centre in Birmingham.”

Chapter 3 - continued

2010-03-23T02:16:00.000-07:00

Two other early members of BDRG were Alun Davies and Carl Freeman. Here Carl, who was working for RNIB at the time, describes how he first met Alun and became involved in BDRG following the highly unusual catalyst of a bar room brawl in a Birmingham pub:

“The first I became aware of Birmingham Disability Rights Group was when I attended a one-day disability awareness course on the Birmingham University Campus in the 1980s. It was facilitated by Bob Findlay.

“I was struck by his approach and I guess the session helped to move on my thinking – giving an equality and human rights dimension to disability and to my own disability awareness. I passed on my address to Bob so he could send me more information on the work of BDRG, but I assumed he lost it as I didn't hear anything.

“Some months later I was standing at the bar of the Kings Arms at the top of Harborne High Street. It was relatively early on a Saturday night, but it was quite busy in there. I had noticed a blind guy at the other end of the bar talking to the barman – pint in one hand and folded long cane in the other.

“Suddenly the most almighty fight began between what I assumed to be two gangs – but other drinkers seemed to be joining in with enthusiasm. Fists, glasses and chairs began to fly.

“At this point an exit seemed appropriate. I have never been clear in my own mind as to whether my offer of help to the blind guy was an altruistic act, or whether I felt my chances of self-preservation would be enhanced if I had a blind bloke on my arm (assuming that no one would hit me)!

“Whatever the motivation I found myself performing sighted guide ‘under fire’. It is, perhaps, worth noting that we were both clutching our respective beers as we sought refuge at the top of the stairs that led to the pub's function room.

“This was also the first and only occasion when I have ‘audio described’ a punch-up as the fight spilled out from the bar, into the foyer, past the foot of the stairs and then out on to the street. Introductions did not occur until after the last of the combatants had left the premises and the manager and staff had begun the clean-up operation.

“And so that is how I first met Alun Davies. On discovering his involvement with BDRG, my growing interest in disability rights once again had direction and momentum. This time my contact details made it to the BDRG office and I received an invitation to the first of many committee meetings.

“Now that we have Google and other search engines it is relatively easy to track down ‘shadowy groups’, to read all about their activities online and use the ‘contact us’ link to do just that. But back in the 1980s it was much harder.

“You may have half a name or a rough idea of what an organisation is called, but how do you track them down if that's all you have – no address or phone number and the internet and email yet to become part of everyday life?

“I suspect that many of those who were actively involved in the brawl at the Kings Arms that night ended up with cuts and bruises and a sore head (not to mention a ban from entering that particular pub again).

“The outcome for me was much more positive. I got myself education and the chance to participate in a very different sort of fight. The fight for equality and civil rights for disabled people.“

Alun Davies now chairs the Disability Committee of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Carl Freeman is Health and Social Care Policy Manager with The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.

Katherine Walsh joined the fight for equality and civil rights in a slightly different, though no less memorable way, following what she describes as “an exciting and mind blowing day conference” at Tilton Road Day Centre in Small Heath:

“There were quite a lot of people there. Certainly Alun Davies was there as well and Bob Findlay and Geraldine Egan, who did quite a lot of work for the Rights Group. She worked for NUPE at the time and was very supportive.

“Geraldine was instrumental in providing a lot of the kind of procedures that were necessary to form a group because of her union experience. It was quite a different group, it didn’t structure itself in the same way as other groups and it was quite radical really.

“It was interesting to move on from physical access. It is not really about physical access at all – it is about the way society treats you. That is just a by-line. Anybody can do access, but as a disabled person only you know how you feel about the way you have been treated and even ostracised.”

Chapter 3 - continued

2010-03-23T02:13:00.000-07:00

In an article about the history of the BDRG published in the newsletter of the Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People in 2006, Katherine summarised the early years of the group:

“BDRG had been set up by a quartet of people and some radical views. Of particular importance was the use of language. Among the members were the more Left-wing oriented members of Social Services department, some trade unionists and others from around the city.

“Bob Findlay was, at that time, Development Worker and, later, Co-ordinator and Alun Davies was the Disability Awareness Trainer. The organisation was funded via Social Services and from equality training.

“The organisation met monthly, often at BVSC in Digbeth, but chose to move meetings around to give as many disabled people as possible the chance to participate in lively debate.

“The choice of terms was people with disabilities as opposed to the prevailing usage of disabled people and there were some particularly acrimonious disputes around this. Because of this Birmingham remained isolated from the rest of the Disability Movement until the early 1990s when BDRG became a member of BCODP (then known as the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People).

“BDRG was, from the beginning, a campaigning organisation and the local media bore the brunt of this. A regular monthly newsletter, written in columnar fashion like a newspaper, called Building Bridges was important to the wider membership in a city where transport posed an enormous problem in getting to meetings.

“Patronising images of disability in the newspapers and on the television were challenged and the use of appropriate terminology was also introduced. In this case, in line with the policy of BDRG, the term people with disabilities was introduced into the media. The STOMP campaign (Stop Their Offensive Media Propaganda) was one such campaign.

“Following the precedent set with the International Marxist Group, the organisation kept to a draft constitution and did not register as a company limited by guarantee. There was much interesting academic discussion that followed at other day conferences and this is an area that is non-existent in Birmingham at the moment. The lack of theoretical debate is greatly missed.

“A long-term aim of BDRG had been to set up a disability resource centre following a model already in existence in Waltham Forest, East London. Some of us visited this centre and some of the city councillors were also treated to a day trip there during the campaign to get a resource centre both revenue and capital funded.”

In 1987, having left the sheltered employment at the Scope factory in Garretts Green and now working at the BDRG, Maria Mleczko was asked to produce a business plan for the proposed Birmingham Disability Resource Centre project. The document contains a draft constitution, proposals around funding and other recommendations.

Shown the document in 2009, Maria said:

“I recall being the author of this because this was the six-month project that I was in. I never thought about how substantial it was at the time. It was wonderful – I just know that it was wonderful. You don’t think about it at the time. You are just busy working at it.

“I had mentoring support from the Birmingham Voluntary Services Council, but not much. A few people came in and I spoke to one of the two teachers who were on this course. I remember getting angry with this poor woman and she would say ‘Maria you shouldn’t be telling me this, you know you should be taking it to your Group’.

“When our monthly meeting was in the same building as this project I would leave home at 8 o’clock in the morning and I wouldn’t return until 10 at night. I thought ‘why come home?’ I did go out after I had done my day’s work for an hour or something, but why come all the way home and then back into town for the meeting? I am glad that somebody has still got some of the work that I did because that, in itself, makes me feel proud.”

Chapter 4 - Spirit of perseverance

2010-03-22T04:27:00.000-07:00

If the 1980s was the decade in which the seeds of radical change were sown and nurtured, language, values and ground rules debated and action plans drawn up across the emergent disabled people’s movement, then the 1990s would be the decade when many of these plans came to fruition.

Disabled people remain diverse in their opinions as to whether those changes and actions were the right ones, were enough, or even went too far, but most will agree that visibly significant things began to happen from 1990 onwards.

As the chimes of Big Ben augured in the final decade of both the century and the millennium, change was on its way for disabled people across the world. In the United States this change was to come sooner rather than later.

The year, 1990, would witness the passing into statute of the Americans With Disabilities Act, an important piece of legislation giving equal rights to disabled people in the States for the first time in history. Similar legislation would not be introduced in Britain for another five years, until the controversial Disability Discrimination Act of 1995.

However, the agenda of the disabled people’s movement in the UK remained radical and was about to become more so. In 1990, Mike Oliver, a disabled academic and rights campaigner, published The Politics of Disablement. Becoming identified as one of the key writers of the movement and developing the social theories of disability of Finkelstein and UPIAS. Mike Oliver’s writing had much in common with Bob Findlay’s thinking, the exploration of the historical position of disabled people within a capitalist society.

But disabled people were becoming less preoccupied with academic debates and increasingly mobilised into action. A watershed took place on May 27, 1990, when thousands of disabled people from all over the country gathered outside London Weekend Television Studios to protest against the patronising way that disabled people were being portrayed by the television fund raising programme Telethon.

The protest helped to change both the media and public attitudes towards disabled people, making the statement that disabled people were no longer willing to be viewed as passive recipients of charity and were now demanding equal human rights alongside the rest of society. Rights activist Mike Higgins recalls the event:

“Prior to the events around Telethon, there were a number of direct action events associated with the Campaign for Accessible Transport (CAT) and other such activities, including events organised to campaign against patronising tv programmes like Telethon.

“However, the Block Telethon event was perhaps the culmination of our success in that area and the high point of the disabled people’s movement’s activity in proclaiming the obscenity of charity and the outraged character of our movement, when all we were demanding was equality.

“What Telethon, and similar events did and continue to do, is to trivialise the experience of disabled people, suggesting that by sitting in a vat of baked beans or by doing other such stupid stunts you can actually address the very serious discrimination faced by disabled people is offensive to say the very least. It also misses the point entirely that the cause of the discrimination we face is the way that society is organised.”

During this period, Birmingham Disability Rights Group were becoming more firmly established, increasingly more vocal and their campaign for a Disability Resource Centre was gaining momentum. Terry Vincent joined the group in 1989, initially through her friendship with Bob Findlay’s wife Brenda, but before long she was a fully committed disability rights campaigner:

“I had just finished a sociology degree when Brenda and Bob came to visit me. I thought that it was just a social call, but it turned out that Bob had a purpose – he invited me to join the Disability Rights Group.

“I’ve thought about that evening a lot, Bob knew I was a feminist and activist and he raised my consciousness of my disability identity which was a real awakening. My learning curve was steep and for the next 15 years I was able to get involved in some brilliant campaigns and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I actually always so much loved the women’s suffrage movement that I saw disability rights issues as being equivalent to suffrage issues so I was really ripe and ready to get involved.

“They invited me to a meeting in Vincent Drive in Ladywood and what I remember most about the meeting (which was very well attended) was that what people wanted from a resource centre was literally if a light bulb went, that there would be somebody that they could call upon instead of having to book someone from Social Services; or arrange for somebody special to come in ¬– that there would be a bank of people who disabled people locally could ring up. It was really about being a service provider to disabled people. So I remember that meeting really well.”

Terry began to attend the meetings of the Disability Rights Group, which at that time was based in an office near Aston Expressway, with some of its meetings taking place at Southside in Sparkhill, Birmingham. She recalls that active members of the group alongside Bob and Brenda included Dave Nugent, Robin and Tracy Surgeoner, Katherine Walsh and Maria Mleczko.

Terry remembers that it was often very difficult for the Group to maintain continuity in its proposed activities because of the challenges presented in things like trying to find suitable premises or obtain funding:

“BDRG moved offices three times within four years and this took up so much of our energies and time that would otherwise have been spent campaigning, holding meetings and getting new members.

“Each move was to more accessible and bigger premises, but each one also threw up new problems as none were central to the city centre, buses weren't accessible, there were problems with taxis and most members didn't have transport or personal assistants. We also had to contend with funding issues and investigating charitable status, to which we were opposed.

“It is important to emphasise the difficulties we faced each time. A lot of people had high expectations of us, but the reality was all this was done with next to no experience on the part of the two employees and very many members and volunteers.”

In 1990 she applied for the job of Project Officer with the BDRG – a post which Bob Findlay had recently resigned from. Prior to Terry’s first day in post, the group moved into new offices at Southside on the Ladypool Road in Sparkbrook.

Having resigned from being a paid worker, Bob himself had resumed his original role of unpaid BDRG chair: Terry recalls feeling a mounting sense of disquiet at having to step into Bob’s shoes and continue to meet the high expectations of the group, especially about having to be its very public spokesperson on controversial issues. Bob was going to be a hard act for anybody to follow:

“Bob had left me tons of written material on his perspectives and things he had written for various other things. Bob would usually give me tasks to do and one of them was to organise members at very short notice to go to the studios for a live programme called Central Weekend, which was on late in the evening. It was an era when disabled people were not given a voice on television. My initial reaction was to say ‘no, I don’t feel comfortable being a spokesperson!’ But as always I went along.

“So we went off to Central Weekend. I think Katherine Walsh and Jackie Johnson were there. Both Jackie and her friend were small women and also both wheelchair users and they were part of the Group at that time. So there were about four of us sitting in the front row of Central Weekend where we were to hijack the meeting and point out how inaccessible society was, even the fact that the television studio itself was inaccessible.

“I can’t remember what the actual topic being discussed was on Central Weekend that night, but there we were and I was charged with raising the issue, but we had all been given something to do. Then what did the bloody camera person do but they entirely focused on me and they ignored all the other people from the Disability Rights Group and just kept asking me questions and I was going ‘errmm’. It was awful.

“It was a baptism of fire and I was very hesitant for a good while after that to do any sort of public speaking on behalf of the Group. But again Bob would frequently come in and say ‘you need to go off to this event, you need to go off to that place or that conference and you must give the Disability Rights perspective and must educate people and must stand up and if necessary halt whatever is going on and speak up’.”

But in spite of the rigours of reluctantly becoming, at times, a very public rights activist, Terry was not easily dissuaded from her involvement with BDRG and began to throw more and more of her energies into the more practical mission of establishing a disability resource centre:

“Because the meeting at Vincent Drive indicated this was at that embryonic stage and Bob had met with Councillor Albert Bore from the city council, there had been some agreement in principle that a disability resource centre would be funded, but I think that it had gone really not much further.

“Yes, so the other task, apart from doing the social stuff, the publicity stuff, was to start looking at the funding for a DRC.”

Chapter 4 - continued

2010-03-22T04:20:00.000-07:00

In the late 1980s, current leader of Birmingham City Council’s Labour Group and former leader of the council, Sir Albert Bore, was chair of the city’s Economic Development Committee. Sir Albert explains why the council supported the calls for a disability resource centre and also why funding was identified by this committee, as opposed to the traditional source of local authority funding for disability projects from social services:

"You might find it surprising that in many respects this came out of an Economic Development Unit and not out of a Social Services Department and I think that that is the context that you should explore to begin with.

“What’s that about is, that for a period in the mid to late 1980’s, the Economic Development Unit as it first was (it later became the Economic Development Department) was setting up a number of centres to help to push enterprise type activity and to assist with different groupings.

“Some of it, such as the Disability Resource Centre is still around and also the Credit Union Development Agency which was an initiative developed roughly in the same period. There were a number of Enterprise Centres assisting, for example, those in the black community.

“So there was some more specialised or focussed activity. You have to put that long gestation period up to the beginning of the 1990s into that context where there were a lot of resources going in to setting up centres serving different functions within the community.

“It was the lack of Government encouragement in the previous decade – this was the 1980s and it was a period of Thatcher government and unemployment. In Birmingham in 1984/85 there was an unemployment average rate of 25% and in some of the inner city wards it was more than 50%. So there were a number of council initiatives to try to put resource into communities, driven from the community base in that environment of a citywide economic crisis, if you like.”

As chair of the Economic Development Committee from 1984 to 1993, the negotiations, funding and planning of the proposed centre fell under the stewardship of Sir Albert’s committee with Susan O’Shea being one of the principle EDU officers liaising with Terry, Bob and the members of BDRG.

Sir Albert is asked whether he thinks the development of a user-led centre back in the early ‘90s was more successful because it was viewed as an entrepreneurial enterprise as opposed to a social care service. Was the development less bureaucratic than it might have otherwise been?

“It is hard to say really. What my memory tells me is that you had a number of champions around who wanted to see this as a resource led by the community and the community of people with disabilities.

“It was possibly also because it was Economic Development Unit driven that it had a less bureaucratic (your choice of words) form. Perhaps if it had come through a Social Services lead it might have taken a different form – we will never know will we?”

Susan O’Shea worked closely with Terry and the BDRG board on the development, not just of the proposed Centre, but in terms of the Rights Group itself. Susan explained:

“Well there was a dual approach really. There was work to support the core group (which was the Birmingham Disability Rights Group) to develop its own organisation to put in place things like constitution; to run its own affairs; to develop itself as an organisation in its own right and to develop a membership base.

“Flowing from that there was a wider plan (being the enterprise side) which was to develop activities and projects that were services and activities that members wanted to utilise.

“Things like, for example, the Information and Resource Centre and Employment were key things always mentioned in consultations.

“But there was a lot of planning to do, a lot of work to actually move from a Group which was running an organisation to the point where you would run a full-scale project and building as well as manage staff and budgets.

“So a process needed to happen and that was a lot of capacity building and developmental work alongside the research itself to see if a centre was feasible, how it could be funded and how it could be managed and organised. It took time to do that.”

Robin Surgeoner was working for Birmingham City Council as a Sports Development Officer when he first encountered BDRG. As a paralympic athlete he had been appointed to work in the city and was visited by Maria Mleczko on behalf of BDRG.

He recalls that Maria was on a fairly resolute fact finding mission and needed reassurance that he was ‘on the good side’ in spite of working for the city council.

A few months after the meeting, in 1990, Robin’s wife Tracy became involved in the group and, before long, they were both full blown members.

In common with many disabled people, Robin recalls arguing for change from a social model before he had actually heard the term being used to describe this perspective:

“As early as 1985 I was arguing about access to sport and recognition of athletes, access to participation and all sorts of things, as a political issue, not just as a sports sort of nice thing, that was the whole point.

“I received my MBE in 1988 which was for services to disability sport, but was primarily about the fact I had been arguing and fighting for equality of recognition.

“Recognition that performance of excellence is personal and individual, it can’t necessarily be measured against able-bodied or non-disabled world records and things like that. So I’ve always come from that angle.

“I worked with what was then the London Disability Resource Team in piloting the very first National Disability Equality Training Package through the then British Sports Association for Disabled People, which was as it sounds, a sports organisation, but part of their vision was about access to participation as well.

“At a political level they had contacts which reached up to a ministerial level. I guess becoming known as the social model gave it a much more easily deliverable definition if you like. Although it’s astonishing how few people still really understand, or want to understand the issues.

“I came to the BDRG already pretty angry, for want of a better word and I’m now known by many people, as an artist known as Angry Fish. I wrote lots of prose, poetry, stories and articles that used to go into the BDRG newsletters. Then I met Bob.

“I have always had a good relationship with Bob as, for the majority of the time, we sing from the same hymn sheet. When we had the first International Day of Disabled People in ‘93, we were well established and BDRG effectively ran the majority of that day’s events in terms of disability arts and stuff like that, we were going to British Council of Disabled People (BCODP) conferences all over the place in the early ‘90s as well.

“I think that BDRG was probably one of the most powerful disability organisations Birmingham ever had. It was a thorn in the side of the council, it was a thorn in the side of the Evening Mail but, if there was ever something going on that was remotely about disabled people and wasn’t human interest stories, but actually took it to the next level, it was BDRG who the papers, who the BBC, who ITV Central... they came to us.”

Given the average age and the left of centre political convictions of the majority of BDRG members during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, perhaps an unlikely contributor to the long development phase of the Disability Resource Centre was a former George Dixon Grammar School pupil and RAF intelligence officer, Len Sutton.

After completion of his service with the RAF in the early 1950s, Len had embarked on a university degree course in engineering, followed by a long career in technical drawing and training management. In 1980 he was made redundant after nearly 30 years, but he soon landed a new post as supervisor of a Manpower Service Commission City Centre Access programme through Birmingham Voluntary Service Council.

His subsequent work, overseeing access surveys in the city, led to his appointment as Access Officer for a new group called Access For All in 1983. In 1987 he became the Director of the Access Committee for Birmingham, overseeing a substantial project to conduct access surveys across the city, with particular attention to the inner city wards of Birmingham.

Len’s technical expertise, along with his commitment to making the built-environment fully accessible, would be of great value to the BDRG. During the planning process for the Disability Resource Centre, Len worked closely alongside Bob Findlay, Katherine Walsh, Maria Mleczko, Robin and Tracy Sugeoner, Terry Vincent and other BDRG members to prepare documents such as reports and plans.

His expertise gave the Group an edge in its negotiations with the city council and his contribution was such that following his death, a room at the Disability Resource Centre was named in his memory in 1996.

Chapter 4 - continued

2010-03-22T04:18:00.000-07:00

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre eventually opened in 1992, but only after a prolonged seven-year process of campaigns, meetings, reports, surveys, promises, offers and ample amounts of head shaking, door knocking, site visiting and form filling.

If disabled people were going to get their own centre in Birmingham, it was not about to arrive on a plate and the proverbial level playing field certainly existed in the sense that the Group were destined to inch slowly, though relentlessly forward, through the same local authority hoops and around the same pitfalls of official procedure as everyone else.

There would be no special treatment and no charitable handouts on this journey.

Some of the key milestones along the way included:

1985

Birmingham Disability Rights Group established, first discussion at BDRG on the idea of a resource centre run by and for disabled people:

Research carried out by BDRG suggested that the best plan for achieving its aims would be to set up a Disability Resource Centre (DRC) which will provide:

a social meeting place
training opportunities
a comprehensive information and library service

Members of BDRG visit the Disability Resource Centre at Waltham Forest, East London. Later on, city councillors and officers also make a fact-finding visit to the same centre in London.

September 1986

BDRG begins a feasibility study into the need and support for a Disability Resource Centre run by and for disabled people.

October 1986

A report submitted to Birmingham City Council by BDRG titled Disability (Resource) Centre with an additional Resource and Finance Breakdown

November 4, 1986

Birmingham City Council gives all-party support for the establishment of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre (Resolution 8478).

April 1987

A response issued by the Economic Development Committee titled A Disability Resource Centre for Birmingham.

May 15, 1987

The report of the feasibility study is published from the BDRG office at Birmingham Tribunal Unit, Cornwall House, Lionel Street, Birmingham.

December 1987

BDRG publish a follow up to the feasibility study titled Why Birmingham Needs a Disability Resource Centre?

1988

Bob Findlay writes an article, Kerbing Disability Rights in Brum, for Birmingham Campaign News. The article looks at the cutbacks in council spending and its impact on disabled people.

February 1988

Disability Projects – A Report of Evaluation published by Economic Development (Community Enterprise Sub Committee).

April 1988

Joint report – A Disability Resource Centre for Birmingham – by the Director of Development Committee and the Director of Social Services to the Social Services Committee and the Economic Development Committee.

July 1989

Disability Resource Centre report by joint Economic Development / Education (Training and Employment Support Sub-Committee).

Tilton Road School designated as the site for the DRC. BDRG start investigations and assign an architect.

August 1989

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre – Feasibility Report by Emma Woolf of Radius Project Development brings together previous research and ties the development of the Tilton Road School plans to an action plan by a Working Party.

September 1989

Architect reports on unlikelihood of using the site. A new search begins for alternative premises.

October 1989

Architect reports that Tilton Road School will cost £1.5 million to repair and that the city is unlikely to provide the finance.

December 1989

Other buildings are considered, such as Ladywood Neighbourhood Centre and Bierton Road School.

September 1990

Programme of conversion of Bierton Road to office accommodation commenced with end date of December 1991.

February 1991

Operational Policy produced by BDRG setting down details for the running of the organisation. Completion date of refurbishment of Bierton Road stated as January 1992.

November 1991

The Birmingham Disability Resource Centre report by Radius Project Development.

September 1992

BDRC officer Anne Boothe writes an article in Pinpoint Magazine on the newly opened Disability Resource Centre.

February 11, 1994

Memorandum and Articles of Association incorporated.

March 7, 1994

BDRC registered as a charity.

Sir Albert Bore recalls that the central driving force for everyone concerned was a spirit of perseverance that had been engendered by the 1980s:

“It was perseverance on all sides really, but it was the environment of that decade where there were ideas bubbling up and where you had a political establishment, if you like, which was keen to run with ideas. You had people from the Disability Rights Group who persevered; you had officers of the council who persevered and the politicians persevered with the idea.

“Yes, it took a long time but, as we have already said, aspects of this had to be worked up, things were knocked back, resources were not available etc, etc, but in the end it happened. And I think that we just have to accept that this was one project which took a long time in gestation, but which, eventually, ended up very much in the vanguard, if you like, of what was happening anywhere in the country. And that is as a consequence of the perseverance on all sides.”

Perseverance was certainly what drove the members of BDRG, especially in response to some fairly significant knock-backs along the way such as the withdrawal of the provisional offer of the Tilton Road School site in October 1989 on the grounds of expense. Former BDRG management board member Katherine Walsh remembers that Tilton Road was a favoured site being closer to the city centre than the site they eventually settled on at Bierton Road in South Yardley.

The Group’s senior paid worker during this time, Terry Vincent, maintains that perseverance was more often than not reigned in by compromise, especially as the reality of the centre drew nearer and some staff and committee roles, therefore, began to metamorphose from the auspices of the freely acting and passionately autonomous Rights Group to the more measured and publicly accountable Resource Centre:

“BDRG was adamant about things, DRC were more pragmatic. So the same people on two committees could hold separate feelings. I did. I was torn a lot of the time between what is negotiable and what is non-negotiable.

“But, of course, the funders being so well versed in their own field were very good at saying why it had to be this, or that and the choice in the end was probably Hobson’s choice – no choice. It led to a lot of unhappiness because the people at BDRG were saying ‘we’re supposed to be running this’ and then we would come back from the meetings and say ‘yes, well the funders said this’.”

Bob Findlay also recalls this period of mounting division between the expectant parent organisation, BDRG and its imminently due off-spring, the Disability Resource Centre (DRC). Tensions began shortly after BDRG moved into its Sparkbrook office base at Southside, during the latter stages of the DRC’s development at Bierton Road:

“It was shortly after the move into Southside that the decision was taken to split the two projects into the BDRG and the DRC. I think it was partly to do with pressure from a number of sources.

“Personally, I think mainly from again officers in the council who were discussing the legality of setting up a board of directors for the DRC and whether they would be a company limited by guarantee, a charity; and the BDRG saying that we didn’t want to be a charity or anything to do with that.

“And in my opinion it was a spurious argument as they said ‘what if there is a conflict of interest between the BDRG, the host organisation, and the DRC itself?’

“It was around that time of the debate that the separation took place. But one of the big problems with that (which I think you can guess) was that all the money went in one direction – it went to DRC and BDRG had nothing.”

Chapter 4 - continued

2010-03-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre opened its doors in the late summer of 1992. The following article introducing the new centre was written by BDRC worker Anne Boothe and was published in the September 1992 edition of Pinpoint, the magazine of Disability West Midlands:

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre

In this article Anne Boothe details the role of the Disability Resource Centre and describes some of the services available at the recently opened facility.

The Disability Resource Centre is a centre of excellence, encouraging the self activity of people with disabilities. The centre is run by and for people with disabilities, offering people the opportunity to become involved in management and training, support, advice and social activities. A range of services are offered from the centre and a number of groups have offices on the site.

A Reference Library and Information Service

The library is open from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm, Monday to Friday. It contains a comprehensive range of periodicals and a growing library of videos, tapes, Braille and printed matter.

The Information Service covers all areas and issues associated with disability and can be contacted by phone, tape and letter.

Information can be translated on to tape and into Braille and interpreters in spoken and sign languages will be arranged if requested.

Birmingham Disability Rights Group

The BDRG was the founder member of the Disability Resource Centre and still maintains a controlling interest. BDRG is a pressure group run by and for people with disabilities aiming to promote the rights of people with disabilities. Group membership entitlements include a monthly newsletter.

The Strawberry Studio Restaurant

The restaurant will be offering hot and cold drinks, snacks and hot food from September 2nd. The restaurant is staffed by people with disabilities. It can also provide catering for conferences held at the DRC.

An Equipment Pool

The equipment pool offers a range of aids and equipment available to hire for students and trainees with disabilities on Local or National Government training schemes.

Birmingham Information Federation

BIF is committed to improving information services to people with disabilities, those who care for them, and those who provide services. BIF will achieve this by improving access to services and promoting choice of services.

For more information, contact:

The Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, The Bierton Road Centre, Bierton Road, South Yardley, B25 5PY.

Irene Wright, who was to become a chair of the management board of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, recalls her first impressions of the centre in the early ‘90s:

“My very first experience of actually coming into the centre was of going into the resource library and someone called Trevor Bailey, a volunteer who later became an employee, made me so welcome.

“I used to use my manual chair going through the city centre and, on one occasion – on my return from a union meeting – someone actually spat in my face and said ‘people like you shouldn’t be out’ and then to be able to come into a centre like this where nobody took any notice, I could be just me. It was amazing.

“It wasn’t anything to do with my disability or anything else, I was me and I think that that is very important. I think that what was given back from here nobody can explain or tell you what its value is.

“It’s something that’s really important to disabled people because here we are looked at as people first and the disability is just something that is different, we are looked at as people with abilities rather than disabilities and I think that’s important.”

Chapter 5 - Rights Now!

2010-03-22T04:13:00.000-07:00

When the Disability Resource Centre opened in Birmingham in 1992, the national campaign for disability discrimination legislation in the United Kingdom was well underway and within the next three years it would culminate in the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

Since the early 1980s there had been several attempts to pass anti-discrimination legislation through parliament but, whilst generally receiving cross-party support, all of these attempts had failed.

Discrimination and Disabled People in Britain, a book by Colin Barnes and published by the British Council of Disabled People (BCODP) in 1991 laid out the case for fully comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Legislation and gave fresh impetus to a mounting national campaign.

The call to enshrine the proposals arising from Barnes’s book into UK legislation was answered by MP for Manchester Wythenshawe, Alf Morris. His motivation was led by his childhood experience of watching his own father’s slow deterioration in health and eventual death and the subsequent struggles of his widowed mother in the 1930s and 1940s.

As an MP Morris had led the movement that brought in the Chronically Sick & Disabled Person’s Act in 1970, becoming the world’s first Minister for the Disabled in 1974. In 1991 he introduced a Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill which was very much in line with the new BCODP campaign.

The opening of the Disability Resource Centre (BDRC) therefore coincided not just with a ground swell of public opinion and a wave of new activism, but the formation of a national alliance of disability organisations called Rights Now! The unique thing about the Rights Now! Group was that it was a partnership of both user led organisations, such as BCODP, and many of the big national charities, such as Scope, RNIB and RNID.

In spite of the inherent antagonisms which existed within what was at the time a very unlikely alliance of the organisations ‘of’ and ‘for’ disabled people, by pooling both commitment and resources Rights Now! was very successful in countering government arguments that sought to dismiss or minimise the case for anti discrimination legislation.

Irene Wright, a committee member of the newly created BDRC, conveys the sense of pride that local people felt when they participated in campaigning activity on a national level:

“Yes, I think when I first came here it made me realise how important the anti-discrimination law that we needed should be. Before getting involved with the Resource Centre itself, I became involved as a volunteer with Birmingham Disability Rights Group, so it all marries into one another in the end.

“I can remember that from here we as a committee of the Disability Resource Centre actually sponsored one of the banners that went down to London on July 9, on that famous day when there were so many disabled people in Trafalgar Square, that was when the first part of the DDA actually got started.

“That’s something to do, I think, very much with the history of the DRC and Birmingham Disability Rights Group, that they were actually part of something positive that came out of the government for disabled people.”

An interesting connection between the new Disability Resource Centre and the aforementioned MP for Manchester Wythenshawe, Alf Morris, was that his niece Estelle Morris had been elected as Labour MP for the Yardley constituency in 1992.

Looking around for somewhere to base her constituency office, Estelle Morris’s team had made an approach to the new Yardley based Disability Resource Centre, asking if she could rent office space from them. After consultation, the request was turned down as the centre did not want to be seen as being partisan and the Member for Yardley moved into alternative accommodation on the Bierton Road site.

Many of the people who were involved in the early days of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre recall a period of forming, storming and norming on many different levels.

Some of these challenges were around practical access issues such as the locking systems on windows, the layout of toilets and the height of light switches. Some things involved general tenancy and building issues which had to be resolved through long-running negotiations with the city council as the landlord.

For instance, the building was a constant target for burglars and vandals for months on end until security measures were put in place which resulted in the feeling that the centre looked and felt like Fort Knox with heavy duty anti-burglar features around what was intended to be a user-friendly, inclusive and inviting environment.

The launch of the new user-led centre may have represented a successful end to BDRG’s seven year campaign, but new questions were now arising on a daily basis around operational, funding and management issues. Terry Vincent recalls the realisation felt by the employees that operating the BDRC was going to be a very different proposition from working for the Rights Group:

“We had a collective lack of experience as entrepreneurs running anything the size of the DRC. Mostly all we had done up to then was hold discussion meetings and plan campaigns. Now we had gone to managing a huge budget and managing a building that was vandalised from day one.

“You had the funders wanting you to do it their way and the BDRG wanting you to do it its way and whichever way you turned there was a problem. In the end it was the “service users” who were failing to get a service because there were obstacles to getting in the building, there were un-set up projects.

“For quite a while when people came in the only thing that they could do was go to the library – that was really it.

“We were constantly being given deadlines to meet and if they weren’t met then the funding didn’t come and if the funding didn’t come… Also each quarter the payments would come late so we struggled from the beginning.”

Robin Surgeoner recalls a very definite split around this time between the Rights Group and the Resource Centre. Things came to a head when people met to appoint the new management board for the centre:

“Rather than BDRG becoming the managing body it kind of got sidelined and all of a sudden there was a new management committee on the board of directors of the DRC. It wasn’t BDRG and it sort of changed its essence really. Perhaps the real sticking point was the funding and the fact that the council gave so much money and wanted to have a huge influence on the board.

“I remember coming to one particular meeting, in what’s now the Len Sutton Room when the building was still a shell, and there was a big discussion of who could be a board member. It was as if you’re BDRG you’re not a board member. BDRG isn’t part of this anymore. That was when there was a big kind of parting of the ways.

“It ended up with a board and a new set of employees. Even though the inception of the Resource Centre was BDRG’s, the lead started to be dictated rather than being organic. If BDRG had been given the money, the management and had become the employer, that would have been a different story.

“I don’t mean that in a sour grapes way, I just think that wasn’t allowed to happen. It became the council’s baby, it became the council’s Disability Resource Centre. It lost that organic, that dynamism that came from BDRG.”

Chapter 5 - continued

2010-03-22T04:12:00.000-07:00

One of the early members of the BDRC board was Derek Farr. Even those who share Robin’s perception that a powerful sense of organic dynamism had gone with the passage of control of the project from the Rights Group to a more pragmatic committee of disabled people functioning in close partnership with the local authority, acknowledge the contribution and commitment made by Derek Farr.

Robin describes Derek as “a fantastic character” and Andy Beaton, who joined the BDRC board initially as a representative of Birmingham City Council, conveys the importance of Derek’s role in establishing the middle ground as far as service delivery and funding were concerned:

“Derek Farr, as Treasurer and Chair, moved the centre along the route of a service delivery model whilst he was always very strong about the campaigning side of it and respected other people’s views on that which may be different to his own. However he wanted to see the centre move forward.

“He brought something to the centre which I think is essential. Probably more essential nowadays with the move towards sustainability and more self-sustaining trading. Derek brought business skills having run his own business and I think it was on that premise that he took on his roles. Derek was a very committed individual.

“You wouldn’t always agree with him, but you could never take away what he put into the centre and he had a massive positivity towards his role.”

Having a strong interest in computer technology, Derek Farr was highly innovative in ensuring that its use was fundamental within the delivery of services at the BDRC. His achievements included the development of the organisation’s website at a time when other voluntary and community sector groups were only just discovering the potential of things like the internet and email.

It was Derek who had the foresight to attain the URL “www.disability.co.uk” for the organisation several years before other community groups would realise the expediency required to bag the best website names.

Derek was also instrumental in establishing an ICT room in the building which would, for a while, operate as a Cyber Café type of facility for disabled people wishing to access the internet and learn about ICT. Long after Derek’s death, perhaps his legacy is the fact that a room remains in the Centre to this day which is well-stocked with computers and is used for both training and job search opportunities.

A very early Chair of the BDRC was Mary Smith, a retired nurse from Sutton Coldfield, who had previously been instrumental in establishing a forum of disabled people in north Birmingham.

Like most disabled people Mary was committed to making society generally more equalitarian and accessible, though it is fair to say that she was one more of a growing number of disabled people attracted to the BDRC from across Birmingham who did not come from the rights perspective. Terry Vincent recalls this challenge to widen the membership:

“I would do my best constantly to explain BDRG’s perspective. Apart from the fact most people coming to the DRC were not political and did expect some ‘services’, we were not in agreement with the national disability rights movement on the issue of terminology and I would find myself in intense discussions with activists and new members about how we defined ourselves and why.

“Mary Smith was having none of it because, she was of a certain generation, a certain mind set and a certain value system that it sort of meant nothing to her. But, I genuinely felt (and to this day still do), that really it is not for me to say ‘you don’t speak the party line so you can’t come in’.

“So we, at the DRC, were much more welcoming and open-armed than BDRG would have been because you would have found it too uncomfortable to stay at BDRG. But obviously the DRC was for people with disabilities and not just people with disabilities who agreed with a particular standpoint.”

An early project based at the BDRC which Mary was instrumental in driving forward for a number of years was the Birmingham Information Federation. Launched at the Birmingham Medical Institute in Edgbaston in March 1992, the BIF was a pilot project funded by the Department of Health through the National Disability Information Project.

BDRG founder Bob Findlay worked for the BIF for a period alongside George Rowley, a former senior manager with the Automobile Association. George continued to work at the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre long after the closure of the BIF project, running an equipment pool for disabled people and then playing a lead role in setting up and running a new training organisation at the centre called Enable.

George recalls his work as a trainer and coach with Enable:

“I worked with people who, for one reason or another, had been given the labels of not being able to do stuff, like education or employment. People are really interesting and helping them gives me a buzz. Seeing people reach their full potential and goals is really satisfying.”

From an interview between George Rowley, Clenton Farquharson and Pete Millington published in Pinpoint magazine / New Year 2002 edition

A few years later, George’s experiences working for BDRC and Enable would inspire him to set up a training business called Gallant2000 in partnership with Clenton Farquharson and Christine Sarginson. For his part, Clenton’s collaboration with George in the fields of equal opportunities, diversity and Neuro Linguistic Psychology began at the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre whilst he was using the services of Enable.

Clenton went on to become a board member of BDRC and, more recently, became the representative of Equality2025 for the West Midlands region.

His particular perspective as a black disabled person, as well as his experience as a service-user whose personal experience of disability had begun in adulthood, gave Clenton valuable subjective insight and the motivation to support other disabled people and to challenge and educate service providers, not just around disability, but around wider diversity issues:

“I had the experience of being attacked and stabbed numerous times. This led me to acquire my disability. Since this time I have gone through an emotional roller coaster, firstly of feeling absolutely desperate, that my world was at an end and that I was completely useless.

“But, over the last few years, this has completely turned round and I now have a mission to promote Equal Opportunities and Diversity. I have enormous passion and emotion for this subject.”

From an interview between George Rowley, Clenton Farquharson and Pete Millington published in Pinpoint magazine / New Year 2002 edition

Chapter 5 - continued

2010-03-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Chapter 5 - continued

2010-03-22T04:08:00.000-07:00

But just as the home straight seemed to loom for disabled people in Great Britain, along came the Government with a few more hurdles. Alf Morris’s Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill failed at the second reading on 26th February 26, 1993, and amidst great controversy the Bill, this time being promoted by Roger Berry, the MP for Kingswood, was talked out at its report stage in May 1994.

In spite of overwhelming support for Berry’s Civil Rights Bill across the House of Commons, the Minister for Social Security and Disabled People, Sir Nicholas Scott was successful in using what were seen by most commentators as procedural means to talk it out.

Just a week later, Alf Morris made the following statement to the House about Scott’s tactics:

“Never was there a more blatant act of indecency than was witnessed in this House on the day of John's funeral last Friday, when, as my Hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Mr. Berry) said, the Minister for Social Security and Disabled People, having already had to apologise, in a personal statement to the House, for his conduct in the debates on the Bill on May 6, ‘cynically talked out’ a measure whose only purpose is to give full citizenship to Britain's 6.5 million disabled people.”

One of Scott’s fiercest critics at the time was his own daughter Victoria who was working for the national disability organisation RADAR as a parliamentary lobbyist on disability rights issues. She was reported as saying "professionally, I am very, very angry. Personally, I feel rather let down".

On May 23, 1994, disabled people held a demonstration at the House of Commons to express their anger and disappointment that the Bill had been talked out having been so close to becoming UK law. Dennis Skinner, the MP for Bolsover told the House:

“Earlier today, as you may be aware, at about 11 o'clock, a number of disabled persons wanted to get into the House of Commons. I agreed that I would see them and take them round Parliament. They wanted to go through the main entrance.

“They were stopped by the Serjeant at Arms, who said that he was not prepared to see them trying to get up the steps. He then told me that they could go round through the big carriage gates. They decided to do it as an act of symbolism — to crawl on their hands and knees against what has happened to the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill. When they got to the carriage gates, although they had been promised access that way, the gates were shut in their faces.

“It is one thing for the Minister for Social Security and Disabled People to kick away the crutches of those disabled people, but I think that it is an affront when, in parliamentary terms, they are not allowed to go through the main entrance and they are not allowed to crawl their way through the side entrance either.”

Prompted by a re-invigorated ground swell of public anger on top of the embarrassment of the Minister and two colleagues having to apologise to the House of Commons for using misleading tactics in talking out Berry’s Bill, the Government moved very quickly to introduce their own equality legislation.

Following a rapidly undertaken consultation in the autumn of 1994, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was finally passed on November 7 the following year. In the words of Roger Berry “with all the loopholes, it was like a string vest”.

In terms of grabbing the headlines at the end of 1995, the DDA had stiff competition from the disabled people’s movement. The spirit of direct activism which had increased amongst disabled people’s organisations in the previous five years, became very visible for the first time on the streets of Birmingham in September 1995.

With the formation of a national network of activists in 1992, the Disabled Person’s Direct Action Network (DAN) held its first protest in Christchurch, Dorset, in 1993. Katherine Walsh recalls the weekend in 1995 that the DAN network came to the Second City:

“Members of Birmingham Disability Rights Group got together with DAN to organise a weekend of campaign in Birmingham. Disabled people came from all over the country.

“Following on from Black Civil Rights in the USA, DAN set up weekends of direct action across the country. In Birmingham, we began by bringing the traffic to a halt at 8.45 in the morning around Smallbrook, Queensway. Weren't we popular! There followed a barrier at the NEC, another around New Street and perhaps the biggest of the lot, a complete blockage of the transport in New Street on a Saturday afternoon. There was an evening of debate on Central Television’ accompanied by some good local news coverage by the BBC.”

In November 1995, John Gordon, a Birmingham based activist and DAN member reported on this, the city’s first “We Will Ride” demonstration, in Pinpoint:

“While there may be debate as to the method, there can be no doubt that it was the most visible demonstration by disabled people that has ever taken place in the West Midlands. Disabled people of all ages, various political affiliations and different conditions or impairments, came together from all over the region, and beyond.

“They were highlighting the fact that buses being bought and sold at the NEC this year would still be inaccessible in 20 years time, and that even newly refurbished railway stations were still taking no account of the needs of disabled travellers.

“Many disabled people have participated fully in the democratic process, only to be unfairly denied the opportunity of civil rights based legislation.

“Reluctantly, they will continue to participate in non-violent direct action in order to bring about these necessary changes to public transport, that will benefit all members of society and not just themselves.

“Those who took part felt powerful and united. It had helped to break those stereotypes of disabled people as being passive, either having things done for them or on their behalf.

“The actions of disabled people in Birmingham have helped to change that perception, and begun a process that will change the transport system in the West Midlands.”

Chapter 6 - Doing it for ourselves

2010-03-22T04:06:00.000-07:00

Andy Beaton became involved with Birmingham Disability Resource Centre in 1995 when, as an employee of the Economic Development Department of Birmingham City Council he was given responsibility for being the Contact Officer in relation to the Resource Centre’s funding within his wider brief of ‘disability specialism’ in the department’s new thematic team.

A disabled person himself, Andy was able to bring the added dynamic of personal experience to his position as ‘the man from the council’ on the BDRC Board:

“I felt, having had a whole range of experiences because of my disability from ‘86 through to ‘95, the way I was treated by Occupational Health at the time of my appointment to the city council and also the lack of understanding from colleagues of my condition as well as misapprehensions and misunderstandings.

“I think that was something that I shared with many people and certainly with the Board members who I came to work alongside. I think they felt quite positively towards the fact that their city council representative was somebody who declared a disability. Indeed the person who succeeded me in the role also declared a disability and that was not a contrived arrangement. That was the situation that pertained.

“However, I think it was a positive experience for me. That area of work is one that had always interested me. Taking on the thematic work as well and being able to look at the city wide provision for disability.”

Andy’s personal interest in social enterprise, which reflected a wider interest amongst colleagues within the Economic Development Department, was particularly engaged by an area of the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre called Strawberry Studio.

From its opening in 1992 until its closure in 2009, Strawberry Studio was a training kitchen for people with learning disability and operated under the auspices of Birmingham City Council’s employment preparation service.

Whilst Andy, amongst many others, may have recognised in Strawberry Studio the potential to be developed into an independent social enterprise, with disabled people both preparing food in a fully operational kitchen and serving it in the adjacent restaurant, it remained, thereafter, an income generating training environment operated by the council.

Even so, there were many learning disabled people over the years who benefited from their time at Strawberry Studio, such as Jerome Chen-Bacchus, from Erdington, who began training as a chef at the restaurant at the age of 22. Jerome was first given the label of learning difficulty when he was at primary school and was immediately transferred to a special school. Looking back on this experience Jerome expresses some sense of sadness about losing his friends:

“The teachers said to my parents “‘Jerome can do things, but he has a learning difficulty’. What I don’t understand, and can’t find out, is why I couldn’t stay in mainstream school with just a bit more time for copying from a black board or more time doing maths, English, science, etc.

“My mom told me I may have to move school. From primary school I moved to a special school and then to special secondary school. Moving school I felt upset about leaving my friends who understood me.”

Before training at Strawberry Studio, Jerome had worked for four-and-a-half years for a fast food restaurant in Birmingham, but had become frustrated by the lack of opportunities to progress from the role of an ‘area host’, which basically involved a lot of cleaning with no discussion about promotion or development.

As well as offering a new opportunity to gain skills and confidence, Jerome also learnt a lot about other people with learning disability working at Strawberry Studio.

In particular he discovered that the range of different levels of learning related impairment was vast and diverse, a revelation which inspired his own belief that people with learning disability should not be marginalised and had the same rights to opportunity as other disabled people:

“First of all, it’s a shame that people could have the same rights as other people, but are being judged because they have a learning disability. Secondly, I feel everyone with learning difficulty is put under the same umbrella. I mean, if you are working with someone who has the same disability as me, they are not necessarily exactly the same.

“We can each be better in our own way. There are good qualities in everyone, but employers don’t see this. They just want to give you a job and let you do that job until you get bored, when they should be encouraging you to learn new skills.

“Because of the trolley I could work in the offices and meet customers: ‘What’s your name? What do you like?’ Trying to get customers to recognise there is a restaurant here and they are welcome to have their food and sit there.

“That’s what I like about catering – I like the customer care, cleaning, basically making sure everything is suited for everyone. Since I’ve been working at Strawberry Studio I’ve been finding out more about people with learning difficulties. Maybe one day I could open a restaurant they could come to and get a good wage instead of being on benefits.”

From its earliest days, employment and training services became a priority area of focus for the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre. Debbie Nunn is another disabled person who initially gained support from the centre in terms of her own personal development but went on to give back as much as she had gained herself.

Born and brought up in Olton, Debbie had a number of impairments from early childhood and remembers that things were very different for disabled children back then with the emphasis in the education system being entirely on life skills with a bit of art thrown in, as opposed to academic development.

Given the label of ‘learning disabled’, Debbie attended a local church school where she experienced a very similar sense of powerless fatalism about her own long-term future to that expressed by other disabled people earlier in this book:

“It was difficult for me at school. Once my epilepsy started that was where my education ended. There was a strong belief system that as I was a left-handed, epileptic with low vision I automatically fell into the label of being learning disabled by the doctors and possessed by an evil spirit or being punished by many of my peers and teachers.

“Things became pretty dire after that. I was eventually sent to a rehabilitation centre, they were organisations that look to see if a person can achieve certain skills. You had a choice of woodwork, machining, packing components, gardening, catering or basic office work. In truth I drifted through departments and ended up doing odd jobs to support the staff.”

Taking large quantities of drugs to control her seizures – most of which have since been banned, they left her feeling, in her words “zombiefied and in a mist”. Debbie described this period of her life as being “horrifically miserable, isolated and lonely”.

Her life took a turn when a buyer for a building and civil engineering company visited the rehabilitation centre and, following a lengthy conversation on industrial fittings, the buyer mistook Debbie for an employee rather than a service-user. The outcome was that within a month she left the rehabilitation centre and became his assistant in his company.

“It was the most wonderful experience. It was the first time in my life that I was not judged on my medical conditions and labels, but seen as an individual who had intelligence and potentials. I ended up as assistant plant manager.

“At that time Women’s and Ethnic rights had just started to gain strength and I was feeling more empowered and that led me to look at how I and other disabled people could become more empowered too.

“I set up an organisation called the ‘Network’. It was open to anyone who felt socially isolated or had a problem they could not share with family, friends or the authorities. Naturally many people who used the Network had disabilities. It ran for over 25 years and was the foundation for my passion for human rights.

“I went on to work at British Gas but, after ten very happy years. decided to take voluntary redundancy. It was the first time I had been unemployed and the old insecurities and prejudices began to surface. That was when I first got involved with the BDRC.

“I met Steve Blick who, at the time, was the Employment Officer. I did some volunteering and was asked to cover the BDRC reception, it was around 1995. The centre was going through a huge change, having recently moved to Bierton, and it was the beginning of the separation. Teresa Cabot was manageress at the time with Ann Rowles, Tahira Razaq and myself as receptionist in the Admin section.”

Chapter 6 - continued

2010-03-22T04:03:00.001-07:00

A defining feature of the community and voluntary sector remains its capacity to nurture social entrepreneurship, not just amongst directors and managers, but amongst employees, volunteers and even service users. Debbie’s experience in the mid-1990s was a very good example of how the workplace culture and environment at the centre supported her personal progression from service user to volunteer, then to employee and a secondment to a project manager within a relatively short period of time. Whilst working in the administration department she co-wrote a successful funding bid which established a project called the Customised Training Programme.

“It was almost a challenge to the funders saying we will guarantee you that if you provide us with funding to support ten people of any age, gender, background and disability we will get them through a National Vocational Qualification in either business administration or customer service. We will find them a work placement with a blue chip company which, in return, will pledge to guarantee an interview for the participant for any suitable vacancy if they pass their NVQ.”

The project was a resounding success with the participants working with Heartlands hospital, Griffin Financial Services, British Gas West Midlands, HSBC and City College . Everyone on the project passed their NVQ and either got a job or decided to continue with their education; two participants going on to take degrees and a further two starting their own businesses.

Following the project Debbie became an employment and training officer working with David Heap.

“This period was probably my happiest I met some amazing centre users and really loved working with David. We co-wrote many training packages and worked with a huge range of organisations promoting the Social Model of disability.”

After a decline in her health Debbie took medical redundancy from the BDRC in 2002, but still has close links as an independent trainer.

Here Debbie recalls some of the people who played key roles in the development of services at BDRC during the 1990s and a little more about the internal politics:

“When I first started at the centre, there had begun a separation between the Rights Group and the BDRC. It became a little bit of a ‘them and us’ situation at one point which was sad because I admired so many people involved at the BDRC especially the founders. Derek Farr, for instance, who created the first fully accessible cyber café and got the URL tag ‘disability’, which was a huge achievement.

“I remember a nerve-wracking radio interview I did promoting the service and a rather embarrassing press photo in the newspaper, a copy of which my dad still proudly owns! Irene Wright and Jenny Poyner’s work on access for disabled people in Birmingham also demands recognition. I could go on, but the fact that through very challenging times the centre is still there and thriving, that in it self must be its own best testament.

“Some of us felt that there were people who had a very different outlook on things and, perhaps, an unwillingness to see things from our perspective. We felt that you don’t have to throw red paint on somebody to make a statement. You can achieve big things in a quiet way. I think that it was personality more than anything else because there are 101 ways to skin a cat aren’t there?

“I do genuinely admire what the BDRG achieved when I think of the climate in which they achieved it. The founders like Bob Findlay and everybody else have done a really wonderful thing for the community of Birmingham. You can’t ever take that away.”

Chapter 6 - continued

2010-03-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

Another disabled person who made a huge contribution to BDRC in the 1990s was David Heap, who worked at the centre between 1994 and 2000. David was the first profoundly deaf person to be employed at BDRC and like Debbie, he recalls a culture of flexibility in which employees (and disabled people in particular) could develop:

“I started working in 1994 and remained until 2000 when I moved down south. I started by applying for and becoming the Information Worker at the time. It was my first time working in the voluntary sector and for a disability organisation because previous to that I worked for Sainsbury’s and then for NatWest Bank in Birmingham, so it was a whole new departure for me.

“As a profoundly deaf adult I had been used to working with hearing workers and it was the first contact that I had really had with a number of other disabled people all going through similar barriers and so on.

“One of the best things about starting was that it opened my eyes in terms of things like access to work as I had never heard of this scheme before until I joined. When I think of all the times that I had struggled previously with staff meetings with up to 25 people, trying to communicate by lip reading people rather than having access to a sign language interpreter.

“My experiences were quite different as it was a very hierarchal structure working for the bank previously with a Supervisor, a Manager and a Director. BDRC was much more open and a very small organisation at that time.

“As a disabled person, both as a child and an adult growing up, I was quite familiar with a lot of the issues. It was the best move that I ever made actually and I was really thrilled to get the job. It was also a promotion from where I was before which is unusual when you go into the voluntary sector. We all had our own roles and worked under the direction of the Board and the manager, but to a certain extent we were allowed to get on and introduce our own initiatives, if you like.

“In 1994 the Discrimination Disability Act was being formed and a lot of consultation was going on so I was straight in at the deep end because we were having to try to implement this when people came here so it was good.”

When David started working at BDRC, the Information Office was based in a large room known as the Library. This room is now the centre’s Conference Room, but in the 1990s it was filled with resource materials and information.

David recalls that volunteers played a major role in gathering resources and keeping them up to date, particularly his colleague Trevor Bailey who had enormous experience in updating materials and developing resources around current issues affecting disabled people in Birmingham.

Around the same time that David started his post as the Information Officer, Steve Blick joined the organisation as the Employment and Training Officer. Initially they shared the large library but, over time, this area was permanently divided by a wall into two separate areas, a conference and training room and an IT training room which was equipped with computers.

The Information and the Employment and Training staff relocated to some of the smaller offices in the Centre and shortly afterwards Steve Blick was appointed to the post of Centre Manager.

One of the first priorities under Steve Blick’s new leadership was to raise the profile of the centre in Birmingham as well as marketing its services. In spite of the fact that they were operating the foremost disability centre of the city of Birmingham, which also happened to be located deep in the heartland of Birmingham City FC supporters, David reveals how he and Steve successfully introduced the colours of their beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers into BDRC’s new logo:

“One of the good things was trying to market this centre. I came from a commercial background before joining the Disability Resource Centre and all of our leaflets were produced by ourselves on Publisher (I think it was at the time). We thought that we needed to look at the logo.

“I started with that process and developed the current logo which has now been going for over ten years. I am slightly embarrassed because I am a Wolves supporter and Steve was as well so if you wonder why we chose the colours gold and black – I had nothing to do with that!

“The logo was designed by disabled people themselves. The two sisters who ran the graphic design company were profoundly deaf and they came up with the logo and its glossy finish. The original leaflet has obviously changed over the years. It was a bit of a long process as we had to get it right. The logo was accepted by the board and we changed all our letterheads and adopted this one.”

When David moved across into the Employment and Training department, he was joined by Debbie Nunn and replaced in the information department by Brian Cleaver. Brian had previously worked as the regional officer of RADAR (Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation) in the West Midlands and was also a well-known amputee Marathon runner who used the moniker Brian “The Hop” Cleaver. Trevor Bailey continued to be the other familiar face of this popular new duo in the centre’s information service.

David recalls with pride that the Employment and Training team was extremely strong and successful, being part of a larger network within Birmingham and having a service level agreement with the EDD (Economic Development Department).

In his previous role as Information Officer he played a part in setting up other projects, such as BHEARD (Birmingham Hearing Equipment and Resource Display). This was a shop window of all the products that deaf and hard of hearing people could use in the home or in the workplace. As Information Officer, David’s role was to demonstrate the equipment and to set the service up with Colin Whitehouse providing technical expertise as required.

Capter 6 - continued

2010-03-22T03:55:00.000-07:00

Around this time BDRC also set up a service called VOICE (Volunteering Opportunities Increasing Choice and Equality), a volunteer project which aimed to provide disabled people with volunteering opportunities that would build-up their own skills and confidence in a working environment.

In tandem with the VOICE project, Debbie and David began running additional training programmes to support people to gain confidence, self esteem and listening skills, guidance in writing CVs and practical advice on job interviews. According to David:

“A key thing was that we were very focused on people getting out of the training cycle. We wanted to get people off training courses and into meaningful work, so that was the object at the end of the day.

“In all I spent seven years in the Disability Resource Centre and we developed a lot of links outside, not just with the local authority (Birmingham City Council), but with voluntary sector organisations as well. A lot of initiatives were tried and tested. It was quite a strong team and people stayed and worked here for quite a while. Obviously some people came and went.

“One of the great things about this centre is the Management Committee which is run by disabled people, so it was what you would call an organisation of disabled people working for disabled people so that was really quite key. Having said that, it was not total 100% representation of disabled people on the board as you also had reps from the local authority and so on.

Longstanding board member Andy Beaton re-emphasises the value to the organisation of its user-led board and recalls his own personal roll call of just some of the key personalities who have contributed to the success of both the board and subsequently to the organisation as a whole:

“I think a centre like BDRC could not have been sustainable or continue without that commitment of people with disabilities to take it forward. So user-led it certainly was. I don’t think the DRC would still exist had there not been that commitment of potential service users, people who had different functions in the centre.

“It is quite a hard balance to get. Part of the training I do on good governance is that you need to let the staff manage their side of things and I think the centre gets that balance about right. Maybe it didn’t always because it is quite hard when people have got a real passion for their subject together with a real zeal and time and commitment to do it.

“The centre has come through all its up and downs. The proof of the pudding is that it is still functioning and, I think, potentially flourishing in the current environment and still supporting disabled people with a range of services, certainly involving the potential for people to be employed in whatever work environment structure they want as opposed to what someone else imposes on them.”

“A few names from historical times really stick out for me. Sadly some of them are no longer with us. Dave Nugent, a very early member, was a pleasure to work with. His knowledge of disability issues, from a practical sense rather than a theoretic sense, was legendary. His incisiveness in meetings was brilliant. He gave so much to the centre and sadly his life was cut short very suddenly.

“Derek Farr I have already mentioned.

The energy and enthusiasm of Bob Findlay is legend and he put so much into it. Again he brought a very strong campaigning view to it, but a very overall understanding of managing an organisation. He was always a man to keep to his word and commitment to a particular issue. Again, I found Bob great to work with.

“The fourth is Irene Wright who is still on our board. Irene has held various positions including Chair, but not at times when I was there. I think Irene was one of the people, along with Derek Farr who welcomed me to the Board. Those two were key players over a number of years and had massive commitment.

“BDRC has never had a large board, so a lot of people had to put in a lot of time. I was not around from 1998 to 2003 directly, but, certainly, in my latter years at the city, Derek and Irene steered the centre as it grew and as it established itself. Irene again brings a breadth of massive experience in other disability sectors and practical delivery.

“I think there were other people who came and went. Two more names strike me, perhaps who didn’t have so much time with the centre, but they really were full of impact whilst they were around. One was Jenny Poyner who was a very committed individual at that crucial time when, I think, the centre could have gone one way or the other.

“The other person is somebody who didn’t really have a long relationship with the BDRC, but he had a slightly circuitous route in and out of the centre and made a large impact on me, Jon Prashar.

“Jon was a person who was initially a consultant and he was contracted from time to time by BDRC to deliver disability equality training. I keyed into him from the city council and myself and a number of colleagues attended that training.

“Jon also joined the board and made a very good impact over probably no more than 9-12 months. He had a good grasp of strategic background. He was very articulate and very helpful.”

Around the time of his involvement with BDRC, at the end of the 1990s, Jon Prashar was appointed as the first manager of the disability section of Birmingham City Council’s Equalities Unit.

Jon stayed in the post for just over a year before moving on from Birmingham and, at the start of the new Millennium in 2000, he was replaced by a controversial new appointment to the role, Alan Holdsworth, aka Johnny Crescendo.

Alan was a well-known protest song writer and performer on the national disability arts scene, a contemporary of Ian Stanton, and was also an organiser of the very high profile demonstrations around disability rights which were being staged around that time by the radical network DAN (the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network). Alan’s stay in Birmingham was short, but he was to be the catalyst for a number of new developments which would impact on the lives of disabled people in Birmingham. Johnny Crescendo had come to town.

Chapter 7 - The man from the Council

2010-03-22T01:32:00.000-07:00

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”.

Chapter 7 - continued

2010-03-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

In fairness to Alan Holdsworth, behind the defiant guitar-strumming stage persona was a very considered strategic agenda for Birmingham’s disability community. In an interview in Pinpoint in Autumn 2000, Alan laid out his two key objectives which were closely connected to the new national agenda of the DAN network, the ‘Free Our People’ campaign:

"The ‘Free Our People’ campaign is about getting people out of institutions, but trying to make sure that our own homes don't replace those institutions. I came to the realisation that the way to do this won't always be about direct actions on national targets, we have to start developing strong, local activity to assure long-term success.

“My aim in Birmingham is to see if we can build a disabled community in a city which has, in the past, had a reputation for being fractured and disparate in terms of the local movement."

The Pinpoint article when on to explain that, on the whole, Alan had been encouraged by the willingness he had found from people in Birmingham to make a new start:

"There is a realisation that the issues which might be dividing the community can be put aside while we all try to find out what unites us. I see my job as helping that community come to fruition and develop it's own expectations."

Alan explained that the two central objectives he had for Birmingham were, firstly, to facilitate the establishment of a new Coalition of Disabled People:

"Power comes from people working together. Disabled people in Birmingham must be involved in identifying key issues affecting our lives in order that the council begins to work on our agreed collective agenda.

“The idea in the past that some elitist 'super crip' comes to town and can change everything internally on their own doesn't work. For instance, you can't force social services to radically change themselves around the social model of disability through policies or committees alone. Change must be driven by the community and people can only do this if they come together.

“A central part of how the Coalition intends to address change will be through issue based forums around the core aspects of full participation and equality. As I understand it, the Roman concept of a forum was to create a place where people meet, it wasn't the actual meeting itself.

“The forum is about the process of people meeting and sharing from their own personal experience, it's an on-going thing. We want it to be an outreach thing too, so invitations don't just go to the ‘usual suspects’, but we get people in who are currently experiencing difficulties, maybe with housing or independent living.

“As all of these forums begin to kick in, the disabled people of Birmingham will not only create a blueprint for Brum, but they will own it and the ownership of this blueprint will be central to the strategy of changing council policy and practice."

The second of Alan's key objectives, describing them as the things on which he would personally either stand or fall, was to be the establishment of an Independent Living Centre run by disabled people and providing services that disabled people had, he went on, been asking for over many years:

"We are involved in drawing up a business plan for a new centre at the moment. This plan will have been put before the council by December 1, the day that Birmingham celebrates the International Day of Disabled People at the Drum in Aston.

“The theme of the event at the Drum will be ‘Independent Living’, so we need to get people there in order to use this as an opportunity to ram home the need to have independent services in the city run by disabled people.

"Our International Day of Disabled People celebrations will have huge significance this year. I hope that all disabled people reading this interview will come together and join us at the Drum on this very historic occasion for Birmingham.

“We need all disabled people to be part of this change, so eventually we can help those of our brothers and sisters currently locked away to become free.”

Whilst there remains to this day many shades of opinion about Alan’s relatively brief period of influence whilst working for the Disability Equality Division in Birmingham, and his detractors came from both the political Left and the Right, it is difficult to dispute his strategic astuteness and the major personal impact he subsequently had on the disabled people’s community across the city – the very direct ramifications of which lasted for at least the next five years.

The IDDP event he was promoting in his Pinpoint interview turned out to be very successful, attracting disabled people from across the city, many of whom were new faces to either engagement or activism, or both, and even to the very notion of actually ‘celebrating’ disability for that matter.

Alan’s team at the Equalities Division, notably including Jon Coleman and Stuart Malpass, alongside members of the new Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People being given leadership at that time by individuals such as Rob Punton, Paul Green, Christine Chidzomba, Mark Lynes, Tom Comerford, Sam Brackenbury and Sandra Daniels, supported by other user-led groups, such as People First, People in Partnership, Disability West Midlands and the Black and Ethnic Minority Disability Partnership, quite literally pulled out the stops to make sure that the event had impact.

The event was a complete departure from anything similar that had previously happened in Birmingham on this scale, especially an event funded by the local authority. There was a strong emphasis on disability arts with stage performances from well-known artists such as Mat Frazer.

There were also a number of very engaging and innovative participatory activities throughout the day, such as a huge walk-or-roll-across Monopoly board on the theme of independent living and a giant wall on to which members of the public could post their issues of concern. Comments left on the wall were later incorporated into a blueprint for disability services in Birmingham published by Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People.

One of the other notable features about this symbolic event was the high profile presence of DAN whose uncompromising display materials and tables piled high with t-shirts bearing the loud and proud slogans of the disabled people’s movement, took pride of place in the main exhibition area.

It was an unquestionably overt statement which highlighted a clear and strong connection now existing between the newly formed Coalition of Disabled People, the DAN network and, whether they approved or not, Birmingham City Council.

Birmingham had suddenly gained a notoriety within the disabled people’s movement nationally which it had largely lacked since the peak years of Bob Findlay’s leadership of BDRG and his well-known public debates over language and philosophy (particularly with the Lancashire and Yorkshire based members of the UPIAS hierarchy in the late 1980s).

For the next few years the Coalition of Disabled People went from strength to strength, opening offices in the Custard Factory in Digbeth before moving to offices at the Southside Business Centre on Ladypool Road, which was by interesting coincidence the same building in which Birmingham Disability Rights Group had been located prior to the launch of the Disability Resource Centre.

Throughout this period the BDRC itself, for want of a better phrase, kept its head down. Reconciled to the position which had been adopted almost from day one of its opening, staff and trustees at BDRC remained focussed on service delivery and were, as far as outward appearances were concerned, happy for another organisation to be giving a collective campaigning and consultative voice to disabled people and taking on the political cut and thrust of policy and planning debate with the local authority.

Chapter 7 - continued

2010-03-22T01:26:00.000-07:00

One of Birmingham Coalition’s main campaigning points during the next few years was around Alan Holdsworth’s second primary objective, the opening of a Centre For Inclusive Living (CIL) in Birmingham run by disabled people. Partly reminiscent of the battle for the Disability Resource Centre by BDRG, the final outcome was no doubt different from what was proposed in the original feasibility study.

Once again the intention to move into a city centre based location was compromised by the funding and choices on offer. The new Birmingham CIL eventually opened in autumn 2005 in a suburb some considerable distance from the city centre, this time at Prospect Hall in Selly Oak.

By another interesting coincidence, the CIL opened in office space at Prospect Hall recently vacated by Disability West Midlands which was in the process of closing permanently due to financial problems after 28 years in existence, as was the Coalition of Disabled People after just six years.

Birmingham now had two cross-impairment user-led service providing organisations, the BDRC and the BCIL, which had each been established by campaigning groups, though by 2006 the ‘voice’ organisations themselves were no longer in existence.

In spite of the passions and efforts of, at one point possibly hundreds of disabled people in Birmingham – including key individuals from the old BDRG vanguard as well as many new activists, the Coalition went into fairly rapid demise more or less from the point of departure of Alan Holdsworth from Birmingham City Council.

His departure also heralded the subsequent reorganisation, diversification and, arguably, the diluting down of the Disability Equalities Division within Birmingham City Council itself.

Alan’s own observation about wanting to avoid the perception of ‘super crip’ coming to town to change everything internally, had sadly turned out to look more like a prophecy than the note of caution he had intended. In fairness to Alan many people, from the top downwards and bottom upwards, supported his key objectives.

The reasons for the ultimate demise of the Coalition were complex on both political and personal levels and not least influenced by a change in the administration of the city itself. The Labour party losing overall control of the council in 2003 and total control in 2004 to a Conservative\Liberal Democrat coalition.

To some degree the writing had probably been on the wall all along, especially given the close and continuing connections with DAN, but to coin a phrase “it was good while it lasted!”

An opportunity which arose for the BDRC as a spin-off from the period of intense activity by the DAN in Birmingham can be traced back to the evening of the Independence Festival at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in the summer of 2000.

When the event closed at around midnight, an unprecedented number of disabled people flowed out of the ICC into Centenary Square and on to Broad Street, the city’s golden three-quarter mile of pubs, bars, restaurants and night-clubs, in understandably high spirits. The evening had been a huge success for Birmingham’s disabled community, being the crowning event of a whole weekend of arts-based activities.

With the passing of the midnight hour, many of the disabled attendees were looking forward to jumping into a taxi to take them either home or to their hotels. Unfortunately, however, the second city’s capacity to provide accessible taxis was woefully unable to deal spontaneously with more than one or two wheelchair users and other potential passengers with mobility impairment.

By 3 o clock in the morning, emotions on both sides were running high as dozens of disabled people were still waiting for taxis to take them home and even taxi drivers who could have accommodated disabled people were refusing to do so.

With so many DAN activists present, a spur-of-the-moment demonstration was inevitable and the night culminated in the temporary closure of Broad Street.

Throughout the following week there were on-going protests outside of the TOA Taxis headquarters in Harborne and a great deal of media attention with local DAN members such as Christina Chidzomba and Tom Comerford being interviewed.

The immediate consequence of the great taxi debate was a conference held on December 4, 2000, at the Centennial Centre in Ladywood where around 100 disabled people met with taxi licensing officers from the council and a single taxi driver’s representative. Perhaps we should not be too surprised at the ultimate irony being that many disabled people either missed the conference or were late because of the continuing shortage of accessible vehicles available in Birmingham.

The outcomes of the conference were that the licensing department promised to make its complaints procedure more effective, to make more information available about accessible taxi companies and to license a wider range of vehicles. A further outcome was to be the launch of compulsory Disability Equality Training for new private hire taxi drivers and BDRC went on to win the contract.

Debbie Nunn was working at BDRC when the taxi training contract was being negotiated. Debbie remembers an atmosphere of tension between local groups during the tendering process with BDRC manager Steve Blick, Janet Higgins, a colleague, and herself, giving a presentation to officers from the council’s Licensing Department alongside local members of the DAN network.

BDRC did not win the bid on the first time of applying, but went on to win it second time around. Here Debbie explains how the training works:

“If you are applying to become a Birmingham taxi driver you need to go through a series of tests to show your competence as a driver to gain your licence or ‘badge’. In addition you have to attend a disability equality training day and pass a written test at the end of the session.

“The training covers the differences between the social and medical models of disability, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, with emphasis on public transport vehicle law.

“The potential taxi drivers are taught how to work with a range of disabled passengers through practical sessions such as how to assist a wheelchair user, guide a blind person, communicate with a deaf passenger and so on. Also how to identify working dogs who accompany disabled people. They are also informed of the range of penalties they can expect if they breach the law.”

Debbie has also worked closely with the Business Services and Employment Departments at the centre to write and deliver training to Birmingham City Council Facility Management Staff, and many other external agencies and companies. The increase in disability equality training opportunities led to the organisation employing another trainer, Elaine Watson, on a permanent contract.

As Debbie explains, the new training opportunities coming from Birmingham City Council help to emphasise the high regard in which BDRC was being held by the local authority.

“We have had really good feedback from a lot of the drivers and we have had a fairly good relationship and link with the city council, because it has been a major funder to the centre through information and employment and the links with Strawberry Studio.”

Chapter 7 - continued

2010-03-22T01:23:00.000-07:00

It would be unfair to say that BDRC was exclusively reaping the opportunities generated by the activities of the city’s disability militants. The Birmingham Coalition, in particular, was also receiving substantial levels of new funding which had been squeezed out of public coffers since 2000.

It would certainly be true to say that BDRC’s reputation for dependable service provision over the previous decade appeared to carry weight with potential funders. However, as current BDRC chair, Tim Phillips, says nothing was ever handed to BDRC on a plate and its survival was dependent on developing a robust business-like approach:

“I was on the board when Irene, Derek Farr and myself interviewed Steve Blick for the then vacated Chief Exec job, it was around, probably ‘97-ish. Andy Beaton represented the then Employment Service part of the city council on the board, but he left for a while.

“On his return a few years later Andy took the BDRC through a difficult time when we lost Steve Blick to another job. It also coincided with the third sector moving away from Grant Aid arrangements whereby companies like ourselves basically got money, pretty much as a right for want of a better phrase, from the council in three year chunks.

“When the ERC network collapsed we, in effect, had to lose one or two jobs. Although Steve had left just prior, we couldn’t afford to fill his role. Andy and I had to see the BDRC through a difficult transition period in which we had an interim arrangement without a Chief Executive Officer.

“We employed Tom and Deb Veitch, with whom Andy had had connections with his work both within the city council and the Third Sector, to carry out a feasibility study to see how the BDRC could re-sustain itself, regroup and look at the way forward.

“They did a very good piece of work for us, highlighting areas of reshaping of the BDRC to meet the changing environment and the shift away from Grant Aid to a self-sustaining community-business scenario or model.

“One of the points that Deb and Tom highlighted was the area around the Chief Exec. The position, they felt, should be within a parameter of a personal specification to drive the newly formed business forward. After a period of time, during which we had to secure the funding to employ a Chief Exec at a rate that would attract a person that we felt would actually meet the spec and put BDRC’s vision forward, we engaged them.”

Former BDRC employee David Heap offers his views on how the social and political landscape changed between the 1990s and the 2000s, both within the BDRC and for wider society as a whole:

“It is different today – there is more awareness – that is one of the key things. I think that you see more evidence of disabled people. If you think about the Olympics at Beijing, even though it could have been better and more involved, disabled athletes were promoted and you saw positive public attitude when people were receiving medals; that’s a big change from the past.

“I think that also goes with wider attitudes which have definitely changed because you see more exposure on the media. I am not, therefore, saying that there have not been some positive things, but we are still trying to change things for the better. With regard to transport, it was hoped then that by the year 2010 there would be fully accessible transport but look at it – this hasn’t happened.

“The ‘90s was definitely a period of great change and there was an expectation of things changing for the better. Many people worked hard to eventually get the DDA into force, with organisations working together within an overall movement. It took time, but eventually the movement worked to get the Government to push it through, eventually. There were a lot of battles along the way.

“It was interesting that in the ‘90s the radical element, the Direct Action Network were very local and very active. When we went into the early ‘noughties’ it all went quiet and they went underground. If you like it was as if there was a feeling ‘we have done it’. Things quietened down with still a lot more work to be done. I think people’s attitude definitely changed.

“At the moment, the National Deaf Children’s Charity organisation is trying to improve classroom acoustics. This Government has built a lot of new schools, but right from day one the architects, and so on, don’t implement the changes which would cost absolutely nothing – ‘oh we forgot to make sure the acoustics in that classroom are right for the deaf children or hard of hearing children’. It never ceases to amaze me and this is where it gets frustrating.

“It is always about funding and I think that the big struggle throughout these growing few years was core funding. That was one thing that we were always fighting for recognition for, not just for our organisation, the Disability Resource Centre, but all the organisations; because local authorities say that it is crucial that you have a solid infrastructure in place with funding that recognises administration and maintenance for the organisation.

“It is all right funding the services with a two or three-year budget, but you need to keep them there. It was a big, big struggle and I think that it ultimately led to the demise of some organisations – not just in Birmingham. Disability West Midlands was one of those incidentally.

“The BDRC seems to have survived that process and I think it comes down to people such as the Social Service reps who have recognised the need for core funding.”

Andy Beaton summarises how BDRC has adapted and is still adapting to the wider context of Third Sector funding:

“There will always be a need for a grant aided sector. However, agencies which support that sector are finding that while there are still opportunities for grant aid a lot of what local authorities and health authorities used to give in main programme grants are now only available on a tendering and commissioning basis. I think that is the way it is moving.

“The Adults and Communities tendering process, procurement processes with small voluntary organisations for instance, many that BDRC deal with around specific disabilities, are all having to look at issues like tendering for contracts and establishing what they should charge in the forecast recovery model and that is about business-like practice. To some small organisations that is very new.

“I think there is always going to be a voluntary sector, but a more self-sustainable one – a ‘not all eggs in a single funding basket’ one. A lot of organisations may well, for longer term existence and sustainability, move to a more varied funding package such as that which the BDRC has.”

Chapter 8 - Empowering services

2010-03-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

If its ability to adapt to a more competitive and demanding funding culture has arguably led to BDRC’s survival, underlying this has been the unwavering long term commitment of a small core group of generally uncelebrated board members, such as Tim and Andy.

The longest consistently serving member of the BDRC board is Irene Wright. Inspired by hearing Bob Findlay talk at a meeting of the Disability Advisory Board of her Trade Union in the early 1990s, Irene immediately became involved with BDRC and has remained passionately committed to the promotion of the social model of disability across her beloved Birmingham ever since.

From joining the board of BDRC, Irene became involved in wider access work across Birmingham and went on to play a leading role in both the Birmingham Access Committee and in establishing the city centre based Shopmobility schemes.

“I actually went on to the Access Committee many, many, years ago as the BDRC representative. I took over as Chair temporarily for three months and, 12 years down the line, I’m still Chair.

“I’ve become very much involved with access and the city council actually includes me on some street works contracts. If there are big jobs, then I have to be consulted. I go out and have a look to make sure that things are laid out right. I feel that it’s very important to say to them that if you’ve got it right for disabled people, you’ve got it right for everybody.

“We are another organisation of disabled people, our make-up is probably 80% disabled people which is much higher than even BCODP ask for – it only asks for 51% so we are very good.

“It means that people who are giving the information and those who are trying to assist with advice are the people who have actually got different disabilities. We are giving, hopefully, the right advice and I think that’s important because once we can get the council to take notice of what we are saying then we are more likely to get a city that’s more accessible.

“One of the things we must remember is Birmingham is built on a hill – we’d love it flattened, but, unfortunately because of the billions of pounds it would cost us, it will never happen – so it’s just trying to make the best of what you’ve got and that’s what we try to do.”

Such is Irene’s national reputation that in August 2004, she was visited by Bert Massie in his role as Chair of the Disability Rights Commission who had come to Birmingham to gain a perspective on the progress of the DDA in the Second City. During his visit, Irene gave Bert a tour of Birmingham city centre, showing him both good and bad examples of accessible buildings.

Aside from Irene, consistently chipping away at the rock face of local authority planning processes over the past two decades, another constant throughout BDRC’s history has been its information service. The roll call of officers including Trevor Bailey, David Heap, Brian Cleaver, Denise Swithenby, Vicky Wooldridge and Janet Higgins, John Boular and Toni Cuddihy.

From the very outset of the modern disabled people’s movement, information was seen as a vital and fundamental requirement for the empowerment and independence of disabled people. When the Derbyshire Centre for Integrated Living was discussing the ‘Seven Needs of Independent Living’ in the early 1980s, information was, by design or otherwise, at the top of the list:

Information

Counselling

Housing

Technical aids

Personal assistance

Transport

Access

The emergence of the phrase ‘the Seven Needs of Independent Living’ built on the ideas of academics such as Vic Finkelstein, provided a framework for practical action out of the social definition of disability.

Most of the new national organisations and agencies around disability from the 1960s and ‘70s onwards, user-led or otherwise, including Disablement Income Group, Spinal Injuries Association, Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation, Disability Alliance, British Council of Disabled People, Disability Law Service, Holiday Care Service, Disabled Living Foundation, Centre For Accessible Environments and National Bureau for Students with Disabilities (Skill) put information provision at the heart of their services.

Whether their primary focus was campaigning, personal finance, education, housing, leisure, mobility, employment, rights or independent living, an information service was seen as the vital tool which empowered people through knowledge.

No longer was the primary purpose of a disability group or charity to do things for and to disabled people, in effect controlling disabled people’s lives for them. The theory now being that if people were given information about benefits and services they could make their own choices and take control of their own lives.

A more organic development took place from 1973 through an evolving national network of small, independent and local organisations, generally run by disabled people, whose sole purpose was, quite simply, providing all types of disability information to all disabled people.

From the first one pioneered by Ken Davis and colleagues in Derbyshire in 1973, these groups popularly became known as DIALs (Disability Information and Advice Line) and in 1986 a national co-ordinating body was set up called DIAL UK which supported the network of associations whilst each maintained its own independence.

Whilst local DIAL organisations were springing up across the West Midlands generally, Birmingham never actually had a dedicated Birmingham DIAL. Perhaps the more complex provision of advice and information services in a large city did not lend itself to the development of a dedicated service, for instance, neither London, Manchester, Newcastle or Liverpool developed city-wide DIALs.

When the BDRC was launched in 1992 it had to contend for punters, funding and its reputation with at least two other providers of disability information locally, including Disability West Midlands, based at Moseley Hall Hospital, which launched a mobile information vehicle funded by the Birmingham Inner City Partnership in 1992 and with the Information Service on Disability (ISD) based at Oak Tree Lane Regional Rehabilitation Centre.

In addition to these groups, people living on the borders of the city could also seek their information from groups like Solihull DIAL, Coventry Council of Disabled People, Dudley Benefits Shop, One Voice Wolverhampton, North Worcestershire DIAL and Sandwell CARES. These were later joined by Walsall DIAL and Ideal For All Sandwell as well as additional groups in Birmingham such as the Coalition of Disabled People, Freshwinds in Selly Oak and the Lisieux Trust in Erdington to name but a few.

There were also the specialist information services, often set up by people with great personal experience and knowledge in a particular area. A well-known face at all three of the original Birmingham services during the early to mid 1990s was Andy Whyment, a retired police officer from Kings Norton who set up the Mobility Advice Line in 1993.

Having done voluntary advice work around mobility issues, primarily with Disability West Midlands as its motoring correspondent, Andy set up a dedicated line in his own home which, on his death, transferred to ISD at Oak Tree Lane in Selly Oak.

Another disabled person with strong connections to both Birmingham Disability Rights Group and Birmingham Disability Resource Centre was Jenny Poyner whose expertise, like Irene’s was around access. Jenny became the first person in Birmingham to become an auditor member of the National Register of Access Consultants.

She set up her own organisation, Birmingham Access Ch4

information around access as well as producing a directory of accessible venues in the city. In common with Irene Wright, Jenny was awarded an MBE for her commitment to access issues in Birmingham.

Disability arts were also represented as a field of expertise in the city by West Midlands Disability Arts Forum, an organisation which had two incarnations, one in the early 1990s led by Katherine Walsh and the other in the early 2000s which was based at the Custard Factory in Digbeth and was managed by Alan McClean who currently works at Black Country Touring.

For the most part though, as vital as information has become to the lives of disabled people, it is often a service taken for granted or ignored by most of us until we actually need it ourselves, usually in a crisis. In 2006, RADAR published a guide for newly disabled people and their families called If Only I Had Known That A Year Ago…

Its title perfectly expresses the high value of good information provision to the people who need it and at the time they need it.

It is an unfortunate reality that organisations like BDRC are generally only missed when they are no longer around; supporting people to claim benefits and advising them how to make complaints or invoke legal processes are not commonly celebrated activities and, on the contrary, can be contentious as they seek to open gates which the nation’s ranks of civil servants, politicians and assorted ‘professionals’ strive to keep, if not locked, then certainly only one-third ajar.

Chapter 8 continued

2010-03-22T01:17:00.000-07:00

John Boular has worked in BDRC’s Information department for a number of years and is another great example of someone who has developed an extensive and specialist knowledge-base around disability issues, built on the initial foundation of personal experience when his own life was changed by disability.

Whilst every disabled person’s life is as unique as any other individual person in society, the sharp journey that John took from being physically able and fully employed to being disabled and without employment and the hurdles he had to get over to develop and achieve new aspirations, has parallels with the lives of many other disabled people. It, therefore, gives him valuable insight into the experience of those he now supports.

When John left school he went straight into a very physical job in the electro plating industry, working for his grandfather who was a hard task master in the age old tradition of Birmingham gaffers. He worked in factories for 15 years, when he began to suspect that there was something wrong in his spine.

After 18 months of pestering his doctor to no avail, he visited a private osteopath who confirmed that he had a serious long term condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, which prevented him from doing any physical work.

John was fortunate in having a supportive employer who initially did what they could to support him with things like equipment. But his luck was to change fairly quickly when the company relocated to China and, alongside most of his colleagues, John was made redundant.

“The very first time that I went into the Job Centre to sign on I had a bit of a dilemma because under the JSA you had to put down a job that you can actually do whereas I had only done one job for 15 years and I could no longer do that.

“I eventually saw a Disability Employment Advisor and one of the options was to go to Mansfield, Portland College, to train. I went there for about six months and I retrained in computers.

“On my return I was approached by Shaw Trust which helped me to find a voluntary position in a company called Total Computer and Network Support Limited in Aston. I was there for about two weeks when I ran into Maria McLeod in the pub. I got talking to her and she mentioned that the Disability Resource Centre was looking for somebody for a temporary position for three months for maternity cover. So I came, had an interview and got the job and have been here ever since.”

John worked on the Connect Project which was to support 60 disabled people (20 per year for three years) to use computers in their own homes. It was the first time he had worked from an office base and he enjoyed the new experience.

John does not describe the process of becoming a disabled person as being emotionally traumatic or even life changing in major ways, though he does recall going through a period of attempting to maintain his previous work patterns and lifestyle by “banging loads of painkillers down every day” in order to carry out the physical work of the factory. He observes that over time he resolved himself to an acceptance of the things which he could now do and the things he was now prevented from doing.

When Megan Davies took extended maternity leave prior to leaving the Connect Project altogether, it gave John the opportunity to see the project through to its conclusion and, with the support of BDRC Manager Steve Blick, he successfully joined the Employment and Training Department on a more permanent basis.

In 2004 John moved from the Employment team into Information and has worked there ever since. Here John emphasises the value of the Information service to the users of BDRC:

“The main areas of Information... I would have to say that benefits are at the top. If somebody acquires a disability, the first thing they want on their list is, moneywise, what are they going to live on? How much are they going to get in benefits? Second, I would probably say equipment – where can they get certain pieces of equipment, for instance, from Social Services? Then I would probably say transport, as there is quite a big issue around transport.

“What I would say though is that while the information leads you to believe there are a lot of things out there, when you actually try to get those things you can run into a brick wall.

“The information lets you think that there are loads of people out there who will do loads of things for you, but whenever you ask for something you don’t qualify or they can’t afford it – I think that’s where the gaps are. DIY for example. A lot of people phone up and ask ‘I’ve got a disability and I need somebody to cut the hedge or to fix a tap or something’.

“One of the main things I would have to say is that they either can’t afford a normal engineer to come out and do that because of the price or the bills, or the engineers wouldn’t come out for such a small job.”

For a number of years John was partnered in the Information Department by his colleague Toni Cuddihy and between them they successfully delivered the Information service under a service level agreement (SLA) with the Adults and Communities department of Birmingham City Council.

Because a substantial element of this SLA is providing an outreach service around the city, Toni and John became well-known faces all over Birmingham. In common with the experiences of many other employees, past and present, John started at the BDRC in one role and then developed additional areas of expertise. Part of his role now is that he is BDRC’s ICT Officer, overseeing the Centre’s ICT infrastructure as well as offering ICT advice to service users.

Does John think that computer technology will ever make his main role of Information Officer obsolete?

“I don’t think that that would ever happen. Although we can search the internet, some people don’t know how to do that still and others just can’t grasp the internet. Many are really scared of touching a computer, so I think that there is always going to be a role for information officers.

“People still want to interact with the faced figure and the information that we can give, I would say it’s around experience. A lot of people can look at the internet and a great example would be the benefits system, especially the Disability Living Allowance.

“On the internet it will tell you what you need to do to claim Disability Living Allowance, but then you have a load of people come back to us to say that they have filled out the form, but they still haven’t received anything. I think that is where our experience comes in because we know a bit more than what is actually put on the internet.”

Another worker at BDRC who believes in the personal touch is John Ellis. John, a member of the Employment Preparation Team has worked at BDRC for just over six years.

His job involves engaging and working with disabled people who are preparing for work and the various elements that support that – anything from explaining opportunities within voluntary work or training or direct job searches through to the Centre’s job club and other specific types of support.

Like so many people whose personal stories have been highlighted in this book John is a disabled person himself and first came into the Centre as a potential service user:

“I came into the centre for some advice, as a service user, got to know a couple of the staff and I also tapped into Job Club. Although I had been in the printing trade for more than 30 years I had also been a volunteer in disability for about 20 years. My wife was a senior carer for people with severe learning disability and I had been a volunteer for about 20 years on one of her projects.

“Having come here for advice myself, I soon became a volunteer. It was put to me that I might work well as a volunteer mentor which is what I did, I was very pleased to realise that the organisation offered training even though I was a volunteer and not a member of staff.

“I did an NVQ in mentoring and worked with some of the clients. This went on for a while and I gradually became more and more involved. At this stage I left the printing trade, I gave up printing partly due to my health condition and partly because I was ready for a change and realised that I could possibly do something else.”

John is another example of someone who, due to personal experience of disability, found that the flexible and supportive environment of BDRC and the development and training opportunities available, helped him to develop his own expertise and skills and to move into a role where he feels most effective himself as a support worker.

Whilst John believes that his personal experience of disability gives him valuable empathy towards the service users, he also values the experience brought to the centre by people who are not disabled, but share a commitment to the BDRC’s overall philosophy and culture:

“Having personal experience of disability or experience of working in health or disability I think, is important. I feel it is almost crucial, but I think it would be wrong to disengage non-disabled people, as they can also provide vital experiences. I think that you need an empathy and understanding to work with a lot of our service users.”

The Employment and Training Team supports people with all types of impairment, but John Ellis points out that the common denominator for many of the BDRC’s service users is the lack of confidence which can be related to being a disabled person:

“Confidence can be a major barrier and often if people live with a disability for a number of years, including mental health and emotional health, there is a cross-over of their original disability and their emotional state of health which can impact on their confidence and self-esteem. So, a lot of our work is in rebuilding that and supporting people to regain their confidence, I think this is a major element of the work we do.

“I believe that what makes the BDRC’s Employment and Training service different from many others is the level of support that we are afforded from all levels of management. While we do have targets and outcomes that we have to evidence, we do not have real restrictions on the amount of support that we can give.

“We will revisit clients and will allow them to revisit us and we don’t have cut off times. The doors are always open and I believe that sort of ethic is passed down through the organisation, that is a major thing that I respect about the BDRC and much of the enjoyment I get from the job is that flexibility.”

Chapter 8 continued

2010-03-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

Mohammed Vaseem, the manager of the Employment and Training department, arrived at BDRC to provide management and guidance to new employment projects being launched in June 2006. He also directly delivers careers advice and guidance to service users. Mohammed explained about the service:

“We provide support to help to get disabled people into employment, training and voluntary work. We run a Job Club on Thursdays where we can provide one-to-one support to clients in job matching and CV writing, interview techniques and preparation.

“We also deliver customised training as well. Myself and my colleagues (John Ellis and Tracey Bennett), help in the delivery of interview techniques, confidence building and time and stress management as well.

“We have a whole range of clients who access our services ranging from people with mental health issues to those with physical disabilities. Since I have been here we have supported quite a number into employment.

“One was a client who had been unemployed due to a mental health condition for many years. Previously he was self-employed. He had low self-esteem when he approached us and didn’t think that he could get back into work.

“We got him into voluntary work to help him to regain his confidence and also to give him the self-awareness of the skills that he could offer an employer. With voluntary work we tend to support clients through recognised qualifications – working towards a recognised qualification as well. After a year he started applying for employment opportunities and he quite quickly got a job at the NHS as an administrator. There are a lot of success stories like this.”

Like John Ellis, Mohammed identifies low esteem and lack of confidence as two of the factors which make job hunting difficult for individuals, especially people who have been unemployed for a long period or having acquired a disability, have become socially isolated.

Mohammed, himself, obtained a degree in Chemistry and Business Studies in 1996 and then worked very much in the voluntary and community sector for organisations such as Islamic Relief, East Birmingham Community Forum and PATH West Midlands. His experience of working with black and ethnic minority communities in areas of Birmingham such as Alum Rock, Washwood Heath and Saltley gives Mohammed an insight into different cultural perspectives on disability and an understanding of what organisations need to do in order to engage with marginalised communities:

“The centre is very good at engaging disabled people from the BME communities. Before I started work here I had come across the perception from some sections of BME communities that BDRC was a white organisation and its services were predominately for white disabled people.

“When I started working for BDRC I realised that the entire organisation was very committed to engaging and supporting disabled people from the BME communities. We now advertise in the local ethnic media, highlighting all the services we offer. We also offer bi-lingual language support in Urdu, Panjabi, Mirpuri and Bengali. When working with the BME communities it is important to understand the cultural issues. Over 40% of our service users for the employment and training projects are from the BME communities.

“Everyone’s been welcoming – that is one of the strengths of the BDRC. I feel although we are a well-known organisation we are continuously struggling for funding and that’s always there. But I do enjoy my work here. I do enjoy supporting disabled people getting back into employment – I find it very rewarding.”

Mohammed also emphasises that employment support isn’t just about supporting the individual on a very personal level with things like confidence, time keeping, CV writing, etc, and that many of the barriers to employment for disabled people are created by employers and by society at large:

“There are a lot of things I wasn’t fully aware of because I had no experience of working with disabled people, including the difficulties that disabled people have getting into employment, the barriers created by employers and education and training providers and their reluctance to adapt.

“I think that there needs to be more awareness amongst the employers in particular who may feel reluctant to recruit a disabled person if they think that they have to spend a lot of money to accommodate that person. So probably more funds and more awareness for that type of activity is needed I think.”

In June 2006 the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre also launched an 18-month action research project which interviewed 200 disabled people about the perceptions and barriers which obstructed their employment aims and ambitions. A focus group of 30 disabled people provided more in-depth or qualitative feedback about their experiences either in employment or trying to find training and employment.

The key findings of the research backed-up Mohammed’s conviction that diversity and equality awareness work still needs to be done with employers around attitudes, anxieties, negative stereotypes and misconceptions, but also that a range of other issues need to be addressed in society generally in order to create the metaphorical level playing field.

Issues such as the welfare benefit trap for people wishing to trial work whilst maintaining a safety net of basic financial support; flexible working practices, such as home working and social enterprise; more widespread communication support, such as the provision of BSL interpreters or audio formats; and in terms of future service development, a more holistic and person-centred way of supporting people which addresses the whole range of independent living issues in a more joined up way.

Chapter 9 - Forward!

2010-03-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

When the global recession engulfed the world like an unstoppable force in 2008, it spelt hard times ahead for everyone and none more-so than the so-called ‘third sector’.

But for disability organisations across Britain there had already been a crisis period which had taken place from around 2004 to 2006, during which time many disability groups all over the country and those run by disabled people in particular, went out of business.

Different groups went into decline for different reasons during this disquieting period of time for the disabled people’s movement.

For some groups, changes in local funding criteria had suddenly put them at a disadvantage in terms of adapting to a new funding culture; organisations of disabled people could not compete with local branches of professionalised national organisations; in some local authority areas there had been an ideological shift with user-led campaigning groups falling out of favour.

For many groups it was a question of steadily depleting infrastructure – the big three-year grants which gave organisations the superficial impression of ‘never having had it so good’, invariably did not cover core costs such as central administration, building and running costs and the cost of organisational directorship and leadership training.

For user-led disability groups, these pressures came on top of the fact that many organisations were being run by individuals with a wide range of personal health, mobility, financial and independent living challenges. As a disabled activist once commented “before I can get down to Parliament to join the afternoon lobby, firstly I have to organise how I’m going to get out of bed in the morning”.

Whilst the user-led agenda which had originated in UPIAS and then BCODP in the early ‘80s contained a radical, innovative and powerful message around self-determination, the reality was that however ideologically sound they were, increasingly, many user-led boards and committees lacked the professional expertise around things like directorship, management and financial accountability required by funders, partners, members, staff and ultimately, by service users themselves.

In the West Midlands, a number of well-known organisations folded between 2005 and 2006 including Disability West Midlands, Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People, West Midlands Disability Arts Forum and Shropshire Disability Consortium. We have already learned that in 2003 Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, itself, had also come under pressure following the collapse of a very substantial funding stream around employment and training. However, it had astutely commissioned Tom and Deb Veitch to carry out consultancy work to advise the board on how to reshape the BDRC around a more business orientated model.

One of the consequences of this consultancy was the appointment of a new Chief Executive Officer, Louise Simmons, who came to work for BDRC from the Alzheimer’s Society in January 2005.

With a strong background working for both third sector, local authority and government bodies, Louise brought values and beliefs to the role which were conducive to working for a social model of disability organisation whilst also knowing from essential first-hand experience how the public sector thinks and operates.

The cliché ‘game keeper turned poacher’ is commonly heard in the third sector when a long-term employee of a large public agency, such as a social services department, unexpectedly joins a grass-roots voluntary and community sector group. There can be a perceived ideological chasm between the two sectors and with the inference that the person has literally defected from an agent of control and oppression to one of subversion and rebellion (or vice-versa if the employee goes in the other direction or, of course, depending on which sectors we define as being the poacher or gamekeeper).

Louise Simmons perhaps exemplifies the more complex reality of the contemporary environment, where individuals no longer spend their entire careers working in one particular sector, but bring a range of knowledge and skills gained from different situations.

Louise had actually been born and raised in the Yardley area, but it had been some time since she had worked in Birmingham so she was on a steep learning curve as far as knowledge of the disability movement in the city was concerned. What attracted Louise to BDRC?
“It is an independent organisation, not linked to any other and if I think about my work in the charity sector prior to that I’d been working in a structure where there was a national organisation and below that was a regional structure across the country and then there were local branches – so I’d worked for national charities.

“I had not worked for a local charity, a stand-alone charity, and that in some respects was quite a challenge because I would not have the support, if you like, from the national organisation and the resources that come with that. So it was going to be a challenge.

“I think beyond that the services that BDRC were providing certainly interested me and I was given the impression from the advert that it was a medium-sized professional organisation very much moving towards social enterprise, very much operating as a business rather than a charity and all of that excited me as a number of charities were still operating, at that time, very much hand-to-mouth and still shaking tins on street corners.”

Chapter 9 continued

2010-03-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

Louise inherited an organisation which had become scaled down in recent years with just seven members of staff providing administration and reception support and running information, employment and training services. The post of Chief Executive had been vacant for more than two years and so the organisation was lacking leadership and strategic direction.

However, Louise could see the potential for growth and the need for the services that were being provided as well as the need to provide new and more services. But first of all there was the small issue of funding:

“Within in a few days it became apparent that the organisation had no funding beyond March 31. So having just walked into the organisation, I was already facing a potential redundancy situation along with all the other members of staff. My priority was to secure funding beyond March 31 of that year.”

The management experience which Louise brought from other organisations and sectors meant that she was able to turn things around fairly quickly, in spite of the initial uphill struggle. Existing services had to demonstrate that they were hitting the performance targets of their contracts in order to justify new funding bids. Staff were supported with training and encouraged to change the culture of the organisation so that it became “procurement ready” and quality assurance systems were put in place:

“Things like quality systems, policies, procedures, management arrangements, meetings, standard things that need to be in place in an organisation to enable it to run effectively, performance management arrangements, staff appraisal systems all of that had to be put in place because it was not there.

“Beyond March 31, when the initial need to ensure the organisation survived the next tranche really was to make sure that the BDRC was procurement ready, that organisations like Birmingham City Council and the Learning and Skills Council and whoever would be happy to contract with us and we could demonstrate our ability to deliver and manage contracts, so a lot of work was required in the first 12 months.”

If some of this starts to sound a long way away from the chain of events which started with Paul Hunt’s letter to The Guardian in 1972 and led some years later to Bob Findlay sitting alone in a school hall in Balsall Heath wondering if anyone would turn up to the inaugural meeting of BDRG, we should, perhaps, remind ourselves that at around the same time as Louise had arrived at the centre, in early 2005, across the city both Disability West Midlands and Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People were struggling for survival, in large parts because of infrastructure and leadership issues and arguably because of a failure to demonstrate a working business plan.

Within a year, both organisations would be gone, whilst BDRC was now starting to go from strength to strength. Like it or not, for a medium-sized third sector organisation like BDRC to survive, becoming sharper in terms of professional standards, financial accountability, entrepreneurial outlook and overall business sense were essential requirements.

Another of Louise’s innovations was to take the strands of commercially viable services which had been previously developed by workers like Steve Blick, Janet Higgins, Debbie Nunn and Elaine Watson and bring them together under the remit of a new department within the organisation – a third strand of the organisation’s services aptly titled Business Services.

The type of things that fitted into Business Services of course were not necessarily new areas of work within BDRC or the wider disability movement, such as disability equality training, access auditing, disability consultancy, arranging accessible events, etc., but the idea of formalising and delivering them in a more strategic and commercially astute way was a significant development for BDRC, it also built on the social enterprise related ambitions of the organisation.

If there had been any sense of trepidation or uncertainty in the past about, firstly, whether to and secondly, how to develop a business model from the foundations of a community and rights based ideological agenda, BDRC was now making a clear statement of intent for the future. Louise recounts the development of the department:

“There was a small element of business activity taking place, which sat in the Employment and Training Division at that time. Two staff members worked in that division on the Disability Equality Training contract which BDRC still holds today to train taxi drivers in Birmingham.

“But that was really the only contract that BDRC held at that time and it became evident that we did get the odd enquiry from other organisations around Disability Equality Training and whether we could put other related types of training on. It seemed a good idea to explore that opportunity further.

“Beyond that, BDRC has always hired out its rooms. Organisations have been able to hire our facilities for meetings or conferences and what we have here is pretty accessible compared to most in Birmingham, so there was obviously a market around that.

“I looked into this in more detail and thought it would be quite nice to pull together a new section which looked very much at developing BDRC business really.

“We pulled together that taxi training contract, the rooms that we hired, the tenants that were based here and looked at expanding that further, particularly opportunities for training in Disability and Equality or training on the Disability Discrimination Act, doing access audits for example and other consultancy work.

“I put a plan together and presented it to the Board of Directors here and they certainly wanted to see it happen. The plan was in line with what they wanted to do, so they said ‘if you want to do that then go away and get the funding for this to happen’.

“So I worked on an application to the Big Lottery Fund and I was successful in securing three years funding to create a Business Development Manager post and an assistant post and, because we already had the disability and equality taxi training contract, I managed to secure that for a further three years and we were able to establish a post of Access Auditor/Trainer.

“We were able to create a new section comprising of three members of staff to take this forward. The plan was that after three years the Business section would be self-sustaining through all the contracts that it was securing, etc. and that any profit we made could be used to deliver our other services.”

With new money also coming in to develop the Employment and Training Service, in June 2006 the workforce expanded quite quickly with an influx of another nine new members of staff, a huge change for BDRC at that point in time with more new members of staff coming in than had actually been working there at the end of May.

Whilst there was always plenty of qualitative anecdotal evidence to show that service users valued the services provided by BDRC over many years, there were now big changes taking place, not just in

Birmingham, but across the country in the way that local authorities were going to fund the third sector, with contracts and service level agreements based increasingly on carefully monitored targets and stringently controlled accountability of expenditure.

The days when long term core grants were well-meaningfully thrown at groups who were, for whatever reason, flavour of the month with their local statutory department officers or politicians, had come to an end and whether the playing field was equal for all or not, disabled people’s organisations would have to lift their game alongside everyone else.

Chapter 9 continued

2010-03-22T01:05:00.000-07:00

But what is Louise’s view on the pitfalls and challenges of attempting to run a more business like model, particularly in the disability sector? How does the emergent vision based around an entrepreneurial model compare to the purist rights model where government and local authority agencies might have been expected to fund equality and consultative organisations out of a statutory responsibility, if not a duty under the recent Disability Equality Scheme section of the Disability Discrimination Act?

“I can see both sides to that argument. There is certainly a role for BDRC and other organisations to represent the rights and views of disabled people. But I can also appreciate the issues facing many user-led organisations who perhaps are not in the position of BDRC, particularly if it is, for example, a learning disability based organisation or perhaps an organisation where all the staff, volunteers and board have a visual impairment.

“There are lots of barriers that those user organisations will face in fighting their way through funding and procurement procedures.

“I can completely see that, in some respects, we spend so much time making funding applications and justifying our own existence when actually there is a very good argument to be said that we shouldn’t have to do all of that and if the money automatically came through and we could spend a lot more of our time doing what we really want to do, supporting, representing or empowering disabled people.

“However, who is to say that BDRC is the best placed organisation to do that? I can see from a public sector point of view, they have to consider value for money, best fit, openness, transparency in terms of who they give their money to.

“How does an organisation that is not in receipt of money, but is providing or has the potential to provide a good service get funding if they are not given the opportunity to apply or to take part in an open, fair, transparent process?

“I think there does need to be that open, fair and transparent process. What I would say in response is that I am not entirely sure that the processes and all the evidence that we have to provide, as a third sector organisation, are always proportionate to the funding that is available or that we are being given.

“I will just give one example around that, I have seen, since I started work here – that’s four and half years, the fact that six times more work this year, 2009, is being put into funding applications and tendering, than was the case when I started in 2005.

“It is not the case that our applications are deteriorating, probably quite the opposite, we have quite a few experienced members of staff here now. It’s simply down to the competition, money is becoming smaller and there is more competition.

“The sad thing is that in many cases organisations like ourselves have to compete against the private sector, big national organisations and how can little old BDRC whose Chief Executive and managers fit bids for funding on the side of their day job, possibly compete fairly and equitably with big multi-national private companies that probably employ departments of tender bid writers and have much better economies of scale?

“I hope that answers the question in a way, there are pitfalls and I would like to reach a situation that is somewhere in the middle.”

Louise’s point about whether it is actually the role of BDRC to be a campaigning or even a consultative organisation is a very relevant one and a question which reflects a view from BDRG originator Bob Findlay who suggests that there are two broad types of organisation of disabled people, those that deliver services such as BDRC, DIALs, self-advocacy groups or centres for integrated, inclusive or independent living and those that provide a voice for disabled people such as coalitions, councils, consortiums and, of course, rights groups.

The dilemma being, as Bob previously inferred in this book, that the ‘voice’ organisations are at a distinct disadvantage in terms of getting either core or project funding, not least because by their very nature they are ethically and ideologically obliged to snap at, on an ongoing basis, if not give damaging bites to, the proverbial hand that feeds.

A more recent development in both Birmingham and the wider West Midlands has been the development of networks of disability organisations, previously funded on a regional level by Regional Action West Midlands and currently by the BASIS stream of the Big Lottery Fund and in Birmingham by the city council.

Birmingham Disability Resource Centre, alongside other disability organisations, has started to develop the Birmingham Disability Network with funding support from the council. Ultimately, this has the potential to provide a more strategic framework for third sector disability organisations in Birmingham to consult, inform, network and even campaign on behalf of their members.

Obviously, this is a very different beast to, for instance, the Birmingham Disability Rights Group which was created from the grass roots level and thenceforth was entirely, exclusively and directly controlled by individual disabled people.

A network does, however, if successful, still have the potential to be strategically powerful and influential, especially where large and locally respected organisations reach consensus on pertinent issues. The key being whether the member organisations, of or for disabled people, will have their own genuinely applied mechanisms for listening to and then representing the views, aspirations and concerns of disabled people within their organisations.

The other point being whether the network can maintain its own integrity, autonomy and independence from the funder, in this case Birmingham City Council. As we approach the end of this history, perhaps this development brings us full circle and a similar history book in 20 years time might hopefully talk about the success of the Birmingham Disability Network.

To close our history we asked some of our oral history interviewees for their final reflections and thoughts about the future, starting with BDRG founder Bob Findlay, whose characteristically forthright critique within the social oppression model of disability remains as sharp as it was back in 1985:

“I would never knock the work being done here, but I think that the economic development ethos can play to the stereotype that disabled people only have meaning if they are in employment. There is no doubt that having economic power is important.

“I feel it is important to get disabled people into work, but to have that as your central focus, in my opinion, means that you end up playing the normal game i.e. not everything about disability is about employment and the centre should not move away from looking at barriers (the social and cultural barriers) to simply focus again on the individual needs of disabled people to get into work.

“Obviously my politics say to me that individuals are important in their own right but as a dominant ideology, in practice it actually oppresses the disabled person by promoting the individual tragedy model and becomes a way of controlling us by individualising our own experiences. Whereas the social oppression approach says that individuals in a social group are defined by the structures and the culture and attitude and, if you like at the macrocosmic level, the barriers that society creates and we cannot as individuals overcome all those barriers simply taking an individual approach.

“So finding disabled people work isn’t wrong, but it is not a radical agenda. I would never knock it and I am proud – I recognise the work that it is doing.”

Here our Vice chair, Andy Beaton, reflects on the reasons for the centre’s success:

“I don’t think the BDRC would still exist had there not been that commitment of potential service users, people who had different functions in the centre and it is quite a hard balance to get.

“Part of the training I do on good governance is that you need to let the staff manage their side of things and I think the centre gets that balance about right. Maybe it didn’t always, because it is quite hard when people have got a real passion for their subject and the zeal, time and commitment to do it. But again the centre has come through all these ups and downs.

“Again the proof of the pudding is that the centre is still functioning and potentially flourishing in the current environment and still supporting disabled people with a range of services, certainly involving the potential for people to be employed in whatever work environment structure they want as opposed to what someone else imposes on them. I would love to see this develop more. Things like the sort of services of disability equality, the taxi training and access audits.

“I think the centre has got the tools to do these sort of things. I think, for instance, that it could take a lead role in the Birmingham Disability Network. It will help to strengthen these things to move forward.

“The future of the third sector in delivering services against contracts is about the potential for collaborative working and that is something that BDRC is getting involved with in a big way and that is a very positive thing. It is something I have been pleased to see move forward more now than it did before.”

Chapter 9 continued

2010-03-22T01:02:00.000-07:00

Former leader of Birmingham City Council, Sir Albert Bore, a person instrumental in securing funding and premises, pays tribute to the BDRC and to the Disability Rights Group which got it going:

“It was the Disability Rights Group who drove this project and the officers within the Economic Development Unit persevered alongside the Disability Rights Group. Out of this came a particular type of Resource Centre – a project which had some uniqueness to it and I think that we should all be rather pleased that it had, even though it took seven years in gestation.

“Just to say that it was ’92 when it was first opened (so we are talking about 17 years ago) I think that there is a longevity here that we should all be rather pleased about. We must have got something right.

“Those were the days back in the 1980’s when there was an urban programme (the Inner City Partnership programme) which allowed us to fund things. It is when you have access to a resource like that and you use it in a clever way which will allow you to move the agenda forward.

“I am very pleased that we were able to deliver a Disability Resource Centre. It was a period of years where local government (and certainly local government in Birmingham) were pursuing very imaginative initiatives in terms of helping on enterprise or training initiatives.

“And what we had was a wide spectrum of these initiatives in Birmingham, a disability focus being just one of them and I am just pleased it happened and I am pleased that the Disability Resource Centre is still here 17 years on.”

BDRC Chief Executive, Louise Simmons, summarises her thoughts on why the centre remains extremely successful and increasingly looks towards a bright and abundant future:

“There are loads of things, I have to say, it would be difficult just to pick one. I think BDRC has an extremely committed, dedicated, flexible, fantastic workforce. That is one thing I am extremely proud of, I have been involved in most of the appointments of the staff that are here now.

“Any organisation has a turnover of staff. Some of the people that have been here for the longest have moved on now, but we do have some people that have been here for a while, which is great. We do have a lot of new people, but all the staff are just so committed and dedicated to the organisation and that is something that is sometimes difficult to find elsewhere.

“It’s something very special to the BDRC how everybody will support each other and help each other out, everyone is just so committed to what they do. The services that we provide, I am extremely proud of them too. So I suppose those are the two critical things that for me, I see as being positive.

“On the subject of our Employment Service, because that is one of the things developed here very early on, I don’t think it was an intention of the BDRG, that the BDRC Employment Training became central.

“It may have been but I have not picked up on it, I think it came out of the early relationship with the Economic Development Unit, which provided the financing, there was the connection with Strawberry Studio, which was developed quite early on, then throughout the ‘90s we look at people like David Heap and Debbie Nunn and it seems to be a constant service in one way or another.

“I think, my understanding of service development historically and let’s be fair, I think the organisation started out as a rights and representational type of organisation, but – as funding has changed and funders dictate what they want – then BDRC chased the money in some respects.

“If the money is not there for disability rights work anymore because the DDA came into force in 1995 and should have probably addressed a lot of the issues that were around prior to that, so I think BDRC have had to adapt and change from being a rights based organisation to a service delivery organisation.

“I do believe that implementing training remains important. I think if you look back at BDRC’s constitution it makes it really clear that the centre was established for the benefit of disabled people across the board, whether that be physical disability, sensory impairment, learning or mental health and the centre was established to support and empower disabled people, to take part in mainstream society and to be active citizens.

“At the end of the day a key element of being an active citizen and taking part in society is to contribute to society through employment.”

The year 2010 marks the 18th year of BDRC’s existence and also the 25th anniversary of the launch of Birmingham Disability Rights Group in 1985.

Between 2008 and 2009, BDRC supported just over 4,000 service users in Birmingham and, with new funding contracts being signed with bodies such as the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and the Adults and Communities department of Birmingham City Council, the number is set to increase in coming years.

The organisation is still governed by a majority of disabled people on its board of directors and 90% of staff and volunteers at the centre are disabled people – in this respect it remains one of just a handful of organisations in the city which are run by a majority of disabled people.

Ironically, perhaps in terms of the timing of the completion of this history of BDRC, this year the organisation has been given notice to vacate the building that it occupies on the Bierton Road site in South Yardley, as Birmingham City Council, the landlord, is planning to close down the whole site.

So, whilst the funding during the next two years and the development of existing and new services is looking extremely healthy, the potential impact of changes to location and facilities will be substantial.

Chapter 9 continued

2010-03-12T15:04:00.001-08:00

During the course of conducting oral history interviews for this book, there have been as many different views, recollections and perceptions expressed about the BDRC as there have been individuals taking part.

It is of value to re-emphasise the unique journey taken by the changing collective of, largely disabled people, who have driven forward the BDRC from the development of the idea by Bob, Maria, Katherine, Robin, Tracy, Terry and colleagues in the late 1980s and to recognise that it was not always a smooth road and that the organisation’s history involved times of personal trauma, passionate, critical and sometimes acrimonious argument and inevitably at times, the parting of ways.

But without this passion and at times strongly expressed difference of opinion, the BDRC might never have happened and its history would certainly not have been so engaging. A natural consequence of people reflecting on the past is also that people invariably arrive back at the present and begin to consider the potential of the future.

So there have also been many ideas offered to us about the future direction of the centre which will be fed back to the Management Board.

As we enter 2010, it is exciting to see that new seeds are being planted for services and developments which may correlate closely with Bob’s unwavering social model critique.

Funding from the Equality and Human Rights Commission is set to fund an awareness raising project around disability discrimination across the wider West Midlands County and BDRC also sits in a potential lead role in developing the new Birmingham Disability Network, which may be the more appropriate forum to take on discriminatory structures, culture and attitudes across Birmingham.

Another important development in 2009 has been the launch of a Service User Group in the Centre which meets regularly to feed views and issues back to the staff and board of the organisation.

In November 2009. BDRC hosted a Leadership Training course run by the national organisation Disability LIB which is supporting infrastructure and leadership development for user-led Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) around the country.

The development of Disability LIB itself was closely linked to the publication of the research report Thriving or Surviving: Challenges and Opportunities for Disabled People’s Organisations in the 21st century by Scope on behalf of the Disability LIB Alliance in February 2008.

The training event was presented by Mike Adams, Chief Executive of the Essex Coalition of Disabled People and a former trustee of Disability West Midlands in the 1990s. Attendees came from DPOs all over the country.

Without exception, all of the DPO representatives talked about the same issues around leadership, direction, management, procurement, branding, relationships with local authorities and the balance between campaigning type activities and delivering contracted services.

Whilst there is no single working model of a DPO in Britain and each one delivers different services and positions itself uniquely, there is much commonality and Birmingham Disability Resource compares well with kindred organisations. Measured against the standards, values and recommendations emerging from Disability LIB at the end of 2009, the organisation is definitely thriving as opposed to just surviving, though the line can still seem like a thin one!

As the BDRC moves forward into the second decade of the new millennium, it will, without doubt, have to continue to consider how it achieves the balance between the very valuable support it offers to individuals through its information and employment services and the macrocosmic issues around disability discrimination, barriers, attitudes, equality training, access promotion, consultation, independent living, strategic networking and general debate, especially around radical or innovative agendas.

It may be that during this development process it is found that some of these things are better done by the Birmingham Disability Network, by the existing Service User Group, by working with other organisations or by facilitating new ones and throughout all of this it must continue to develop professionally and maintain both core and project funding in a changing financial landscape as we all emerge from the global recession.

As the Biblical proverb goes, “the wise person built their house on the rock” and the history of the BDRC demonstrates that it has clearly been built on a combination of both firm ideological and professional foundations which it still maintains. But most importantly... this house is accessible and open to all!

So to coin a familiar Brummie term... Forward.

Forward

Forward - The History of Birmingham Disability Resource Centre

Copyright details

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface: The Heritage Lottery Fund

Foreword by Professor Carl Chinn, MBE

Introduction by Pete Millington

Chapter 1 - The roots of change

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Chapter Two: When the personal became political

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Chapter 3 - Defining moments and Building Bridges

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Chapter 4 - Spirit of perseverance

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Chapter 5 - Rights Now!

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Chapter 6 - Doing it for ourselves

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Chapter 7 - The man from the Council

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Chapter 8 - Empowering services

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Chapter 9 - Forward!

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