Chapter 2 - continued

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).