Chapter 4 - Spirit of perseverance

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.”