Dr John
Harrison
A presentation
at the 25th Anniversary of Disability West Midlands – 2002
For the
first 21 years from the date it was founded, DWM was based in a hospital.
That’s something that’s always surprised a few people and some have been
critical. So to start my short talk I will offer an explanation for that and
it’s based, in part on a brief look, for the first time in well over ten years
at various papers and files I have at home. The rest is memory and please bear
with me, because as we all know memory can be a funny old thing, some scenes
last forever, twisting them a bit as the years go by and inevitably they are
biased, and then going back to the records shows how much of the stuff that’s
resurrected has been totally and utterly forgotten and some you’ve just got
plain wrong.
I’ll start
at 1970, when something called the Chronically Sick and Disabled Person’s Act
became law. Remembering the 60s and 70s, everybody believed that one of the
functions of the NHS was to provide a home for people who could not find one
anywhere else, usually because they managed to say their difficulties were
health related. The result was that many people, aged in their late teens,
twenties, thirties and forties were confined to old style chronic sick
wards, usually workhouse buildings which had hardly been modified with a
minimum of nurses or other staff, working in terrible conditions and most of
the patients, as they were called, were over retirement age.
Section 17
of the Act sought to put that right, by declaring it unlawful for persons under
65 to be cared for in any part of a hospital that is normally used either for
people above that age or for those with what the Act rather cryptically called ‘premature
aging’, whatever that is.
Two years
earlier, to an unashamedly medical model, the NHS itself had produced a
memorandum outlining what might be needed to comply, dedicated NHS units, a
favourite management word that, for (and
I quote) ‘the young chronic sick.
After the
Act became law, regional hospital boards as they then were, were left to work
out their own responses, but to start with they could put up bids for one-off
government grants to build suitable units on a competitive basis.
Some regions
had their plans and ended up with several units, the West Midlands, the largest
region of all did not and ended up with cash to build just one, at Moseley
Hall, chosen partly because of pressure from Dr Ronald Cape who worked there at
the time.
Moseley had
only recently been turned from a children’s to an old people’s hospital with
brand new 60’s style hospital wards and after it was built a senior nurse at
Moseley Hall decided to call the new building Hillcrest.
Like so many
government projects, the running costs were hopelessly underfunded and
Hillcrest never opened to full capacity. It was supposed to have an attached
senior doctor but that was never funded. I lived in Moseley and had just
started working at Moseley Hall and other hospitals and had just made a
sideways move to geriatric medicine, so I welcomed this chance to keep in touch
with young people, so I volunteered for the job and stayed voluntary for the 14
years I held it.
Starting to
ask around it soon became clear that not only did the Regional Health Authority
have no policy for the new unit, but it had no policy at all for accommodating
let alone rehabilitating younger disabled people who could find no help from
their local authorities or the charities, or their own finances.
I’d already
learnt from experience at Selly Oak how vital it is for public bodies to work
together for the best interests of disabled people. On the other hand the
disability movement was then only a faint stirring in the undergrowth of which
most of us, knew nothing. But not quite, it so happened that one of the Moseley
Hall staff was sister-in-law to Ted Marsland and she told me that he had been
interested in this kind of thing for some years but had never found time to
work on setting up what he had in mind.
Ted came to
meet me and later brought along Ruth Wolfe who was quite unique, her decades of
single handed voluntary dedication to disabled people added to that her range
of contacts, she was I believe at that time on the national council of the
Royal Society for Rehabilitation. There was also a regional hospital board
public health specialist, John Parr, who got together with us, he had worked
with the Wales Council for the Disabled and also in Dudley where collaborative
services for and with disabled people were already developing.
John, or
Ruth, or both of them, brought along Hugh Barker from Dudley, Ruth brought
Larry Walters from Solihull and suggested two key people from Birmingham, one
specialising in rehabilitation from social services, the other from the housing
department. Five service providers and three disabled people in that first
working group which met at Hillcrest five times or so.
So the
thinking was that of providers wanting to share their aims, ideals and
practical problems among themselves and with disabled people and, above all, to
learn. We did not want to limit it geographically to Birmingham but with our
tiny resources we balked at taking on the whole region. So as a compromise,
which itself wasn’t at all realistic, we settled for the West Midlands county.
At least that covered Dudley, Solihull and Coventry.
The new
organisation was therefore called The West Midlands Council For (and again I
quote) The Disabled. Our mission statement in the first annual report was about
acting as a liaison group, promoting education and information, and promoting
(not providing) better services on the basis of our own experiences.
Ted, Ruth
and then Peter Lowe, who was working at Hereward College in Coventry, were keen
on making further and higher education more available to disabled people and
that became another objective the following year.
As for
practical models, Ruth did bring her experience with what is now RADAR, after
two organisations were amalgamated, and there was also what is now the
Institute for Aging Health, also based at Moseley Hall, which used to hold
regular seminars and conferences along the lines we could perhaps copy.
It wasn’t
until one of the committee meetings in 1979, a couple of years later or
thereabouts, that Ted told us about a visit to the United States and what he’d
learnt about the disability movement there.
Although the
inaugural meeting was at Prospect Hall, from then on the much expanded
executive meeting always met at Moseley and I apologise for not being able to
mention everyone’s names. We were very fortunate that the hospital had
accessible spare capacity and three successive general managers who were very
keen to have a venture like this on their books. No charge for premises and
resources we used was ever made and that was one reason that we could get
started on such a small annual income, less than four thousand in small grants
in the first year and not much more in the years after that.
Ted was
elected chairman, after a few months we had two part time staff, Theresa Jackson,
now Theresa Samuels, as organising secretary, her title changed after three
years to executive officer, and Betty Cohen. Theresa devoted an enormous amount
of imagination and energy into making contacts, organising seminars,
conferences. In the peak year of 1980 there were 8 such events. She decided we
needed a newsletter, settled on the name Pinpoint
and produced the first issue in 1981, the International Year of Disabled
People.
The first
edition briefly reported, in my opinion, the best conference of all, it was
held in the banqueting room in Birmingham’s council house, where to a large
audience six disabled people and two family carers described their wide range
of, not only experiences, but their hang-ups, objectives and ideals.
We also
produced what we called occasional papers, six between 1979 and 1982, which not
surprising were about residential care, personal counselling and further
education, with a little bit about rehabilitation. In 79 we decided we should
open an information service but had to wait for funds until 1981. Birmingham
Saturday Hospital Fund chipped in and Francis Fontaine joined us as our first
part-time information officer.
About that
time Theresa designed our now familiar logo and we committed to change our name
to West Midlands Council for Disabled People, with which we were all in
agreement. But sadly it could not last, the International Year had given us a
boost with short term grants, but our core income from public bodies, the
Regional Health Authority, Birmingham and Dudley Councils was by now far too
small. Committee members were by now nearly all fully occupied with their jobs
and collectively felt that they could not spend much time on appeals.
At the
outset we’d informally agreed we would not organise fund raising events or
public flag selling appeals. Appointing the information officer had helped seal
our fate, in 1982 we had to suspend all the staff until more funds were raised.
There was
however one enjoyable development, a diversion you could say, because it wasn’t
really in line with our original objectives but it helped us get the show on
the road. Because of the sudden massive unemployment of the early eighties, the
government set up a job experience scheme called the Community Programme.
For almost
five years, from 1983 to 89, a group of mostly young and it has to be said
‘able bodied’ people worked at the former headquarters at the old hall at Moseley
helping staff to produce reports on the voluntary organisations supporting
disabled people in Birmingham. There had never before been a comprehensive
directory of them. Public sector housing and access in local shopping areas,
they were also surveyed. An ambitious sense of giving disabled people an access
report for all of Birmingham. But it turned out sadly to be beyond their
resources to finish in the time available and to my shame it was never
published. The basic conclusions are still in my personal files at home.
Meanwhile
the committee was just as determined that the WMCDP should not fail, even if it
meant marking time for a while until our financial fate became more realistic.
Here I have to pay tribute to John Allen and also to John Parker who moved to
replace him from the Community Programme and became our administrative officer
during that unrewarding fallow period.
Theresa
resigned for a better job in 1985. I followed Ted as chairman but basically was
far too pre-occupied with my own work to give more than token service.
Although to
add a personal note if I may, in 1984-5 I was working on a national project on
NHS services for younger disabled people, which involved personal contact with
a great many people in the disability movement in London and elsewhere. One or
two who distrusted me being a medical professional. But overwhelmingly it was
the experience in the WMCDP that gave me confidence in what was a fascinating,
developing, national and international consensus and I made many friends.
By the later
80s, I’d become convinced that without investment income of our own, we could
not survive. Without reliable, sufficient core funding from the public sector.
Our big problem was this West Midlands title, none, I repeat none of the local
authorities or district health authorities who were not already supporting us,
were prepared to give anything and by now, what we were receiving from the
other three local authorities were simply token grants.
From 1984
however, thanks again to Theresa, we were bailed out by useful funding from the
West Midlands County Council which looked promising for the future, but two
years later Margaret Thatcher abolished the County.
There now
seemed to be only one organisation who could possibly support a regional body
like ours and that was the Regional Health Authority. We talked about it
amongst ourselves and then Ted and I wrote to the chairman giving our full
story, saying in effect if the RHA felt we were not offering a relevant service
and could not give us a realistic stable core grant, after all we would have to
wind everything up.
That was an
ultimatum in all but name. But as you know we were successful and I guess not
least because Ken Bales just happened to be the Authority’s chief executive at
the time. A large, dependable new grant enabled us to persuade Bob Taylor to
replace me as chair. Then we recruited Joe Hennessy as director, replaced a
couple of years later, as you know, by Laura Cale.
National
disability politics had moved on. WMCDP was safe for a while and in theory, at
least, disabled people were now in charge.
