Memories from Len and Peggy Tasker about how they formed the Coventry Cripple's Social Club in the late 1930s

Len and Peggy Tasker are aged in their 90s and still live in Coventry. As a young disabled man Len joined with others to set up the Coventry Crippled Boys Club in 1938. In 1941 Len met Peggy, a young disabled woman who supported him to make the club inclusive of both male and female members. 

Whilst the terminology used to describe disabled people has changed over the years with the term 'cripple' becoming viewed now as an offensive term, the actual activities of Len, Peggy and their peers were quite revolutionary in terms of young disabled people getting together to advance their own interests. The aims of the Club were centred around social activities and their collective sense of enterprise, determination and resilience perhaps reflected the wider wartime spirit which kept the people of Coventry going through some terrible years.      

An early picture of Len Tasker

Len Tasker:

I wasn’t born with a disability, I was a robust young boy up to the age of 9 and then I climbed up a tree on Stoke Heath Common and I fell from top to bottom. I don’t know if the tree is still there but I fell from this tree and I damaged my hip and it turned TB. Well from that I went into Warwickshire and Coventry Hospital and spent the next 10 years in hospital.

I was born in 1915 and so this was in 1924 when I fell off the tree. I was born at the start of the Great War. I remember my dad walking up the entry where we lived in a back yard house in Coventry, in his khaki uniform, with all his equipment on his back and this is the part of the Great War that I remember.

And I remember my sister, my eldest sister, had me in her arms so I was only about three or four, if that, when my dad came home from the war in about 1917. So I remember the Great War through my dad, he was a wonderful man and my mother was a wonderful woman. How mom brought up a big family I’ll never know, I was number 8 of 9 children.

I had a younger sister after me born in 1921. I remember her being born! I went to school like a normal lad, I didn’t like it, I wasn’t very clever but I put up with it up to when I was nine and then I did this boyish trick, climbing trees and fell off it.

I went into Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital first. Don’t forget this was 1924 and of course orthopaedic surgery in those days was nothing and they didn’t know what was the matter with me and I’d bruised my hip joint. My hip joint was gone and I couldn’t walk, so they operated on me and made a mess of it. I’m not blaming them, they did their best at that time. But I had operation after operation trying to put it right until Coventry and Warwickshire gave up on me and they pushed me over to Northampton, a special orthopaedic hospital over there and I was there for four years strapped down on a metal padded frame. I could only move my head and my arms but as a young lad I had to accept it, life just went on.

In those days prospects for a disabled young person weren’t very good. We’re going back now to the 1920s. If I hadn’t had a good family like I had who were prepared to look after me, I would have finished up in an institution. And institutions in those days were institutions!

I had no education as such, so when I came out I thought I’d better pick my education up so I started to go to Coventry Tech. I was 19, 20, 21 then and I was in a class with 14 year old boys, but Mr Clemson, the headmaster was a wonderful man and he helped me tremendously and supported me and it was because of him and his encouragement that I picked up a lot of my education through going to evening classes.

I was on crutches then and access to the outside world was very restricted. If there was anyone campaigning for access back then, I wasn’t in contact with any of them. It wasn’t until years later, 1938, after I’d come out of hospital and got a job and everything, that we started the Enterprise Club for Disabled People and it was then that we started to campaign through the Club for the welfare of disabled people, especially socially. We hadn’t got any headquarters and we hadn’t got any money.

It wasn’t called the Enterprise Club at the beginning, it was called the Coventry Cripple’s Social Club For Boys. We were open for boys only when we first started because you never saw any disabled girls in those days. I don’t know why, whether their parents kept them indoors or what, but very rarely saw them.

It all started when Eric Grey, a polio, wrote a letter to the Coventry Evening Telegraph appealing to anyone who was interested in forming a club for crippled boys, to write to him. He lived in Glencoe Road in Coventry and I saw this advert and I answered it and a fellow named Harry Trustlove, an amputee, also read Eric’s letter and so the three of us met at Eric’s house and decided to start a social club for crippled boys. Boys only.

And then one day I was walking in Nauls Mill Park, with a friend and there was this disabled girl by the pool and I said “Bill let’s invite this girl”. Anyway we didn’t and we walked around the pool and when we got back the girl was still there with her friend and so I went up to this girl and I said “would you be willing to start a lady’s section of our club, we’re boys only at the moment?”  And this is where I met Peggy.

Peggy Tasker:

This was 1941 during the war and they’d found a bombed out building down town in Priory Street. As we’d had the Coventry blitz in 1940, Len approached me and a builder let us have this old building which had been blitzed and he helped us patch the windows up and put the doors back on and the stairs were in the cellar so we got them fixed and it was quite a good room, it was originally a doctor’s surgery in Priory Street. Through the Coventry Evening Telegraph we advertised for disabled people interested in joining a social club, teenagers as it were then and we had quite a few came along, we said “just come along and introduce yourself, we’re open every evening providing the air raids aren’t too severe”.

So they did, they came and we had quite a number came and joined us for somewhere to go. They’d got nowhere to go, especially during the war, only the pictures. We got together a lovely crowd and from there it just snowballed and we had quite a few got married from there, they met their boyfriends and their girlfriends, so we called it a matrimonial bureau.

As we did ourselves! We were married in 1945 at the end of the war and after 1942 the raids eased off although we did get the occasional odd ones but after the city was blitzed in 1940 and then in the following April, it seemed to quieten down a bit after that. We did still get the sirens going off but it didn’t stop us enjoying ourselves at the Club.

As I say it was a bombed out building but the ladies and the fellows got the hammers out, put shelves up, the girls scrubbed the floors and made it tidy, made curtains and we had a lovely social club. And that’s how Len met me in Nauls Mill Park and we helped the fellows get the place ship-shape.

Len nearly went in the pond to tell you the truth. I said to my friend “what are those two up to, they keep looking at us”. So she said “I’ll take that one”, he was with a friend of his, a young lad who’d lost his leg and they were chatting and we were chatting and I said “I don’t know what they’re up to but if there’s any trouble, you take one and I’ll take the other”. But anyway we ended up as friends and that’s how the Coventry Cripple’s Social Club came about.