Blogging the project - coffee with Bob is never dull

It's always a delight to meet up with Bob Williams-Findlay for a coffee at Bebo's in Birmingham city centre and even more enjoyable when disability history is high on the agenda of our meeting. Even the café itself has a historic relevance for Bob and I as it was the place in which a small group of us met on the eve of the 2010 Conservative conference and conceived a new national network called Disabled People Against The Cuts. Bob has been a long time activist in the disabled people's movement for many decades and was the prime facilitator of the Birmingham Disability Rights Group in the mid-1980s and the city's Disability Resource Centre launched in 1992.

Going right back to the early days of UPIAS, Bob has continued to be one of the movement's sharpest thinkers, whose ideas, definitions, concepts and critiques around disability have been right up there with the more well-known champions of the modern movement, though he hasn't always been in receipt of the same accolades. Anyone, like me, who has attempted to keep up with the thoughts of Mr Williams-Findlay over the years will share my observation of the general pattern whereby Bob comes up with a radical idea, a lot of people object, dismiss, ignore and argue against it ...then five years later we all agree with it.

So when Bob invited me for a coffee to mull over his latest thinking about disability history, I found myself harbouring a feeling somewhere between intrigue and foreboding - intrigue about Bob's latest thinking and foreboding that by the end of the meeting I might well be having to re-think my own position on disability history right in the middle of an HLF funded project.

Thankfully Bob's latest critique was not a radical departure from what I already knew to be his take on what is meant by 'disability history', in fact the discussion today could be better described as a development of his previous thinking.

I knew already, for instance, that Bob is critical of the approach which puts an equal emphasis on recording the personal achievements of disabled people in history, such as Beethoven composing symphonies after he became deaf or Julius Caesar being a great Roman emperor in spite of his epilepsy, etc., as it does on the history of the disabled people's emancipatory movement in the late 20th century. Bob had previously indicated to me that he views the first of these approaches as 'the history of people with impairment' as opposed to 'disabled people's history'.

It is a very good point and one that is difficult to argue with in terms of the purpose of researching disability history which, surely, is about understanding the social and political history of disabled people both globally and locally, at any specific point in history and within a particular cultural context.

 

Highlighting the impairments of Beethoven and Caesar might be of passing general interest and useful trivia information for quizzers - a bit like knowing that Harold was shot by an arrow in the eye in 1066 without knowing any of the wider context and significance and subsequent impact of the conquest of Britain by the Normans. But were any of these individuals (Beethoven, Caesar, etc.) representative of the lives of disabled people at the time and do these examples tell us anything about society's position on disability?

 

But Bob's latest thinking goes further than just drawing the distinction between the study of miscellaneous examples of people with impairment in history versus the story of the modern disabled people's movement and, in a similar way to how Mike Oliver took Vic Finkelstein's social model of disability ideas and built into them a fuller oppression model critique, Bob suggests that the history of disability as we understand it today actually began from the industrial revolution, as this was around the time that very specific processes of social oppression began for people who were from thenceforth identified as disabled people.

 

We know for instance that with the industrial revolution came massive changes for people in Britain, as Alan Ereica wrote in The People's England:

 

"Industrial society seemed to have taken away men's control over their own lives, without guaranteeing them growing wealth after all. The change from workshop to factory had created a new civilisation - the average Englishman was no longer a countryman, but lived in a heavily built-up suburb and worked in industry. The transformation had brought him material goods, though no security - it was a disaster to lose a job - and a feeling that he had less control over his life. Every aspect of his life was becoming, like his home, depressingly uniform in pattern."

 

There are some interesting points in this passage which back up Bob's theory. "It was a disaster to lose a job" and no doubt even more of a disaster not to get that factory job in the first place due to impairment? People having less control over their work, lives and homes, "life was becoming depressingly uniform". Those people with impairment who would have survived with a great degree of autonomy and independence in the traditional workshops of rural Britain now had recourse only to the Union workhouse, the asylum and the charitable institution.

 

Ereica goes on to describe how the new class of factory workers organised into Unions to protect their individual rights but also to have a collective political voice. With industrialisation therefore came the development of the 'working class' - a term very specific to post-industrial history. We would never use the same term to talk about the peasants of medieval England. Bob's point being, similarly, the concept of 'disabled people' has it's roots in this same era of industrialisation. They were members of the new working class who for reasons of impairment could not hold down jobs in factories or fit easily into the "depressingly uniform" pattern of urban life. Their destiny was therefore less likely to be Union membership or even factory ownership, but much more likely to be admission into the workhouse infirmary or the charitable basket workshop.

 

Disabled people were therefore a new subclass which was defined by the specific circumstances of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, specific economic and social policies supported by new medical, eugenic and psychiatric theories and leading to specific government and local legislation which would define and control the lives of disabled people within this wider industrial and urban environment.  

 

My only difficulty with Bob's theory is not with his very sound analysis, but with the new challenge that it presents us in terms of the language we use to record and talk about disability history. For instance, there are many other very significant events and social policies affecting 'people with impairment' throughout history. The persecution of women with mental health impairment during the European witch hunts; the reaction to people with leprosy or plague; the treatment of returning soldiers from the crusades; the response to impairment in the world's biblical texts or the writings of philosophers and theologians. Isn't it just a lot easier to talk about all of these things under the one discipline of 'disability history'?

 

If the wider public still don't understand the difference between the social and individual models of disability 40 years after its conception, are they likely to understand a theory which says that disabled people didn't exist before 1760?   

 

Acknowledging my genuine puzzlement, Bob drained his coffee mug and giving me that customary smile I have come to know and love, added "yeah, I'm working on that". 

 

As always, coffee with Bob is never dull.