The early history of West Midlands Council of Disabled People

Dr John Harrison

A presentation at the 25^th 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.       

Proud to be Disabled - Introduction

Proud to be Disabled

 

Personal reflections of the UK Disabled People’s Movement

Transcription of a 60 minute documentary film by Birmingham City Council Equalities directed by Paul Green, introduced by Clair Lewis

Featuring Ken and Maggie Davis, Mike Higgins and Linda Laurie, Tom Comerford and Jane Campbell in interview with Pete Millington

Produced by Barrier Free Sound and Vision

Introduction

The history of disabled people as a political community began in the UK in the 1970s with the first stirrings of a new liberation movement.

The first and foremost principle of this movement was a shift from medical interpretations of disability to a social model view.

To be disabled according to this model was being prevented from being as able as you can be by environmental barriers and the attitudes of others around you.

This new thinking started disabled people on a long quest to be recognised as a culturally distinct group in their own right. To disabled people the sense of having a culture was born out of the common experience of discrimination we share with one another. It’s also derived from a sense of pride in our identity.

This is our history, the journey of our experiences.

On the 20^th September 1972, a letter appeared in The Guardian newspaper that was to have a lasting effect on the way disabled people came together and thought of themselves as a community. The author of the letter was Paul Hunt and in it he called for a united struggle by disabled people against the discrimination they experienced in all areas of their lives.

At the age of 19 Paul had gone to live at Lee Court, the very first Cheshire Home to be set up in this country. Until then he’d been living in a hospital for the terminally ill. A depressing but common experience for disabled people at the time. At Lee Court, Paul joined a community intent on developing their own skills and gaining more freedom. At first this independent outlook was encouraged, but it was not long before those in charge of the home began to impose increasingly rigid restrictions on the residents.

An important struggle for choices and rights began inside the home that eventually was to extend far beyond the confines of its walls. Paul eventually moved out of Lee Court and became active in the newly formed Disablement Income Group.

D.I.G. was a single issue group campaigning for increased state benefits for disabled people. But Paul soon came to believe that uniting over a single issue was not the way forward for disabled people, it only addressed one of the symptoms of discrimination rather than the root cause.

Paul’s letter brought an amazing response from disabled people all over the UK. The people who responded to Paul’s letter were to form the core group of a new and radical organisation, the Union of the Physically impaired Against Segregation (U.P.I.A.S.) which held its first meeting on 3 December 1974.

U.P.I.A.S led the first important debate on the definition of disability, describing it was a form of social oppression and casting off the old definition of disability as a medical and personal problem.

Ken and Maggie Davis were two of the people who originally responded to Paul’s letter in 1972.