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 | You and Yours - Transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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| TX: 19.04.06 - Disability Archive PRESENTER: SHEILA MCCLENNON |
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| MCCLENNON Three separate groups are at work creating archives of the history and experiences of people with disabilities, so that the true account of a long and ongoing battle against discrimination will be preserved. English Heritage is funding one history project run by a group of disability rights campaigners in Manchester. The University of Leeds Centre for Disability Studies has collected the writings of activists and their supporters. And the charity Scope is part way through an oral history of the lives of over 50 people with cerebral palsy, it'll eventually be held by the British Library. John Thorne has been hearing some of the accounts. WILSON The young males went in the mornings and the ladies went in the afternoons. They didn't want us to mix with the girls in those days, they were very, very strict, wouldn't let disabled people mix together - the opposite sex to mix together. THORNE These are the unexpurgated real life experiences of the older disabled community, as recalled by Tony Wilson and Antonia Lister-Kaye. KAYE There was more laughing at people, jeering people in the street, you never find today. Children today - disabled children are given much more opportunity to express themselves and to be part of the mainstream. WILSON It wasn't a school, it was like a day centre where we used to make things and all that and do weaving and do embroidery work and whatever they think disabled people were fit to do. THORNE And it's these unique kind of experiences that the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People wants to add to mainstream history. BOSTOCK We want to appeal to different people about their oral history archive. THORNE Stephen Bostock, a sign language specialist, interprets my questions for Brian Kokoruwe, who is coordinating the Manchester Project. KOKORUWE For the oral history project we want to interview disabled people, record what they have got to say. But for deaf people we are going to video them in sign language, communicating using sign language instead of voice. NEWS CLIP Today disabled people left their wheelchairs and crawled along the pavement outside Parliament in protest, Sam Cumbers reports. And this House of Commons is ours and we won't leave unless ... If the government found this sight embarrassing that's exactly what angry disabled protestors intended. The campaigners are determined to fight on. It may be embarrassing really and shaming saying that disabled people want results so bad that we're prepared to get out of our wheelchairs and crawl into the House of Commons ... THORNE Karen Peachey, team leader at the Manchester Coalition, says old television news reports of the parliamentary struggles against discrimination illustrate that some progress has been made. PEACHEY It shows us how far we've come in terms of campaigning for equality and for access but it also reminds us that there's still a long way to go. THORNE I mean how far have you come? PEACHEY There are still barriers out there, attitudinal barriers, physical barriers, organisational barriers that we need to challenge and I think this archive helps us to do that. THORNE And the true history of disability has yet to be properly written, says Professor Mike Oliver, the Emeritus Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Greenwich. Historians have distorted the real lives of disabled people, he says, branding them as heroes or villains, never as ordinary people living with a disability. OLIVER People do kind of retrospective interpretations - the Richard III syndrome. And of course all that gets played over into literature, you think about all the disabled villains in literature - Long John Silver, Captain Hook - they all have disabilities. All the James Bond villains have an impairment of one kind or another. And so the proper history of disability is yet to be written, all we've got is these stereotypes of disabled people as being villains or heroes, that simply is not how disabled people are, how disabled people have been through history and how they ought to be represented. KAYE Well my name's Antonia and I'm 74 and I'm aware that the future isn't going to be all that exciting but the past has been wonderful. My father was in the army and I was actually borne practically on the barrack square. And they went off to India to have a jolly time in Agra but I was left a very furious abandoned ... THORNE Antonia is one of the life story interviewees who talked to the Scope oral history project Speaking For Ourselves . Philip Mann is coordinating that historical record, which will be held at the British Library Sound Archive. MANN We're finding that often children born 50 and more years ago were often written off by society. Parents were told to forget about their children, to put them into residential institutions. There was a real lack of expectation. KAYE My mother took me to see a neurologist who held me upside down by my feet and said this child is spastic, take her home, forget about her, she'll never be any good, you're wasting my time, your time and everybody else's. THORNE Professor Mike Oliver says some responsibility for such prejudice and cruelty must be accepted by the outwardly benevolent charities of past generations. OLIVER For at least the last 200 years in modern industrial societies, like Britain, disabled people have been excluded and one of the reasons they've been excluded is because the big charities were in the forefront of advising government - yes we'll provide special schools, we'll provide residential institutions, disabled people don't need rights, they don't need to live in society. The fact that in the last 10 years they've woken up to the fact that within disability politics there's a revolution going on doesn't fill me with confidence that we can trust them to fund and to provide proper accounts of disabled people's history because they're not going to provide an account which clearly locates them as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. THORNE An archive devoted to the community of the disabled isn't a new idea. The University of Leeds has collated an extensive website of the lives, experiences and writings of disability activists. But Professor Oliver warns that the collections must be controlled by disabled people themselves. OLIVER We cannot leave it to organisations that purport to speak on our behalf, like Scope, we cannot leave it to the media - they still deal in stereotypes. So if we are going to do it we have to do it ourselves. THORNE The Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People passes Professor Oliver's test. A national record of disabled people's history collected and collated by disabled people. Now the coalition is looking for suitable premises to open its collection to the general public. Ann Ray is a long time activist and deputy chairman. RAY This archive will always be there for future disabled people to refer to and what needs to happen in the future to take that struggle forward. In some ways it's a way of future generations of disabled people not reinventing the political wheel that we've worked from. THORNE And the historical record, already archived in Manchester, can sound horribly uncaring and discriminatory. OLIVER This is a booklet called the Empty Hours , which is described as a study of the weekend life of "handicapped" children in institutions. It describes the life of the children as bored, lonely, no toys, no occupations, nothing to reach out to or to touch through the bars of their cots, like battery hens - void lives in cot cages. THORNE Karen, could you say what listening to that sort of thing from 30 something years ago - how does it hit you? PEACHEY It just makes people sound like objects and of no value and it just highlights really the way that people perceive disabled children or disabled people as if you were worthless and you'd no opportunities. And that we've moved on from there now but it's - we don't want to be like that again. MCCLENNON Karen Peachey ending that report by John Thorne. 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