This programme contains discriminatory language which some may find offensive
and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.
So this is page 26 of the Evening Standard
on Monday, 23rd February, 2009.
"Dozens of parents have complained to the BBC that
"a disabled television presenter is scaring their children."
TV AUDIO
THEY LAUGH
"One father said he would ban his daughter from watching
"the channel because he thought it would give her nightmares."
CBeebies Bedtime Story.
Have you ever listened to a seashell?
My name is Cerrie Burnell.
I'm a mother, writer and actor.
But to some people, I will always be remembered as the woman
on children's television with one hand.
Others were like, "Oh, no,
"yeah, I mean, that arm - I feel the same.
"I mean, I don't mind disability, but I don't want to deal
"with it at nine o'clock in the morning," you know.
"Sorry. We'll deal with it at ten to two."
My little arm is, for want of a better word, you know,
a deformity or a disfigurement.
And it's that that is unnerving.
But my experience isn't new.
For hundreds of years, disabled people have been shut out
of our society.
We were made to feel we were superfluous to the world, you know,
and that's a very hard message.
They wanted perfect people.
They didn't want disabled people - they wanted us to be perfect,
and all the treatments were to lead to that.
At the end of the day, disability
is largely feared, and you fear
something that you do not
know and do not understand.
I want to explore a hidden story to discover how the attitudes
of the past still shape the lives of people today and find out
whether we can ever overcome centuries of injustice and fear.
Prejudice towards disability is very rarely spoken of.
This kind of whisper of, you know, well, it would have been better
if you were able-bodied, or it would have been better
if you weren't here at all.
I didn't view myself as being disabled until I was in my late
teens, early 20s, because the word "disability", to me, had always held
such huge negative connotations.
I thought disability meant vulnerability.
I thought it meant that you were incapable
of doing things independently.
I certainly didn't think it was sexy or powerful.
I was born in 1979, without the lower part of my right arm.
But until I appeared on children's TV, I'd never personally
been confronted by the prejudice that disabled people
have faced throughout history.
How is it possible these attitudes still exist in the 21st century?
To understand where they come from, we have to look
to the past and to a story most of us don't know.
If you look back at our history, there was this whole idea,
if you were disabled, you were disabled in every way -
you were mentally disabled, physically disabled,
morally disabled.
They were all tied up.
You were a lower form of life. The more disabled
you looked, the more this was assumed of you.
Southwell Workhouse in Nottinghamshire is one of the few
surviving buildings like this left in the country.
It's eerie and it's sort of haunting.
There's a kind of merciless air to it. I can't imagine
the desperation or the fear.
These institutions were designed
to be a last resort for the non-disabled poor,
but it was in these places that our modern attitudes
to disability were first formed.
"Idiocy, cripple, epilepsy, dropsical, weak mind, deaf,
"an impediment in her speech, deformed."
Before the Industrial Revolution, many disabled people could scrape
a living or were looked after by their families.
But as thousands flocked to the cities to work
in the new factories, those unable to compete in this modern world
were left behind.
With nowhere else to go, the workhouses started filling
with sick and disabled people.
"Aaron Pudney - deformed, incapable of earning his living.
"Mary Watson - infirm and being deformed."
This is a parliamentary report into workhouses from 1861, listing
everyone over the age of 16 in England and Wales who'd
been an inmate of a workhouse for five years or more.
And this is upwards of 60 years!
I mean, one's been in there 70 years!
"Albertina Salmons - blind. Mary Kerridge - blindness.
"Robert Gett - infirmity..."
By 1900, the process of institutionalising disabled people
had begun.
"Sophia Ransom - unsound mind."
"The whitewashed walls afford so many resting places for dust
"and the germs of disease.
"The beds are mostly straw.
"We saw a stream trickling from beneath one cot.
"The room had a strong odour of ammonia. A baby in a cradle
"was being tended by a deaf and dumb woman, and another infant
"was in the arms of an imbecile."
I think it's very telling and also really appalling that both
disability and poverty are so interlinked, and so that attitude
of, you know, if you're poor, you're no good,
or if you're disabled, you're no good.
And it's a fear of mine that a shadow of that has carried on,
really, so that we view poverty and disability in the same
light, almost, today.
If you've always been told that you are not deemed worthy
of something, you know, it takes an awful lot to build up
the fight and the courage to say, "Actually, yes, I am."
By the early years of the 20th century, well-meaning reformers
had begun to campaign for a more humane alternative to the workhouse.
The Cheshire Archives hold the story of one woman who was to create
an institution that would affect the lives of tens of thousands
of disabled people for decades.
Mary Dendy was a social reformer.
She was part of a large group
of benefactors within the Manchester area
who would look for causes like poverty or poor education,
who would then look at how they could raise money to try
and improve those.
Dendy's radical vision was to lift disabled children out of poverty
and give them a new life in a self-contained community
where they would be shut away from society.
It would be known as the Sandlebridge Colony.
Years later, it would become the Mary Dendy Hospital,
where Claire Moore's parents worked.
This is actually a newspaper article.
It does explain how she came across the young people
that would end up living here.
So, Ms Dendy "obtained from the Director of Education
"a complete list of the known defectives..."
That's the children, is it? Mm-hm. "..and visited them."
"I found little children hidden away in rooms, only waiting
"until they should die."
Gosh, OK, horrifying. So she's really seeing the impact of poverty.
So she set up a home for the permanent care of the
"feeble-minded"! And what constitutes
feeble-minded? That term, once you look at the records, seems
to be almost an umbrella term
for all sorts of disabilities. Yes.
There are likely to be children with intellectual disabilities,
learning disabilities, but also, as we can see from some
of the photographs, there are definitely children with physical
disabilities as well. So...
So the assumption was, if you were physically disabled,
you were probably "feeble-minded" as well?
That's likely to be the term used, yeah, because feeble-minded is used
about 90% of the time
as he reason why that child has been admitted. Yes. The idea
is that these young people will move into this permanent situation...
And will be looked after. ..and will be looked after.
This was something that was seen as a welcome, almost, solution.
But there was no way out for them, either, if it's permanent.
That's right.
This is one of the admission books. This tells us about some
of the very early children who were brought in to Sandlebridge homes.
This is written in Mary Dendy's own hand. It's amazing.
So, who's this?
So this is Sydney Humphries, and he was born on the 10th
of November, 1893, and he was admitted eight years later.
He's described as "a big-headed boy with weak limbs." OK.
It's indicated that he has had hydrocephalus - water on the brain -
which will have contributed to that. His learning difficulty.
This young lady - this is Alice Crossley. Alice. She's described
as a very nervous child.
She is nearly blind. Now, you can see from this
photograph, she has her hands up, so I can
see in the photograph there that she has six fingers
on each hand.
I hadn't noticed that.
So that is carefully noted as part of her disability.
That, alongside her visual impairment... Yes. ..obviously
would have made her very vulnerable,
you know, out in the community. Mm.
The mother applied for blind aid
and for help so that she wouldn't have to put her out to beg. Yeah.
So her mother's obviously...
Her mother must have been absolutely desperate.
It says that she's quite well and happy.
"Works in house and knits. Wants to work in the laundry,
"but impossible. Eyesight very bad, seems very stupid."
I would really like to think that these young people
had lives beyond what was written on this page here,
because it's a snapshot. Perhaps it's the only record
of that young person's life.
In 1913, the Mental Deficiency Act
gave authorities sweeping new powers
to institutionalise people against their will.
The effects of this policy to segregate and confine people
who didn't fit are still being felt today.
At a stroke of a pen, a doctor can sign your life away
for the rest of your life. That was it.
In 2007, a letter arrived at the family home of David Gambell.
It was addressed to his mother, who had been dead for many years.
The letter was from a residential care home where, unknown to David
and his brother, Kenneth, or the rest of their family,
their sister, Jean, had been living.
I got these letters.
I was ready to just rip the thing up and throw it away, but pencilled
in the top right-hand corner, I've seen "Jean Gambell".
I remember that name as a kid, you know,
so I rang the elder brothers and sisters.
I said, "Have we got a Jean Gambell, a sister?"
And they were like that, "Yeah, she's your older sister.
"Oh, she must have passed away years ago."
I said, "Well, I've got a letter here -
"she's in some care home in Macclesfield."
I rang the Macclesfield up.
I said, "Have you got a girl there called Jean Gambell?"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes.
"A bit puzzled now in the head, and she's very profoundly deaf.
"And she's...
"..she reckons she's got a family.
"We don't think so.
"We just put it down to old age and that, you know."
"Well," I said, "I happen to be her brother."
70 years earlier, Jean Gambell was taken from her home in Birkenhead
at the age of 15 and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act.
She had spent almost her entire life in institutions, including time
in the Mary Dendy Hospital.
When we seen her, I didn't know what to expect.
Me and Alan, my brother, walked in there
and she...looked up at the two of us and her eyes sparkled,
as if it was only yesterday, and she came running
over and holding both of us, you know, and do you know what?
She knew our names.
"David and Alan."
Such an emotional moment.
And within...well, weeks, she died.
She was just hanging on to see us, a family at last, long last.
What else could be worse than being locked up for 70 years?
She was denied all the things that could have happened.
She could have been courting, she could have got married,
she could have had children - all that was taken away from her.
There was a lot of life, though she never existed it.
She was older than me, so I didn't know they'd put her
into a mental institution.
I believe she suffered from meningitis,
that's why she was put away.
Even to this day, we don't know for sure
what she was put away for.
I've got all kinds of letters here, and...
She was originally sectioned for being a lunatic, feeble-minded.
My dad had to sign it, you know. He wouldn't even know
what he was signing for, you know?
He thought, maybe this is only a couple of months.
But unknown to him, she was there
for the rest of her life.
He wrote letters and letters to these homes -
"Is it possible for her release?"
But no, no, no way.
From birth to death...
..that's her whole story there.
Jean Gambell was one of many thousands of disabled people
who were permanently excluded from society
under the Mental Deficiency Act.
Among those who had campaigned hard to get the bill passed
was Mary Dendy.
I actually have an essay that Mary Dendy wrote.
"The Experiment at Sandlebridge."
So it's an experiment?
This was revolutionary, what Mary was trying to achieve here.
Yeah.
"Fortunately, the feeble-minded are much more easily made happy
"than sane persons."
LAUGHTER
OK, Mary, if you say so!
"It is perfectly easy to make the great majority of the weak-minded
"happy without ever letting them see anything of the outside world."
Mm.
"Above all, I should like to emphasise the fact that it is easy
"to keep the feeble-minded children if they are never allowed
"once to indulge animal passions."
So if they're never allowed to have sex?
That is what Mary was explicitly... Trying to stop.
..trying to prevent.
She wanted to stop, in her mind...
So that's what this whole thing is about, actually?
Yeah, absolutely.
This is around segregation of men and women
to stop reproduction through the generations.
She set up this beautiful home with a very kind of noble idea.
But actually, it's quite horrific.
That it's... "Let's just stop them from breeding."
And then what?
Eventually we would all be filtered out?
Yeah, this was really about looking to...
..strengthen the human race.
Strengthen human stock... So it's eugenics.
..by filtering out these so-called defects.
You know, this was really quite a well-supported movement.
Great figureheads - like Winston Churchill, for example,
Aldous Huxley, many other politicians, writers -
you know, held this very same view...
That the world was better off without disabled children in it?
Yeah, and this sort of environment that Mary is setting up
is almost a solution to what they see
as societal ills at the time.
That... It's just so shocking.
It is, it is.
ARCHIVE: Eugenics seeks to apply the known laws of heredity
so as to prevent the degeneration of the race
and improve its inborn quality.
In the 1920s and '30s, scientists and politicians alike
made use of Charles Darwin's ideas about selective breeding.
Here is a man who, although normal,
comes from a mentally defective family.
Here is his wife, who is also normal.
They've had 17 children.
Seven of them are all mental defectives.
Their aim was to use the new colonies like Sandlebridge
to segregate disabled people, keeping them away
from the strong and healthy.
Two live at home - a man and a crippled dwarf girl.
This film, made by the Eugenics Society in the 1930s,
remains shocking and controversial nearly a century on.
Once they have been born, defectives are happier and more useful
in these institutions than when at large.
If carefully trained, they can be taught simple routine tasks.
But it would have been better by far, for them and for the rest
of the community, if they had never been born.
It's so horrific, just that mentality of...
.."You were a mistake, you don't have a place in the world.
"It would have been better for everyone if you
"just didn't exist."
I mean, it's really obvious to me that had I been born in this time,
I would have just been viewed as a defective,
I would have been seen as absolutely worthless.
It's what Hitler was championing, really.
You just take a thin slice of society away slowly, slowly,
slowly, so no-one notices.
And then suddenly you turn around and you go,
"Well, where are the disabled people?"
Ideas about eugenics grew in popularity across the world
during the 1930s, but it was in Germany that they were taken
to their most extreme conclusion.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime carried out the mass
sterilisation of up to 400,000 disabled people...
..with all kinds of impairments.
Over a quarter of a million more were murdered.
The discovery of these horrors ended Britain's public support
for eugenics, but it didn't end the authorities
still trying to control the lives of disabled people.
Instead of shutting us away, the medical world now
saw our disabled bodies as problems they needed to fix.
ARCHIVE: You think you're on the scrapheap,
but the future holds something very different for these lads.
Efforts to rehabilitate disabled people had begun
after the First World War with wounded servicemen.
ARCHIVE: They come in on crutches, and it's Roehampton's job
to send them out under their own steam,
ready to pick up their lives where they were interrupted.
But by the 1940s, doctors had turned their attention to civilians.
Hello. Hi, what an absolute pleasure to meet you!
Ann Macfarlane was born in 1939.
At a young age, she had developed a condition called Still's disease,
which caused her joints to swell and stiffen.
They wanted perfect people, they didn't want disabled people.
They wanted us to be perfect, which was, I think,
why I...experienced the torment
of trying to be perfect.
And all the treatments were to lead to that.
So it's really the medical idea...
Yes, the medical... ..that you have to be able-bodied, that's the goal?.
Yes, absolutely.
ARCHIVE: Look at these happy, healthy children.
What a contrast to this little girl...
..who is walking for the very first time in her life.
By the time I was four years old, I was so ill
that I went into hospital.
They could see that my knees were bending up and I couldn't
straighten them, my arms were beginning to bend, my fingers.
So they decided to break my legs and put me in plaster.
This is when you were four?
Yes. So that was quite a prolonged affair.
So, every time you had your legs broken and reset,
they would heal and then the same issues would persist...
That's right. ..and they would break them again. Yes.
For the sake of being made perfect, Ann spent virtually her entire
childhood in and out of hospitals.
Till I was nine, they didn't really know what to do,
so they decided that I needed complete rest.
So they made what they called a plaster bed.
A sort of... A statuette of your whole body. Oh, God.
Told me to shut up and throw a bucket of water over my head
if I didn't stop screaming because they had to get the legs
as straight as they could, to lay in this plaster bed.
So you were just trapped?
Oh, yes, you were strapped down, you were strapped on to it,
you couldn't move.
And then you had a mirror... You can't quite see the mirror
in the picture, but there was a mirror over the bed so you could
try and turn it to see what was going on around you.
And how did you feel being in this plaster bed?
Well, at first it was absolutely terrible,
because it was so painful and uncomfortable.
But as I got used to it, it was fine.
And do you get used to it?
Because I remember having a plaster cast just on this arm -
it's one, one limb, you know - and I absolutely screamed.
But no-one threw water over me and no-one told me to shut up.
Sometimes it's very difficult
for me to think back to that childhood.
The pain, the fear. The fear, I think, was paramount.
ARCHIVE: People often say, "Poor old so-and-so
"has to go into hospital."
As if a hospital were the most dreadful place.
Look how happy these children are.
Everything I can ever think of was all to make me more perfect.
And look what I've ended up like!
LAUGHTER
But we're conditioned right from the beginning to think
that we're not right, we're the problem, we have to change...
Oh, definitely. ..to fit in.
Yes, definitely. You're a nuisance, you're a burden.
You were seen as nothing, really, as a disabled person.
I mean, what good were you?
You know... Well, plenty of bloody good,
but no-one sees that! Yes, but nobody recognised it. Yes.
What Ann went through happened more than 30 years before
I was even born.
And yet, when I was growing up,
doctors did their best to make me
perfect, too.
Roehampton was the hospital that had the prosthetics unit
I used to go to.
I remember, you know, walking along corridors and looking up,
and just seeing, like, hundreds and hundreds of prosthetic legs
just kind of hanging there, just waiting.
The people in the white coats, the people with the power,
some of them had very firm ideas. There was never a choice
as to whether I could have the prosthetic or not.
There was a hook that was literally
like this, kind of covered
in plastic, and the idea was
that it would open and close,
and you'd be able to pick things up.
I mean, do you think it worked?
No.
There was one called the myoelectric hand
and this was like, you know,
cutting-edge technology.
So, it would open like...
..and everyone was really excited about this.
Not me, everyone else.
I then went back to just having just
a regular prosthetic that was like a doll's hand,
that didn't do anything. And I... I said to a doctor, you know,
"I just don't want it. I just don't want to wear it."
And he said, "Well, you know, the other children
"might not like it if you don't wear it,
"or you might not have any friends."
Saying that to a six- or seven-year-old is...
..is so poisonously ableist,
and I don't think it was particular to him,
that was just the attitude at the time.
It was such a quiet victory when I finally
didn't have to wear it.
But I'd never have been allowed the freedom to choose were it not
for one man who, in the 1940s,
began to change our prejudices
about disabled people.
If you can get the proper treatment from the start,
these people can become, once again,
in spite of their severe disability,
useful members of society.
Ready? Go.
One of the extraordinary things about Dr Ludwig Guttmann,
a Jewish neurologist, is that he came to Britain
to escape the Nazi regime in Germany - the very same regime
that was determined to wipe out disabled people.
He's like a father to these patients.
He treats them like sons and daughters sometimes.
In 1944, he opened Britain's first
specialist unit for the treatment of
spinal injuries at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
It's no good to...to be just what was called kind.
You can kill people with kindness.
You have, sometimes, to be firm.
Paraplegia is not the end of the way.
It is the beginning of a new life.
Guttmann had a brilliantly simple idea - to use
competitive sport to give disabled people the chance to succeed.
We started with simple games first -
darts, playing in the ward,
and we had billiards and snooker.
HE BLOWS WHISTLE
And then I saw, of course,
how these men react,
not only physically, but psychologically.
They suddenly felt
or see they can do something.
I've come to North Yorkshire to meet a woman
who spent nine months under Dr Guttmann's care.
She adjusted herself
to her disability in the most marvellous way,
with her determination, with her courage,
and with a good sense of humour.
In 1958, Lady Susan Masham
was paralysed from the waist down
in a riding accident, when her horse
fell and rolled onto her.
This was me riding in a point-to-point.
That was before my accident. Yeah.
And yet, two years later, she competed for Britain
in what would become known as
the first international
Paralympics in Rome.
Oh, this is the opening ceremony,
so all the different countries. So, there you all are.
I was one of those.
ITALIAN COMMENTARY
Oh, it was a completely...
..pioneering, new adventure, really,
and it was the first.
So, we were all guinea pigs, really.
SHE CHUCKLES
Did you feel a sense of belonging when you were there? Yes,
I think so. Because this must have been... Yes, it was a movement. Yes.
Yeah. And it was an amazing
organisation... It looks it. ..bringing
all these different people,
who are paralysed, together.
And whose idea was this? It was Guttmann.
He was called "Poppa"!
"Poppa Guttmann"!
SHE LAUGHS
ITALIAN COMMENTARY
He was a remarkable man.
He thought that if people could compete in sport,
they could compete in everyday work.
Psychologically, that was his ethos? Yes.
And at the beginning, people used to come round and say,
"Oh, what are you going to do with all these cripples?"
And he said, "Oh, they'll get back to work.
"They're going to be taxpayers."
He was determined that his patients
would achieve something.
The men and women who competed in Rome not only became
international heroes...
That's me. Ah!
..but showed the world we are all more than our disability.
COMMENTARY: Prima, Lady Masham, Gran Bretagna.
There you are! That's a gold medal.
So, you got gold? I got gold, yeah. That's amazing!
I got a gold, a silver and a bronze.
We went to dinner with a friend,
at a restaurant by the Trevi Fountain,
and I lost my gold medal.
You lost it?! I lost it.
They said I'd thrown it in the Trevi Fountain.
LAUGHTER I hadn't. I think it dropped out of
my wheelchair. Did they give you another one?
No, I tried. Oh! No! But somewhere, somewhere in Rome,
there is a gold medal. Somewhere in Rome. I left my heart in Rome. Oh!
Yeah.
SUSAN CHUCKLES
Susan returned from Rome, having won
bronze, silver and gold medals,
and went on to compete in the '64
and '68 Paralympics.
You know, Guttmann was very keen
for us to pass on his philosophy.
He wanted us to be his ambassadors.
Do you think that this inspired you
to then get involved with things in the early stages?
I think it did, and it opened my eyes to the need for
the general public to understand disability better. Mm.
Today, there are more than 5,000
para athletes globally,
who compete in Games throughout the world,
reaching an audience of billions.
In the early days, we were very much
amateurs, in a way.
And now the Games have become
much more professional.
But maybe they're not quite so fun.
SHE LAUGHS
It's remarkable that one man
influenced the public's attitude
toward disability so profoundly.
By seeing what was possible, if you look beyond the disability,
he proved to all of Britain that every individual had worth.
That's an extraordinary legacy to leave behind.
But for most disabled people across Britain,
Guttmann's sports movement would take years to change attitudes.
Thousands of people, without family to care for them or the financial
means to live at home, remained hidden away in institutions.
Do you feel very shut off in here?
I do, rather. Mm. It can't be helped. Mm.
It took one man, who was living in
a residential home in Hampshire,
to change the rules.
When did you start to get to know Paul Hunt? How did that happen?
I was curious about this man,
because he was so highly thought of by the residents.
Judy Hunt met Paul while working at Le Court,
the home where he lived.
Quite often, I was helping out at a table which Paul was on,
so I got to sort of know him a bit,
I mean, and hear, hear him talking,
and he was quite a witty chap, you know?
He was a reader, writer.
Right from the start, it was looking at the situation
of disabled people to liberate themselves.
I've strong memories of hours spent in the wheelchair store.
Ha! What were you doing in the wheelchair store?! There was
a shortage of spaces to just sit and have quiet conversation,
because people shared bedrooms. Mm.
I think I was in awe of him, actually.
In 1970, Paul and Judy decided to marry and move to London,
where Paul soon realised the prejudice he had lived with
in institutions existed in the outside world as well.
Right, on this page is the letter by Paul Hunt.
Two years after arriving in London, he wrote a letter to a national
newspaper calling for disabled people to come together
and end their enforced segregation.
"Every sentence in her article could apply with equal force
"to the severely physically handicapped, many of whom
"also find themselves in isolated and unsuitable institutions,
"where their views are ignored and they are subject to
"authoritarian and often cruel regimes. I am proposing
"the formation of a consumer group to put forward, nationally,
"the views of actual and potential residents
"of these successors of the workhouse.
"I should be glad to hear from anyone
"who is interested to join or support this project.
"Yours faithfully, Paul Hunt."
That's just amazing.
I don't think anyone would have put into words...
..so sublimely and so beautifully
the struggle and the call to arms, really. Yeah.
Paul's letter galvanised people across the country.
No government, present or future, will give us what we demand
unless we shame them into action.
And as disabled people began to voice their outrage, they drew up
a blueprint for their future.
He says, "In our view, it is society
"which disables physically-impaired people.
"Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments,
"by the way we are unnecessarily isolated
"and excluded from full participation in society." Mm-hm.
"Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society."
And what they'd been struggling with for quite a long time
was saying, "it's not us
"who should be accepting..." Mm.
"..our disability. We shouldn't be accepting our disability.
"We have to eliminate our disability..." Mm. "..by changing
"the environment." And it just opened people's eyes enormously.
It's the first time that anyone has said, "It's not you,
"you're not the disability, you're not the problem.
"It's the world..." Yes. "..and the way that you're viewed."
That's right. And if it's the world, you can change that. Mm-hm.
So, when I was around 20, er,
when I was at drama school,
they suddenly, halfway through my second year, decided
that I was a disabled actor,
instead of being an actor.
Why? I don't know, but all of a sudden, there was this big push
to make me wear a prosthetic hand on stage,
and the idea was that
I would go forth thither
into the world and wear a prosthetic
and become Kate Winslet or something.
I was definitely there for the Kate Winslet part,
definitely wasn't there for the prosthetic part.
And that's when I really started feeling some deep shit
in my self-esteem because, again, it was like this... We...
You know, you're not good enough as you are.
And so this is when I started learning about
the fact that there was a social model of disability and that,
you know, you the individual shouldn't have to conform to
society. Society should bloody well change for you.
THEY CHANT
It was the time of free love and the whole idea of
challenging the status quo.
You know, I was moved by seeing
all these demonstrations.
I suppose there was a bit of a rebel in me. I think that was
quite liberating, you know?
At the age of 18, John Evans
embraced the anti-war and civil rights movements
that were sweeping the world.
But in 1975,
he had an accident that left him paralysed from the neck down.
When I broke my neck, I went into this institution.
I had that feeling, a very definite feeling that I'm not going to spend
the rest of my life here,
with 49, 50 other disabled people
just because I'm disabled.
In 1978, he moved into Le Court,
the same residential home where Paul Hunt had once lived.
ARCHIVE: Le Court is a home in the
true sense of the word,
exactly as you and I mean home,
not an institution.
Even though Le Court was a lot more progressive,
there was no integration, no inclusion in the local communities,
and I think that's not - to me, anyway - part of what life
should be. Unfortunately, I wasn't rich,
which would have been another way
I could have paid for people to work for me.
But at 25, I had no option. I had to go there, you know,
I didn't have a choice.
John was determined his life wouldn't be spent locked away.
Influenced by the emerging disability movement,
he set about finding an alternative way of living,
outside of an institution or residential home.
Project 81 was like a dream,
or a vision, about living in the community.
I was pioneering, I suppose, for my freedom
and, within that, it was the freedom for other disabled people.
So, you know, there was a real buzz about something that could happen.
Then you got a sense of a movement growing, because that was
what was going to liberate us.
The main thing was trying to get the idea that
we just wanted to live in our own homes, in ordinary streets,
with ordinary people.
And also, we wanted to ensure that we were involved in
all decisions that were made
about our lives
because, until then,
all decisions were made by social-care
or health-care professionals.
Up and down the country, people called on the authorities
to give them the money that would enable them to live independently.
In 1983, John was one of the very first to move from
a residential home into a place of his own.
It's just indescribable, I think, the feeling after
living in a home with disabled people for almost
four-and-a-half years, then suddenly I've got my own place.
It's, er... Yeah, it was astonishing.
For days, I couldn't sleep because I was just
buzzing all over and just so excited.
Don't pull my arm off again, will you?
No, right, I won't. Handle me gently.
And now, you know, 45 years later,
you know, I look back and think,
my goodness, in some respects, becoming totally paralysed was
one of the best things that happened to me, cos it enabled me to be
a central figure in developing the disability movement.
Our strength is that we are united
and we know what the problem is.
And by coming together, we are going to change that.
CHANTING
I would have been four when John and others
were winning their freedom.
What do we want? Rights!
When do we want them? Now!
But the world they found outside of the institutions
was anything but welcoming.
CROWD CHANTS: We want what you got! We want what you got!
All we want is to be able to get on the bus, the same as every other
member of the public. If you want to get on the bus,
get on the bus... How?! How?! How?!
We were angry. We wanted to get on public transport,
and we wanted to be free.
So, we decided that we would become freedom fighters,
and that's when we started breaking the law.
We are here. We are not going to go away. In fact, if anything,
we are going to gain in strength.
Nearly 40 years ago, Baroness Jane Campbell
and Alia Hassan took to the streets, fighting for their rights.
It was a moment that we suddenly felt proud of who we were. Yeah.
It was a bit like Black Power. Yes. We were, then,
proud to be disabled people.
# We demand the right to transport... #
If it's public transport, it ought to be public,
and we're members of the public too.
The interesting thing is, is I went from feeling totally powerless...
Yes. ..to bringing London to a standstill, and that is
actually very powerful. Amazing!
NEWS ARCHIVE: In Whitehall, direct action by the disabled,
action that stopped the traffic.
Their demand - equal civil rights.
And it's like, actually, we're not powerless. No.
We can be visible. We can be heard.
NEWS ARCHIVE: The protesters here say demonstrations like this today
are designed to force the Government to take notice of the views
of people with disabilities.
I want to be able to go nightclubbing.
I want to go to restaurants. I want go to the cinema,
without being a fire risk.
I'm afraid you're under arrest for obstructing the highway,
because you're refusing to get out of the way of these vehicles.
We just didn't have anything. No buses.
The trains, you sat in the guard's van,
with the pigeons and the post, in the freezing cold.
There was nothing.
And the worst thing is,
"We don't have people like you in here." Oh, yes,
I've been thrown out, yeah. That was the worst. It's like...
..no blacks, no dogs, no dis... Yeah. ..no disabled people.
Live from the Television Centre in London,
a host of distinguished guests are arriving for a night of fun
and surprises. Children in Need, 1990.
I'm out here demonstrating because no-one ever asks disabled people
what they think of events like Children in Need and Telethon.
But for Jane and Alia,
it wasn't enough to just fight the physical barriers.
They wanted to challenge the most
deep-seated belief
that disabled people
are people to pity.
We hate charity, don't we? Yeah, we do. And that's very controversial.
They have the money, by portraying us as poor, pathetic creatures
that need money... And that, for us,
is another indication that we haven't got a voice.
We have a very important saying in the disability world,
it's called Nothing About Us Without Us.
And that means if you're not employing at least half of us
to work in your charity, then you are not speaking on our behalf.
Until able-bodied people take responsibility
for stopping the continuation of our oppression,
we will always be fighting.
THEY CHANT
..28 hours, Michael Aspel!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Tell me about the Telethons. How did that come about?
We heard that there was going to be
a big charity fundraiser called Telethon.
Yes. And it was big. They were going to get all the big celebrities
down there. And what was the aim? To raise money for the charities...
Right. ..so the charities could help us poor disabled people.
And we decided we would go down there
and picket it. And we called the demo
"Block Telethon"
and "Piss on Pity". Yeah. Ha! Piss on Pity.
CHEERING
All those people in the building opposite are begging on our behalf.
Let's roll the scoreboard, see the running total, let's see it!
We want to tell you - you don't have our permission!
We went down there and we literally
blocked the entire studios.
You can't afford to ignore
disabled people any longer!
We don't want your patronage. What we want is your support for
our equal rights as disabled people,
campaigning against segregation!
And there's this wonderful
shot of Chris Tarrant.
He was absolutely... He was livid. ..enraged, wasn't he? Yeah, he was.
It's an amazing event. People come from all over the country,
they work for 27 hours nonstop, and it raises huge
amounts of money. I mean, are you saying that
everybody disabled in this country doesn't want to know about
the money that Telethon's raised? Because I don't believe that.
CHANTING: Rights, not charity! Rights, not charity!
In 1992, ITV aired its last Telethon
on behalf of disabled people.
The Telethon protests
had made their mark.
Now you have the choice about the way that you give.
You can choose to continue to portray us as helpless,
deserving crips,
or you can see us as people involved in a civil rights struggle.
BELL TOLLS
In 1995, after 15 years of direct action by disabled people,
the Government took the first step towards giving us equal rights,
with the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act.
My bill is concerned with outlawing discrimination
against disabled people.
If you read this bill, it is not a PR exercise.
If that sort of a bill
had gone through for black people or women,
there would be utter outrage, utter outrage.
But many people thought the legislation
fell short of true equality.
We know that we deserve much better.
We know that we deserve
proper human civil rights.
THEY CHANT: Tell me, tell me, what you gonna do?
The fight continued until,
eventually, in 2010,
the Government passed
the Equality Act, which went further
than ever before to protect our rights.
We did it. Ha! We did really good. We did really well.
We were kind of 20th-century suffragettes.
We were becoming liberated disabled women,
and that is, that is... So exciting. ..incredibly
intoxicating. Yes!
We've fought for these changes that have happened to enable us
to live in the... Live the life we want, not just surviving.
But a lot of young people,
they don't know their history, you know?
Those of us who did know how,
you know, how hard that struggle was at times
just to make things happen.
TV CHATTER
The law has given us rights...
There we go!
..but they don't necessarily change
the way society views us.
Those attitudes won't change with the passing of a bill.
I don't think anybody that's grown up in a segregated...
..situation ever gets over it.
I don't think you can, because you...
It's the norm.
It's what's normal to you when you're a child.
And then everything after that is a struggle
to try and create something better.
Micheline Mason was born with a condition commonly known as
brittle bones disease.
Growing up, her impairment meant
she was denied a place at a mainstream school.
I used to dream of going to school.
The reason I wasn't there was nothing to do with...
..anything that was about my needs.
And I knew that very early and felt very angry about it.
When her daughter Lucy was born
with the same condition in 1984,
Micheline was determined her future
was going to be very different.
My overriding thought I had
when Lucy was born
was that she was entitled to everything in the world
that everybody else is,
just by being alive in this world.
I think my dream...
was that disabled people would educate the able-bodied world
in education about how
we could live together,
and that the children would have a big role in that,
because children are much better at inclusion than adults.
But the fight Micheline had in front of her was to get Lucy into
a mainstream school, at a time when
tens of thousands of disabled
children continued to be segregated.
ARCHIVE: This is what's called a special school.
There are no non-disabled children here.
The advocates of special schools too easily claim
that disabled children can prosper
only in this environment.
THEY CHANT: We'd rather be together!
I've always been very aware that if my mum hadn't
done the work that she did,
my life just would have looked so different. I probably wouldn't
have gone to a mainstream school.
THEY CHANT: We want education...
REPORTER: The gates of Downing Street under siege.
Campaign groups for the disabled demanding that all children
should be taught in the same schools, whatever their physical
or mental impairment. With them,
14-year-old Lucy, who attends a mainstream comprehensive.
Everybody, disabled young people decided that they're fed up of being
separated in different school systems. Because there is
an actual law at the moment that says that it's up to
the, like, different education authorities
to decide where disabled children
go to school, so they can force them
to go to special schools against their will.
I discovered, locally, this group called
the Parents Campaign for Integrated Education,
and it was almost entirely parents of children with Down's syndrome.
Their children were pioneers of
inclusive education, because they were willing to take on
this particular battle
and make it work.
I've never met parents that were...
..that committed and that brave.
Together, they took on the education authorities
and proved inclusive education
could work.
MAN SHOUTS
The real meaning of inclusion became sort of obvious after a while.
And when people saw the non-disabled kids saying,
"We want our friends in school with us,
"and we have a lot of fun together,"
you know, that, in a way, is what changes people.
You almost can't argue about it any more.
I was often told I was this, you know,
the definition of inclusion working, because of the fact
that I was one of the first kids to go into mainstream school.
I find it quite hard to believe we achieved it,
to be honest. But, you know,
it's a human right, it's enshrined in international human rights law.
Like, that was a massive thing.
But to go from a Portakabin in South London,
you and some of your mates, to a bit of international law that
is there for everybody in the world, it's like...
That isn't no achievement, I think you just have to...
MICHELINE LAUGHS
It's very nice to hear you say it.
It's always hard when it's yourself, isn't it?
Today, the world my daughter
is growing up in is undeniably different.
It was prejudice that segregated us into institutions,
it was a fear of difference that made doctors try and fix us,
and it was discrimination that shut us out.
And after more than 100 years,
we're still not there yet.
The clock is being turned backwards, and has been turned backwards
ten years ago, you know, that we're almost fire-fighting now
to try and keep what little we have.
We've had some major years of austerity. Mm.
Who are being the hardest hit? Who are the people who are
now living more in poverty?
Disabled people.
Who was the hardest hit throughout the Covid-19 pandemic?
Disabled people.
We have to fight every, every...
..threat to our freedom, you know?
Cos that's what it is. It is the threat to our freedom
to live the lives we live.
But, I mean, I'm an optimist and just feel that, you know,
we've got to keep going and, you know, we've got to make sure
they don't disappear.
So, what's the fight that we have today?
We look at the huge achievement,
er, all of the rights that have undoubtedly been won.
That's where we have to remain vigilant, really, to make sure that
those rights aren't suddenly taken away in the middle of the night,
when no-one is looking. A bill in Parliament can just be changed.
And all of a sudden, all of that funding, or all of that freedom,
or all of that access is just suddenly gone.
And so, then, what you get is a narrowing and a narrowing
and a narrowing of...
..of life and experience as a disabled person,
until you...you have nothing.
We're in a very bad place at the moment.
However, I can't believe it will last.
I suppose my belief is,
inclusion is something everybody wants, in their hearts.
I've always said it.
And, erm, who wouldn't want that as the future, you know?
So, I'm hoping this is the dark before the dawn.
I really am.