Episode 3 The Disabled Century

CHANTING: We want Ted! We want Ted!

This will enable us to provide strong and honest government for Britain in the '70s.

The early 1970s were a period of conflict and questioning for many.

But there was no organised voice for disabled people,

although individuals were beginning to challenge the system.

Richard Jameson found himself inside one of the huge, grim mental homes of that time.

I thought - in fact, I knew - I was an international star of stage, street and radio

and I went all over the West End with hidden cameras and microphones trained on me.

I landed up in a cafe, spouting away to the hidden microphone,

until the proprietor slung me out.

This is where I was transferred by police car

after a particularly exciting bout of hypermania.

Of course, the grimness of the place was lost on me -

I thought I was in the emperor's palace in Thailand.

I was convinced this wonderful thing was happening. I've never felt so happy.

The normal person just does not know what he's missing.

It was about a month later that the grimness of the place bore in on me.

Nobody bothered to enquire into my mind or say what was going wrong in there.

I was left in an armchair, a very comfortable armchair, to work it out for myself.

This is the undergrowth - very bleak.

The windows are even bleaker.

It looks like a convicts' camp, my pyjamas look like convicts' clothing, and we were treated like convicts.

If your bedclothes weren't done properly in the morning, they were thrown to the floor.

The nurses went round like sergeants and corporals, barking orders.

It wasn't quite the right atmosphere to get better, I don't think.

I was kept in pyjamas for the first month. They were afraid I'd run away.

Damned inconvenient it was, and I couldn't go down into the town because you can't hide your crotch.

It was bloody annoying! I said, "Can I have my clothes back?"

And because I burst into tears, this went into the report book and I was given my clothes back,

which was marvellous.

Pyjamas are inconvenient when you're trying to get down into society.

But there were happy moments. We did have our happy moments.

Like the two nurses who held me down on a bed and rifled my pockets and took all my property,

which was particularly annoying cos I'd just got it back from the charge nurse. They nearly killed me.

We had dances in the theatre, which was capable of putting on shows for us.

We had full-scale dances with a musical accompaniment,

which you might have thought was an absolute holiday camp,

but really the atmosphere of madness hung over it in a sort of pall

and was not at all pleasant,

so it was all rather gloomy even though it was trying to be cheerful.

The doctor who was in charge was rather like a little Hitler,

as far as I and a good many others were concerned.

For all that, we were very lucky to see him for about three minutes every fortnight.

He didn't really give a damn.

He said, "I'm afraid you've got to wait Richard. I'm terribly sorry..."

He didn't even say sorry. He said, "You're nowhere near back to form.

"Charge nurse, show him out."

It's a terrifying business trying to prove you're sane. I almost gave up.

I remember crying and all the rest of it, all over the place,

because I couldn't get out.

In the early 1970s, a report examined disabled people, institutions and power.

The report coined a term for the institutionalised disabled...

You would go to bed at six o'clock, not particularly tired.

I was able to read, you know, down the bed, with a torch.

There were lots of other people

that couldn't do that.

They were lying on their backs

gazing at the four walls, with nothing to do.

You'd go to sleep thinking, and feeling,

"Wouldn't it be wonderful not to feel like this ever again,

"and it would all be over?"

And the thought of dying did seem to have a...you know...

something quite sort of happy about it.

Cos it would be that you wouldn't be missing anything,

cos every day was...was the same.

'The new bus is going to mean a lot to girls like Sue Barker, a spastic.

'When she first came here, Sue was very unhappy, but her deep faith helped her accept her disability.'

The ways and means of living were taken out of the control of disabled people.

They were expected to be pleased with simple things.

In my search for somewhere to live, I went to Norfolk, to a home up a country lane,

and was greeted by this woman with a frilly hat - presumably a matron -

and she started to show me round,

and I went into this huge room where all the residents were sitting around the edges of the room,

like you see in day centres.

She swished these great velvet curtains back and said,

"When you come here, you can sit and watch Canada geese land on the lake.

I turned to her and said, "I won't be sitting here watching them come to this lake.

"I'll be going to Canada to watch them in their natural habitat."

I did a bit more looking around

and saw all these cane baskets and the usual things that disabled people are expected to do,

and just decided it was not for me.

# How many roads Must a man walk down

# Before they call him a man? #

One of the places I went to said to me that I couldn't have a room of my own.

I'd have to go in the big girls' room, a dormitory of about six.

You must have been waiting for someone to die before you had your own room.

But on the Friday we all had to sit round this big oak table and people were given their benefits,

and so everybody knew what everybody else had.

I thought, "No, no, not for me."

You didn't even have to think for yourself what you wanted to eat.

That was decided for you.

It didn't matter whether it was what you wanted.

That never came into the equation.

One treatment decided for Richard Jameson was ECT,

a controversial therapy challenged by many who experienced it.

Nearly all of us were ordered to have ECT,

and it was a little bit worrying because most of us thought our brains were going to be fried,

or killed or cured, and all that sort of drama.

We all queued in a room beside the ECT room and went in one at a time,

were given anaesthetic. I had mine,

and as he was putting the anaesthetic up my arm, he asked me to recite a little poem I'd written.

"Mildred, a dim-witted dove, fell all meltingly in love.

"She wrote a sonnet every day and even an unsuccessful television play.

"Love had cleft her heart in twain Like Rommel at El Alamein.

"Heartbeats fluttered in her bosom. She tried to calm them, couldn't lose them.

"Alas, her love cannot be true - she's fallen for a kangaroo."

And that's when I sparked out.

I didn't see how anything so Heath Robinson and haphazard

could be allowed to operate in the 20th century, in England.

The fears of patients before we went on was that our brains would be fried

or that we'd emerge with half a brain or lose our memory.

It's not a very pleasant thing to see.

It's rather like a sheep or cow being slaughtered.

You don't want to see that. You just want your sheep or cow on the plate.

So we don't really talk about the nasty appearance of ECT.

Richard's experience of institutions was typical of a lot of disabled people at that time.

Some now wanted out of the slow rot of segregated care.

I saw so many people dying

and being carried off in their brown box.

And I used to think to myself, "My God, that's going to be me one day!"

I decided I was not going to die, not yet.

I was not going to be carried off

in a brown box.

I was going to have a life, no matter what.

Nobody... Nobody was gonna stop me

and it didn't matter how long it took

and how long I had to wait for it to happen.

Something had to happen.

But for some, like Bill Surrey, who spent 70 years in an institution,

leaving was more of a shock.

They had all the hospitals closed up.

And I made a joke. I said to the staff, "Oh, gotta come out the nuthouse.

"Never mind. Couldn't do nothin' about it. We all have to come out."

Marie said, "Well, look Bill, all the staff gotta come out." They didn't wanna leave.

I couldn't do nothing. Had to come out.

I said to her, "I suppose I gotta come out the zoo." She said, "Don't talk silly, Bill.

"It's not a zoo." I said, "It must be a nuthouse."

Oh, I laughed to meself. Wind them up.

Eighteen years of institutional life had left Louise Medus ill-equipped for life outside.

Institutions were often indifferent as to how their former residents were to manage.

I didn't want to leave Chailey. I'd been there since 17 months old.

It's like being kicked out your home, knowing you could never return, leaving all your friends.

They packed all my stuff in this little suitcase and I couldn't take my rabbit with me,

but when the crunch came, you were just dumped somewhere you didn't know.

You'd never had anything of your own. You had your clothes and your few personal possessions,

and maybe a book or two, a suitcase.

The whole of my life was in a suitcase.

And that was it.

Disabled people were leaving institutions to find no support.

Care in the community existed as an idea in the 1970s,

but there was no significant shift in resources to help disabled people live like everybody else.

In 1974, I moved into a purpose-built flat. I was one of the first people to move in.

And as other people joined me...

They were mainly people like myself, who had come out of an institution

and just found it incredibly hard because they often came from quite long distances away,

so they had no network of friends.

I remember one couple moving in

who just sat amongst their curtains and their light bulbs and crockery

and just nobody to come and support them to put their home together.

There was no sophisticated technology like there is now.

A local charity actually came around and said,

"If you want to be able to call for help, we'll make this HELP sign."

I remember having to use it in the middle of one night and it was very efficient.

Someone passing by at 4am saw it flashing and called the police.

There was a woman that moved in next to me, a young woman who was quite mobile when she first arrived,

but quite quickly she became a wheelchair-user

and she also developed a mental illness

which resulted in her not turning her lights on in her flat.

She used to bring all the toilet rolls and biscuits home from the local day centre,

but she wouldn't touch them.

She never ate the biscuits or used the toilet rolls.

In the end, she would sit outside her door, naked, and she would cry.

If you gave her something to eat, she'd eat it, as long as it didn't belong to her or was in her flat.

And when I used to ring the doctor,

he used to say, "Why don't you take a sleeping pill and forget it?

"It'll all resolve itself somehow."

But she died about ten weeks later.

It certainly felt to me as though it was people coming out of institutions, closing them down.

Not so much closing them down, but people trying to move on, realising they could,

and not having any community support.

I myself had very little.

# You know, together we will stand Every boy, girl, woman and man. #

The change in attitudes to the disabled was sluggish.

Many were met with petty distinctions and resentment.

It wasn't all bad for disabled people in the 1970s.

Mat Fraser recalls his youth with fondness.

I was at public school, fifth form, and chose my fag - Constant - and I had to slap him.

We all had to go up and slap our fag.

"Go on - slap your fag, Fraser."

And so I... I didn't have any shoes on,

so I slapped my fag with my foot, cos that's how I slap people.

He duly started to cry and I felt bad about it, but it looked hard.

That was one of those things that happened in the fifth form at public school in 197...whenever it was.

'I loved the '70s, style-wise. Everything was really tight fitted.'

I don't do baggy well.

In the '80s, my arms didn't reach out the end of most T-shirt sleeves.

In the old days, you had cap-sleeved T-shirts, tight-fitting bodies, crotch-hugging, bum-clinging stuff.

I find that more attractive on anyone.

Disabled people were increasingly a presence in society.

The isolation of disability was breaking down.

The next step - SELF-acceptance.

In those days, there wasn't the same contact or knowledge of the condition you were born with.

Then you'd feel quite secluded, which, unfortunately, I did, and became perhaps bitter.

I was feeling very insecure about who I was.

We went that night to the circus. As we walked up the ramp to the seats,

I froze on the spot.

I was petrified of what I saw - this person, small person, dressed in a clown outfit,

looking down at me.

It was like seeing a mirror image and I was horrified.

-Arthur broke the ice with...

-"It's not often our sort meet, is it?"

I could tell she was reluctant to come up the ramp.

I'd not met with this attitude. I knew little people in show business and they didn't have inhibitions.

I couldn't wait till the end of the show.

I was performing as well as I could, but I had my mind on Penny. I wanted to talk to her.

We went round the corner and I was looking for this clown.

This wasn't a clown, but a man, all his make-up wiped off. Looked quite handsome, really.

We chatted about life, how I coped.

I went home feeling a bit better about myself because I'd met somebody like myself -

there was somebody out there.

In the '70s and '80s, many disabled people organised into self-help and lobby groups.

Gladys Brooks was one of the founder members of the Restrictive Growth Association.

RGA, as it is now, that's just the Restrictive Growth Association,

is very supportive.

There is nobody quite like somebody with the same problems as yourself -

to understand you, your problems, what you're going through, what mental torture, everything like that.

So, anyway, we went along, and there must have been perhaps 50 to 70 people.

I was amazed, cos I had met only two little people, really.

I'd seen one or two, seen the film with Snow White.

I knew they were about, but I'd never seen so many in one place at one time.

MUSIC: "48 Crash" by Suzi Quatro

There had been a number of ladies, especially, couldn't face the mirror image.

They went away in tears and we never saw them again.

-There we are...

-..arriving at the church.

-I didn't see that bit, obviously.

-No.

'Arthur was still with the circus, and I joined as a wardrobe mistress.

'And they were going to have elephants come just for photographs.

'The two elephants were outside the church, and our white cars.

'We got on the elephants for photographs and then before you know it up they were and off they went.

'I said to Arthur, "Hang onto me!" I'd never rode an elephant before.

'It was like sitting on an upturned yard brush.

'I'm sure the people of Southsea thought it was a publicity stunt, but it was for real.

'We got back to Mary Chipperfield's Circus and had a reception in the circus ring

'and were blessed by the actors' chaplain, and had to do two shows on our wedding night.

'No time off. Circus life was circus life.'

Eileen Chipper's marriage to her partner Ken freed her from the institutions.

The marriage lasted 14 years.

The Falklands Victory Parade of the early 1980s notoriously hid its war disabled.

They didn't suit the image.

But times had changed. Elsewhere, disabled people did not accept the barriers -

people like Mike Rogers, amateur pilot, and himself disabled in World War II.

I got onto British Airways and said, "Any chance of flying Concorde?"

And he said, "No, I'm afraid not. We don't even train our own pilots live on Concorde.

"But what about a Jumbo 747?" So I said, "That'd be all right."

Wonderful!

So I flew this damned great thing - 600 tons of it, or something.

He landed it beautifully, then said, "You taxi it back to the hangars."

So I taxied it the whole length, going round Concorde and things,

and you're 40ft up in the cockpit, looking in second storey windows.

He said, "What did you last fly, Mike?" I said, "Tiger Moth in 1952."

The '80s and '90s saw many attempts to bring in civil rights,

resulting in a limited 1995 Disability Discrimination Act

which was heavily criticised by disabled activists.

There is no enforcement procedure,

so we'll have a bill that won't work, no-one will take any notice of. They will laugh!

These attempts to secure rights were a sign of one simple fact -

many disabled people now see access as the issue of their lives.

I was at school, and I was doing some work.

I moved my head to write something and I had an incredible pain

and there was a horrible crunching noise.

I thought, "I'd better go home now."

After that, I had to lie down all the time. Up till then I'd been sitting up. I could use my computer.

I could use my car by getting in it with my parents.

Lying down, it was different. I had to find new ways of doing things.

Access is fundamental, and it's the fight for access that dominates disability in the '90s.

..Westminster Bridge, underneath a bus.

-What've you done?

-Chained myself to the bus.

No group illustrates this more than the Direct Action Network,

those disabled people prepared to break the law to gain access.

We're not interested in sympathy. All we want is to get on the bus.

'DAN, the Direct Action Network, takes our issues onto the streets.'

The public sees us out of the context of being socially dead, of being invisible.

We can't be ignored. It's made one of the biggest impacts in the last decades on thinking on disability.

It's true to say DAN doesn't represent all disabled people

and it's also true that DAN is not liked or approved of

by many traditional disability organisations, and politicians.

But it's one of the things that I think disabled people can be proud of.

Occasionally, you get to the point where it compromises your safety

and it can be...scary.

One occasion, we brought morning rush-hour traffic to a standstill.

One way to hold a bus is to post people at the back and front of it,

then the drivers turn the engines off and go away and wait it out.

There was one of us - a guy called Steven who uses crutches -

sitting on the front bumper of the bus,

and I think he was cuffed to it by the wipers.

After quite a long wait, the bus driver had been pacing around, getting angrier and angrier.

He eventually jumped on and started the engine.

He put the bus into gear and started moving up the hill with people still attached to the bus.

Some people don't want to handle it.

They don't want their lives to stop because a disabled person is saying,

"Why can you ride on a bus and I can't?"

I remember getting arrested on a demonstration in Leeds,

and they sent the meat wagon - I wasn't using a wheelchair -

and they said, "Get in the van."

I said, "I can't. The step's too high." So they sent a car and it was a two-door car.

I made the copper sit in the back. I said, "I've got to sit up front. It's the only seat I can get into."

The magistrate seemed to be very sympathetic.

I spoke on my behalf and I said, "I should know better at my age.

"I'm an old soldier and I'm here to support the group.

"And we believe in access and civil rights,

"and if I've got to break the law, I'd break it again."

When I go on a day of action, I see two things -

the system being quite shocked at disabled people demonstrating on their own behalf and taking power.

A demonstration makes the demonstrator feel like a thorn in society's side.

I go as it's something I believe in and I'm happy to stand up and be counted within, and it's powerful.

It's so easy to forget about disabled people. We've been so invisible throughout history.

All of a sudden, we're making our presence felt. We're being very high profile and confrontational.

We're saying we're not prepared to accept socially dead status any more.

Disabled people no longer accept exclusion.

And as the 20th century closes,

disability is increasingly defined as an issue of access, rights...

..and humour.

Strangely, to begin with I didn't feel disabled,

but people stare at me, some rudely.

A taxi driver - they're wonderful things -

a black-cab driver, I was in the back of his cab...

"Where are you going, then?" So I said, "Kensal Rise" or where it was.

And he looked back and he said, "Where's your mince pie?"

I said, "Sorry?" "Mince pie - your old eye!"

I said, "Actually, it's not there. There's no eye, no mince pie."

He went, "Oh, cor blimey, what happened?!"

I said, "It's surgery." "Surgery? What's the matter?"

I said, "It's cancer."

I've got on my web page these two counters.

The one is how many days since I've had sex and the other's how many days I think I've got left to live.

They're both just for fun, but the one about death upsets people a lot.

They don't like thinking I might die of what I've got one day. It makes them uncomfortable.

I got married in 1987.

I hadn't worn my legs from when I was 19, and I decided I wanted to walk down the aisle.

I went to Roehampton to have some new legs made.

And the fitter said to me, "What height do you want?" Cos you can choose what height you want to be.

And I said, "I'll stay the same height."

And my husband said, "No, she wants to be a bit smaller.

"I want her to be a ½ inch smaller than me so she won't tower over me."

So I was reduced from five foot six to five foot four and a half.

I had a girlfriend when I was 21. She visited for a week.

The first night, we slept together

and the following day I said to Mum we were having a relationship and how wonderful it was going to be.

Later, Mum took me aside and said, "You realise you can't have sex?"

Unfortunately, because I was angry about that,

I said, "Well, I just HAVE." Which isn't something you should really tell your parents.

I think that upset her and probably wasn't my greatest plan.

Kids have looked at me, which I don't mind - kids are OK - cos kids are just fascinated.

I usually say, "I'm a pirate" and they're OK.

I think my agent was talking about I'd be very good at playing villains or science fiction or something,

somebody with scars and an eye patch.

We're going to a photographer I know to have me photographed as I am.

I like wearing make-up going out.

It can be a bit difficult because I'd wear it all the time,

but if I'm going shopping, I think my carers feel a bit strange

about pushing me around Tesco's wearing eyeliner.

So, usually, I just do it to go out at night.

They're very good about it. They haven't thought me too weird. They find it quite amusing.

With Disability Pride, as with a lot of things,

it's not "Hey, wow! Look at my arms, aren't they fantastic? Nay, better than yours!"

I'm just saying they're equal, but different.

To me, they're just as important as yours are to you.

Don't look at them as inferior, different, negative, bad or something you don't want to look at.

Cos here I am and you've got to deal with me, and that includes my arms.

And I'm proud that I'm saying to you you've got to deal with my arms too.

That's Disability Pride. I'm not ashamed of my difference.

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