Episode 4 The 1952 Show

Hi, I'm Len Goodman and this is The 1952 Show,

taking a special look at the decade that maybe made us.

And it's special because it's you remembering it.

All this week, we have been taking a quickstep down memory lane

to the decade which burst into life when our Elizabeth became Queen.

So grab a cuppa, take the weight off your feet

and come along-alonga with me.

What's on the table, Mabel?

Attention!

An ex-national service squaddie

tells of those days of keeping kit clean and endless square bashing.

'50s food.

From rationing to ratatouille.

How Britain's grub changed from ho-hum to yum-yum.

Then, Britain at its best

as Roger Bannister breaks

the four-minute mile barrier.

Go on, Roger, go on, my son.

-Magically, we are joined by Paul Daniels.

-Madam.

Who will chip in with his two pennyworth

and some of our '50s contributors will pop in for a chat.

So are you sitting comfortably?

Well, let's go with The 1952 Show.

Come on.

Believe it or not, back in the '50s,

I was too young to be called up for national service

but many, many 18-year-olds weren't so lucky.

National service was set up in 1947,

for all young men to serve at least a year in the Armed Forces.

No ifs, ands or buts, you got your letter and off you marched.

# Run to the station

# Jump from the train

# March at the double

# Down Lovers Lane

# Then in the glen where the roses entwine... #

The longest way up

and the shortest way down.

# Lay down your arms and surrender to mine. #

National service, a threat of unknown territory

that hung over every young man's head in Britain after the war.

Robert Strong was 18 when national service came knocking at his door in 1952.

I was an ordinary working class lad and I was working in a factory then.

I remember that February 1952, when the king died.

That was the year that I was going to be 18

and that was the year I was going to go in the Army.

So, with an about turn and a quick march,

let's go back 60 years to stand by your beds and see what national service was really like

for new recruit Private Strong, R - 22718529.

The first thing I heard, I heard someone shout,

"Are you cold?" I looked round, he was talking to me so I said, "No."

He said, "Well, take your hands out of your pockets, then."

And there was a corporal standing there.

That was my first order from the Army.

So I did and never put them in there again.

We were shown where we were going to live

and there was about 54 of us came.

They split us into two barracks and we were given sheets and blankets

and we had to make our own bed.

Make sure that the blankets folded all squarely,

the sheets are in line at the edges and this is how the bed block

will be finished every morning for room inspection.

To be honest, I hadn't really made my own bed at home, I'd always let Mum.

So folding these sheets in a special way, it was quite hard, really.

You had to really learn it, I'd never done anything like that before.

Then they were given brown paper and string to send our civilian clothes back home

because we weren't allowed to keep them.

They gave you two pairs of brand-new boots.

To get a good shine on those you had to build up a coat of polish on the top, for hours on end.

Until finally, one day,

you got this shine that you wouldn't let anybody touch.

Left, right, left, right.

We started what we used to call square bashing, which is marching,

and being an infantry regiment

they really played a lot on that,

a terrific lot on the marching.

Up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down...

Punishment was mainly cookhouse duty.

We called it jankers, everybody called it jankers.

I don't know why but...

Peeling potatoes and a friend of mine said to the cook sergeant,

he said, "Have we got to take the eyes out, sergeant?"

He said, "You're going to eat them, is up to you, you're eating them, not me."

'The Army believes that neat and tidy equipment is part of discipline

'and without discipline no army can be efficient.'

The main activity that we had was cleaning our kit from morning to night.

The evenings, until you went to bed, was getting ready for the next day.

I can't remember much recreation, we certainly didn't go out.

We certainly weren't allowed out, anyway.

'And how many of them take the trouble to write home to give their families

'an intelligent account of what army life is really like?'

I did get homesick, and not only me, all those in the barracks.

One or two had been to a boarding school but most of the 25 in our hut were similar to me,

working class boys, in the same boat if you like.

We all had to do the same thing so we always helped each other

and if there was one that couldn't do it we helped.

We all had to toe the line.

None of us wanted to be there, really.

Looking back now, certainly helped me

with looking after my own kit, looking after myself.

So it helped a terrific lot in my later life.

# Lay down your arms

# Lay down your arms and surrender to mine. #

-Well, Paul, What do you make of that?

-Oh, the memories, the memories.

-Yeah, because you did national service.

-Oh, I did, I did two years.

I was eventually Lance Corporal Daniels 23370053, sir!

I went through ten weeks of hell training, brilliant system.

National service took me away from home,

family and the rest of it and I was mixed in with all different creeds

-and age groups and from all over the country.

-Yeah.

Despite being a Yorkshire Regiment.

But then I got shipped to Hong Kong. Wow!

In my life I could never have dreamed of going to Hong Kong

and it was really, really good.

And I guess, you learnt discipline.

Oh, discipline, everything, yes.

I can still strip down a Bren gun

and put it back together in my head, you know.

Then, of course, you had things like you salute the long way up

the short way down, like he said in the movie.

But we used to take the Mickey, you know.

In the parachute corps you went the long way up

and came down slowly like that, thumb at the front.

If you were in the catering corps you went like that

and came down like that with the pan, you know.

I bet you've never been as fit as when you came out after two years in the Army?

I was extraordinarily fit.

We were up at 5.30, six in the morning and running.

And you didn't stop until you went to bed.

I've often advocated that they should bring it back

but not to kill people, to save people.

-Yeah.

-More to do with heart attacks, drownings, fires and all that.

-I think would be a great, great system.

-Yeah.

-When I'm king that's what's going to happen.

-That's going to happen?

-Yeah.

It's amazing, isn't it,

that, more than half a century after it was stopped, hardly a week goes by

without someone talking about bringing back national service?

Now the National Health Service, though,

is something we've stuck with.

It brought the promise of universal health care

especially for us kids post-war, and one of the biggest threats to those kids was polio.

A disease that was many a parent's worst nightmare.

I can remember going out on the streets

and I remember a woman two or three doors down

coming out and screaming at me and saying,

"You shouldn't be out here, you're not allowed near other children."

And taking her children into the house.

She was frightened I was going to infect her children.

It was summer 1952, Sue O'Brien had polio.

Summer plague, or the crippler, as it was known, was every parent's worst fear.

I had a very mild case of polio.

I can remember having a very painful stiff neck

and being unwell and being in bed for two or three days.

Sue was lucky.

A viral disease that attacks the nervous system,

polio causes paralysis of the limbs and breathing muscles

and, in about one percent of cases, death.

Other childhood diseases, such as tuberculosis and diphtheria,

had been brought under control by the early 1950s

but polio had reached epidemic levels.

In 1952 alone, there were nearly 4,000 acute cases of polio and 295 deaths.

A couple of days later, my brother had an extremely high temperature

and he was put to bed and very quickly he became paralysed in arms and legs

and much of his body and eventually was taken off in an ambulance.

For the doctors treating Sue's brother, Peter,

polio was a deadly enemy.

No-one knew what caused it and there was no cure.

My parents said they thought we'd caught it at the local fair

and the local fair was a dirty place and that was the place we would have caught it.

We had been to the fair the week before we went down with polio

and we were never allowed to go to the fair again.

Always keep yourself as clean as possible.

Geoffrey Spencer, a junior doctor in the '50s, recalls the draconian measures taken in schools

to try to prevent the spread of the disease.

Kissing was absolutely forbidden, with some justification.

But there was a lot of rather more silly things.

They were worried about lavatories for children.

First there were staff, and then there were older children,

delegated to stand there with a bottle of Jeyes fluid or something

to squirt the seats between people sitting on them.

Whether that did any good or not I haven't the slightest idea

but it was quite unpleasant.

Walking around all day with a wet bum.

One theory was that in our efforts to keep clean,

and with better living conditions after the war,

we lost our natural immunity to polio and this caused the disease to spread like wildfire.

Geoffrey soon found himself at the front line in the fight against the disease.

There was a request for volunteers

to go to a hospital in North West London,

where they had more people with polio than they could cope with.

Some of them quite severely disabled and in breathing machines, iron lungs.

And while I was there, for about three weeks,

there were several members of staff who went down with it

having caught it from the patients who had come in with it.

So it was terrifying.

I can remember wondering if it's my turn next.

Sue remembers vividly the first time she visited her brother Peter in hospital.

He was lying in his iron lung, and an iron lung is a very ugly piece of machinery,

and all I could see was his head.

Peter was paralysed from the neck down, unable to breathe on his own.

The iron lung, a sort of pressurised tank,

drew air in and out of his lungs using a pump and bellows.

He looked very different, his face was pretty much the same

but he had this tremendous long hair which was back in a,

not a style you would've expected in a little boy,

all brushed back almost like a Teddy boy, really,

on a 10-year-old boy, and this enormous bush of hair.

There was these huge great pumping machines in the corner of the room

which pumped air into the iron lung.

My youngest brother, Hugo, who must have been two or three at the time.

I don't know whether he pulled the plug out or turned the switch off for the pump

and all hell broke loose when the pump stopped working

and the iron lung stopped functioning.

I wanted to look in the iron lung and see his body

but I wasn't allowed to because my mother tells me how

when she used to see pictures of starving children in Africa,

emaciated children, she said that's what he looked like,

that's what his body looked like, by the time he'd been in the iron lung for a while.

As Peter lay gravely ill, across the Atlantic, in America,

groundbreaking work was being done on a vaccine by Dr Jonas Salk.

'With courage based on confidence,

'Dr Salk inoculated his own three children whilst testing his vaccine.

'Perhaps the worst feature of the disease has been the feeling of hopelessness

'at the prospect of many months in the grip of paralysis.

'But now sufferers, like these children at Queen Mary's hospital in Carshalton,

'look towards a better future.'

But the uptake of the new vaccine in Britain was initially slow,

until the case of Jeff Hall.

Jeff Hall was a very famous footballer

and suddenly he got severe bulbar polio, with total paralysis,

and couldn't breathe and couldn't swallow.

He died within 48 hours.

That had a galvanising effect which outstripped the politicians' efforts many, many, fold.

The immunisation clinics were overwhelmed with demand.

Thousands of lives were saved by that man's unhappy death.

This medical breakthrough came too late for Peter.

His mother, who sat by his bedside every day for a year,

had kept a diary of his illness.

On June 26 1953, she wrote.

'He asked me to lift his head

'and then the final overwhelming vomiting began.

'He couldn't speak any more but mouthed at me, "Put me down."

'Vomit stained his face and looked rather horrifying

'and then it was all over.

'Not Peter any more, just a pretty doll.'

After he died,

the word polio was not allowed to be mentioned, ever!

Peter was never talked about.

Well, Sue, I don't think anyone could watch that film

and not be touched and I think you are very brave to come in and talk about it.

It must have been such a tragedy.

It was a terrible time.

It was very sad for all the family and still makes me feel sad now.

It affected our family really for the rest of our lives.

My parents never got over it,

both my parents suffered from depression and

I think my younger brother and I, perhaps, some of that rubbed off on us as well.

But, of course, I was considered to be the lucky one

and I got away with it.

I was OK and, like all polio victims,

I got on with my life after that.

And, at that time, of course, there was no protection against it.

It came out of nowhere,

until that guy came along with the immunisation system.

Yeah.

And even then it was only the football guy, Jeff Hall,

who was like the Beckham of his day.

Then everyone flooded to get themselves...

Immunised.

I can remember growing up,

and up and down the street we were constantly being warned about it.

I don't know about you but my mum would boil everything.

A dishcloth, boil it. Everything was boiled.

A big copper boiler out the back, you know.

My mother did the washing up under boiling water.

She wore rubber gloves to protect her hands

and she had running the hottest water you can possibly get,

coming out of the tap, to wash the dishes.

She wouldn't wash up in a bowl of water it had to be the hottest water,

boiling water, that she could get to make sure the dishes were clean.

The great news is that since the '70s the Western world's pretty much protected

but now I think possibly,

mostly thanks to International Rotary, who have raised zillions,

and they've been eradicating the disease as they could in different countries around the world.

-India, just a couple weeks ago, wasn't it?

-Yes.

It's completely gone. Absolutely awesome.

So there is hope that one day it will not exist at all.

-That's all we can hang onto, really.

-Yeah.

Well, Sue, I thank you so much for coming in

and relating your story and fingers crossed that polio is gradually being eradicated

and hopefully it will be gone within our lifetimes.

Wonderful.

I'll let you into a secret, I've never had a curry,

I've only ever had one Chinese and I will tell you why.

I never eat anything that I can't spell or anything that my nan didn't cook.

Take a look at this.

# Say hey, good looking

# What you got cooking?

# How's about cooking something up for me? #

In the 1950s,

Britain underwent a food revolution.

Wartime austerity finally began to ease in 1952, when tea came off the ration.

This was followed by sweets and sugar in '53,

with rationing finally ending in '54.

'The 14-year story told by this book was over.

'Many wasted no time in taking full advantage of the big stocks

'but no-one was sent away disappointed.'

There was a new way of shopping, too.

Up until the 1950s, you had to make a trip every day

to the local butcher's, baker's and grocer's.

But all that would change with the groundbreaking launch of the first supermarket as early as 1950.

'The self-service stores are booming.

'They are being opened at the rate of 90 a month.

'Is this the answer to the needs of the busy housewife?'

Although we were so pleased with our basket of lovely new groceries

we often didn't know what half of it was, never mind how to eat it,

as Anita Prosser remembers.

Bananas, I wonder how you eat them, what do you do with them?

It would be very interesting.

I think the first time must have been in the early '50s

that I probably had my first banana because, of course,

boats couldn't get here with things like bananas.

I remember standing there thinking, "What do I do with it?"

And somebody had to show me how to peel the banana.

so you could eat it. Because I think I would have eaten skin and all, you see.

Anita's Greek parents ran a restaurant,

but the menus were limited by what food was available and what their customers wanted.

My parents owned a restaurant in Plymouth,

called Tony's Imperial because my father was called Tony.

Mother tried to do a bit of Greek cooking

but nobody was very interested, they just wanted the ordinary stuff.

'Fish and chips. So English. So simple.

'And so different from what Madame might have been preparing

'for the past two hours on the other side of the Channel.'

The nation needed help in the kitchen.

A perfect pasty should be so tough

that it should be possible to drop it down a tin mine

without it breaking.

Philip Harben was once the most famous cook in Britain.

Over the years, his prime time Friday night show

introduced millions of television viewers

to everything from good, honest fare to medieval banquets.

And there is my conceit of coney.

He wasn't the only one.

Marguerite Patten was the Delia of her day,

the food doyenne of the '50s.

She'd made her name during the war,

showing housewives how to waste not, want not.

Good afternoon to you all, and welcome to Woman in the Home.

Her daughter, Judith, remembers her delight when rationing ended.

How amazing it must have been when you could just go into a shop

and buy anything you wanted.

And you didn't actually have to stick to waste not, want not.

You could actually play around with it a bit,

and decide, "I do like that,"

or perhaps, "Ooh, I'm not sure I shall bother to have that again.

Er... So that must have been quite an exciting period.

With her regular TV shows,

Marguerite had seduced the tastebuds of the nation.

She could turn even the most unappetising ingredients

into mouth-watering meals.

And that's why her books sold like hot cakes.

And that's just a few of my mother's 170, 180 books, cookery cards.

She tried things long before they were bog standard,

and this is why her books were popular,

because they helped women, and men, stretch what they could do.

And help them understand about ingredients,

helped them take advantage of the new things

that were coming in to the shops all the time.

With the shops starting to stock exciting new ingredients,

cookbooks became all the rage.

Anita bought hers 60 years ago, and is still using those recipes.

I got my Good Housekeeping book in 1957,

and it literally was the one that I lived by.

It was simple to follow, it showed you pictures of how to do things,

and I felt that was very important.

And I still make shortcrust pastry from it now,

and my son maintains it's still the best pastry ever.

Well, this afternoon, as you can see,

I'm ready for action in the kitchen of our studio.

As TV chefs like Marguerite showed us how to cook at home,

restaurateur George Perry-Smith was changing the face of eating out.

Known as the father of post-war English cooking,

he opened the legendary Hole in the Wall in Bath in 1952,

one of a tiny clutch of fine dining restaurants at the time

outside the capital.

George's stepson, Tom Jane,

recalls just how unique George's approach was.

He wanted people to enjoy themselves,

and actually enjoy the food,

and there was no battle between the customer and the provider.

That might seem obvious to us today, but in the early 1950s,

going out to a restaurant was not only expensive,

but a social minefield as well.

-DISHES SMASH

-Waitress!

Actually, old boy, the form is that you catch the waitress's eye.

-Look, I'll show you.

-CLICKS HIS FINGERS

CLICKS HIS FINGERS

CLICKS HIS FINGERS

Well, that's the theory, anyhow.

George's philosophy was to make real food,

prepared as a careful home cook would prepare it.

His menus were an exotic blend of dishes

from the Mediterranean and beyond,

like bouillabaisse, tarragon chicken and goulash.

And everything was presented with style.

Something that many customers still remember is the cold table,

which was a ten-foot table covered with prepared foods,

from hams to terrines and pates and salads,

and it sat in the middle of quite an elegant cellar restaurant.

And if you came to it after a decade of relative deprivation,

as most of our customers did in the early '50s,

then, hey, it was... It was paradise.

As the '50s rolled on, we were beginning to develop a taste

for the more sophisticated things in life.

My cousin had a very nice restaurant,

and so for a real treat, my husband took me down there.

We had a slap-up up meal and we had a bottle of wine...

Liebfraumilch.

And we thought we were really... We'd arrived.

Judith, it's lovely to have you with us.

It's lovely to be here with both of you.

And how interesting to see your mum Marguerite there, cooking away.

I'm sure, though, over the years,

there must have been one or two disasters.

I'm sure there must have been, I don't think I saw many of them if there were,

but I do remember getting into the most terrible trouble

about telling people she burnt the toast.

-Well, we've all burnt the toast at some time, I'm sure.

-Yeah.

-Too right!

-Right!

And Paul, what about you, what's your favourite grub?

My favourite grub hasn't really changed much since the '50s,

-cos in the '50s, there wasn't a lot of food around early on.

-Right.

-When did rationing finish? '54, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

But it's still double egg and chips.

Up till that time, for luxury,

we used to get ice lollies in the corner shop,

-he had a fridge, wow!

-JUDITH GASPS

And jelly and custard had just come in. You know?

-Right.

-Which didn't really fit with my favourite food,

which is double egg and chips.

I love double egg and chips, white bread and butter and a cup of tea.

Still the favourite. Debbie's a great cook, but that's my favourite.

In fact so much so that once I was in a hotel,

doing a job in London, you know, posh hotel.

Went up to the rooftop restaurant, Monsieur came straight in, you know?

FRENCH ACCENT: "Allo, Monsieur Daniels, here is the menu, please, let me know when you are ready."

-So I opened it all up like this, huge. And I folded it all up, it's all in these French dishes.

-Yeah.

And he came over, and I said, "I'd like double egg and chips, please."

And his pencil... and he said,

"Ah, that would be with bread and butter?" and I said, "Yes."

And he closed his little pad, and he says,

-"One is at a loss as to which wine to recommend."

-THEY LAUGH

-I mean, who brought up on bread and dripping...

-JUDITH GASPS

Dripping, yes! Yes.

-And did you ever have a one-eye?

-No, what's that?

-Oh, a one-eye, me dad used to make them.

Um... You get a piece of bread,

and you cut a hole out of the middle of it, about yea big,

-and you put them in the frying pan, fried bread.

-Yes.

And you fry the bread on one side, but as you turn the pieces over,

-you crack an egg in the hole in the middle...

-SHE GASPS

-..which fries the right size.

-Ooh, I shall go home and try this.

And then you put that bit on top of the egg as you serve it up.

You know, talking of flavour, when I was a kid,

down in the Bethnal Green Road,

two old girls used to have a fish and chip shop.

And one of them would do the serving,

and the other one would do the frying.

And she always had a bit of a cold,

-there was always a dew-drop, which would...

-THEY LAUGH

..drop into the batter. Pssssh!

-And if you didn't have much money, for a ha'penny, you could just have the...

-The bits.

-The crunchy bits.

-Yes!

-Yeah.

-Those are the best.

-Yeah!

-Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you what, talking about food has made me peckish.

What about you, Paul?

-I'm always peckish.

-Yeah, so am I!

-Good!

Now, we said how the coming of the new Queen Elizabeth in 1952

gave the nation that first burst of colour and self-confidence.

Now, we didn't have to wait long for another great moment -

we had one of our boys on the top of Everest in '53.

And in '54, an Oxford medical student called Roger Bannister

made us Nation Number One again when he became the first person

to break the four minute mile.

-On your marks...

-Get set...

-Go on, Roger!

Go on, my son! Get those legs working!

In 1953, I ran a mile in four minutes and two seconds,

and then the race was on to break the four-minute mile.

On a spring day in 1954,

Roger Bannister was on the brink of storming in to the record books.

Some people thought it was impossible,

there must be an absolute limit,

you can't go on running faster and faster,

was four minutes the limit?

It didn't make sense to me as a medical student

for there to be such an absolute limit.

But he wouldn't make his mile in less than four minutes

by a sudden stroke of luck -

it would take hard training and meticulous planning.

It's not possible to do a fast time without some pacemaking.

Of the two runners that I chose to be pacemakers,

Chris Chataway was the only runner in the country

who was capable of running three quarters of a mile in three minutes,

and Chris Brasher could just about manage a half mile in two minutes.

So the stage was set for Bannister's race for glory.

Location - Iffley Stadium, Oxford.

Contest: Amateur Athletics Association - Bannister's team -

versus Oxford University.

There was a flag on the church, and I used this flag as a wind gauge

to how strong the wind was as the afternoon progressed,

and half an hour before,

there seemed to be a lull in the strength of the wind,

and so I decided then and told Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher,

"The attempt is on."

But things got off to a bad start.

Well, as we lined up at the start, Chris Brasher made a false start,

which I was surprised about.

You don't usually get false starts in an event like the Mile,

because you're not in starting blocks, for example.

Um... And I felt a little flash of irritation.

Worse still, the wind had picked up again,

just what Bannister didn't need.

'Up till yesterday, the world record for the Mile

'stood at four minutes, 1.4 seconds.

'But, as Bannister lined up for the start

'in this race between the Three As and Oxford University,

-STARTING GUN

-'he knew that he had two colleagues with him

'who'd help him beat that time.'

Chris Brasher took the lead, and then I lay second,

and Chris Chataway was third.

And we ran quite smoothly, but on the back straight for the first lap,

I thought it seemed rather slow.

I did shout, "Faster, faster!" as I was following him,

but he kept his head and ran a 1.58 half mile.

'The end of the second lap, and half a mile gone.

'Time: One minute, 58.2 seconds.'

Having passed the half mile in 1.58,

I knew that we were on track for breaking the four minute mile.

'1,100 yards gone, and Chataway starts to spurt ahead.

'He overtakes Bannister and then Brasher.'

Chris Chataway took over, and then, in the middle of the third lap,

I overtook him.

'250 yards to go, and Bannister takes over.'

This final burst carried me to the absolute limit.

Having crossed the finishing line, I then collapsed.

The tape is broken

and so is the record athletes have long been dreaming about.

But at first, Bannister knows little about it.

He stumbles into the arms of his coach, exhausted by his magnificent effort.

I knew that I must have been tremendously close

but I could not be certain

until the announcement was made by Norris McWhirter

and the announcement came

three minutes.

CHEERING

The noise from the crowd was so great that the rest of the announcement

of 3.59.4 was not audible.

All I can say is I'm absolutely overwhelmed.

It was a great surprise to me to be able to do it today.

'The sensation was one of relief.'

We then sort of ran a victory lap

up and down.

Didn't that make you feel good?

It does make you feel good. It makes you feel proud. At the time,

it was such a breakthrough - they'd been trying for years.

-That's right.

-What was astonishing was how other people started to do it.

Yeah. The whole thing was set up with Chris Brasher

-and Christopher Chataway...

-The pace guys.

He was absolutely exhausted. Staggered... But I remember watching it...

-The biggest news.

-It was... People thought you couldn't do it.

It was just an amazing...

Isn't that good, when one guy does it, the rest of the world thinks, "Yeah, it can be done."

-Like climbing Mount Everest.

-Same thing.

Just amazing. What about you? Any good at sport?

No. If he'd had my legs, he would never have done it in ten minutes.

But it was... I went to a grammar school where they had this ancient custom,

first day back at school, in your cricket whites they chucked you into a muddy pond but nobody told me.

I thought they were bullies so I fought like hell.

Instead of coming home in mud, I came home covered in blood.

Me mam went nuts.

Yeah, well, talking of cricket, I remember we were playing Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School

at cricket, the team no-one could beat,

and the best batsman, my mate was bowling

and he hit the ball and I caught it like that,

was so excited and I turned to my mate,

giving it all that, that was what I did, no verbal.

The next day, we got banned for the rest of the year,

-unsporting behaviour.

-One does agree with the ruling.

-Yeah.

The man at the heart of our next film was the inspiration behind

the modern Paralympics.

This is one of my favourite stories because this bloke

dedicated his life to making the lives of wounded soldiers and servicemen better.

Until he came along, they and other disabilities were out of sight

and out of mind.

It was after a serious accident in 1952 as a Royal Ordnance Engineer

that Bill Dempsey woke up to find himself paralysed.

I was devastated at first, thinking, "Well, what'll I do?"

Me brothers used to come and see us and that.

When they used to go and walk away

you were lying in bed or sitting in a chair and you can't go with them.

Bill was transferred to Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which had a new spinal injury unit.

There, he would meet the doctor who would transform his life

and give him the confidence to face the future.

Ludwig Guttmann had a radical new approach to the rehabilitation of disabled people,

as he explained to a BBC documentary team.

To put it quite clearly,

to transform helpless...individual,

severely disabled, into a taxpayer.

Bill was suffering, like the thousands of veterans arriving home with spinal injuries

after World War II.

Guttmann had been asked to set up Stoke Mandeville's groundbreaking unit in 1944

to provide special treatment for them.

His was a philosophy of tough love.

In the war, I got a young soldier who was almost dying. He said,

"I'm waiting for the Almighty to take me up."

You know what my answer was? "Now look here, while you are waiting, you will have to do some work here."

Doctor Guttmann would come round every morning and ask you what you were going to do on the day.

I said, "I don't know." He said, "I'll tell you."

He says, "First of all, you're going to the swimming pool.

"Then you go down to the physio. From the physio, you go to the occupational therapy.

"After lunch, you'll repeat the same thing in the afternoon."

That was your work, a day's work, every day.

It's no good just to be just what's called kind.

You can kill people with kindness.

You have sometimes to be firm.

Guttmann was one of the first advocates of sport as therapy for the disabled.

At first, I used sporting activity as a kind of recreation.

I found very soon that

it can play a very important part as a complimentary to the usual methods of physiotherapy.

Then I saw, of course, how these men react, not only physically,

but psychologically.

They suddenly felt...they can do something.

They can take part in social activities.

The first team game, which I introduced, was wheelchair polo.

Later on, I replaced it by basketball.

Next, Guttmann started the Stoke Mandeville Games,

a regular national event throughout the '50s.

The one I liked was the carpet bowls because...I could bend over the chair

and do the bowls and get me eye in and things like that.

That was a really good sport for anybody of my level.

You would try your hardest to come out with a medal, even if it was a bronze.

An international competition came too in 1952.

Big breath out and relax.

Physiotherapist Ida Bromley worked with Guttmann in the '50s and remembers the difference

his approach made to men like Bill.

Before the 1950s, one rarely saw a patient in a wheelchair in the community.

Very few disabled people at that time actually went to work.

He got a firm in Aylesbury to give four of them a job.

They went from the hospital to the job in Aylesbury in the morning.

They worked a day and they came back to the hospital in the evening,

proving that it was possible, that these paraplegics

COULD perform a job.

Disabled had been simply written off

and here he was concentrating on the abilities of these people

and what they could contribute to the general community and life in Britain.

Just going to stretch your back...

By the end of the 1950s, Stoke Mandeville had opened its doors to civvy street,

giving everyone with a spinal injury access to Guttmann's innovative techniques.

For Bill, they made a world of difference.

Professor Guttmann meant my life.

He give me something to live for, he really did.

-What a marvellous man he was.

-An amazing man.

-In the '50s, any paraplegic or whatever, they just tried to brush them under the carpet.

-Yeah...

People, for some reason, even today sometimes, they talk over the head of somebody in a wheelchair.

It's so wrong!

They've just got something wrong with them

so let's just chat on.

Guttmann knew that. He was also the first guy going round the wards, not being the consultant -

"Deal with that and off with you."

He actually spent time with everybody.

He had a great bedside manner. A fabulous guy.

As much as anything, he motivated people to WANT to get better,

to WANT to get up, to WANT to walk.

You've got to face it. We've got the Paraplegic Olympics

and without him, you wouldn't have had them.

The first one I think he only had 12!

But he had the games idea and he just built and built and built.

There are certain people that you just need a catalyst to light the fire.

-He was one of those guys.

-Great guy.

We salute you.

-We both salute you.

-There you are.

On that uplifting note, we have to leave you now.

Hasn't time flown, as my nan used to say when the clock fell off the wall.

Join me on our '50s sofa tomorrow

when we'll see how 1950s folk enjoyed their time off.

It's doors to manual with the '50s jet set!

As we find out what the '50s did for us.

-Until then, bye-bye, butterfly. From me, Paul...

-Bye.

See you tomorrow on The 1952 Show.

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