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- Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
The top wheelchair athletes of today enjoy the same high-profile exposure and admiration as their able-bodied counterparts. This has come about partly through wheelchair participation in mass fun-running events such as the Great North Run. Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon charts disability sports pioneer Tim Marshall MBE's journey from the rock-climbing accident which left him paralysed, to becoming a trailblazer for wheelchair racing. The fun-runs of the 1980s enabled wheelchair road-racing to flourish, and Marshall took part in marathons and half-marathons where wheelchairs were welcome to compete. This did not, however, include The London Marathon, from which wheelchairs were banned for the first two years. This is the story of how this prohibition was overturned, told from the competitor's point of view. Tim and many others campaigned for the inclusion of wheelchairs in The London Marathon in the face of huge opposition from the organisers. Finally, in 1983 the efforts of sportsmen and women, the press, the Greater London Council and members of parliament resulted in a breakthrough just ten days before the 1983 marathon, which at last agreed to wheelchair participation. Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon reveals the tenacity and resolve required to achieving sporting greatness in the face of adversity. Tim Marshall's story — and the legacy he has helped build for disabled sports — are a testament to his love of racing and his passion for disability equality.
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Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon
Tim Marshall
Contents
Preface
The idea for writing this book came to me during a prolonged stay in the high dependency unit of the Spinal Injury Centre in Middlesbrough in early 2013. As I chatted with one of the nurses, she let slip that she had once done the London Marathon, in 1983, the first year that she was allowed to run that distance, having reached the age of 18. 1983 was also the first year that wheelchairs were let in, so we swapped memories of our experiences. The idea for a book arose from that conversation, and this is the story of how the wheelchair section came about.
Thanks to Kathy for inadvertently provoking the idea in the first place (she really didn’t realise what she had unleashed!); to Mick, Mark, Denise, Gerry, Jo, Gordon, Joe, Ric, Stuart, Chas and all the others whose names I have forgotten but who were part of the early struggle; to Caroline, Jon, Libora and Liz for their comments on earlier drafts; to Liz also for her more than tacit support, which resulted in the crucial contact with the GLC; and finally to Caroline again, who, when friends have (unwisely) asked about my involvement with London, has had to suffer an abbreviated version of the whole book on innumerable occasions. Text within square brackets convey my own thoughts and feelings, often after the event. Any remaining inaccuracies and faults are of course mine. I can only plead the fallibility of memory of events over 30 years ago, and that the documentary records are rather incomplete.
Hospital
In September 1972 I was climbing in the Peak District with a friend from work, on the gritstone at Birchens Edge just above the Robin Hood pub where the road from Baslow to Sheffield splits off from that to Chesterfield. Late on the Saturday afternoon I was trying to pull up a narrow crack on finger jams, but failed, and fell off, about 20 feet, landing full square on both feet and getting a compression fracture of the spine. Taken first of all to Chesterfield Royal Infirmary, two days later I was transferred to Lodge Moor Hospital in Sheffield, the regional centre for the management of spinal injuries. This was to be my home for the next eight months.
The hospital was high up on the moors at the western edge of the city, with no buildings beyond it. In the acute ward, you could hear the clip-clop of horses from the local riding school as they trotted along the roads beyond the grounds of the hospital; and, depending which way you were facing when lying in bed, you could see the helmets bobbing up and down above the dry stone walls, the sight accentuated when, as often seemed to happen that winter, the fields were covered in snow. Round to the right, and way down in a deep-cut valley, was the A57 road that came out of Sheffield, over to the Ladybower dam, and on to the Snake Pass, offering access to the high moorland of the Dark Peak. It was inviting, even if the immediate prospect of getting there was non-existent.
But the outdoors wasn’t entirely out of bounds. One day I woke to a snow-covered paradise. It had snowed overnight, well over an inch, and the sky was a crystal clear blue; I decided to go out and enjoy this.. Despite the blazing sun, it was very cold as I pushed the wheelchair through an inch of snow up to the helipad at the back of the hospital, and sat there surrounded by the snow, in utter quietness, soaking in the pleasures of being outside, in the country once again. Almost everyone thought I was mad, but the ward sister – who could beat me at Scrabble, and was altogether a very impressive lady – knew, for me, what that experience was about; simply magical.
The physiotherapist assigned to me, Harry Charles, was a leading light in the hospital sports club – strictly speaking, the Spinal Injury Sports Club – so even though I was stuck in bed for the first 10 weeks, there was an early introduction to the sports side of rehabilitation. The gym, in which all the sports took place, had originally been an ordinary ward (South 2, or S 2) when the whole hospital was an isolation hospital for infectious diseases; and there was still one ward functioning as the regional infectious diseases unit. But S 2 became the gym when the Spinal Injury Unit was established there in the early 1950s.
While I was still in bed in Lodge Moor I had seen a clip on the BBC’s Saturday afternoon “Grandstand” programme taken from the Paralympic Games held in Heidelberg. They showed a British athlete in a wheelchair doing what the programme called a slalom, pushing the wheelchair along a pre-set track, tipping the wheelchair onto its rear wheels to bounce up or down a step, ducking low like a limbo dancer to get under a low tape, and so on. My memory of this broadcast finished with the man in the wheelchair doing a back-wheel balance on the two rear wheels, and in my memory the wheelchair fell over backwards and the man fell out. The programme had introduced him as Philip Craven.
A few weeks later, still stuck in bed, I had a letter from France. I didn’t know anyone in France; what on earth was this about? It turned out to be from the same Philip Craven, who at that time, he told me, was teaching wheelchair basketball, and other sports too, at a rehabilitation centre at Kerpape in southern Brittany. (The connection to him was obscure: a daughter of some friends of my parents had been at university with Philip, already in a wheelchair from a climbing accident at the age of 16. She contacted him about me, and so he wrote to me.) This was the first instance of contact with Philip that was to continue, on and off, for the next 40 years.
Once I was allowed to start getting up the gym was an obvious destination. Other than Wednesdays it was used routinely as part of the rehabilitation programme, but on Wednesday afternoons it was used by ex-patients who came up for a sort of mini sports day, when as far as possible the gym was cleared of moveable equipment to enable people to play battington (a kind of badminton but with solid rackets), table tennis, snooker and wheelchair basketball. The size of the central section of the gym, maybe 15 yards by 6, made basketball – no more than 4 a side at maximum and more usually 3 – especially exciting to watch.
It was Harry Charles (actually a Remedial Gymnast rather than a physiotherapist) who got me playing table tennis, along with his successor John Honey, just finishing his training in physiotherapy. Swimming was also sometimes on offer, very good for paralysed limbs, but I’d never been a water sort of person, had never learned to swim, and I didn’t take up the opportunity then. It was Harry, though, who first aroused my interest in wheelchair sports, and who encouraged me to go to the national championships held annually at Stoke Mandeville.
My first visit there was straight after being discharged from hospital. I had supposed that going to “The Nationals”, as the games were universally described, would involve a rigorous selection procedure. I had no idea what that might be, but presumably through some regional or club-based structure based on performance: were you good enough? The presumption was partly correct, in that the hospital sports club made the entry for you, including such details as sex, level of disability and which sports you were going to do; but it seemed that anyone could go, regardless of ability, provided that they were attached to an existing sports club. At that time the clubs were essentially hospital-based, and the hospitals were those with spinal injury units. So, there was “my” club – Lodge Moor Spinal Injury Sports Club – and clubs from other hospitals: Stoke Mandeville, Pinderfields (Wakefield), Southport and so on. The only exception to this that I could discover was the Scots, who came down as the Scottish Paraplegic Association, rather than from Musselburgh or Philipshill, the two hospitals in Scotland then offering specialised treatment for spinal injuries.
One memory from that first visit to Stoke was of meeting Philip Craven, but also of meeting a colleague of his from the Southport club, Gerry Kinsella, who was later to do remarkable things in setting up and running the Greenbank project on Merseyside. This was a project teaching the empowerment of people with disabilities through education, employment training and so on. At that time the Southport club was a powerhouse in UK wheelchair basketball; Philip and Gerry were both in the international squad.
Stoke, however, wasn’t the only sports event for the spinal injury community. Most of the spinal units put on a day’s sports event, featuring all the usual sports: basketball, bowls, table-tennis, field events, and so on. There were the Pinderfields games, the Lodge Moor games, the Southport games … These events also provided the opportunity for those aspiring to international selection for both more competition and to strut their stuff in front of the selectors, who thus had a wider range of events in which to appraise someone’s abilities. But there were occasionally events which were unique to the particular centre. At Sheffield, the last event of the day was always what was called a marathon. Of course, it wasn’t anything like a marathon: it began on the outdoor basketball court, turned left along a poorly-surfaced road which ran along the back of the hospital, turned round at the end and came back along the road, and up to the helipad. There it did a 180° turn and back to the finish at the basketball court; maybe ¾ mile in total. There were usually 30 or 40 participants, and during the several years that I went to the games, the winner was always the aforementioned Gerry Kinsella, from the Southport club; this was a pointer to the future, though I didn’t know it at the time.
A final memory of my first visit to Stoke was of Professor Guttmann’s farewell address to the assembled athletes. This was 25 years after the first games had been held in 1948, and he lauded particularly two people – John and Gwen Buck – who had attended every National Games right from the beginning, both achieving international selection in bowls, both of them fine examples of making it in the spinal injury world through the medium of sport, and all starting at Stoke Mandeville 25 years ago. Yes, I thought, I’ll be here in 25 years’ time, just like they are now…
Stepping Out
It didn’t quite work out like that. Becoming involved with a wheelchair basketball club from the Nottingham/Derby area, a breakaway from the original Lodge Moor club, and successive visits to the nationals, slowly opened my eyes to give a broader view. Firstly, Stoke appeared to be an organisation limited to spinal injury wheelchair users, not wheelchair users with other causes of having lost the use of their legs, or other disabilities altogether; somehow, that didn’t seem quite right. (My initial understanding of the place wasn’t strictly correct: the lettering across the outside of the main sports hall announced it to be “Stoke Mandeville Stadium for the Paralysed and Other Disabled”. It was just that, at the time, the “Other Disabled” seemed conspicuously absent.) And secondly, many of the people I met in the sports world seemed largely to have their lives, especially their recreational lives, totally described by, even defined by, their disability. Of course, this wasn’t true of everyone, and those of whom it was true seemed quite contented; but I didn’t want such a life. I had had the good fortune of being appointed to a lectureship – more on promise than achievement, I think – in the department where I’d been working for two years before the accident. I also found a place in a hall of residence, where I eventually became an assistant warden. The job, and living in a hall of residence, however artificial in relation to “real” life, brought about a wider perspective. Disability wasn’t one of my fundamental characteristics like gender or ethnicity. It was there all right, all the time, but it didn’t define what or who I was.
For me, it was important to keep contact with the climbing club, the social group with whom I felt the closest affinity, and within which I’d already developed a number of good friendships which survive to this day, over 40 years later. Curiously, this had been quite easy to do when in hospital, as the club owned an old gritstone cottage barely 5 miles from the hospital, so that the ward was frequently invaded on Sunday evenings by a large group of climbers on their way back to London from a weekend away; visiting rules were quite relaxed at the time. This contact was part of the essentially outdoor recreational lifestyle which had become so important to me, and which I was determined to keep going, somehow, once out of hospital. Difficult in the first year out, it became a lot easier once I had my own transport (a van) fitted out for sleeping in, so that I could go away for whole weekends once again. Of course, going away at weekends didn’t mean I actually went climbing. Whilst the others went off to the crags, I began exploring disused railway lines and forest trails, which could be found in abundance in both the Peak District and North Wales. And failing these, there was always the possibility of using minor roads.
In the mid- to late-1970s I was still involved with the Notts and Derby club, mostly for wheelchair basketball, but also from time to time for table-tennis. Local authority recreation departments would stage a day, or an afternoon, of disability sport, and invite local disabled sports clubs to take part. Thus it was that, one grey, dank, drizzly November day in a sports centre in what felt like the back of beyond – actually, the outer regions of Stoke on Trent – we arrived to play an exhibition game of basketball, and to try anything else that was going. One such was short mat bowls, which by some extraordinary luck I managed to win, and win a small cup to boot. Club members were enthusiastic for me, pointing out that if I could transfer the skills I obviously had to outdoor greens, I could easily find myself on international trips to – well, all over. The prospect didn’t seem that enticing, certainly not in comparison with what I hoped – thought – the outdoors might yield, if only I could find out more. But how?
Exploring outdoor activities further came about from a completely unexpected source. The concept of Town Twinning, which took off after the Second World War, drew together cities and towns from different countries with something in common. So, for example, a fishing town on the north-east coast of Scotland might be twinned with a fishing town from Brittany and a German town from the Friesland coast. The idea was to develop knowledge and understanding of the different cultures of peoples from countries which had spent much of the last 60 years fighting each other. Over the years, Birmingham had become twinned with Lyon, Frankfurt and Leipzig (then in East Germany). Thus it was that in the autumn of 1976 a group of people from Birmingham came together to go on an informal visit to Lyon for a swimming competition, and would I like to come? As a non-swimming table-tennis player there didn’t seem much point (except that a visit to Lyon would always be nice), but a table-tennis tournament was added so I was on the plane.
Attached to the group that went to Lyon, both as a general helper/carer and as a qualified ASA instructor, was someone called Sheila Dobie, who in the past had been involved with the swimming group from Stoke. Though I don’t remember at all, I must have talked to her about my interest in outdoor activities, because the next thing that happened, in early 1977, was getting a letter from someone called Liz Dendy at the Sports Council. She explained that she had been given my name by Sheila Dobie, who had told her of my interest in outdoor activities. Liz went on to say that this was an area the Sports Council was interested in, and they were organising a week-long event at Plas y Brenin, the national climbing centre in North Wales, for instructors of disabled people in outdoor activities, and that they needed some disabled people to act as role models (or guinea pigs, though that term was never used in official documentation). Would I be interested in taking part? Would I?
New Horizons
The designated week was the first week in June 1977, Silver Jubilee week. I had to obtain permission from my head of department to be absent during term time, not so difficult then as the students were approaching exams, there was no more teaching, and I was only peripherally involved with the exams. So I was allowed to go. But I had to learn to swim first, and this was done with the help of a couple of staff from the PE department at the university. It was pretty obvious, though, that swimming was not going to be one of my favourite activities, since I hated putting my face in the water, and only ever achieved a doggy paddle on my back. But at least, if I fell into water, I would be unlikely to drown.
The weather in North Wales was awful, pouring with rain almost every day, but it didn’t seem to matter. There were some indoor sessions where different people explained how their disability affected the physical requirements of an activity (canoeing, sailing, skiing etc.). Practical sessions showed how people could overcome or circumvent the limitations imposed by the disability. I spent most of the time paddling a canoe, something called a Caranoe made by Frank Goodman from Valley Canoe Products in Nottingham.
The Caranoe was different from other canoes: it was wider, had an enormously long cockpit, and had a fluted base running the length of the craft, rather like corrugated iron, though with much larger corrugations. These, and its width, gave it far greater stability than an ordinary canoe, and the size of the cockpit made it much easier to get in and out. We were, however, trained to get out of an ordinary canoe, should the need ever arise, i.e. if you capsized.
Despite the awful weather, what came to matter from that week was meeting Liz Dendy, and also Norman Croucher, a double below-knee amputee with artificial legs who had started climbing before his accident, and simply carried on developing his climbing skills afterwards. (Later, he went on to climb Cho Oyu, one of the 8000 metre peaks of the Himalayas). Norman was at that time a member of the Great Britain Sports Council, and it was he and Liz who between them had had the idea of putting on this course.
Subsequently, Liz asked me to join an advisory group at the Sports Council, on water sports for disabled people, and so I met those who had been heavily involved with developing their sport for people with a disability: Mike Hammond with water skiing (he had also done lots with snow skiing), Ken Roberts with sailing, and so on. It may also have been during the week at PyB that I met Bill Parkinson, who was the “Northern Development Officer” for the BSAD, the British Sports Association for the Disabled, which had been established by Ludwig Guttmann in 1961 to provide sports opportunities for people with a physical disability other than spinal injury. Quite what Liz thought I had to offer a group consisting of people already expert in their chosen field, to this day I don’t know; but a new world beyond that of the climbing club – and Stoke Mandeville – was beginning to open up.
At around the same time, a PE student from the hall of residence, Ged Brennan, had developed an interest in outdoor activities for disabled people. She was a good canoeist, so good that she was used by the PE department of the university as one of the instructional staff on the Introduction to Outdoor Activities course which was held at the end of every summer term for all first year PE students. Ged wondered whether I might be interested in going to the university’s outdoor centre by the side of Lake Coniston and spending some time canoeing, and maybe sailing too. There was, she assured me, a canoe held in the centre which, with minimal alteration (the fitting of a backrest), should be suitable. She had talked to the member of staff responsible for running the first year courses and had been given permission for me to attend one of the weeks. There was a caveat – that she wouldn’t need other staff members to help with me, and that her instructional activities with the first year students wouldn’t be compromised.
So off I went to Coniston, and had a wonderful week, including sailing in a GP 14 down to Peel Island – featuring as Wild Cat Island in Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”. Initially, we had no idea how best to accommodate someone like me in a GP. Ged tried strapping a plastic chair to the floor of the boat and putting me on it, but I was too tall, and had to take serious avoiding action every time the boat was put about, either tacking or gybing. Eventually we discovered that for me, the best way was to sit transversely on the floor with a foam rubber cushion underneath.
Most of the week, though, I spent canoeing (the backrest worked), including crossing the lake to Fir Island – and being capsized on the way back by a water-skier who decided to pirouette around me. With wash from the power boat and the skier coming at me from all sides I didn’t stand a chance, and duly capsized in the middle of the lake. It was then that the training drummed into me at Plas y Brenin came into full force: “Don’t try and get out halfway over, go right round until you are completely upside down, then lean forwards and with your hands either side of the edge of the cockpit, push backwards so that you roll forwards out of the canoe. Your life jacket will bring you to the surface from where a rescue can be carried out.” And that’s exactly what happened, except that dragging me into the Centre’s rescue boat was a bit more difficult than rescuing an able-bodied person would have been. (As a footnote, water-skiing was subsequently banned on Coniston by the Lake District Special Planning Board, though that decision had nothing to do with my experience.)
The summer of 1977 was the first time I went to “The Internationals”, the counterpart of “The Nationals”, started in 1952 by Ludwig Guttmann and held every year at Stoke Mandeville, except in Olympic years when he tried to arrange for the Games to be held in the same country as the Olympics, though not necessarily in the same city. For example, in 1968 Mexico felt unable to cope with problems faced by tetraplegics at altitude, and Israel offered to host the Games instead. And in 1980, Russia stated that it didn’t have any paraplegics (!) so the Games went to Arnhem. The current model, of the Paralympics following the Olympic Games in the same city, was finally adopted in the Seoul Games of 1988.
I went to Stoke as a spectator, not an athlete (I wasn’t good enough). But although this was regarded as a high point, indeed the pinnacle, of wheelchair sports, or more specifically spinal injury sports, not a word could be found in the national press. The media was full of tennis (Wimbledon), cricket, bits of athletics, golf and horse racing, and even then, in high summer, football. What was the problem? I wondered. Was it just the pressure on space in the newspapers, or that the games weren’t regarded as serious sport at all? The local newspaper usually carried something, but almost invariably in the middle of the paper as a human interest story (“such brave people, overcoming adversity…”). Or was it that the games took place in a small country town some 40 miles outside London, where no one from the sports departments of national papers ever went? Was I just being naïve in expecting any coverage at all?
I wondered how the Americans fared in this regard. And how they got on with the more adventurous end of the sports and recreation “market” for disabled people. Would they be “pushing back the frontiers” or so cowed by a litigious environment that no one would ever try anything different from the standard spectrum of sports seen every year at Stoke? That first visit to the internationals provided no answers (maybe I hadn’t found the right people to talk to). It may have been during this week I began to develop the idea of an entirely different approach to the reporting of disability sport: if sports reporters couldn’t be bothered to visit and report on what they presumably thought was an unimportant activity, how about staging disability sports events as part of an able-bodied sports event? You could call it integration, of a sort, I supposed. At the time I had absolutely no idea of what this might entail, let alone how to bring it about; and in any case, it would surely be very different for different sports. The idea sank into the sub-conscious.
A Churchill Fellowship
Back in the hall of residence all had gone quiet, as term – indeed, the year – had finished and the students had all disappeared for the summer. The pigeon holes where their post was distributed by the hall office remained largely empty, though some post too big for the pigeon holes was simply left on top of the table below. Mass circulars were not routinely forwarded, the hall office told me, but they would wait a week or so – a student might have been passing, even in the middle of the summer vacation, and have dropped in to pick up any post – before forwarding individual letters, or throwing mass circulars away.
One day a dozen or so plastic-wrapped circulars appeared on the table. Through the plastic I could just see that they were from the Youth Hostel Association (YHA). Curiosity arose. I’d done a lot of hostelling before my accident, and I wondered what kind of information was being sent out nowadays. I picked up an envelope that had been sent to a student who had graduated and left the university altogether. Somewhere inside was an advertising panel. The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (WCMT) had just announced its new topics for awards to be made in 1978. Amongst the topics was “Leisure and Recreational Pursuits for the Disabled”. I read on, and eventually sent for an information pack.
The WCMT was established shortly after Churchill died. A large sum was raised by public appeal, and rather than build a statue (which pigeons might have no respect for) or some other physical memorial, the Trustees decided to invest the funds to produce an annual income which could then be used to finance a number of bursaries, or scholarships, for UK citizens to travel abroad to learn about some aspect of a subject which the trustees had announced as one of this year’s topics. There were 8–10 topics each year (they changed every year), with 100 or so bursaries awarded in total. The trade-off for the Trust was that individuals receiving a fellowship had to write a report about their travels, and show how they would implement what they had learned during their time away. In this way, it was felt, the Trust would be enhancing the development of civic activity in the country as a whole.
There were three stages to an application. You sent in an outline proposal (one paragraph only) of what you wanted to do. There was some sort of screening activity in the WCMT headquarters, as a result of which those who passed muster were invited to write a fuller proposal about what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go, how long for, and so on. A further screening process led to interviews for those who passed the second stage. And then, finally, those who succeeded in the interview were awarded a fellowship. I put together a brief outline of what I wanted to do, under the clumsy umbrella title of “Outdoor and adventure sports for the disabled, and integration with the able-bodied”, and sent it off.
There was further help from people already far more deeply involved in disability sport than I was. Norman Croucher told me of a centre shortly to be opened in the Lake District which would be offering week-long residential courses in outdoor activities for disabled people. He had become a trustee, and told me when the official opening was taking place, some time in the autumn. I went, hovered in the background (I had absolutely no official status there at all), and managed to snatch a word with the newly-appointed director, Emrys Evans, about visiting the centre to see what was what: what they were going to do, how, and for whom. I arranged to visit early in the new year. And Bill Parkinson, either during the Plas y Brenin week or later, lent me a copy of an American wheelchair sports magazine “Sports ’n Spokes”, which he thought might be of interest. It was. It covered the conventional range of wheelchair sports – basketball, table-tennis, ten pin bowling, and so on – but also new developments in wheelchair design, and new sports and activities tackled apparently for the first time by wheelchair users. Eventually, I took out a subscription.
In the meantime I managed to pass the first hurdle of the WCMT application process, and had to put together a fuller application. With hindsight, what I said I wanted to do turned out to be only partly what I ended up doing. The original idea was to attend a few of the American regional wheelchair games to see how they managed the publicity, and to go to their national games, which always seemed to be held under the aegis of the Bulova watch manufacturing and repair factory in New York. This turned out to be a no-no, for all the regional games, and their national meeting, had occurred well before the summer vacation here, realistically the only time I could find a large enough block of time free of student teaching. (It was obvious, really: the Internationals were usually in late July, so in order to select a team the American nationals had to be held earlier, and the regional events through which you qualified to attend their nationals, earlier still. This would have brought these events back to May and June, several weeks before I could get away. Thank heavens no one in the Churchill Trust seemed to have rumbled that.)
From “Sports ’n Spokes” I found an Outward Bound course being put on by the Minnesota OB School, a mixed course (able-bodied and disabled) based largely around a canoe-camping expedition in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area 50 miles north-west of Lake Superior (but whose waters, I was to discover later, drained 400 miles north to Hudson’s Bay). Going on this course was part of the application, stressing a “pushing back the boundaries” of what was conventionally regarded as suitable for disabled people to undertake. A visit to the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was more or less mandatory for a wheelchair user visiting the USA on a sort of study tour. Since early post-war, the campus had been developed to make it totally accessible for wheelchair users, and some of what I might find there might be useful back in Birmingham. And I proposed to start the visit by attending the American Spinal Cord Injury Association annual conference in Chicago, to make contacts and thereby fill out quite a lot of unprogrammed time in what I estimated would be a 6-week fellowship.
Rather to my surprise I was invited for an interview, late in the autumn. The visit to London, necessarily by train, started badly. At that time there was no provision for wheelchairs in the ordinary coaches, not even in first class, so it was travel in the guard’s van, or don’t travel at all. Well, OK, that’s how it was, I knew that. But the train was late, and years before the advent of mobile phones there was no way of telling the WCMT that I was likely to arrive late. I think I remember phoning them from the forecourt at Euston to explain a “late arrival at…”, but there was then the question of getting to the Trust offices in South Kensington. I had allowed enough time to push – it was about three miles – but the train’s being late prohibited that. This was well before either buses or taxis were accessible to wheelchair users, so instead I had to use the underground – from which, of course, wheelchairs were formally banned, at least from the deep underground sections.
From previous visits to London I knew that the best way was not via the ostensibly most direct route using the Northern line to Leicester Square and changing to the Piccadilly (there were steps on the interchange) but instead going backwards, on the Victoria line to King’s Cross–St Pancras, and changing to the Piccadilly there (the interchange was step-free). Using escalators – down at Euston – was just part of the normal way of getting about. But what the station at South Kensington was like I didn’t know. It was no use asking any station officials, because of the ban on wheelchairs.
As it turned out South Kensington was partly accessible. There was a lift from the platform which deposited passengers on a sort of gantry which ran above and across all the platforms, but which left a flight of steps up to the foyer. As ever in these circumstances it was a question of nobbling a couple of passing travellers, and one station man, to carry me up the stairs. As a result of all that had gone before, I wasn’t in the calmest state on reaching the Trust, and the pent-up frustration emerged during the interview; or so I thought.
Memories of the interview have become somewhat blurred. I remember talking about lack of publicity for events taking place in a small country town 40 miles outside London, and of trying to find out if they were any more successful in the publicity stakes in the USA; of my recent experience of outdoor activities, of my intended visit to the Calvert Trust in the new year, and again, of wondering if they had taken things further in the USA (the MOBS course suggested that they had); and thinking that the panel didn’t seem at all impressed. But the most abiding memory concerned their last question, which was about the need to take a companion/carer with me to provide the personal care they apparently thought I needed. I regarded this idea as quite preposterous – I was entirely self-sufficient in self-care – and replied with near-scorn to the suggestion. And that was it. I left feeling very disappointed – I don’t interview well, and the uncomfortable fact is that a) I know it, but b) don’t seem to have found a way of dealing with it. It had been a worthwhile attempt, albeit in the end rather chastening; and I was still going to find out more about outdoor activities in the UK – or at least, England – through visiting the Calvert Trust early in the new year.
