At the first Annual General Meeting of the National Spastics Society in 1952, Bill Hargreaves asked parents to think beyond schooling their disabled children. What would happen next? How would they earn a living?
As a result of his passionate speech, Bill was invited onto the Executive Committee as the only disabled trustee. He was then asked to set up an organisation of some 70 home workers, widely scattered throughout the country. Some were printing Christmas cards designed by artists with cerebral palsy. Others were assembling jewellery to raise funds for local groups.
Bill helped plan and create Sherrards, an industrial training centre for disabled people in Welwyn Garden City. The centre was equipped with industrial machinery that could train up to 50 trainees at a time.
As industrial liaison officer, Bill became so successful that the Ministry of Labour financed his travel to 150 of their Disabled Consultative Committees to spread his message to employers:
“Look at me. You may think that I look odd, but I don’t feel odd. I stagger about, but I don’t fall down or drop things. My hands wave about, but I still do a good job of work. I just need a chance. That’s what spastics need, a chance to prove themselves. We are just normal people locked in disobedient bodies. Given the right chance, many disabled people could do a good job of work.”
Written off as unemployable
During the course of his work, Bill found jobs for many hundreds of people with cerebral palsy who had previously been written off as unemployable.
The 1952 film, Chance of Their Lives, shows a disabled man walk past a ‘MEN WANTED’ sign. After a brief look, the employer shakes his head, and the jobseeker walks away.
The scene is obviously staged for the cameras, but the reality wasn’t very much different.
Job discrimination
In August 1986, ‘An equal chance for disabled people’ revealed widespread discrimination against disabled people in the workplace. It sent in applications for 150 secretarial jobs advertised in London papers and magazines. Each employer received 2 letters. Both were essentially the same, except one was from an applicant with cerebral palsy. This applicant stressed that disability had not been a problem in previous jobs. The study found that 97% of non-disabled applicants received positive responses, compared with only 59% of applicants with cerebral palsy. In November 1986 Bob Wareing MP raised the findings in the House of Commons.
Even today, disabled people are almost twice as likely to be unemployed as non-disabled people, and 3 times as likely to be economically inactive.
Job discrimination started early. Alan Counsell remembered an encounter with the schools careers officer:
“I wanted to be a librarian, and the careers officer Mr Jolly said, ‘No way, no way, could you ever do anything like that.’ And what came back was a voice from the side, and that was the headmaster, who said, ‘Now then, how can you say that, because you don’t know our Alan: he can do whatever he wants.”
Careers guidance
The lack of imagination in most careers guidance for disabled people was staggering, as Barry Morgan found:
“I went to Personnel, and they said, ‘Oh we’ve got a nice little job for you.’ Well, they make mops, and there was 4 nails on a leather circle, you see, and I put these 4 nails through, and I had to bend the nail over and clump them down with the hammer. That was my job!”
Often, disabled people were expected to take jobs that did not match their skills and capabilities.
Judy Smart, who had a degree, worked in a sheltered workshop for disabled people:
“… the worst job that I ever had, and that was screwing up newspaper to pack round lamps, and Veronica and I did this, day in and day out for about a year…”
Joan Ross felt that the employment options she was given did not match her talents or needs:
“I really felt that I’d been put on the scrapheap. The things that they suggested, like making artificial flowers, and possibly to be going to residential training for employment, were totally unsuitable for me.”
Job interviews
Dr Lin Berwick MBE found getting to the job interview was a challenge in itself:
“When I got to the bank, it was one of these banks with these horrible revolving doors, which wasn’t easy, going through on a pair of tripods…
“But anyway, eventually, I found my way into the bank, and made my way to the accountant’s office, and when he opened the door, he said, ‘Oh, I know they told me you were disabled’, he said,’ ‘but I didn’t realise you were that disabled, but you might as well come in and sit down anyway…’
“I thought, ‘God, this is a really good start to your first job interview!’ But I thought, ‘Well, I’m here. I’ve got 1 chance, so I might as well really go for it’, and he took my mother around the bank, showed her some of the obstacles, and we came back into the office and we started to talk about the work, and he proceeded to ask my mother every single question about my training.”
Anne Pridmore stopped telling people she was disabled because it did not help her chances of getting interviews.
“They sent me to a private business school to learn shorthand typing and bookkeeping, and I had to do the English and Maths because I left school early, and everybody was told that they’d get them a job at the end of the 12 months, but in fact they wouldn’t promise me that because I was disabled.
“It was a mainstream college. When I wrote for jobs that I was disabled, and then I found that if I did that, I wouldn’t get anywhere.
“So, then I used to not tell them, and turn up and watch the horror on their faces. But I finally got a job through doing that when I was 16.”
Jacqui Rawlinson found a more positive response but it came with a condition:
“I went down for a career assessment, and… I had a number of tests and they found I had a very logical mind, and they suggested computing. And a local firm, British Aerospace, which was the British Aircraft Corporation in those days, took me on as a trainee programmer, on the understanding that I would provide my own electric typewriter. Can you imagine it?”
Tony Wilson recalled how his childhood dreams of working with animals or in gardening were cruelly dashed:
“I wanted to go out to work. They said, ‘Would you like to go out to work?’ and I said, ‘Yes’. But then my foster parent said, ‘I don’t think he’s capable of doing it…’ In those days, they didn’t let any disabled people go out to work much at all, did they, when I was young, at all.”
A dream job
Desmond Cox found that spurious health and safety concerns stopped him from getting his dream job.
“What I wanted originally to do when I’d learnt electronics was to make radios, but that fell through, because the company wouldn’t take me on. They gave excuses of fire safety and other stuff, so I never got to do that, what I called ‘a dream job’.
“In the long term, I feel bad because financially I’m having to depend on other people for benefits, taking their taxpayers’ money, when I would have loved to have had a full-time job for my normal working life, to earn my own living and buy my own things and a house, which I never got to do.”
After years of teacher training, Sheila Bingham encountered blatant discrimination when she applied for a job at a day nursery:
“Well, mum thought I could get a better job, so I applied again for a children’s job. I went into the interview. They were interviewing a lot of people for a day nursery…
“And we went in. The interview went fine. I’d worked with children, I’d worked with handicapped children and then they, the crucial question came, ‘Have you worked with under 1-year old babies?’ And I very truthfully said, ‘No.’
“And she said, ‘Right we can’t have you then, because you won’t be able to handle them. We have a lot of babies in day nurseries.’
“So I went out, waited for the next person to go in, and they asked her the very same question, and she also answered, ‘No.’ And they said, ’Well, we’ll teach you. That’s all right. We’ll teach you how to handle them.’ No such luck for me.”
For Jill Mahler, teaching was no more welcoming:
“One of the things that was suggested to me was teaching, and I went to a couple of teacher training colleges, and it was terrible the reception I got from the heads. ‘Why on earth have you been sent to me? How on earth do you think you would teach?’
“One of the problems that people have is lack of imagination when they are interviewing. But also I can recognise that I do have what, I sometimes feel is the biggest disability: speech. I don’t speak in the same way as other people.
“I get a lot of prejudice from ignorance, because people still, deep down, equate disability, physical disability, speech disability, with a lack of intellect, and therefore they treat you like an idiot or else in the case of the police, they’ve accused me of being drunk in charge of a car!”
Pauline Farr went through all the academic hoops to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher:
“I got my place at college. I went for my interviews. I got my qualification.
“I went for a normal medical, you know, heart and lungs, what have you. That was fine. Several weeks later I had a message to go and see the college doctor, who I thought they were just out of politeness asking that I should see him. And I stayed with him just a few minutes and in that time, he said, ‘You couldn’t possibly teach children, you couldn’t possibly manage their coats…’”
To lose a dream job for such a trivial reason defies belief. But there was no anti-discrimination legislation at the time.
Valerie Lang MBE found that her success in her Civil Service career was resented by some non-disabled colleagues:
“There were on a couple of occasions, people who were clerical officers, therefore earning rather less than I was, who couldn’t see why a disabled person should earn more than they did.”
Barry Morgan‘s career in electrical engineering was cut short by an act of senseless thuggery:
“I went to Birmingham Polytechnic to do an ONC in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. It was the final night, and I went to have a drink with some student friends, caught the bus home, and when I got off the bus, they made a grab for my briefcase.
“And of course I wouldn’t let go of it, and they pushed me against the bus shelter, and… it fractured my collar bone. And the worst part about it was it was the side of my disability, and it took a long time for that to heal.
“It also upset me greatly psychologically, if you understand me. I was very wary of people, and it took me a long, long time to get over that. I lost my job because I could not cope with people.”
In the end, a new career came from an unlikely source.
“I was looking for work, and it went on for 2 years… Getting kicked back, and things like this, and I can understand from the point of view of disabled people wanting to work, and people not giving them the opportunity…
“One day, I was walking round the supermarket, and all of a sudden, I could hear, ‘Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white cat…’
Barry Morgan with the Postman Pat coin-operated toy.
“This coin-operated ride seemed to draw me to it. And I thought, ‘I wonder whether they have agents to repair them and service them…’
“So, I decided on the Monday to give them a ring. And they says,
‘Yes, we might be interested. Would you like to come and see us?’
“So, I went and seen the managing director, and he took me down the warehouse. He says, ‘Right,’ he says, ‘that one over there,’ he says, ‘has been giving us nothing but trouble. Tell me what’s wrong with it.’
“So, I got the key, undone the back, and inside there’s a big circuit board. Of course, I was in me element with that, and somebody had cocked up the way these switches were formatted, so all I did was format them in, put the 30 pence in, and away it went. So, of course, he had no choice but to sort of say, ‘OK, the job’s yours.’”
The quotes in this blog come from Speaking for Ourselves, the oral history of people with cerebral palsy.
Alex White writes 
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