One of the common misconceptions about disabled people is that they are somehow not sexual beings. The reality, of course, is that relationships are just as important to disabled people as they are to everyone else.
Anne Pridmore recalled:
“I think that I didn’t have any hang-ups about being disabled, but I don’t think I really recognised it, because I was mixing in a non-disabled world. The only time that I felt excluded was when my friends began to get boyfriends and make relationships, and I was then left. That was quite a bad time for me really.”
Tony Wilson saw how the sexes were separated at his day centre:
“They used to call it morning classes and afternoon classrooms, you know, where we used to make things, and all that, and do, and all that, and do weaving, and do embroidery work, and do drawing and all that, whatever they think disabled people was fit to do. If we were caught with one of the girls we would get in serious trouble, and we’d be put away. That’s what they used to do in those days…Put people away or in institutions or something if, if you were caught. So you had to keep, so you had to behave, behave yourself in those days, otherwise you would be put away.”
In the 1960s, Tony met Winnie on a holiday at Clacton-on-Sea. In this era, the chance of having an ‘independent’ holiday was rare for disabled people in residential institutions.
Tony and Winnie would meet every September at the hotel. Then one year Winnie wasn’t there:
“I said, ‘Where is she this year?’
“They said, ‘She died.’
“And I said, ‘Nobody told me. Nobody contacted me and told me she died.’”
Barry Morgan also had a lost love:
“Society says, ‘Ooh, that don’t look right.’ Society frowns upon it, and really speaking, everybody is entitled to have a relationship, the same as anybody else. I had one young woman that I really, really loved, and she really, really liked me, and I regret not marrying her. Her mum and dad sent her to Australia before I could, but she’s been in touch. We had a reunion in Australia, and it was brilliant: 40 years since I’d seen her. I mean, I got lady friends, I got quite a lot of lady friends that I sort of go out with for meals and enjoy their company, but I don’t know why, but I’ve never been the marrying type. I always loved her, didn’t I? And I always lived in hope.”
Bob Williams-Findlay found that a social worker intervened when he got engaged. He was at Oakwood College in Essex, a residential college for students aged over 18, run by the Spastics Society:
“When I got engaged, apparently the social worker… came to talk to me about why I had decided to get engaged.
“And then she went behind my back to my mother and like said, ‘Did she know I’d got engaged, yeah? And wasn’t she worried that I was probably an over-sexed young man?’
“Now, how one works out that somebody’s over-sexed from an hour meeting is beyond me but really that isn’t the agenda, is it? The agenda is that at that time right – we were talking about the late Sixties, early Seventies – disabled people should be asexual. They should not have independent thoughts, yeah?
“Well, having been told that her son was apparently over-sexed, my mother said, ‘Well, if that’s your opinion of my son, it isn’t mine. If you’re so narrow-minded and bigoted, do you mind leaving my house this moment?’ And she threw her out.
“Yeah, that’s my mother for you, you know, she’ll defend her own, yeah? That was a difficult time because I was in this relationship, her parents didn’t approve, my father had died – that really cut me up, yeah.
“My emotions were in a total turmoil. I ended up having a nervous breakdown. I had to go into hospital for a few weeks – at least probably 2 – I can’t really recall to be honest. And of course, yeah, my mood swings were quite high, so in the end I left Oakwood as a result. Needless to say that really put some pressure on the relationship and it did collapse, and we went our own way…”
Kay Bath’s father took a different approach when she wanted to go on holiday with her boyfriend:
“He was able-bodied, and a part-time DJ and he suggested going on holiday. So, I put it to my dad, and he said, ‘Yes. I’ve got absolutely no objection to you going away as long as you get engaged first.’ Which was really funny ‘cos what the difference an engagement ring was going to make I really don’t know… But that was still the time when disabled people weren’t supposed to be having sex.”
Jill Mahler faced prejudice from the medical profession:
“There has long been a belief that people with disabilities should not get married, a wrongly held belief in the case of cerebral palsy, that they will be passing on bad genes or something like that.
“Other people say, ‘Oh dear, it’s not nice, it’s somehow unclean.’ I don’t know why they think people with disabilities have to be ‘clean’. I didn’t have a problem, except with the first child. When I went to see a doctor for confirmation of the pregnancy, she asked me if I wanted an abortion, which was extraordinary!”
Antonia Lister-Kaye found opposition to her pregnancy from her own family:
“My mother-in-law was absolutely furious because I had a disability, and she thought it was genetic, and a fortnight before the baby was born, she suddenly said, ‘Well, you know, personally, I think all disabled women should be sterilised.’”
Sheila Bingham found her mother was interfering:
“We got married in 1963. Mum had already been to the doctors to see if I was allowed to have kids. She didn’t tell me all this. She never let on what she was up to. Anyway, we decided we were going to have children, whatever anybody said: it didn’t matter.”
Pat Entwistle had a happier experience. But it did not start well. He met his future wife Joan for the first time at a social club for disabled people:
“I said, ‘The secretary, she’s a right stickler.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her,’ and it were Joan!
“Eventually, we decided, after a long time, to get married, and I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be the first time in my life that I’m having somebody that’s mine’.”
Dr Lin Berwick MBE found a partner for life:
“When I met Ralph, I realised that he was a very special sort of a guy. He allows me to be a whole person. He doesn’t speak for me. He doesn’t fall into the trap of, things like, taking my money, paying for goods in a shop and expecting the person behind the counter to give him my change. And, if people speak at me, rather than to me or speak to him, he turns round and says, ‘I don’t know. Ask my wife.’”
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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