How did the Disabled People’s Movement get started in Bristol, and how did it start to change people’s lives?
It is not possible to pinpoint the exact moment that the movement took off in Bristol. Was it at its first public meeting? Or its first public demonstration? Or at the planning meetings to arrange either event, or both? Recollections are different, but the impact of becoming an activist was similar.
“It was the first time that Disabled people were being publicly angry.”
Ian Popperwell
“There was a small group of people that were trying to set up a Centre for Integrated Living in the late eighties. And a few of us were slightly more radical than that, [and] said ‘But actually, what we need is a Coalition of Disabled People’. So we created what became the Avon Coalition of Disabled People. Our launch was outside the Arnolfini in Bristol [in ’89]. It had everything on the ground floor, and they had an accessible café, and then they did this big fundraising thing, they got Arts Council funding and spent something like £400,000, which was a lot of money at that time to raise the café up off the ground and made it completely inaccessible. So we had a big demo outside and got the local TV and radio interested. It was the first time that Disabled people were being publicly angry.”
“It was the first time in Bristol that Disabled people had organised something for themselves, about themselves, and all the speakers were disabled.”
Ruth Pickersgill
“In 1988, we held the first big meeting of Disabled people in Bristol that was organised by Disabled people. It was to launch what we called the Avon Coalition of Disabled People. I still remember it to this day because we were really worried. We thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if anyone’s going to come. We don’t know many Disabled people. We don’t know whether Disabled people are going to want to come to a Disabled people’s meeting because they won’t be used to doing that. They may think it’s like a day centre and may not want to have anything to do with it. It was at Barton Hill Settlement; when we arrived, suddenly people started coming and we ended up with 86 people and the room was absolutely packed and it was really exciting. It was the first time in Bristol that Disabled people had organised something for themselves, about themselves, and all the speakers were Disabled. All the audience was Disabled and it was just a really exciting thing. We always say that was the beginning of the Disabled People’s Movement in Bristol.”
As the movement developed, in Bristol and nationally, it became more visible, and more radical.
“They decided to lock arms and block Whiteladies Road and put up banners challenging the approach that Children in Need had towards Disabled people.”
David Mendelsohn
“I was involved as a support person [for the] Avon Coalition of Disabled People from about 1991. [The Coalition] wanted to challenge the medical model of disability that was very prevalent within the BBC and Children in Need, which would stereotype young Disabled people in a very, very negative and inappropriate way. There was a pre-launch event on Whiteladies Road in Bristol. People were meeting outside the studio centre, and we arrived and we mingled, we were able to get to the marquee. And we decided to lock arms and block Whiteladies Road and put up banners challenging the approach that Children in Need had towards Disabled people. The cameras were mustered – I think we got some people interviewed to state the case, to say why we were there and got in the Evening Post, so made a good impact.”
“The sense of possibility was probably like nothing I’ve ever experienced”
Liz Crow
“We were in Birmingham with the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network, and we had three days where we kept going out and blockading the city. At the end of those three days, the city council had a major order in for a new fleet of buses, and it changed the order to make sure that they were all accessible buses. It was an immensely successful few days. [There was] a particular moment where we’d blockaded the city centre, and we were headed back to the hotel. We filled the streets, and there must have been maybe a few hundred of us. We walked and limped and rolled back, and sang what became an anthem at the time, where the words were, ‘We’re DAN and we’re proud of it’. It just repeats the same phrase, and we just sang it round and round and round and round. We were in this road with these high buildings, and it echoed off the buildings. And the sense of possibility was probably like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”
Not all activism involves getting on the picket lines. These examples show what was achieved change in other ways.
“We shook Bristol”
Penny Germon
“We organised arts events. We had the Tragic But Brave Roadshow. And we went around Bristol fly posting ‘The Tragic But Brave Roadshow are coming to Easton Community Centre’. We had Ian Stanton and Johnny Crescendo. And Wanda Barbara, Barbara Lisicki. And Julie McNamara. And they would do cabaret, and sing songs like Choices And Rights In Our Lives, and Crip Without A Chip, and The Glee Club. And it was just fantastic. The Easton Community Centre was packed with people who had all come to see this cabaret of political Disabled people. And we shook Bristol.”
“All the teaching was done by Disabled people and they would learn to work with us to see us as equals, and see us working with their teachers on equal terms, which was really good for them.”
Paul Sullivan
In 1994, Paul Sullivan began what was to be for him a 14-year cycle of Disability Equality and Inclusion training for medical students and social work communities at Bristol University’s Medical School and the School of Social Policy. He says: “We would run workshops on the Social Model. We’d teach them about the barriers as identified in the classic model. And then we would talk to them about the specific access needs of people with different impairments.” The students were sent on ‘field trips’ to gain direct experience of Disabled people including at the Centre for Deaf People, the Disabled Living Centre and hospital orthopaedic departments.
“Everything was led by Disabled people, this was the great thing about them. All the teaching was done by Disabled people and they would learn to work with us to see us as equals, and see us working with their teachers on equal terms, which was really good for them. I think the social work students liked it, they were used to the idea of openness to other people’s talents and abilities. A lot of the medical students were very science-focused, they were there to learn and absorb facts, and all this touchy-feely stuff about barriers and needs and wishes and desires was a bit challenging for some of them. But it was really important work to make them realise that medicine isn’t just about science, it’s about real living people.”
It was an advantage, says Paul, that this input was given to medical students early in their training, before they had “learned too many bad habits”. As to long-term benefits, he says: “We had an influence on a lot of people who went into the medical profession. I have met students that I’ve taught later on who have said they remembered what we taught them and it did make an impact on them.”
Of all the disability activism he’s been involved with, this, says Paul, is what he’s most proud of, because of what he hopes are the “longest-lasting effects”. He says: “Changing and working with students and helping them to be more open and accepting and positive and imaginative, I think that’s really useful and I’m glad to have been involved in that.”
“You can change hearts and minds just by chatting without making it heavy duty.”
Meryl Gaskell
Meryl Gaskell recalls the research project Let’s Go! This was with schoolchildren with physical impairments and learning disabilities for Bristol Dial-A-Ride, who had realised the children “weren’t very happy” about their school transport. A steering group of 24 people was set up, including “teachers, drivers, local authority, transport providers, people from the Disability Equality Forum, anybody we could think of to come in and listen and learn, and we had the city council’s education inclusion officer, who was brilliant.
“We interviewed the teachers, the parents, transport providers, drivers, escorts, but we were the first in the country to actually ask the children. We had a Disabled facilitator and it was just her and a little group of people, no other adults present, and really asked what they [the children] thought about it and they really gave their views. It was absolutely brilliant, really, really good stuff. They were on the bus for hours, the drivers were smoking, all sorts of things going on, and they were quite easy to remedy, but nobody thought to ask the children.”
At the seminar, the steering group waited for the usual reading of ‘dry reports’ but Meryl said: “Right, okay. Well we’ll hand over to the children”. She recalls: “they’d been practising for ages and set up chairs like a little bus, and one of the children acted as the driver and the escort in helping people on, get to their seats. So they all sat there, and then they sang a song, to [the tune of] Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. It was absolutely brilliant because the chorus was ‘Hey, you, sort my transport out’. It went down so well.
“So in a very humorous, nice, light way, we got the message across. We did a report to feedback to the city council, and from it some of the recommendations were taken on board and made it a bit better for them. That’s my way of campaigning – you can change hearts and minds just by chatting without making it heavy duty.”
The project helped change the children’s self-perception, too. “They could actually say to the people who organised their transport and the city council who pay for it, ‘Hey, you, sort my transport out’ – rather than everybody speaking for them and saying what they think. I think they felt quite empowered by that. [It] was a pretty special thing for them to be doing.”
“All activism, whether it’s through the arts or not, can have a wide range of radicalism in it.”
Liz Crow
The disability arts movement has always been an integral part of Liz Crow’s activism, in spite of her early attempts to get into journalism school, radio training and television work being met with “repeatedly doors being closed for very clearly discriminatory reasons, at a time when it was entirely legal to do that”. For her first solo film, she recalls how “for every day of the edit, I crawled up a flight of stairs, and I took my own bucket” because there was no lift or toilet access. She says: “If you really wanted to do that stuff, you had to be prepared to take measures that were never acceptable”.
In 2008 she was working on Resistance, a “big moving image piece” drawing attention to “Aktion-T4 and the Nazi campaign against Disabled people, and which was its first official state campaign of mass murder” – and its contemporary echoes. Coincidentally, sculptor Antony Gormley had just secured his One & Other Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square, inviting members of the public to stand on the plinth, one per hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days. This was 2009, the 70th anniversary of Aktion-T4, and Liz thought: “We’ve got to get Disabled people up there”. She secured a place but realised it was non-transferable, so, she says, she “went up using my wheelchair, dressed in Nazi uniform”. The resulting, conflicting, unresolvable images held people’s attention, “got them asking really profound questions, and then continuing to think about it afterwards”.
She says: “That’s when I realised that both film and performance were really compelling media to work through” – though not everyone was of the same mind. She explains: “I’ve found quite a lot of activists have a real antipathy to the idea of arts being a vehicle for activism, as though it’s a lesser activism or a less committed activism – that in order to be a pure activist, you simply get on the picket lines, or you do the blockading, and you don’t involve arts, because somehow that waters it down or makes it more moderate. Which is a position I disagree with. All activism, whether it’s through the arts or not, can have a wide range of radicalism in it. For me, art is about communicating, about making connections with people, connecting viscerally – not just emotionally, but that whole body connection. It raises questions more than it provides answers, which as activists, is what you need to be doing… drawing people into it so that they start to take ownership of the ideas, and start to work them out through their own minds and imbed those ideas in themselves. And then what you get is much more sustainable change.”