22 March, 2007
When Lesley-anne Alexander suggested that I give this lecture, I hesitated to accept. I did not want to appear to be blowing my own trumpet. In the end, I decided to go ahead in order to sketch the outline of a history that is not yet written: the history of the struggles of blind people against discrimination in the second half of the twentieth century. I will speak of the ‘new disability movement’ that sprang up in the 1960s, the contribution made to it by leading blind people, including yourself, chairman, and others present and absent here. I want to indicate the impact of these struggles on RNIB in the last quarter of the century. Finally, I will consider what we have gained and what challenges still face us.
This is the ‘history’ in which much of my life has been led. I have had a second, and related, relationship to history, on which I also want to touch. I refer to my life as a practitioner in the field of social history. I do not regard it as something separate. On the contrary, the way I learned, mainly from E. P. Thompson to write history has been vital to the way in which I have approached disability politics. And so to my tasks.
In a very real sense I was born into history. My parents were sincere and active members of the Communist party. They had married in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War and I was born in the same year. The family was poor but not in the direst poverty. As a railway platelayer, my father enjoyed steady, if low paid work in the 1930s. Throughout my childhood my mother augmented the family income, first by charring, later by the hard toil of the steam laudry. Consequently we were always well fed, but the purchase of clothes was often a struggle, and we grew up in a room and kitchen, high above one of Glasgow's railway termini. Nevertheless, I saw what real poverty was at the age of eight, when I accompanied my mother canvassing for the ‘Party’ round some of the worst slums in Glasgow during the general election of 1945.
The monstrous spectre of Stalinism has disfigured Communism so much that it requires a great effort to understand that, for many of the rank and file, Communism stood for justice at a time when unemployment and poverty stalked the land. It was my act of youthful rebellion to refuse to join the Communist party, but I see no need to apologise for the political choice my parents made. Indeed I honour them for the values they imparted to me. Not being religious, they yet wanted me to grow up within a moral context. So they sent me to one of Glasgow's Socialist Sunday Schools. There I learned ‘the Socialist Ten Commandments’. Let me quote just one of them: ‘Do not hate or speak evil of anyone. Do not be revengeful, but stand up for your rights and resist oppression.’
I don't think these ten commandments were much better kept than the other lot, but I would like to think that something of them rubbed off on me and helped to guide me.
And so we come to the matter of blindness. It happened when I was fourteen, through double detachment of the retina.
I have to say I was not much phased by it and I have often wondered why not. I sometimes think the reasons are not to my credit. I remember thinking I would never have to do the washing up again. My mother soon disabused me of that. I also thought I would never have to play football again, and was mighty pleased, because I had two left feet when it came to kicking a ball. Here again I was to be sharply disabused. Boys were always playing football at the Royal Blind School, Edinburgh, which I entered in 1952 . ‘The school’ was the most formative influence of my teen-age years. To put it bluntly, it was an institution for producing blind people, which had both positive and negative impacts upon me.
To mention the positives first. It made me independently mobile to a high degree. We had to play football and go swimming every week. We had to walk about the city streets with the aid of no guidance device. The white stick was regarded as a symbol of victimhood and we were forbidden to carry it.
Another legacy was music. We spent hours every week singing, playing the piano and listening to classical music. It weened me off Doris Day.
Finally, I must mention the many lifelong friendships, which were rooted there, most importantly that of my wife, Etta, with whom I shared the ‘first fine careless rapture’ ov youth.
These are the positives. The negatives were just as important. Resident in Edinburgh, we soon lost the friendship networks of our sighted peers at home. The educational standards expected of us were very low. It was assumed that blind children needed two extra years to reach the leaving standard attained by sighted children. Hence we all stayed at school until age 18. As I wanted to sit for university entrance exams, I was kept in school until I was nearly 21.
Not that the school was keen on university education for blind boys and girls. Rather it was pessimistic about the possible outcomes and encouraged the abler pupils to think of physiotherapy or home teaching of the blind as the only careers likely to be open to them. As a physiotherapist I would have been about as useful as a member of ‘Dad's Army’ facing a Panzer division and I wasn't cut out to deliver tea and sympathy along with craft and braille teaching.
As to a career, my parents had encouraged me to aim for university and I had already formed the youthful ambition to be a lawyer. This was met by a complete negative from the school principal. ‘a blind person cannot succeed in law,’ I was told. I was soon presented with another stumbling block. At that time in Scotland, you had to take a degree in Arts if you wished to enter on higher law studies. I was passionate about history. ‘A blind person can't read history,’ I was told.
All this, as we would say now, was a clear case of stereotyping, ‘Seeing the disability, not the ability.’ I ignored the advice and enrolled myself for a history degree at Edinburgh University.
I managed to distinguish myself somewhat, getting the best ‘first’ in my year, the class medal in European history as wel as writing an original dissertation on the history of Socialist Sunday Schools, which was published in the following year. And stil the barriers did not disappear. By that time, i had given up my ambition to study law and wanted to go to Oxford to read for a D.Phil. in history. So Iwent to see my professor and asked his advice. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he said: ‘REID, how can a blind man do historical research?’
‘Great God,’ I thought, ‘What more do I have to do?’
I must now fast forward to disability politics-passing over post-graduate studies at Oxford. One incident there must be mentioned, however. Etta and I were married now and she was working as a physiotherapist in the city. We had an attic flat on the Iffley road. One day our landlady said to us: ‘There is a postcard for you in the box. Would you like me to read it to you?’ We thanked her and, after the usual formalities, heard her read, ‘So sorry to hear you are paying such an extortionate rent.’ That embarrassing lesson stayed with me and led, eventually, to the establishment of the Kenilworth Reader Service for the Blind.
I joined the National Federation of the Blind in 1958, during my first year at university. My motives now seem clear enough. I was angry at the way we had been presented with unnecessary barriers. But I was rather naif and it took me a long time to understand the structural character of these barriers. For a time I beat my wings against the bars of the cage. I am remembered to this day, for example, for bringing a motion of censorship against the National Library for the Blind because it published the expurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover six years after Penguin had won the right in court to publish the unexpurgated text. I also denounced the Federation for deciding to register as a charity-my experience of charities had not been very good.
Those were the days when I was ‘red Fred’. Certainly I felt very different from most people in the Federation. Taken all round, the Federation of those days seemed to me timid, ultra-respectable and deferential. They were always going on about the ‘image’ of the blind, which must never be risked by behaviour that could be represented as ‘having a chip on the shoulder’.
These clashes with blind respectability led to me resigning from the executive of the Federation.
Like George Orwell I felt stifled inside the whale. Little did I know that the whale was about to surface and blow. This tookk the form of the Disablement Income Group. It was formed in 1965 by two disabled women. Together they organised a demonstration in Trafalgar square to campaign for married disabled women to have a pension in their own right. Their movement quickly snowballed to take in the additional expenses faced by all disabled people, their exclusion from the labour market and their incarceration in homes run by charities. They demanded a new deal and it was foreshadowed in 1970 by Alf Morris's Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act.
DIG was a product of the times, like the civil rights movement of black people in America. They inspired three of us in the Federation, Martin Milligan, Colin Low and Fred Reid. The late Martin Milligan was a philosopher of western Marxism, who had campaigned passionately for inclusive education. My teen-age experiences convinced me he was right to denounce the special schools of those days as ‘prisons’. The second was a young criminologist, colin low, a colleague of Martin at Leeds University. He was already criticising the new ‘generic’ social services, arguing that they showed little concern for blind people.
And what was i, the third member of this ‘terrible trio’, doing?
Well, to begin with, I toured the Federation branches urging them to drop their narrow demand for a ‘blindness allowance’ and throw in their lot with the new disability movement that was demanding a ‘national disability income’. I could now see the structural barriers more clearly and how they could be tackled. In coventry I led a successful campaign for a disabled representative to sit on the social services committee. At Warwick University I joined forces with the Professor of bio-engineering to urge that modern technology should be harnessed to solving the problems of blind people. That led to my work with john gill, now RNIB's chief scientist.
In all this I was very critical of RNIB, not entirely fairly – as I now think. It was doing good work opening up computer programming as a new professional field for blind people. It was pioneering the education of children with complex needs. At the same time, however, it was too narrowly focused on services to the blind, careless of the structure of under-employment and income deprivation, suspicious and aloof from the new disability politics.
It was also clear to me that the Federation was still ill-equipped to challenge RNIB on such issues.
The upshot was that we formed the Association of Blind and Partially Sighted Teachers and Students-ABAPSTAS for short-though the acronym was so cumbersome that most people called us ‘the bastards’.
I have said that the political trends of the sixties were very influential in producing the new disability movement. For me the motivation was also rooted in my experience as a young lecturer at warwick University. e.p. Thompson recruited me into his Centre for Social History. His book The Making of the English Working Class (1965) had revolutionised the way we looked at working-class history. Gone was the narrow focus on trade unions and Labour politics. Thompson taught us to write about the miner at the coal face, the women working in the textile factories and the metal workers at the lathe and milling machine. This was ‘history from below’ and it was as if we had discovered a new continent.
In the light of Tompson’s work, I saw that I could not be content to write a conventional biography of Keir Hardie. I had to set his early career in the context of the Lanarkshire coalfield, where the traditional skilled collier was engaged in a fierce class-conflict with the great iron and coal companies. But how was this to be done? Clearly I needed the sustained support of a trained reader. So far I had survived with volunteers. Now that teaching was added to research the burden was becoming intolerable and I began to see a vital structural issue: the absolute necessity of a paid reader or, as we would now say, a support worker. This became the key demand of the new ABAPSTAS, which we won after struggling for about ten years.
RNIB tried to hold aloof at first, but Martin was busy persuading the Federation to demand that its governing council should be opened up to blind people elected from the organisations ‘of’ the blind. This participation campaign was the central strategic move. Martin persuaded the Federation and the National League of the Blind to demand 50 percent of the seats on the council. RNIB dragged its feet and finally offered four. Nothing could have been more calculated to shake the Federation out of its habitual deference. It demanded one-third of the seats on the council as an irreducible minimum and threatened to mount a demonstration in Great Portland Street if refused. Alf Morris, the new Minister for the Disabled added his support and the tv cameras were poised to record the show. That is how I came, as President of the Federation about 1972-3, to be negotiating with the then Director-General, Eric Boullter. Eric knew the game was up and secretly wanted to help. He was aided and abetted by Duncan Watson, as chair of RNIB. But Eric was worriedt the diehards on the council would resist surrendering so much and tried to beat me down to onequarter. I refused to call off the demonstration for anything less than one third and we finally compromised at thirty seats, which was between one quarter and one third.
The importance of that victory can hardly be exaggerated. It enabled Duncan to take RNIB forward into the mainstream of disability politics. It swung in behind the demand for support workers. Under Ian Bruce's leadership It took a major part in the campaign for a disabled living allowance and mainstream education.
I served with Colin and Martin on the RNIB council until 1987, helping to establish the new inclusive fe college at Loughborough. It had always been difficultfor me to hold the balance between disability politics and my work as a history lecturer. By1987 my colleagues were pressing me to take over the chairmanship of the Warwick history department and I felt I could not refuse. ‘You're not interested in us,’ they would grumble. ‘You're only interested in Britain for the blind!’ When I retired from university teaching in 1997, Colin asked me to rejoin RNIB. The organisation urgently needed rebalancing. I am very proud of the work I did to support Eamonn Fetton in re-organising RNIB schools and training establishments. Eamonn richly deserves the grattitude of us all. I am also proud of the agitation I mounted within the organisation to bring the employment of blind people back onto RNIB's agenda.
And now we may ask, ‘What does it all amount to?’ LOOKING back I believe we played a significant part in the struggle to root out discrimination against blind people in British society. I am proud of that but now, in 2007, I also feel a strong sense of unfinished business. 66 per cent of British blind people of working age have little hope of paid employment. 90 percent of them live on means tested benefits. 60 percent of blind people over 60 years of age say they cannot go out unaccompanied because the streets are so dangerous. It still seems to me, therefore, that society expects blind people to put up with far less than sighted people. No where is this clearer than in library services. To take my own county library service for example, it stocks nearly a million items for distribution through its public libraries. The RNIB Talking Book Library stocks 12'000 for the whole of the UK. About 125'000 books are published annually in the UK. RNIB adds about 300 of them to its stock each year. This is radical discrimination and the consequences are clear in the daily lives of us all. Let me give just one illustration. I recently wanted to read Istanbul, by the Nobel prize winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. The online catalogue of the Talking Book Library informed me that it contained no books by this author. Warwickshire Library Service turned out to contain Istanbul and three novels by Pamukk.
I am proud that RNIB campaigns against this kind of discrimination: for ‘the right to read’ – and for employment services, and for social security that really boosts the purchasing power of blind people, and for health and social care, and so on and so on. I am very glad that our ‘vision’ speaks of ‘a world in which blind and partially sighted people enjoy the same rights, responsibilities … as people who are sighted.
And yet, and yet … My worry is that we still speak with two voices. When we campaign we speak the language of rights and stress the inadequacy of our services to meet the need. When we appeal for charitable funds we talk up our services and speak the language of the supplicant on behalf of the unfortunate blind. The danger is that this second voice may blunt the message of the first, reassuring the public that ‘the blind are very well looked after’. If this happens, we are complicit with a Victorian culture of charity which is far from dead and a sop to the humanitarian conscience..
You may be disappointed (or relieved) that I have no revolutionary answer to this problem. I am certainly not against voluntary action or ‘not for profit’ organisations. I do not recommend that we ‘pull out’ of, say, talking books so as to shock society into giving blind people ‘the right to read’. Such action would be futile and damaging. But there is perhaps something within our power. We can look to our style of presentation. We can try to speak the same language when campaigning and fund raising. The latter should avoid ‘hype’ and always make clear that charity can only be a stop gap on the way to a world of rights and responsibilities.
So, to conclude, I have tried to celebrate the struggles of the ‘of’ organisations to root out discrimination in our land. I salute the new RNIB and its valiant leader, Lord Colin Low, who is doing so much to fight our cause in parliament. I welcome those younger members of the RNIB Board who are now taking up the cause – I know the sacrifices they will be called upon to make and I hope that their lives in history will be as rewarding as my own.