Interviews with disabled people
Video interviewees
Lin Berwick MBE
“The neurologist... said, ‘This child is spastic. Take her home. Forget about her. She’ll never be any good. You’re wasting my time, your time, and everybody else’s.’”
Alan Counsell
“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... ‘Now then, how can you say that, because you don’t know our Alan: he can do whatever he wants.'”
Desmond Cox
“What I wanted originally to do, was when I’d learnt electronics, was to make radios, but that fell through, because the company wouldn’t take me on.”
"There was 250 children, and I was the only disabled child there. I used to try and walk, and the other kids used to push me over.”
Valerie Lang
“I’d never met these people before lunch. All the time they’d treated me like a rather clever four-year-old.”
“My mother-in-law... a fortnight before the baby was born... suddenly said, ‘Well, you know, personally, I think all disabled women should be sterilised.”
“The authorities wanted to send me away to a residential school because of my physical disability, and my dad said, ‘No way are you taking my son off me.’
“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.”
Sound recordings also available on the Disability Voices website
- Sheila Bingham
- Susan Bucknall
- Merle Davies
- David Edwards
- Pauline Farr
- Robin Good
- Bill Hall
- Pauline Johnson
- Jill Mahler
- David Mills
- Dorcas Munday
- Anne Pridmore
- Jacqui Rawlinson
- Joan Ross
- Judy Smart
- Tony Stamford
- Gordon Taylor
- Ian Thomas
- Melvin Walton
- Michael Wilkinson
- Bob Williams-Findlay
- Tony Wilson
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