Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon Read online

  The Caranoe was different from other canoes: it was wider, had an enormously long cockpit, and had a fluted base running the length of the craft, rather like corrugated iron, though with much larger corrugations. These, and its width, gave it far greater stability than an ordinary canoe, and the size of the cockpit made it much easier to get in and out. We were, however, trained to get out of an ordinary canoe, should the need ever arise, i.e. if you capsized.

  Despite the awful weather, what came to matter from that week was meeting Liz Dendy, and also Norman Croucher, a double below-knee amputee with artificial legs who had started climbing before his accident, and simply carried on developing his climbing skills afterwards. (Later, he went on to climb Cho Oyu, one of the 8000 metre peaks of the Himalayas). Norman was at that time a member of the Great Britain Sports Council, and it was he and Liz who between them had had the idea of putting on this course.

  Subsequently, Liz asked me to join an advisory group at the Sports Council, on water sports for disabled people, and so I met those who had been heavily involved with developing their sport for people with a disability: Mike Hammond with water skiing (he had also done lots with snow skiing), Ken Roberts with sailing, and so on. It may also have been during the week at PyB that I met Bill Parkinson, who was the “Northern Development Officer” for the BSAD, the British Sports Association for the Disabled, which had been established by Ludwig Guttmann in 1961 to provide sports opportunities for people with a physical disability other than spinal injury. Quite what Liz thought I had to offer a group consisting of people already expert in their chosen field, to this day I don’t know; but a new world beyond that of the climbing club – and Stoke Mandeville – was beginning to open up.

  At around the same time, a PE student from the hall of residence, Ged Brennan, had developed an interest in outdoor activities for disabled people. She was a good canoeist, so good that she was used by the PE department of the university as one of the instructional staff on the Introduction to Outdoor Activities course which was held at the end of every summer term for all first year PE students. Ged wondered whether I might be interested in going to the university’s outdoor centre by the side of Lake Coniston and spending some time canoeing, and maybe sailing too. There was, she assured me, a canoe held in the centre which, with minimal alteration (the fitting of a backrest), should be suitable. She had talked to the member of staff responsible for running the first year courses and had been given permission for me to attend one of the weeks. There was a caveat – that she wouldn’t need other staff members to help with me, and that her instructional activities with the first year students wouldn’t be compromised.

  So off I went to Coniston, and had a wonderful week, including sailing in a GP 14 down to Peel Island – featuring as Wild Cat Island in Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”. Initially, we had no idea how best to accommodate someone like me in a GP. Ged tried strapping a plastic chair to the floor of the boat and putting me on it, but I was too tall, and had to take serious avoiding action every time the boat was put about, either tacking or gybing. Eventually we discovered that for me, the best way was to sit transversely on the floor with a foam rubber cushion underneath.

  Most of the week, though, I spent canoeing (the backrest worked), including crossing the lake to Fir Island – and being capsized on the way back by a water-skier who decided to pirouette around me. With wash from the power boat and the skier coming at me from all sides I didn’t stand a chance, and duly capsized in the middle of the lake. It was then that the training drummed into me at Plas y Brenin came into full force: “Don’t try and get out halfway over, go right round until you are completely upside down, then lean forwards and with your hands either side of the edge of the cockpit, push backwards so that you roll forwards out of the canoe. Your life jacket will bring you to the surface from where a rescue can be carried out.” And that’s exactly what happened, except that dragging me into the Centre’s rescue boat was a bit more difficult than rescuing an able-bodied person would have been. (As a footnote, water-skiing was subsequently banned on Coniston by the Lake District Special Planning Board, though that decision had nothing to do with my experience.)

  The summer of 1977 was the first time I went to “The Internationals”, the counterpart of “The Nationals”, started in 1952 by Ludwig Guttmann and held every year at Stoke Mandeville, except in Olympic years when he tried to arrange for the Games to be held in the same country as the Olympics, though not necessarily in the same city. For example, in 1968 Mexico felt unable to cope with problems faced by tetraplegics at altitude, and Israel offered to host the Games instead. And in 1980, Russia stated that it didn’t have any paraplegics (!) so the Games went to Arnhem. The current model, of the Paralympics following the Olympic Games in the same city, was finally adopted in the Seoul Games of 1988.

  I went to Stoke as a spectator, not an athlete (I wasn’t good enough). But although this was regarded as a high point, indeed the pinnacle, of wheelchair sports, or more specifically spinal injury sports, not a word could be found in the national press. The media was full of tennis (Wimbledon), cricket, bits of athletics, golf and horse racing, and even then, in high summer, football. What was the problem? I wondered. Was it just the pressure on space in the newspapers, or that the games weren’t regarded as serious sport at all? The local newspaper usually carried something, but almost invariably in the middle of the paper as a human interest story (“such brave people, overcoming adversity…”). Or was it that the games took place in a small country town some 40 miles outside London, where no one from the sports departments of national papers ever went? Was I just being naïve in expecting any coverage at all?

  I wondered how the Americans fared in this regard. And how they got on with the more adventurous end of the sports and recreation “market” for disabled people. Would they be “pushing back the frontiers” or so cowed by a litigious environment that no one would ever try anything different from the standard spectrum of sports seen every year at Stoke? That first visit to the internationals provided no answers (maybe I hadn’t found the right people to talk to). It may have been during this week I began to develop the idea of an entirely different approach to the reporting of disability sport: if sports reporters couldn’t be bothered to visit and report on what they presumably thought was an unimportant activity, how about staging disability sports events as part of an able-bodied sports event? You could call it integration, of a sort, I supposed. At the time I had absolutely no idea of what this might entail, let alone how to bring it about; and in any case, it would surely be very different for different sports. The idea sank into the sub-conscious.

  A Churchill Fellowship

  Back in the hall of residence all had gone quiet, as term – indeed, the year – had finished and the students had all disappeared for the summer. The pigeon holes where their post was distributed by the hall office remained largely empty, though some post too big for the pigeon holes was simply left on top of the table below. Mass circulars were not routinely forwarded, the hall office told me, but they would wait a week or so – a student might have been passing, even in the middle of the summer vacation, and have dropped in to pick up any post – before forwarding individual letters, or throwing mass circulars away.

  One day a dozen or so plastic-wrapped circulars appeared on the table. Through the plastic I could just see that they were from the Youth Hostel Association (YHA). Curiosity arose. I’d done a lot of hostelling before my accident, and I wondered what kind of information was being sent out nowadays. I picked up an envelope that had been sent to a student who had graduated and left the university altogether. Somewhere inside was an advertising panel. The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust (WCMT) had just announced its new topics for awards to be made in 1978. Amongst the topics was “Leisure and Recreational Pursuits for the Disabled”. I read on, and eventually sent for an information pack.

  The WCMT was established shortly after Churchill died. A large sum was raised by publ
ic appeal, and rather than build a statue (which pigeons might have no respect for) or some other physical memorial, the Trustees decided to invest the funds to produce an annual income which could then be used to finance a number of bursaries, or scholarships, for UK citizens to travel abroad to learn about some aspect of a subject which the trustees had announced as one of this year’s topics. There were 8–10 topics each year (they changed every year), with 100 or so bursaries awarded in total. The trade-off for the Trust was that individuals receiving a fellowship had to write a report about their travels, and show how they would implement what they had learned during their time away. In this way, it was felt, the Trust would be enhancing the development of civic activity in the country as a whole.

  There were three stages to an application. You sent in an outline proposal (one paragraph only) of what you wanted to do. There was some sort of screening activity in the WCMT headquarters, as a result of which those who passed muster were invited to write a fuller proposal about what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go, how long for, and so on. A further screening process led to interviews for those who passed the second stage. And then, finally, those who succeeded in the interview were awarded a fellowship. I put together a brief outline of what I wanted to do, under the clumsy umbrella title of “Outdoor and adventure sports for the disabled, and integration with the able-bodied”, and sent it off.

  There was further help from people already far more deeply involved in disability sport than I was. Norman Croucher told me of a centre shortly to be opened in the Lake District which would be offering week-long residential courses in outdoor activities for disabled people. He had become a trustee, and told me when the official opening was taking place, some time in the autumn. I went, hovered in the background (I had absolutely no official status there at all), and managed to snatch a word with the newly-appointed director, Emrys Evans, about visiting the centre to see what was what: what they were going to do, how, and for whom. I arranged to visit early in the new year. And Bill Parkinson, either during the Plas y Brenin week or later, lent me a copy of an American wheelchair sports magazine “Sports ’n Spokes”, which he thought might be of interest. It was. It covered the conventional range of wheelchair sports – basketball, table-tennis, ten pin bowling, and so on – but also new developments in wheelchair design, and new sports and activities tackled apparently for the first time by wheelchair users. Eventually, I took out a subscription.

  In the meantime I managed to pass the first hurdle of the WCMT application process, and had to put together a fuller application. With hindsight, what I said I wanted to do turned out to be only partly what I ended up doing. The original idea was to attend a few of the American regional wheelchair games to see how they managed the publicity, and to go to their national games, which always seemed to be held under the aegis of the Bulova watch manufacturing and repair factory in New York. This turned out to be a no-no, for all the regional games, and their national meeting, had occurred well before the summer vacation here, realistically the only time I could find a large enough block of time free of student teaching. (It was obvious, really: the Internationals were usually in late July, so in order to select a team the American nationals had to be held earlier, and the regional events through which you qualified to attend their nationals, earlier still. This would have brought these events back to May and June, several weeks before I could get away. Thank heavens no one in the Churchill Trust seemed to have rumbled that.)

  From “Sports ’n Spokes” I found an Outward Bound course being put on by the Minnesota OB School, a mixed course (able-bodied and disabled) based largely around a canoe-camping expedition in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area 50 miles north-west of Lake Superior (but whose waters, I was to discover later, drained 400 miles north to Hudson’s Bay). Going on this course was part of the application, stressing a “pushing back the boundaries” of what was conventionally regarded as suitable for disabled people to undertake. A visit to the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was more or less mandatory for a wheelchair user visiting the USA on a sort of study tour. Since early post-war, the campus had been developed to make it totally accessible for wheelchair users, and some of what I might find there might be useful back in Birmingham. And I proposed to start the visit by attending the American Spinal Cord Injury Association annual conference in Chicago, to make contacts and thereby fill out quite a lot of unprogrammed time in what I estimated would be a 6-week fellowship.

  Rather to my surprise I was invited for an interview, late in the autumn. The visit to London, necessarily by train, started badly. At that time there was no provision for wheelchairs in the ordinary coaches, not even in first class, so it was travel in the guard’s van, or don’t travel at all. Well, OK, that’s how it was, I knew that. But the train was late, and years before the advent of mobile phones there was no way of telling the WCMT that I was likely to arrive late. I think I remember phoning them from the forecourt at Euston to explain a “late arrival at…”, but there was then the question of getting to the Trust offices in South Kensington. I had allowed enough time to push – it was about three miles – but the train’s being late prohibited that. This was well before either buses or taxis were accessible to wheelchair users, so instead I had to use the underground – from which, of course, wheelchairs were formally banned, at least from the deep underground sections.

  From previous visits to London I knew that the best way was not via the ostensibly most direct route using the Northern line to Leicester Square and changing to the Piccadilly (there were steps on the interchange) but instead going backwards, on the Victoria line to King’s Cross–St Pancras, and changing to the Piccadilly there (the interchange was step-free). Using escalators – down at Euston – was just part of the normal way of getting about. But what the station at South Kensington was like I didn’t know. It was no use asking any station officials, because of the ban on wheelchairs.

  As it turned out South Kensington was partly accessible. There was a lift from the platform which deposited passengers on a sort of gantry which ran above and across all the platforms, but which left a flight of steps up to the foyer. As ever in these circumstances it was a question of nobbling a couple of passing travellers, and one station man, to carry me up the stairs. As a result of all that had gone before, I wasn’t in the calmest state on reaching the Trust, and the pent-up frustration emerged during the interview; or so I thought.

  Memories of the interview have become somewhat blurred. I remember talking about lack of publicity for events taking place in a small country town 40 miles outside London, and of trying to find out if they were any more successful in the publicity stakes in the USA; of my recent experience of outdoor activities, of my intended visit to the Calvert Trust in the new year, and again, of wondering if they had taken things further in the USA (the MOBS course suggested that they had); and thinking that the panel didn’t seem at all impressed. But the most abiding memory concerned their last question, which was about the need to take a companion/carer with me to provide the personal care they apparently thought I needed. I regarded this idea as quite preposterous – I was entirely self-sufficient in self-care – and replied with near-scorn to the suggestion. And that was it. I left feeling very disappointed – I don’t interview well, and the uncomfortable fact is that a) I know it, but b) don’t seem to have found a way of dealing with it. It had been a worthwhile attempt, albeit in the end rather chastening; and I was still going to find out more about outdoor activities in the UK – or at least, England – through visiting the Calvert Trust early in the new year.

  To my amazement, the interview was successful and I was awarded a fellowship, to study exactly what the clumsy title had stated. From memory, however, it was now so close to Christmas that trying to fill out the six weeks of the fellowship with a completed programme for a visit six months away – and who knew what contacts I might find at the American Spinal Cord Injury Association AGM which it might prove fruitful to foll
ow? – had to be parked until the new year.

  Derwentwater

  At New Year I went north to the Lakes, and on New Year’s day was in Keswick. In the main street around the Moot Hall there appeared to be a gathering of runners. Asking around it turned out that this was the first (?) New Year’s Day run of its kind: along Borrowdale to Seatoller, then up over Honister and down to Buttermere, followed by a return over Newlands and via Portinscale back to Keswick. About 22 miles, someone told me, a road race but largely for fell-runners.

  Having watched them leave I wandered off in the opposite direction, out of Keswick and on pavements and footpaths to Portinscale. I turned left and went along the road which wound own the western side of Derwentwater. The traffic was very light, almost non-existent. I reached a junction where one road was signposted to Grange, a small village just beyond the southern end of Derwentwater, bypassed by the runners as they made their way along Borrowdale; the other road went to Newlands and Buttermere, from where the runners would be coming back. There was a man standing at the junction, almost as though he was directing the runners to the correct road to take, with what looked like a pile of plastic water bottles; refreshments for the runners, I supposed, as they made their way back to Keswick with only a couple of miles to go.

  He shouted across to me. “Hi, what are you doing here?”

  “Don’t worry, I haven’t been on the run.”

  “Aye, I know, but what are you doing?”

  We got talking. He was called Boyd Millen, a scouser, living in Keswick, and currently unemployed. Yes, he was a fell runner, but the reason for acting as a marshal was injury. He talked about other runs that went on locally, and in particular an annual race round Derwentwater organised by the local athletics club: almost exactly 10 miles. “You could get round in your chair, if you’ve pushed up here from Keswick.”