Accessibility and Archives: “a permanent liability and a burden to the institution”?
In this blog Philip Milnes-Smith celebrates the life of writer and activist William Ritchie Watson (1904-1965). The post includes historic language which is now, rightly, deemed offensive. Unfortunately, some of the attitudes he faced continue to affect disabled people.
The breach birth of Bill Watson at Clydebank in 1904 resulted in what his doctors termed ‘double obstetric brachial paralysis’, meaning that neither of his arms was able to do what arms ordinarily do. A medical report of him aged 3 noted, “he has learned to feed himself with his feet and can play with toys. He can even play a mouth organ and light a match. He is a bright and intelligent child.” Aged seven, he removed to Macleod in Alberta, Canada, with his family (the whole party at real risk of deportation because of his bodily difference due to eugenic fears about him needing state support for life).
Between his first two memoirs (My Desire; and I Give You Yesterday) we gain a picture of an outdoor, frontier, life with friends, raiding gardens (as lookout), baseball (as umpire, or a “runner for a proxied batter”), but also riding horses and ice skating. Inclusion was reportedly such that he could pass unremarked in the street in his Canadian home town. Indeed, he contrasts his own experience with Lord Byron, a century or so earlier, who associated his physical disability with “corroding bitterness” arising from the attitudes of his mother and school fellows. But it should be noted that Bills’s mother had to argue for his admission to school (despite attendance being compulsory). Having initially been admitted on a trial basis, learning to write and draw by foot, he would go on to matriculate with first class honours, and an expectation of continuing into higher education.
Graduating in both Arts and Law from the University of Alberta in Edmonton (see preview image), he confounded the expectation of the administrator quoted in the title above. Although his disability was enough to spare him the hazing his fellow-students endured, he was otherwise included “as a number like anyone else… unknown to the examiner… accepted by the students as one of them”. A member of the Glee Club he performed in the chorus of the opera Maritana, but he also learned to ride an adapted bicycle, to swim in order to sail, “became active in Boys’ Camps”, participated as goalie in a three-way ice hockey match, and travelled 5000 miles as the mascot of the University rugby team.
Bill was clear that he was disabled by living in a world where inventions are “made for those who can use their hands”, noting some of the workarounds he had put in at home (an adapted telephone of his own devising for example), and observes that “if I had the power, life would be one continuous procession of swing doors, all electrical fixtures would be controlled from the floor” and so on. Nonetheless, he seeks to hang on to the general reader’s attention by refraining from enumerating “ways to make it easier for those who are physically handicapped”. Although he got work and work experience, he was clearly also subject to discrimination from employers. There even came a brief moment when he considered suicide as the best means of helping repay his mother (from life insurance): ‘What use are we to society? Let’s be off!’ He also notes his indignation at the YMCA publishing the story of him learning to swim framed as an inspirational “triumph over almost insurmountable obstacles”: “Its cheapness sickened me.”
If going to University had prompted “a vivid awakening to the difference between myself and others” and a desire to disguise his difference as best as possible, the big shift in his thinking had been the remark of an employer (echoed by Alberta’s premier) that “my condition would embarrass the employees.” With hindsight, his rebuff was viewed as a “blessing in disguise” in awakening Bill to the need for improving the lot of those with similar differences but without the advantages of his education. In a vast country with just one specialist school offering vocational training (and that “an old three-storey wooden structure without an elevator or ramp”), he began to research vocational and life-skill training for disabled people that would “teach in a few months what it would take a person a lifetime to learn for himself… [and] to fit the cripple into some means of livelihood”, “liberating their powers and engaging them in activities that would enlarge the meaning of life for them” so “that they may be better able to readjust themselves to their environment and become independent citizens in their community”. The necessity of his final aim of making disabled people “acceptable to the rest of society” is stressed by the repeated prejudice he encountered against feeding himself in public.
The first memoir was conceived not only as a means of making him an income, but as a means of furthering his cause through opportunities for public speaking, where he took the opportunity to admonish audiences “to look upon the physically handicapped as normal beings. Do not look upon them with pity and particularly not revulsion.” He notes that people had tried to convince his mother “that my place was in a circus among the freaks that people paid to see” (rather than university). But, like Sarah Biffin 130 years earlier, he nevertheless ended up ‘performing’ his disability in public: “He will shave himself, feed himself, and draw with his feet.” Just as she was marketed as the ‘Eighth Wonder’ of the world, we see him infantilised as a “Boy Wonder” and editorialised as “a triumph over handicaps” and “the modern miracle” laying down “a challenge to the people of today” through inspirational overcoming. On the other hand, touring also gave him the opportunity to train young disabled people in the rudiments of, for example, “mouth writing”. This included Myron Angus (1926-2004), who would go on to be an artist. Bill’s wife Marguerite also undertook some training in occupational therapy in case that would prove useful in their mission.
Eventually the Deputy Minister for Education met Bill, choosing to postpone decision-making about commissioning provision until he had researched current European practice. The Watsons’ tour lacked financial backing from the government but was supported by The Associated Canadian Clubs. Arriving in London (England) in the early spring of 1937, he notes that people were as willing to help him as anywhere: “[p]erhaps more so, because of the large number of amputation cases living in London since the War.” They were unable to secure a UK publisher or speaking engagements, but toured special schools including Chailey Heritage, and left with a photostat copy of the plans for the workshops at the Crippled Boys’ Training College at Stanmore (a pioneering step-free complex), then under construction.
The second volume of memoirs concludes with his reflections on European practice, but leaves the Canadian outcome unclear. A 1941 news article allows us to glimpse him advocating for post-war rehabilitation of disabled veterans: “he suggested that these men be placed in various centres and that instructors teach them a trade in which they would be able to derive a living, commensurate with their ability.” His obituary in the Calgary Herald, notes that “[d]ue to Mr. Watson's lectures, a training school was opened near Toronto in 1949 for the physically handicapped. This seems to be the Variety Village at Scarborough, described that year as “an Habilitation School for crippled adolescents aged seventeen and eighteen, with a staff of five teachers”.
In Alberta he is commemorated as an advocate of, and activist for, other disabled people with William Watson Lodge, a complex of accessible and reasonably priced accommodation units in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park which has 12 miles of trails accessible by wheelchair, helping to equalise access to the great outdoors for disabled people.
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.