Accessibility and Archives: On not presuming non-disability (Part 1)

In this, the first of two blogs to open 2024, Philip Milnes-Smith challenges the assumption that absence of direct evidence for disability in our records amounts to evidence of absence.

Frank Yanton Ruck was born and grew up at the Cambray Spa, in Cheltenham but he did not enter the family business (as medical electrician, chiropodist or masseur).  In the 1911 census he was a dentist’s assistant, perhaps with an eye to following in his older brother’s footsteps.  It may be no more than a transcription issue, but Frank has not yet been spotted in the 1921 census.  In the 1939 Register he was a Time-Card clerk in an Aircraft Office.  But Frank’s heart appears to have been in show-business.  In 1913 he used a bequest to become co-proprietor of a “high class picture theatre and skating rink”, the Electric Empire, at the Corn Hall in Cirencester.  Additional attractions included variety shows, beauty contests, and weekly residences by touring acts.  Just at the point when news reports were celebrating its success and saying the people of the district were “under a debt of gratitude to the proprietors”, the Electric Empire appears to have ceased trading.  By the end of that year, he was recorded as a vocalist at a “Farewell Smoking Concert” for a local football captain’s retirement. 

Following the opening of First World War hostilities he can be seen through newspaper reports performing several times, first at a fundraising concert for an ambulance, and then as a humourist at the New Court hospital: “a comedian to the fingertips” producing “paroxysms of laughter right through”.  He later supported wounded soldiers (from New Court hospital) to perform Hawaiian Butterfly “the latest song and trot craze”.  All are shown so swathed in blankets that any crutches or slings (or amputated limbs) would not be visible.  He was implied to be an old favourite with the Tommies at the Racecourse Hospital who “kept his audience in roars of laughter in his character songs”.  One of his other interests was motor-cycling, notwithstanding a road accident that had left him with a head injury in 1912, and he was part of the Cheltenham club, entering reliability trials and on one occasion emerging with “full marks, silver award and prize”.

In none of the newspaper reports from which we can reconstruct this period of his life is there any mention that Frank Yarnton Ruck was disabled.  Indeed, preconceptions and biases around disability implying incapacity may seem to rule it out.  On reflection, however, we might start to wonder why he was seemingly not called up for war service – he was in his twenties and not obviously part of a scheduled (or reserved) occupation, like his older brother (now a dentist in Taunton).   Although Frank appears to have remained in the Cheltenham area for the duration, he did not hit the headlines either as a conscientious objector or as the object of direct action from ‘white feather girls’.  So could he have been considered exempt on the grounds of physical unfitness?  There is a 1922 photograph in the Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic showing him walking in town the previous Saturday.  He has a stick – but so do the father and son either side of him, and the latter has it dangling from his forearm.  So is this an ‘invalid aid’ or a fashion statement? 

We can in fact be categorical, but only because in 1966, he donated to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London a childhood diary of his hospital adventure there (and some extraordinary ‘child patient perspective’ photographs like the preview image).  Without it, it may very well never occurred to anyone that Frank Yarnton Ruck was a disabled man.  That his donation has since been twice lost is perhaps testament to a past lack of care for the heritage of disabled voices and perspectives.  Stephanie Williamson, Co-Chair of Architects for Health, first rediscovered it in a long-locked storeroom at the hospital’s Bolsover Street site in 2008 and it was subsequently rediscovered at the Herbert Seddon Teaching Centre on the Stanmore site a decade later by Dr Iva Hauptmannova.

Back in 1905, Frank Yarnton Ruck, at the age of 15, had travelled up from Cheltenham to undergo two operations on his foot requiring subsequent treatment first with adapted shoes (with “sole plates put on to keep my toes down”) and then a wooden splint and “screw shoes”.  At the end of his stay, a couple of months after admission, Frank was fitted with what he rather vaguely describes as ‘my instruments’.  The donation letter accompanying his account from sixty years previously, included the observation that the work done had enabled him to walk well enough to have spent “sixteen years on the stage” – a career which, if professional, it must be said is yet to be independently evidenced.  But even if it were only amateur, it is one which clearly meant more to him than the jobs we can identify in the public record.  What this case study shows is that it can be wrong to presume that silence on the topic of disability means the person was not disabled. 

There is a particular piquancy in the fact that another of the WW1 concert parties was in aid of Lord Mayor Treloar Cripples’ Hospital and Training School in Hampshire, where some of the boys (perhaps even some from Cheltenham) were, it was reported, fulfilling “a War Office Contract supplying belts and straps for our soldiers.” But we can now also raise the possibility that the amusing character songs and performances sometimes included an element of him performing disability.

With thanks to Jill Waller of Cheltenham Local History Society, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, and Nicola Lane of Pegleg Productions.

Guest contributions to this series remain welcome.  In the first instance, please contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .