Accessibility and Archives: “Leave off discourse of disability”?

In this, the first of a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on some of the roots of contemporary attitudes toward disability, attitudes which affect decision-making in our sector (limiting accessibility to secure employment, to our premises, events, finding aids and records, and the discoverability of past disabled lives).

In January 2023, the National Trust and the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries launched a video about the previously hidden histories of a sample of disabled people from across its collections.  There was inevitably a culture war backlash in certain sections of the press.  One commentator, for example, claimed this was a “patronising parade of newly discovered 'disabled' individuals”, the scare quotes inaccurately insinuating that this was an assertion without evidence.  A related line of attack was that this was a woke virtue-signalling exercise aimed at rewriting history for our era when “[e]verything is now viewed through the prism of the modern obsession with diversity, identity and, lately, slavery”.  Of course, it is true that disability is an identity that would not necessarily have been understood or embraced by people in past societies.  But, there is an  underlying contemporary ableism evident in the suggestion that being termed disabled would be perceived as a shameful slur, as if disability must always connote the incapacity, dependence, and passivity of an “invalid”. 

I may be an early career professional but I was a child of the seventies and eighties.  I can’t remember a single lesson in school devoted to the existence of disabled people in the present day, let alone having existed throughout human history.  In their absence, there was a considerable, but incomplete, silence in the rest of the culture.  In terms of sensory impairments, for example, children’s television offered us Diana Purwell the blind heroine of The Moon Stallion, and the non-speaking deaf title character of Our John Willie.  There were also invalid, wheelchair-using children in shows based on older children’s literature such as The Secret Garden and Heidi, Colin and Clara. 

But representation in and of itself is not enough.  Diana’s impairment is somewhat framed through a disability trope of the “Blind seer”.  John Willie is partly presented through the trope of “care-giver abandonment” (through the death of his father, but also the possibility that his brother would need to institutionalise him in a workhouse, with adult advisors encouraging him to free himself forever).  Not at all the ‘idiot’ that people assume him to be (because he can’t speak), he is also a pitiable “cute mute” – attractive through his innocence.  At the start, he is present at the coalface during the disaster that orphans him – but even this moment of agency has a tinge of the trope of “disability as superpower” as it is John Willie that rescues his non-disabled brother.  Colin and Clara both appear to have some kind of psychosomatic paralysis, overcoming which enables them both to be cured.  There is clearly a danger that this looks like they have been faking it and fooling everyone, and more generally that disabled people could become non-disabled if only they put in some effort.  But it also reinforces the idea of disability as “tragedy”, and a miraculous cure as a “happy ending”.  

In the International Year of the Disabled, Blue Peter may have attempted to inculcate sympathy and admiration for the struggle and achievement of Joey Deacon, whose cerebral palsy meant he had been institutionalised as a child, more than fifty years earlier.  If the intention was to make his story “inspirational” (itself problematic), instead the focus taught a generation of children a new playground insult.  The intellectually disabled John Brownlee in The Machine Gunners similarly generated a memorable catchphrase (“Where you going now?”) without increasing understanding.  But he arguably also reinforced the patronising idea that disabled people are “children in adult bodies”. 

It is also worth reflecting on what was not represented: I remember no disabled adults living ‘normal lives’ (e.g. being parents).  Of course, in the real world, disabled adults were undertaking a civil rights struggle, campaigning for equality (including in the workplace), to which the media paid little attention.  The protests at the ITV Telethons in the early 1990s were baffling to stars of the era who felt that they were doing a good thing (that might be good for their career) by raising money to help piteous, disadvantaged people.  Understanding disability through a charitable lens, even led them to tone-police the protestors as shrill, impertinent and ungrateful.

This is not intended to steer the profession away from including disability stories as accessible, relevant, and potentially interesting to all.  But it is always advisable to approach such narratives from the perspective of disabled people themselves.  That is one very good reason for diversifying who is included in our teams. 

Guest contributions to this blog series are welcomed, particularly if you are working with records of disabled people or with disabled people.  If you are interested, in the first instance, please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .