UK Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: “Travels and Adventures”
UK Disability History Month runs from 16th November to 16th December
In this, the first in a sequence of blogposts for Disability History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on a Victorian memoir of childhood and youth. The post includes historic language which is now, rightly, deemed offensive.
Disability History Month this year has as its theme children and young people. So let me re-introduce George Samuel Cull (1840-1904), whose signing was mentioned in a previous blog. He had his first-person memoir published in 1862 at the age of only 21. Its editor shares his “pleasure in contributing in this way towards [his] only means of support”, noting as follows: “It is to be hoped that his triple infirmity may be a pass-port to the benevolent feelings of those to whom he may apply to purchase his book. The kind people of Bradford and Newmarket [Ontario] subscribed for 300 copies, to enable him to publish the work, and thereby place him in a position to support through life, what we may truly call, a miserable existence.” As he had four more decades to live, it is reasonable to wonder how long they were prepared to act on their sympathy and pity. Contemporary charity advertisements for disability often show children and young people to get viewers to open their wallets, while some contemporary political rhetoric stigmatises disabled adults as shirkers, fakers and an unaffordable burden on ‘hard-working families’.
Cull had become deaf as a baby in Woolwich and his memoir begins not just with incidents in his life, but also his conception of the world, before encountering Deaf community through school. The past being a foreign country, we find a four-year-old with obvious sensory impairment (and thus communication difficulties) having unsupervised adventures. That is not say he was isolated – he got into a scrape with a neighbour, for example. He insists he was then “ignorant” – untaught and unable to communicate adequately his ideas and experiences: “I never had any satisfaction in conversing with my friends though they could understand me and I could comprehend them in many things.” John Kitto’s 1843 account of deafness (including his own) notes of a deaf boy of his acquaintance, “The signs were of his own devising, and had mostly been learned from him by the lads with whom he associated. I observed, however, that if a lad had something to express for which no existing sign was sufficient, this lad would invent a new one for the occasion, or would persevere in trying several, till he hit upon one which the deaf-mute could understand.”
Having moved to Hulme, a visitor informed Cull’s parents about an Institution which could teach him to read and write. Admitted within days to this Old Trafford school, he “was amazed to see so many deaf and dumb boys, who conversed with each other, of course by signs.” We should note that he mentions two of the five teachers were Deaf themselves and we can see their names on the previous page to Cull’s in the 1851 census: George H Hogg (from Bideford) and George F C Goodwin (still working there thirty years later). Although most of the boys were from Staffordshire, Cheshire and Lancashire, the name above Cull’s in the census is William Jones, born in the East Indies. The memoir adds the detail that his mother was “a native of India, who had been brought to England by his father, but… was about to return to her native country.”
Cull suffered a similar (although not trans-continental) separation when his family moved back to Woolwich. He remained in the school even on Christmas Day because they could only afford his rail fares once a year for the summer holidays. Again, it is interesting to note that he was travelling alone, accompanied by his father only from the London terminus to Woolwich. Once there, however, he had considerable freedom. He was alone, a few streets from home when, distracted by watching a flag, he was the victim of a ‘hit and run’ not hearing the speeding horse’s approach. He was similarly unsupervised when he was kicked by a horse in a stable, again not having heard the warning sounds. Neither was the cause of his further disablement.
He recounts taking his younger brother on a jaunt into London under the mistaken impression that his mother had given him permission. Communicating his offence afterwards had clearly been beyond the signing power of his parents, as he was sent back to school early with a letter forwarded to the Head Master: “I was called into his presence in the parlour and he signed to me from the letter; I understood all,.. and I became very much afraid;.. I deserved punishment to be inflicted on my two hands— four hard blows on each with the gutta percha strap, sharp as a knife.”
Notwithstanding this, Cull seems pretty positive about his school experience, noting that there had been a firework display shortly after he became a pupil, and outings beyond the adjacent Botanical Gardens to “Belle Vue Gardens, and Chinese Menagerie and Peel Park, and the great model of Edinburgh, and Panoramas of a great battle at Waterloo and also River Nile in Egypt”. He also notes that they attended the Queen’s visit in 1851 and were visited by a ‘giant’: “I wondered to see such a high man, for his height was about seven feet and a half, his arm was so high that a man could walk under it; he could not enter into the room without stooping; no door was high enough for him to pass.” He does not mention that the school was adjacent to Henshaw’s Blind Asylum – although he observes that the (shared) chapel had a blind organist.
Having finished school, he was meant to be turning his attention to learning a trade. He learned to sew at a military tailor’s shop, but his young friends mocked the trade as “nasty” and unmanly, and he was clearly easily distracted (e.g. downing tools to see the King of Portugal, or to watch a deer hunt). He experimented with carpentry, but there did not seem much work, and it was not technically interesting. Having tried tailoring again, he had to give it up when his father died (on service in the Crimean War) meaning that he could no longer live in Woolwich. At this point, now aged 15, he wrote to Prince Albert stating, “I want work to get money, I want to be a smith to make arms to slay the Russians.” Equipped with a reply authorising his employment in the Dockyard he encountered an Inspector who told him that people like him were not permitted to work there as the foreman could not understand him, despite his objection that it did not take long to learn finger-spelling. A few days later, he tried his luck again and secured work in the “fuze-room” working on shells in Laboratory Square.
An industrial accident which killed three, left him physically unhurt but frightened and determined to emigrate. The disablement that prompted the writing of the book occurred in a horrific railroad accident in Ontario which detached a finger and necessitated the amputation of a leg. He was considered to have been to blame and so was not entitled to compensation. He did persuade the authorities to grant him a prosthetic leg. However, they proposed a wooden one, and he wanted an articulated cork one with springs because he had seen “a black man who had a short stump not so long as mine and could walk very well“. Living by his wits, he made his way to and from Philadelphia to obtain what was subsequently something of a sensation: in hospital where his sight was saved, he reports that someone “brought a great many priests to see the wonder of a cork leg which I wore.”
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with records of Deaf and Disabled people, or using historic records with Deaf and disabled people. If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance, contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .
Thumbnail image: By Unknown engraver - Google Books, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124078904