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 | You and Yours - Transcript ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 02.04.04 – PUTTING DISABILITY BACK INTO HISTORY PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON Byron, Milton, Nelson - they're all familiar names from the past but would you think of them as disabled? Researchers at the University of Leicester think that perhaps you should. They have been looking at how our museums portray disability and they say that often it is being written out. Annie Delin is the team's leader and she's currently meeting curators across the country to talk about it. Lizz Pearson met Annie, but first she visited two museums where they have discovered some intriguing stories, beginning at the Hollytrees Museum of Social History in Colchester where the curator is Tom Hodgson. HODGSON We're going up to the top point that the lift gives access to in Hollytrees. The physical access to this building is important but it's only part of the work we've done on access. A lot of people think it stops with lifts and ramps but it goes a lot, lot further than that. Come up into the Childhood Gallery, which is probably the chief attraction within the museum displays. We've got a lovely collection of toys and dolls. PEARSON High chairs, clothes from - you've obviously had quite a lot of fun. HODGSON Walking down through the displays here, across the snakes and ladders carpet, you can even detour through the snake if you want to but we come just towards the end of the displays and we've actually got a little section here talking about the local artist John Vine. We start really with one bold sentence at the top - John Vine, who was born disabled, was a successful painter living in Colchester in the 1800s. PEARSON Now you've included him in the childhood section next to items from - looks like - the '30s, the '40s and then more recent Star Wars toys familiar from the '70s and '80s, why have you included him here? HODGSON I think we chose to put John Vine into this space because of the lovely painting he did of the Philips' children in about the 1840s - the children there with their toys, there's a little wheelbarrow there, a boy reading a book - but it seemed to fit quite well and this picture really led us to put the display into the childhood gallery but also because we discussed John Vine's upbringing - how he was born, he was born with almost no arms, so his hands really came out of his shoulders. As a result, which was typical for the time back in about 1800, he ended up being exhibited as a curiosity in a travelling circus. So we'll go now and have a look at another artist who's got a connection to disability, which actually is not known by many people. Jane Taylor - the name may not be very well known but her main work is - it's Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. We're very fortunate we actually know that the poem Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star was written in Colchester in 1806. Jane Taylor and her sister Ann were probably the most prolific children's authors of the early 19th Century. And we know from the autobiography that Ann Taylor wrote that her mother had virtually no hearing and the fact that she had no hearing meant that the talking wasn't of any use at home whereas reading and writing were and she actually says that because of her mother's deafness that the two daughters grew up as authors. PEARSON So that was the beginning of their writing - the beginning of the nursery rhyme? HODGSON That's right, that's right. PEARSON Now the way that you have presented this is - it's a kind of tangential way of bringing disability into the museum agenda and it feels very natural. HODGSON It's not kind of focussing to the exclusion of all else on the disability, it's including it holistically within the overall story. EVANS I'm Jonathan Evans and I'm the archivist at the RoyalLondonHospital and curator of its museum and archives. MUSEUM EXHIBIT In April 1890 the remains of Joseph Carey Merrick were laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the East End of London. EVANS One of the things that's affected the way that we present our material is I suppose the story of Joseph Merrick which is such a famous one world wide. MUSEUM EXHIBIT He was the Elephant Man. EVANS We've collected various objects relating to Joseph and we've got, for example, a replica of his hat, he wore a hat and veil to hide his face when he was travelling about and exposed to public gaze. PEARSON And it's quite a familiar hat and veil to anyone who's seen the film, with only a tiny sort of slit for his eyes there. EVANS Yes, the thing that strikes you immediately is the size of the hat, his head was the circumference of a man's waist. PEARSON Now Joseph Merrick is probably the main attraction for a lot of the visitors that come here because he's well known about but you also have, in your displays, information about a number of other personalities from the past who did have disabilities too but whose disabilities were not so familiar to people. EVANS Yes, we've got one over here. PEARSON A display about the x-ray men. EVANS X-rays were discovered in 1895, of the early operators of the machinery - the x-ray machinery - there's a photograph here of Ernest Harnack who was a pioneer - a radiographer. Now he developed quite a lot of the x-ray machinery himself, he wasn't initially aware of the dangers of radiation, the dangers of x-ray machinery and by the time he'd found out about it - in the early 1900s - he and some of the other radiographers were already showing signs of ill health - they would use their hands to see whether the x-ray machinery was working or not and they would pick up wet x-ray plates which would be radioactive. PEARSON So he lost his hands because of the work he'd been doing. EVANS He eventually lost his hands yeah and we're hoping to acquire one of his artificial hands that his family have been treasuring. PEARSON And just in a small space in the museum you've got displays on Joseph Merrick, the x-ray men, how have you thought about the way that you present what you have? EVANS I suppose we haven't consciously decided to feature disability, in the way we've tried to present the material is in the context of the life of that person and the contribution that that person's made. The objects aren't sort of divorced from the people who used them. ACTUALITY - ANNIE DELIN BRIEFING TEAM So we need to make a plan for what we're doing over the next two days and we need to interview the curators at 11. Right okay. And then I'd like to see Nelson's knife and fork which I think … DELIN My name's Annie Delin and I've come to the NationalMaritimeMuseum in Greenwich to have a look at how disabled people are represented in museums. There's four areas where you find disabled people really noticeably - there's the local characters - the freaks if you like - then you have the superheroes, you have these people who have become so famous that we've forgotten they were disabled, so you have people like Byron, Nelson, JohnMilton, Wedgwood. Then you have artists who - there's a surprising number of - who are people who make or create - William Henry Hunt who was a landscape artist who was the tutor of Ruskin and was very well known in his day but he was also a wheelchair user. And then finally and most invisibly you've got ordinary people and one of the reasons that we're finding it so difficult to absorb disability into society now is because we're not seeing it historically, because it's not being shown in museums as much as it could be. ACTUALITY - ANNIE DELIN So we're just going to have a look into the Nelson gallery. DELIN This is the place that I've really been looking forward to because Nelson's obviously one of the key figures in disability history. It will be great to see what kind of images there are of him and how much they show his impairment and what he was like before and after. PEARSON So why hasn't disability been shown in museums in the past? DELIN There are loads of reasons and a lot of them are really good reasons, just the ordinary things that curators have to think about such as what are you going to say about the object when you show it. Contemporary worries - today's worries - about what you say when you show stuff and will people dislike it, will people get upset by certain things or will people think well this is voyeurism, you shouldn't have put it on display because it's encouraging people to stare. PEARSON When you say upset do you mean offended? DELIN It could be any degree of upset and I've had suggested to me by people that I've interviewed that somebody could be upset if they've recently had a diagnosis of something and they come face to face with an image of what it looks like 10 years down the line. But then there is a sense - some people - I mean the recent fuss about Alison Lapper in Trafalgar Square has shown you that it's possible for people to say we don't want to look at this stuff, we don't want to know this. And one of the things about disability that you have to be aware of is there are some unpleasant stories to tell. PEARSON But is part of the reason why disability hasn't been displayed in museum is it because we don't actually have the objects that would enable us to make displays and to mention disability? DELIN We have stacks of objects and one of the great things about this project has been the luxury of going into museums time and time again, sitting down in front of a computer, having been told that there are five items in that museum and having looked at those items and putting in search words and coming up with another 25 items which the museum might say - Oh I didn't know we had that - or they might say - Oh I knew we had that but I didn't know there was any connection with disability. And so the kind of sense of discovery is fantastic, there's a feeling of archaeology, of brushing the dust away and discovering an object underneath it. PEARSON Is this also to a certain extent about reappraising figures from the past who we might not have thought of as disabled? DELIN I think it's about reclaiming figures because I think in the days when they lived there wasn't such a big divide between being disabled and not being disabled, people had a range of abilities. So actually it wasn't incompatible in Byron's day to walk with a limp and still be a bit of a lothario and be somebody who wrote fantastic poetry. And so I think getting them back and saying you can have an impairment and you can still do great things is something which will transcend the rather us and them arguments that we're having in the present day. And we're supposed to be more civilised, we're supposed to have progressed as a society but can you imagine a one armed, partially blind naval admiral now? I find that hard to imagine. So why have we gone backwards? ROBINSON AnnieDelin ending that report by LizzPearson. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is not responsible for external websites |
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