For some time, I have been seeking out a
person with intellectual disability to include in this website. Despite books such as Downs: a history, and other historical research about intellectual
disability, very few named individuals with intellectual disability have left a
record. In the late twentieth century, with
the growth of deinstitutionalization and consensus about normalization and
human rights, this situation has begun to change. Increased recognition of people with
intellectual disability is important because it shows that all people have
value and significance and are worthy of respect.
Mabel Cooper was one of the leading lights of
this new generation of people with learning difficulties. She was born in London, where her mother lived on
the street. The pair were picked up by
the authorities, and sent to separate institutions, and her mother subsequently
disappeared. Mabel spent her childhood
in various children’s homes. She did not
attend school, and consequently did not learn to read and write. Later she was labeled as having learning
disability and sent to St Lawrence’s Hospital, a long-stay institution in
Caterham, Surrey, which she lived for the next 20 years.
“I moved to St Lawrence’s when I was seven,
because they only took children what went to school in this home. And I never went to school so I had to
move. In them days they gave you a
test. You went to London or somewhere
because they’d give you a test before they made you go anywhere.”
“When I first went in there, even just
getting out of the car you could hear the racket. You think you’re going to a madhouse. When you first went there you could hear
people screaming and shouting outside.
It was very noisy but I think you do get used to them after a little while
because it’s like verywhere that’s big.
If there’s a lot of noise, and they had like big dormitories, didn’t
they?”
A similar institution played a much smaller role
in my own life, because my father was the GP for Manor House Hospital in
Aylesbury, a smaller, residential hospital for people
with intellectual disability. Every
Christmas Day from as early as I can remember, my dad and I would visit the wards – or
“houses’, as they were called – and meet the residents and staff. Later,
I worked at Manor House during my year off before University, and in my
vacations. I remember a friendly,
cheerful place, which was clean and warm and seemed benign. As you toured the hospital, you encountered
a cross-section of the intellectual disability population, ranging from people who were
profoundly impaired, lacked speech and barely interacted with you, through to
Bierton House, which was where people who had mild intellectual disability
lived. Many of these folks were great
communicators and very engaging, and they always interacted with my father
and myself. One of them, David Seward,
became a family friend and would come for tea at my home from time to time. It was this group in particular who one felt
should never have been in an institution in the first place.
Mabel
Cooper, who I never had the opportunity to meet, seems to have been such a person. Mabel left St Lawrence’s Hospital in 1977 to live in the
community. Later, the hospital was completely
closed down, and she was given the honour of pressing the button to blow it
up. She was adamant that large institutions
should never be allowed in future.
Cooper had become an intellectual disability
celebrity through her work with Croydon People First, a self-advocacy group. She eventually became chair of London People
First. In both roles, she supported other
people with learning difficulties to be heard.
She collaborated with Dorothy Atkinson and other researchers at the Open
University, who helped people with learning difficulties to research and tell
their stories as part of the Life History Project.
Mabel
Cooper’s own life story was published in Forgotten Lives (1997), and inspired many readers with and without
learning difficulties. Mabel went into
schools to talk to children and young
people about the discrimination and bullying which people with learning
difficulties face. With Dorothy
Atkinson, she also presented at conferences.
She seems to have been a very charismatic person, who used humour to get
her points across and changed perceptions about intellectual disability.
As recognition for her work, Mabel Cooper was
awarded an honorary degree by the Open University, during a ceremony at the
Barbican in London in 2010. As Dorothy Atkinson has written in a tribute for The Guardian, Mabel
“had a tremendous ability to draw on
personal experience to tell stories that, written or spoken, engaged and
inspired her readers and listeners in many walks of life.”
The inclusion of her obituary in the Radio 4
Last Word programme, after she died of cancer in April 2013, is another example
of how this ordinary woman with intellectual disability achieved unprecedented
recognition and made an extraordinary impact.
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