Every eight hours (1960)

[Music] Communications to move people and things and orders and ideas Communications to keep the peace to nourish the healthy to sustain the sick to keep the place going give me the fire service straight away [Laughter] [Music] three injured 75 North Road right be there right away you can liken it to an immense and busy Brave always at work never at peace but you cannot really do that for compared with the simplest human brain London is small and clumsy London may have 8 million people but your brain has 15,000 million cells six times more than all the people in the world now suppose for example that London's Central telephone exchanges were bombed your body too depends completely on such efficient Communications on the signals from your arms and legs your ears and eyes they are sorted out in your brain passed back for the necessary action but suppose your central exchange was damaged before your birth your limbs are without guidance unable to do what you tell them if your brain were damaged here you would be a true with slow stiff movements if it were damaged here you'd be an aoid with your movements sudden and meaningless if it were damaged here you'd be an ATT taxic moving involuntarily all the time every 8 hours another child is born in Britain every 8 hours of every day of every week of every year every eight [Music] hours [Music] there are more than 40,000 spastics living in Britain today more than 40,000 and those are the ones that we know about how many are there that we don't know about hidden away perhaps for years by their families fearful of the neighbors saying they've got a child who's a bit funny 40,000 spastics what's being done to help them let's trace the history 1943 the first Center we had ever known was started in caralon by a physiotherapist Mrs Collis who'd worked with spastics in America 1946 Henry Weston started the first Society the British Council for the welfare of spastics he attracted the interest of Mr Mr Bosworth Smith of the Ministry of Education together they encouraged parents to form their own groups that year the Scottish Council for the care of spastics was born Mr J Leslie Williams opened the first residential school for spastics at Kon 1948 in Devon they started the first Dame Hannah Rogers school and Miss macko as herself opened the puckle Hill school for adolescence at graves end everything now seemed set fair and then for three long years little happened the National Health Service so newly formed had its hands full with other problems the first Society was in no position to launch a frontal attack now the longer you delay treatment of a growing the less the child will improve parents knew this and were desperate and now enter four completely new people each of them detered deted to do something more about this awful problem Ian Dawson Shepard Alex Moira Eric Hudson and Jean gwood it is 1951 and with a capital of5 they start the national Society they draw up a 5-year plan to raise a million pound to establish parents groups in every big town to open local and National pilot centers for spastics to persuade the powers of the be local authorities all Westminster to set up more and more centers and to tell the British public what it's all about to tell it loud and clear to the lucky ones the ones like us perhaps one person in a thousand had heard the word and F still knew what it meant every means was used to reach the people people The Daily Mirror featured spastics in its Ruggles cartoon money is the thing you know money can buy a lot more than you imagine parents groups started collection drives because sometimes the only way to get money is to go out and ask for it a good cause no a proper cause a righteous cause a decent justification for a fit man's right to be strong and straight and in command of his body there were hundreds of thousands of [Music] leak the press the television the news reels and the radio paid [Music] attention new parents groups were started in England and Wales there even arrived a special spastics newspaper to keep everyone in touch in communication target1 million he didn't come in all that easily to begin with does money ever come in easily but there were many devices in 1953 there came the Christmas seals first 2 million of them now 160 million pubs turned themselves into a network of collecting [Music] centers [Applause] there were new ideas in shops and then in came Show [Music] Business the entertainers started their own efforts with Wilfred pickles the Stars Organization for spastics 1 million [Music] forp and in 1957 Target achieved and then [Music] crisis growth had been so rapid that within a few months 1 million wasn't enough plans for expansion couldn't get underway but a bold announcement was made the target for the next three years was2 million every penny of which would be needed for the job that had to be done and in 1959 Target achieved again £3 million in all money out of the Public's pocket your pocket now what does the nation National Society done with this money how's it being spent well here's Hawksworth Hall a long-term assessment center for spastics the first of its kind in the world after a spell here the children who' previously been thought impossible to educate at all can be sent on to one of the society's [Music] schools at regular intervals a board meets at Hawksworth Hall to assess each child's capabilities they're examined medically and bio psychologist in the most complete and thorough way that's possible in Britain the experts determine their chances how much can be hoped for from each individual what treatment what establishment will be the most suitable and valuable for the child the decision is reviewed after a few months near tixover is the Wilfred pickles residential school it looks after children between 5 and [Music] 16 this 9 years old boy is an aoid he cannot it up for any length of time he cannot write but he can work a typewriter and the result of this difficult and awkward struggle is good work by any standards sums are written in his exercise book and he hammers out the answers on the machine his essays would do credit to any boy all this would have been barred to him before this young fellow had not been to school at all until he was nearly 12 he cannot use his hands enough even to work a typewriter let alone to grasp a pencil a little Ingenuity comes to the rescue and with this tool and a special keyboard he can now Express on paper the perfectly normal thoughts of his mind here he is writing his first letter home this isn't funny or sad or even pathetic this is healthy adaptability if you like Cricket okay you play cricket and if you have to bat from a wheelchair or if you can't run about when you field well that's a game too isn't it and if you're a girl net ball can be played one-handed can't [Music] it it may not be R standard but who cares the Thomas delaro grammar school for spastics is the first of its kind in the [Music] world [Music] pupils here sit GCE on a level with any other pupil in Britain in 1957 the ministry of education's official report said the national Society are to be congratulated on the way they have accommodated equipped and staffed the school this school includes a business course too where the older pupils learn typing and secretarial work ready to earn a living alongside anyone [Music] else the boys learn to use tools sometimes adapted so that they can produce work of a genuinely high standard you can still find extraordinary resources of skill in a troubled body this girl with just two fingers and her teeth makes a fine job of sewing these sails for [Music] example girls grow up one day they may have a home to run and so they learn cookery and domestic science you may be handicapped but you can still be a housewife these children look sound and eager enough for education but education is seldom easy for them Dr Wall director of the national foundation for educational research has this to say about the problem of course ordinary children present a large LGE number of problems on which we ought to do research but the cly paused child presents problems of an educational kind which are much more tricky and much more difficult than those even of the ordinary uh physically or mentally or sensorially handicapped children for example the child who has brain damage is liable to have difficulties in all the special senses or in one or other of them of two kinds he may have difficulty simply in seeing like the blind child but he may also have a difficulty in that he can see but he can't really organize centrally uh what he sees similarly you can get a child who has deafness of the ordinary kind or you may have a child who can hear perfectly well but has great difficulty in understanding what what he hears or again you may have a child who has a selective form of deafness for example he can't perhaps here the high notes in speech and the sort of thing that I'm saying to you now will sound him rather like [Music] this now this kind of problem occurs not merely with hearing but with vision and to some extent it occurs also in the whole organization of the space in which he lives which is so important to the actual construction of intelligence but learning isn't only an intellectual business and indeed for handicapped children the emotional factors in learning are perhaps even more important than the intellectual ones and it's about these too that we know so little now the kind of program which obviously is necessary is going to be fairly expensive in my view it'll probably cost about £50,000 a year because you've got to get some of the best brains we can find in the field of psychology and education to work on us and this means really that we may have to fund as much as a million pounds to finance it over the next 10 or 15 years but let me emphasize one thing finally this ears a lot of money but in proportion to the amount of money which is spent on educating these and other children and in proportion to the kind of return which this means in human happiness it's really very little near wellin is sherrard's the first training center for spastics to get to shads spastics must first of all beyond the ministry of Labor's list of unemployables the center will eventually be able to take six0 trainees but at the moment there's a long waiting list it isn't meaningless institutional work either the trainees here make things they actually fulfill contracts for industry and The Woodworking Department very appropriately makes the society's collecting boxes yes there have been many successes but there have also been cases with no improvement cases where the early damage to the central nervous system has been too great or where treatment began too late to do much good it is for just these people the darbury hall exists for them this is the end of the road they are cruy and irremediably [Music] handicapped yet they too can do something useful contribute something however slowly to the world in which which they live it would be foolish to say that this can ever be much but it is the one thing between them and despair here are four of them each handicapped in a different way cooperating in working a carpet Loom [Music] there are other residential schools and centers at Kum Farm craigy park eron hall pread Hall and calwell court and of course local centers more than 50 of them Stockport now is a typical example of a local Center that provides education therapy and occupational Training for older children the children in this advanced class May May well go on to other schools others may have to wait a long time for that chance on some Fate has played a really cruel and tragic trick this little boy is six he's not only a he's also blind here in this physiotherapy Nursery a curious lesson is being learned a baby is being taught how to be a baby the thing is she doesn't know everything that comes naturally to any normal child even such things as finding her face or rubbing her eyes she has got to learn she must be shown her own identity she must even establish where her arms and her legs are and how to move them and flex them and finally use them in fact here Begins the lesson of how one day to be a person yes the pictures changed all right there's a lot of light where there used to be Darkness not yet enough but more each year in 1957 the Duke of Edinburough agreed to become president of the society the director is Dr Stevens the staff has grown from one overworked secretary to a total of 550 of whom more than 300 are doctors therapists teachers and house parents but treatment and schooling and training are not the only concern of the society fundamental medical research is needed so in 1954 the society appointed a research physician at gu hospital he works here in Kat's house under the direction of a medical advisory committee soon afterwards at the committee's request a consultative research committee was formed from a group of leading specialists in related branches of medicine all this money all these schools all this training all this research does it help the to achieve a real Improvement in his condition does it bring him any nearer a normal life well there's a simple answer it gives him the only chance you'll ever get of leading a more normal life the only chance of getting an education the only chance of getting a job this school boy has passed his GCE and brilliantly not so long ago he wouldn't even have been able to try now he has much more than an active present he has a future for this girl there's a long hard road ahead it won't be easy but at the end of it there is freedom she may manage to go all the way she may stop short on the road so much depends on her and so much depends on the national Society they once put this young man in an unemployable class and they were dead wrong because already he's opened the door to Freedom he's working in a factory doing a job for the community and for himself already 200 spastics have moved into jobs in open industry in the open world so what of the future well the national Society has in its own words barely scratched the surface of the problem three things are needed first more treatment there is a chronic shortage of physiotherapists to improve this situation the society has instituted scholarships for student physiotherapists who hope to work in the field of cerebral py the second thing is more schools and centers within the next three years more than a million pounds will be spent on New National schools and residential centers including a center for so-called ineducable spastics those who cannot make use of ordinary education and third more research here is what the society's medical advisory committee chairman has to say in a discussion with Dr Stevens it used to be said that one of the causes of cerebral py was prematurity what part do you think that prematurity plays well there is no doubt that a certain proportion of prematurely born babies are SP and uh therefore anything which would reduce the number of prepator babies would indirectly cut down the number of babies then there's been some very interesting work that the director of the Research Unit has done on chomosome studies is this going to be important well yes you see this takes the matter right further back uh it might be argued that the premature baby who was paralyzed who was that the two had the same cause and that would you'd have to go right back then to the beginning beginning of things to the germ cell and this is where the chromosome story comes in because by a detailed study of the germ cell and by counting and marking out these fascinating little things called genes and the chromosomes on the genes you may be able to pinpoint an abnormal germ cell which leads on to cerebral Psy or mental defect or something of that sort this means of course that you've got to examine and consider the General Health of mothers throughout their pregnancy oh yes because you see you've got two fact that you may have an abnormal germ cell but if the mother's health in pregnancy and in nutrition and everything else is kept up to a high standard then you may minimize the bad effects of what you might call the the hereditary or genetic aspect of it and this has nothing to do with the resus factor no that's a specific example of of a an unfortunate ill health situation between mother and baby where the the baby's blood cells and the mother's blood cells don't match properly and they get this jaundice at Birth and because of the jaundice certain parts of the brain get damaged and they can get cereal py and become now this is perhaps one of the most hopeful lines of prevention in the sense that experts now claim that with proper supervision during pregnancy and with a team available to deal with the baby as soon as it arrives uh possibly as little as four or 5% of Reus Factor babies uh ought to be damaged to other words 95% or more could be saved from trouble we are in fact supporting some research in Bristol which is going to go even further now the Bristol the Bristol work is fascinating the idea there is to instead of leaving in the severe cases the baby to be born and then try and deal with the junda situation there we're trying to give the baby the proper sort of red cells while he's still in his mother's womb there must be some way to go on that yet but we've come quite away in 5 years haven't we how much further do you think we shall have to go well in one way the sky is the limit Dr Stevens um you see I think that all research all investigation into a wide variety of children's diseases and problems will throw some light on the problems of the child equally research on the problems of the child will throw light upon other uh disorders in childhood I think already we're learning that child isn't just paralyzed in muscles it it it's uh it can't really appreciate um its own movements it doesn't know where its hands are it doesn't know where its feet are this what we call the Sensory side of the business is fascinating and I'm sure it's got uh lessons for educationalists and others well now if you take that wide view where is the limit you can go on forever and you got to find a lot of money so that it's right that we should be setting up a child health Research Unit oh yes I'm I'm sure you can't separate it out the child as a whole is your problem if you're going to get the answers you can't say we will only study the cereal py child I've done some preliminary thought on this and it looks to me as if to set up the kind of Research Unit that we want over the next few years we're going to need somewhere between two and2 and a half million pounds we can start off with say A4 a million pounds now and we'll find the rest because we must but is that going to be enough it'll be a good start anyway won't it I mean you don't know where you're going to get to you see I think always in research you've got to have in reserve uh some facilities and money for chasing the interesting hair something blows up in the course of a general program which is fearfully important Fleming's dust coming in at St Mary's Hospital and there was Penicillin that wasn't at the time any pursuit of that was there it lay dormant for some years but you see you may blow up something in the course of general research and you've got to have the Reserves and the money to go after it there's no other child health Research Unit in this country no not specifically I suppose All Children's departments and and and children's hospitals do what they can but there isn't a specially set up unit with full facilities for laboratory search in that sense we think of course that we're leading the world in studies of cereal poliy shall we be leading the world in this field too well you soon will if you set up the right for of department and you can feed it them with enough money and Men Dr Paul Palani is the society's director of research your task as head of the Research Unit is to coordinate and perhaps to inspire the work of the different sections how big a unit do you expect it's going to be well this is sort of very provisional thing but uh we would have of course our epidemiology section our clinical section or group then we would have our chromosome study group um you would have a biochemical group or a group of people interest in the biochemistry side and um well some experimental work as well going on the ugly word which is used for this sort of approach is multidisciplinary isn't it which is which means really lot of people putting together their heads and working on it common problem from different angles this is really what we are aiming to do uh cereal Psy is not a disease it's a disorder for one thing and it's not an entity but it's many entities and we do not know in fact how many so that we have to bring on this problem uh we have to bring the energies to Bear of many people of course spastics improve slowly very slowly painfully slowly many have to face the world still severely handicapped how does the world face them hello I'm Bill harres as you can see by the way I walk I am as I was only2 and2 when I was born and I was 8 years old before I could take my first faltering steps but I don't want your pity I'm all right now I have a most Charming wife and two Bonnie children but it wasn't always like that look at these hands they seem pretty normal now don't they but at one time they were so clumsy that I couldn't write or pick up a cup of tea without spilling it all over the place they're all right now and can do a good job of work and I do know that most spastics if given the right chance can do a job of work the sad thing about some spastics is that they cannot control their facial muscles properly they appear to be well idiotic but this is just not so in most cases it is a question of an intelligent mind locked in an unintelligent body just look at this boy for a minute he's only walking it may not look much but it is so much more than he could do a year or two ago this girl couldn't walk at all it has been such a struggle so much effort but there you are this man's right hand was quite useless to him and he couldn't get a job so what did he do he had it amputated now with a hook he can do a job I am the industrial liasan officer to the National society and my job is to find jobs for spastics and the point I want to make quite clear is this we spastics do not want sympathy what we need is understanding to enable us to stand on our own feet on our merits alone after all we spastics are ordinary people who are handicapped you have seen how spastics have been medically treated educated and employed and you've seen how well the society cares for those who do not improve I've told you about the vast medical and educational research plan I need any repeat that every eight hours every day every week every month every year another is born in [Music] Britain [Music]