Harry Drabble spent his childhood being told what he couldn’t do. Born in Sheffield in 1934, he was diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis at two-and-a-half years old. He told me, ‘When I was two, society wrote me off as a “cripple” incapable of learning. One who should be kept away from “normal” people’.
His story reveals the brutal reality of how Britain treated disabled people seeking education, employment and basic dignity throughout the 20th century. It’s a story that needs telling for UK Disability History Month, not just as history, but as a mirror to our present and a warning for our future.
For more information about ‘Yet’ A Story of Triumph over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability visit here.
The Diagnosis That Changed Everything
When my grandmother May took Harry to the outpatient appointment at the Royal Hospital, Sheffield, in July 1937, she was right to be fearful. A nurse pulled young Harry from her arms in what a contemporary nurse later described as a manner ‘designed to distress both parties’. This was the beginning of Harry’s journey through a medical system that saw him not as a child with potential, but as a problem to be hidden away.
The diagnosis of bovine tuberculosis – contracted from infected milk from nearby Butterthwaite Farm – carried implications far beyond the immediate medical crisis. As Harry later understood it, ‘People with disabilities were paid less than their colleagues…I was called a cripple. It was a descriptive word then. I didn’t take umbrage; it’s what I was’.
But that acceptance of the label didn’t mean acceptance of its limitations. The medical establishment’s view of Harry’s future was clear and decisive. Dr Pattison, the surgical tuberculosis officer who diagnosed him, represented a medical profession that believed physical disability meant intellectual limitation and economic uselessness for working-class children. The Sheffield Independent reported in 1934 that ‘There were not fewer than 4,000 fresh cases of tuberculosis bovine origin occurring every year in England and Wales, and about 2,000 deaths’. What the statistics didn’t capture was the thousands more who survived but were hidden out of sight.
Education: The First Battlefield
Harry’s fight for education reveals how systematically British society excluded disabled children from the opportunities that might lead to employment. When May first tried to enrol Harry at Beck Road Council School after his initial discharge from hospital, the headmaster’s response was swift and unequivocal. He refused to accept him, citing the school’s many stairs and his need for crutches.
The alternative offered by the Education Committee was even more telling about societal attitudes. Harry was directed to a converted building in the Attercliffe slums, with the words ‘Home for Idiots and Imbeciles’ carved above the entrance. Harry later described the bleak wards filled with nonverbal children with misshapen heads and twisted bodies strapped into ill-padded seats. I can picture six-year-old Harry, hungry to learn, but with one leg shorter than the other and an arm he couldn’t straighten, raging against the education committee’s decision to further exclude him from his community in this inappropriate setting. Harry’s protest worked. His mother took him home and refused to take him back. But the message was clear – disabled children were to be warehoused, not educated.
Harry explained to me that it was a nationwide policy not to ‘have cripples at school’. Society wanted ‘us out of sight’, where they had ‘no intention of making progress with us’ as it ‘wasn’t worth educating cripples’.
The 1944 Education Act promised that ‘every child should receive education suitable for their age, ability and aptitude’, but implementation for disabled children was patchy at best. Harry’s self-education through the Sheffield City Library became his lifeline. Craving, but starved of information, Harry scanned the 38 newspapers, and the weekly and monthly women’s magazines, hobby and craft magazines for men, and copies of Readers’ Digest he found in the two reading rooms at the Sheffield City Library. The books he discovered became helped him gain some of the education he had been excluded from and started a lifelong habit of self-educating.
When Harry was finally accepted at Hartley Brook Secondary School in 1947, the bullying was relentless. The children echoed adult attitudes and told Harry, ‘You’re a cripple, you should be in a home, not here with us’. The boys and girls regularly threw things at him and, after every school day, a group of boys waited for him outside the gates and ‘thrashed’ him.
His response, advised by his father, was to fight back. With wasted muscles from long years flat on his back in plaster and faced with several boys, Harry used his right crutch as a weapon. Eventually, he found safety in becoming one of the bullies himself. ‘It was a relief. It didn’t make me a nice person, but I was desperate. I still had an angry core I didn’t know what to do with’.
The Miracle and Battle of Technical Education
Harry’s acceptance to the Central Technical School represented both a breakthrough and a new battleground. His arrival, aged 13, on crutches met immediate resistance: ‘A teacher said there must have been a mistake’. I said, “No,” and took out my letter to show him. “Look, I’ve got the blazer, badge, cap, tie and satchel”. The man shook his head. “You’re to go home, Drabble”. I replied, “No, I’m stopping.”‘
The subsequent meeting with education officials laid bare the institutional prejudice. When told, ‘Your son was offered a place at the school, but we did not know he is a cripple. If we had known, we would not have offered him a place’, May’s working-class logic floored the panel: ‘I will explain to Harry that if there is something he can’t do, I will come and fetch him home’.
Harry later reflected on this moment with awe: ‘I knew I had ground my mother down. I thought I’d beaten her, but she still managed to fight for me. I don’t know how she found the strength’.
The building course at CTS was designed to lead working-class boys into employment in the construction trades – physical work that everyone assumed Harry couldn’t do. But despite ‘one good leg, and one good arm’, Harry refused to accept these limitations. Despite starting in 26th place out of 30 boys, to prove a boy wrong, he knuckled down at the library and, with the help of librarians and teachers, he rose to tenth place by the end of the summer term.
His final examination revealed both his determination and his self-sabotage: During the final bricklaying assessment, he was told to build three different walls. Harry thought they were not his best work. He ‘lost it’ and knocked them down before the examiner came to assess them. Yet the examiner had seen his work and passed it. Harry graduated with a second – class Building Diploma, finishing 15th out of 51 students, ahead of the pupils who had dismissed and tried to humiliate him.
The World of Work: Discrimination as Policy
Harry’s entry into the workforce exposed the systematic nature of employment discrimination against disabled people. The Disabled Persons (Employment) Act of 1944 required employers with twenty or more employees to ‘take a quota of about 3 per cent of disabled persons’, but this came with a cruel caveat – no requirement for equal pay.
Looking for his first job as a silversmith, Harry walked into H. Parkin & Son Ltd and met immediate skepticism. The man looked him up and down and asked, ‘What can you do, lad?’ Harry answered, ‘Let me show you’. Despite proving his skills, the discrimination was built into the system: ‘As a cripple, I was paid less than the others. That’s how it was’.
Harry’s superior skills created unexpected problems: ‘I soon had the union on to me because I was outperforming the experienced men. It was decided I would start work at 10 am, before the morning break. In my lunch hour, I played the violin with the buffer girls, and I left at 3 pm. No team wanted to own me. They wanted me out’.
The irony was bitter – Harry’s disability was used to justify lower wages, but when he outperformed able-bodied workers, he was penalised for that too. As he explained: ‘I didn’t understand why they didn’t adopt my methods and produce more, at a better quality, but I knew nothing about industrial relations then’.
The buffer girls, the lowest in the workshop hierarchy, became unexpected allies. ‘Nelly went in her [clothes-protecting] rags to management to say they understood the men had a problem with me, but said, “This guy’s work is the best in your shop. We take it in turns to buff it [and] because there is so little to do, the person who does it gets more of a bonus.” Those buffer girls had hearts of solid gold’.
The Rehabilitation Failure
The post-war rehabilitation system promised to help disabled people find suitable work. The reality Harry encountered was starkly different. In November 1952, he was referred for rehabilitation ‘but instead of finding a gateway to clean, indoor work, he learnt over three long months to hate ineffective bureaucracy’.
The system’s failures were multiple and systematic. Harry wanted to train as a bookkeeper: ‘I’d gone along and sat with the chap and did maths with him. I got every answer right, but he said, “Oh, you’ve done metalwork, you can do that”. I said, I can’t stand on crutches all day. I want to get into office work”, but no one listened’.
When Harry tried to improve the metalwork workshop’s output and quality, he was told: ‘You don’t realise we have problems getting contracts, so I need the work to last till the end of term. You need to slow down’. The system wasn’t designed to develop potential but to warehouse disabled people in make-work schemes.
The final assessment was damning in its low expectations: Harry was written up as ‘an unstable dreamer who might suit the role of storekeeper or night watchman’. As Harry reflected: ‘I wasn’t able-bodied, so I had no future in physical work, nor could I rely on what I could do with my hands if I had to stand all day, every day. I didn’t blame the able-bodied people who said I was crippled and uneducated. They were right. I couldn’t do more to improve my body, so my challenge was to educate myself and make the impossible leap into a profession’.
Finding Ways Around the System
Harry’s survival strategy involved constant adaptation and finding differnet ways to make money. Music became both a solace and a supplementary income. The Beck Quartet ‘provided music for dances in the mining villages, like Pilley near Chapeltown’. This wasn’t just about money – it was about dignity and connection. Being in a band was a way to make a little money, and widen his social group, but it also got Harry over the awkwardness of going to dances, avoiding the humiliation of not being able to dance and sitting on the sidelines.
The mining community provided unexpected intellectual stimulation. After performing, the event organisers usually invited the band members to their parlours for late-night discussions over copious cups of tea and homemade bread and jam. ‘There, they talked about literature and poetry, including Shakespeare, religion, church music, jazz and the political news of the day’.
Harry’s approach to overcoming obstacles became a life philosophy. He told me he found that adding ‘yet’ to statements about what he couldn’t do transformed them from permanent limitations to temporary challenges. As he explained: ‘It took the pressure off, so I could work out the steps I needed to take to get from can’t do to can do. Mind you’, he added, I chose my battles. I wasn’t daft’.
The Marriage Ban: Eugenics’ Long Shadow
Perhaps no aspect of disability discrimination was more personal than the widespread belief that disabled people shouldn’t marry or have children. The eugenics movement’s influence persisted well into the 1950s, and Harry encountered it directly when courting Doreen Parker, a trainee nurse he met during his final stay at the renamed King Edward VII Orthopaedic Hospital.
When Harry asked Doreen’s father Walter for permission to marry his daughter, the response was brutal: ‘No, you don’t breed from defective stock’. Harry understood the thinking behind it: ‘Walter was born in 1885 and had been a farmer. He was looking out for his daughter’.
Harry’s promise to Doreen represented a direct challenge to these assumptions: ‘you could do worse than marry me. I’ll give you a good house, transport and foreign holidays’. It was a bold claim from a man who was out of work and had been repeatedly told, even by his mother, he had nothing to offer Doreen.
Their wedding in 1958 took place without parental permission, in defiance of both family and societal expectations. Throughout the ceremony, the couple and many of their guests, including Doreen’s mother, expected Walter to turn up and stop the ceremony. The fact that he didn’t perhaps reflected a grudging acceptance of the inevitable rather than approval.
The Economics of Discrimination
Throughout his working life, Harry faced systematic wage discrimination. At Brightside Foundry & Engineering Company, he was ‘forced to work for between a half and two-thirds of the rates paid to physically able stock allocation clerks’. This wasn’t hidden or shameful – it was policy.
The justification was circular – disabled people were paid less because they were assumed to be less productive, but when Harry proved more productive than his colleagues, he was still paid less because he was disabled. At every job, the pattern repeated: ‘As a cripple, I was paid less than the others. That’s how it was. I “gossiped” in the marketing section and got ahead of the game’.
Harry’s innovations at Bachelors Peas demonstrated his value. For example, Harry looked into the order process and found the forms the small shopkeepers used to order from. He noticed that the factory encouraged small repeat orders of only a few products. Harry changed the forms, set up a fast way to check stock of the product and had small parcels made up and sent to the independent 30 or so depots around Britain. The new logistics improved orders’. Yet even successful innovations didn’t translate to equal pay. The head of the company, Colonel Bachelor, went to see Harry and said, ‘I’ve heard very good things about your work, so you will find an additional two shillings in your packet at the end of the week’. Harry told me, ‘Everyone else did what they were told to do. I couldn’t work like that, and I wasn’t going to accept such an insulting raise, so I said, “No, I no longer work for you”. The Colonel’s replied, “You’re a cripple, you should be grateful to have a job”’. Harry left the building and didn’t return.
The assumption that disabled people should be grateful for any work at any wage persisted throughout Harry’s career.
The Psychology of Survival
Living with constant discrimination took a psychological toll. Harry described carrying ‘an unexploded bomb… since he was first admitted to Rivelin’. The anger was both fuel and threat: ‘Without Doreen’s hand on my arm, my behaviour would have landed me in jail, or dead’.
The hospital years had taught Harry harsh lessons about trust and self-reliance. ‘They were doing their job, but there are ways of doing it. They weren’t doing it as one should with a sick child. I didn’t trust them anymore because I never knew what they were going to do to me’.
This hypervigilance extended into adult life: ‘I questioned everything. I needed to understand’. In the workplace, this translated into careful observation and strategic thinking: ‘Once you know the rules, you can try to find a way around them or use them to your advantage’.
Harry’s relationship with other disabled people was complex. In the hospital, ‘I didn’t have time for the other boys. They appeared as ignorant and as damaged as I was’. This internalised ableism was perhaps a survival mechanism. Certainly, by distancing himself from others society had written off gave him the freedom to create new possibilities.
The Role of Allies and Advocates
Throughout Harry’s story, individual acts of allyship made a crucial difference. The buffer girls who advocated for his work, the English teacher at Hartley Brook who ‘recognised his hunger for learning’, the librarians who ‘recommended mathematics and science books to him’ – these people provided the support that institutions denied.
The English teacher, Mr Dove, at the Central Technical School stood out and encouraged Harry to perform at the graduation speech day. The following day, he kindly sent Harry a letter of congratulation commenting that the trio ‘Rawson, Drabble and Staniforth’ had been the best item in the programme, and he trusted he would see Harry at the City Hall concerts and at the Listening Club.
Watching the Hallé Orchestra when he should have been in class was a way of being seen, too: ‘They were kind to this lad with an almost intelligible working-class accent who turned up on crutches week after week to ask them questions’.
These moments of recognition mattered enormously to Harry, who was regularly told he didn’t have the right to be in the same space as non-disabled people.
The Intersection of Class and Disability
Harry’s working-class background compounded the discrimination he faced. The rehabilitation officer’s suggestion of work as a storekeeper or night watchman reflected assumptions about both his disability and his class. Middle-class disabled people might be seen as tragic figures deserving of support; working-class disabled people were simply surplus to requirements and told to hide themselves away.
The physical nature of working-class employment created particular challenges: ‘The only people I knew in paid work were working-class men who were strong, like my dad. The least I could do was strengthen what muscles I could when I had the opportunity’.
Yet Harry also found unexpected acceptance in working-class communities. The miners who attended his band’s performances were ‘open, warm-hearted and hospitable. Many were eager for culture and conversation’. This challenged stereotypes about youth, disability and class.
The Sheffield Cripples Aid Association’s visits highlighted class tensions. The middle-class volunteers ‘were arrogant, with the wrong tone of voice, that of people who “knew best”. They certainly didn’t come across as friendly or helpful.’ Harry found these visits ‘excruciating’ and said: ‘I didn’t need Cripple’s Aid. In my head, I wasn’t a cripple’.
Breaking Through: The Path to Professional Work
Harry’s eventual breakthrough into professional work came through persistence and strategic thinking rather than support from the system designed to help him. After the rehabilitation centre’s failure, he took matters into his own hands.
At Brightside Foundry, he learned to navigate office politics: ‘Everyone supposedly had a copy of the draft that was to go to the 12 members of the board of directors when it was approved. The first time Harry was included, the manager started to read the numbers. He added, ‘Shout out if you’ve got a different number’. When Harry spotted an error and spoke up, he passed a test he didn’t know he was taking.
His promotion to credit controller vindicated his belief that disabled people could handle responsible positions. Later, at Firth Vickers & Samuel Fox, he rose to Section Leader. Each advancement challenged assumptions about what disabled people could achieve.
Harry’s management philosophy reflected his experiences of discrimination: ‘Later, as a senior manager, finally on equal pay, I didn’t use devious tactics. I found that if I explained why each task was important, people invariably worked harder and did the right thing’.
The Continuing Fight for Recognition
Even success didn’t mean acceptance. Throughout his career, Harry faced ongoing skepticism about his abilities. When he broke his leg in 1956 and the GP initially dismissed it as a strain, it reflected the medical profession’s continued inability to see disabled people as reliable witnesses to their own experiences.
Harry’s insistence on setting his leg ‘in such a way that would allow him to sit, in a fashion, and stand barefooted with his big toe of his left foot on the ground’ demonstrated his need to maintain whatever independence he could. Learning to walk without crutches was another act of defiance. ‘When I stopped using crutches, it was a buggers’ muddle. I hadn’t walked on my own since I was two years old, and I had to learn how to walk, again. I tried to make my gait look as normal as possible’.
The effort to appear ‘normal’ was exhausting but necessary for employment. Yet, as Harry noted about his built-up shoe and earlier leg brace: ‘Even in the best of times, I made a different sound to everyone else when I walked. I just had to accept it’.
Harry refused to accept ‘can’t’ and learned to project himself as more able-bodied than he was. As his daughter, I didn’t notice he had one leg shorter than the other, or that he couldn’t straighten an arm until I was a teenager and someone asked me about it. In the final weeks of his life, he was a beached whale in the hospital bed. All the carefully selected pieces of furniture were absent, so he couldn’t move in, or get out of bed. When he was dying, with infinite patience and kindness, I watched him try to explain his physical limitations to nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and doctors who kept pressing his bed’s button to raise him into a sitting position. Even when it was explained, few could accept that he literally couldn’t bend in the middle. The link between bovine tuberculosis from infected milk and bone destruction has largely been forgotten by medical professionals in the UK.
Legacy and Lessons
Harry’s story illuminates both how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go in creating inclusive workplaces and challenging discrimination and prejudice against disabled people in favour of non-disabled people. The explicit wage discrimination he faced is now illegal, but disabled people still face an employment gap and, when employed, a significant pay gap.
His strategy of adding ‘yet’ to perceived limitations remains powerful. It reframes disability from a permanent barrier to a temporary challenge, demanding we ask not ‘what can’t this person do?’ but ‘what support do they need to do it?’
The systematic exclusion from education that Harry faced has, perhaps, improved, but disabled young people still face lower expectations and fewer opportunities. The assumption that physical disability means intellectual limitation persists in subtler forms.
Harry’s experience of the rehabilitation system, designed to manage rather than empower, echoes in contemporary concerns about disability employment services that park people in unsuitable placements rather than developing their potential.
The Personal Cost and Triumph
The cost of fighting systematic discrimination was high. Harry experienced ongoing physical pain from the inadequate childhood treatment. The emotional labour of constantly proving himself, of finding opportunities others took for granted, was exhausting and may have triggered his autoimmune conditions.
Yet, Harry built a life society said was impossible for him. He married, raised children, owned property, took foreign holidays, and had a successful career. More than that, he returned to music and became a teacher and mentor to others. As one student, James, said, ‘His endless patience and enthusiasm were infectious. I was pushed where needed and supported when I was struggling. They say a good teacher stays with you for life, and I am pleased to say that Mr Drabble proves this rule’.
Harry’s reflection on his life was complex: ‘I was deeply grateful for contracting bovine tuberculosis (bTB); without it my life would have been impoverished’. This isn’t inspiration porn – it’s recognition that adversity, while not to be romanticised, can forge strengths, insights and unexpected paths.
Conclusion: From History to Action
‘Someone once said to me, “It was easy in your day”. They didn’t have a clue’. Harry’s words remind us that progress isn’t linear and that each generation faces the task of challenging discrimination anew.
His story, preserved through our collaboration in his final months, stands as testimony to the many thousands whose stories weren’t recorded. The children warehoused in institutions, the adults denied work or paid starvation wages, the people told they had no right to want love, marriage, or family – they deserve recognition, too.
For UK Disability History Month, Harry’s journey from ‘can’t do’ to ‘can do’ offers both historical understanding and contemporary challenge. It reminds us that behind every employment statistic is a person with aspirations, talents, and potential contributions. It challenges us to examine our own assumptions and way of doing things.
Harry spent his life proving he was more than society’s limiting labels. His legacy asks us to ensure future generations don’t have to fight so hard for basic recognition of their humanity and potential. The word ‘yet’ remains powerful – we haven’t achieved true equality and inclusion, yet, but Harry’s story sheds light on the the path we’ve travelled.
As I write this, I remember him saying, ‘Maybe my story will help someone.’ It already has. May it help many more.
If you or a member of your family lived with a childhood illness or injury whose consequences shaped their working life, education, or place in the world, I would be glad to hear from you. Please email me at helen@helenparkerdrabble.com.
To read a sample of ‘Yet’: A Story of Triumph over Childhood Separation, Trauma, and Disability click here.
For more information about ‘Yet’ visit here.
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