Lady Wilkins obituary

Rosalie Wilkins, Lady Wilkins, who has died aged 78, was co-creator and presenter of the first mainstream television program about the lives of disabled people in Britain. She was also a disability activist, documentary maker and Labor peer.

Created with Richard Creasey (then program controller for ATV), Link was Britain’s first TV program both for and made by people with disabilities. It started in 1975 as a monthly program in the Birmingham area, moved to ITV and soon became a fortnightly program broadcast nationally. It gave a voice to the emerging disability movement, challenged contemporary attitudes to disability and demonstrated good practice and innovative approaches to the full spectrum of disability.

Rosalie, a wheelchair user since an accident in 1966, went on to research and present a number of documentaries, including We Won’t Go Away (1981, ITV), about the American civil rights movement for the disabled. She also helped shape and present BBC Two’s Circling the Dragon (1994)about Deng Pufang, the son of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who became a wheelchair user after being thrown out of a window during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1999, Rosalie was made a life peer and joined the Labor benches in the House of Lords. Her maiden speech was about the lack of opportunities for young disabled people. She spoke about the origins of what is now the international Movement for independent livingand the opportunities created by people with disabilities themselves to have choice and control over their lives. “Independence,” she said, “is not about doing everything yourself, but about having control over how the help you need is provided.”

Born in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire, Rosalie was the youngest of four children of Marjorie (née Hockey) and Eric Wilkinsa chartered accountant and member of the Court of Common Council in the City of London.

She attended Dr.’s high school. Challoner, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and St Helen’s school, Northwood, and then in Middlesex, before going to the University of Manchester to study sociology and government.

However, during her second term, when a wooden structure on a float collapsed on college rag day, 19-year-old Rosalie experienced a fall that shaped the rest of her life. She became paralyzed from the shoulders down and said it “gave me choices in life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

She was transferred to the Spinal Injury Center at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, which, under the leadership of Dr Ludwig Guttman, pioneered radical changes in the treatment of spinal cord injury and in the expectations of life that people with spinal cord injuries have. limitation should be pursued. Rosalie would make her own contribution to the fight against disabling attitudes and lack of opportunities.

Six months after her accident she returned to university, graduating in 1969. She moved to London to take up a series of administrative jobs, including as PA to the Director of the Central Council for the Disabled (1971–74 ), while she lived in London. a hotel where she could barely fit in the elevator in her wheelchair and where she cooked her meals using a small stove at knee height in her room.

During this time she presented an ITV World in Action program about a village in the Netherlands, Het Dorp (1972), where people with disabilities could live independently – an option not available to most disabled people in Britain at the time.

After settling a compensation claim for her accident, she rented a one-bedroom apartment in the Barbican, a rare provider of wheelchair-accessible homes, and an estate that Rosalie’s father, like Chair of the City of London Corporation’s Public Health Committeehad played a key role in its development in the 1950s. It took her another four years to find the house in Fulham, south-west London, where she would live for the rest of her life.

The lack of accessible housing became and remained an issue that Rosalie campaigned on, and was the subject of her last speech in the Lords before her retirement in 2015. She spoke of the “catastrophic” impact the lack of suitable housing has on lives of people with disabilities. and the shortsightedness of the then Conservative government’s weakening of accessible housing standards.

In 1974 she began working as a publications officer for the newly established National Volunteer Centre, but after six months she resigned along with other colleagues in protest at the organisation’s dismissal of the colleague who became her life partner, Maria Brenton. Later that year she joined mental health charity Mind as an information officer.

Rosalie worked as a regular presenter of Link until 1988, before working freelance as a documentary maker and presenter. Before taking up her seat in the Lords, she was information officer for the National Center for Independent Living (1997-99). As well as being involved in many disability campaigns over the years, she also held a range of public appointments, including serving on the BBC’s General Advisory Board in the 1970s, and on the Prince of Wales Disability Advisory Group in the 1970s eighty. Most recently she was Chair of the College of Occupational Therapists (2003-2008) and Vice-Chair of both the Parliamentary Group on Disability (2004-2015) and the Parliamentary Group on Deafness (2005-2015). ).

She was also part of a group of female members of the Spinal Injuries Association (SIA) who together wrote Able Lives: Women’s Experience of Paralysis (1989), which I edited.

In addition to her achievements in the public sphere, Rosalie had a gift for lasting friendships. She said what she was most proud of in her life was her 50-year relationship with Maria, with whom she formed a civil partnership in 2006 and who survives her.