Recording of several events during a tour of New Zealand and Australia. Oct/Nov 1974

Recording of several events during a tour of New Zealand and Australia. Oct/Nov 1974

Second - Monday, October 21st, Adelaide, evening meeting of the sponsors. States it was a privilege to serve with Australians in the RAF. Talks about his and his wife's work with disabled. Comments on his home in Britain and other countries and in particular work at one in Northern India. Goes on to describe how contributions from Australia and New Zealand were used. Continues to describe work of hospital at same location. Concludes with story of their latest venture to start a mobile unit as well as other projects.

1974-10-21

Audio recording 00:20:21

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SCheshireGL72021v20025-0003, SCheshireGL72021v20025-0003-Transcript

Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project

File Title: Recording of several events during a tour of New Zealand and Australia. Oct/Nov 1974
Duration: 20 mins 23 secs
Transcription date: 15/09/20
Archive Number: AV-S 510 Side 5 Part 1

Start of Transcription

00:00: Leonard Cheshire: Monday, October 21st, Adelaide, evening meeting of the sponsors.

00:08 [no speech] to 00:54

00:55 [applause] to 00:58

00:59: LC: Judge Mitchell, Ross Stanford, ladies and gentlemen. Well, it’s a very happy occasion indeed for my wife Sue and I to be with you this evening and to have the opportunity of meeting you, and also saying something about the reason we are all gathered together. I would however like to say that it would in no way be a waste of anybody’s time if Judge Mitchell were to go on speaking to us. She has remarkable clarity of thought and expression; she has everything completely under control, and before saying anything I must thank you ever so much for your … all that you’ve done for this foundation to bring it into being and guide it and give it the direction you have.

01:56 [applause] to 02:01

02:02: LC: Now we also have with us Ross Stanford, an old friend from air force days, who unfortunately knows a little bit too much about me for my personal comfort, but I expect he’ll be discreet tonight. And he was my first contact in your truly beautiful city. And it is to Ross that we owe the very beginning of everything here.

02:35 [applause] to 02:39

02:40: LC: But also there are many air force members present, and I’d like to say thank you to you also, not only for being here, but because of the memories it brings back for me – the privilege of having served with Australians in every single squadron to which I was ever posted. It’s my pleasure tonight to say something about Raphael and about the needs and the hopes and the problems of disability in general. I would like to say that our work, that is my wife’s and mine, is mainly concerned with the disabled. And though not entirely, it is very largely concerned with the young disabled – that is boys and girls, men and women in their teens and in their 20s, though some are much younger and some are older. But largely in that category, who for one reason or another have become disabled and are no longer able to lead the kind of life that they wanted to. It may be through an accident on the roads or in a factory; it may be through the onset of an illness – a disease which brings about paralysis of one kind or another. They’ve been to hospital and received the best medical treatment that it’s possible to give, and in these present days we are very blessed with the skill of doctors and surgeons and therapists and others who look after us. But for many of them there comes a moment when the doctor will say ‘You will never get any better’. And so, they have to adjust themselves to the fact that for all their lives they are going to be in a wheelchair or whatever degree of disability may be theirs. We tend to think that such a person is no longer an active member of society – is no longer able to give to society, that it’s for us to look after them. And so of course to a degree it is for us to look after them. But although disabled in body, they’re not disabled in their heart and in their mind. And being young they have all the hopes and the aspirations, all the desires of youth – just to be a normal human being, to be able to go the way they want and they choose, to feel that they can make a contribution to the world, to be independent, to be givers, but of course their disability normally makes them only receivers. They have to lie or sit or move about with difficulty, waiting for other people to do things for them. That is not what they want. I think I can truthfully say that there’s hardly a country in the world that gives them the kind of facilities and opportunities that they want. I don’t seek to generalise; I don’t seek to belittle what is done, particularly in this country and New Zealand, where perhaps medical services are higher proportionately and in quality than most countries in the world. But a young person wants a home life, and we think that for many of them the best solution at the moment is to provide a small type of home – a community home. At any rate, this is our work, with its failings and shortcomings that I only too freely acknowledge. In Britain we have some 60 homes, most of them averaging about 30. Disabilities range from the quadriplegic who’s almost helpless, to those that can get about. It means they can help each other. Even though very heavily disabled, there’s one particular person who may be known to you by name – Hilary Pole – who is so helpless that she can only move 1 toe – 1 big toe. She can’t breathe – she’s kept alive through a breathing machine. But through her big toe, which is in contact with a little microswitch, she can turn on her hi-fi and her telly. She can adjust the volume; she can choose the programme she wants; she can type. You go to her and see her and have a conversation. She can hear you. She answers you on a typewriter. To me that is an example not only of that great burning desire I would say of the disabled to have a purpose to their lives, to keep living, to keep turning what is left to them to the best advantage, but it also exemplifies how the disabled can’t do it without our help. Hilary could never have achieved this without what the doctors and the surgeons and the nurses and the engineers who built her very sophisticated and specialised equipment have done, and also of course the companionship and friendship of her family and her close friends. Well all our homes - that is those that bear my own name - , 60 or so in Britain and a few more, I mean some 70 or so in a number of other countries, are all locally financed and locally run. They take on the characteristic of the country. My wife has her own homes of a slightly different kind, but at one point we joined forces. And that is, well more than one, but particularly in one at Raphael in northern India in the foothills of the Himalayas. And as briefly as I can I’d like to take you there in spirit and just paint a very short picture of what Raphael is. Because Raphael is 1 home that is not locally supported, because it’s a little too large, it’s a little too complex, and it’s a gesture on our part to try and help India in its great struggle to overcome its many problems and its great poverty that afflicts so much of its land. Raphael at present is like a little village of different home units. It has 4 main units. The first as you go in … you cross a dry river, quite a wide gravelly river, dry for most of the year, but in the monsoon it’s a raging torrent. And the latest project has been to build a submersible bridge, so that during the monsoon one can cross it safely. Until now it’s been very haphazard. And last week in Sidney the All Australian and New Zealand Foundation decided that they could put up the money - $15,00 – to build this bridge. Having got across the river you climb up a little bank into what was once jungle but has now been cleared, and there you find on your right a leprosy colony with about 120 people suffering from leprosy. Leprosy of course can in many instances after fairly long treatment be arrested, but the disabilities remain – the clawed fingers, the lack of feeling in your fingers and feet – you pick up a saucepan that’s hot, you don’t know it, so you get burnt, you get an ulcer. But these are all people in whom a disease has been arrested but whose disabilities are such that they can’t really live at home. And we give the - or Raphael I should say gives them - a number of cottages. Each has 4 rooms - that’s 1 family to each room - and each family has a veranda on which it cooks and so on. They look after their own village. They keep it all clean; they do some gardening very well; they weave the cloth that is used in Raphael – they provide all the sheets. They have a tailor that makes clothes for them, they have a hairdresser who does all the hair – they don’t have to bring a hairdresser in from the town. They make their own shoes and so on. To the best of their ability they do work to earn their living, though I’m bound to admit that like all human beings there are some of them that don’t perhaps work as they might do. Perhaps it was our fault for giving them too much, for being … letting them know that come what may they would be fed and so on. But they are I think an outward-looking positive little group. Then there is Ava Vihar [?], as we know it, a home for mentally defective children, mostly children - but there are also some of them growing up -, about 80 of them. Our problem there is that some of them are so bad they need nothing more than custodial care – there’s nothing more you can do than care for them and feed them and stop them hurting themselves and so on. There are others who would respond to treatment. And perhaps we suffer from the fact that the buildings are rather close together, and therefore the one may possibly keep the others back from improving. This is something that we have to look at for the future. A little further on into the 35- or 38-acre estate is what we call the Little White House – my wife’s particular project – which is a home for children who are either orphans or who have no proper home background. – Their parents may have active TB or active leprosy, or there may be some reason why they can’t live at home. The children are brought up, educated at a little primary school at Raphael, and for the rest of their schooling they go out, and now of course they have to be fitted to take their place in the world. Three of them are training to be nurses, and others are doing other forms of training. Then finally there is the hospital block, which in part cares for the long-term severely disabled who we don’t know where else to house, but also takes in members of Raphael when they have some illness like pneumonia or something. In it there’s one wing is a TB unit. In the whole of that area of Pauri Garhwal there is no residential TB facility, except very briefly in the city hospital. The policy of WHO is that their treatment of TB should be domiciliary – at home – and obviously that is the ideal. But in that district at the foothills of the Himalayas where people are very scattered and where there are virtually no facilities at all outside the cities, it’s impossible to reach them in their homes. Nearly all those at Raphael are very severely afflicted with TB. They’re very young – you’re astonished at how young they are. The girl’s section, I believe that’s all of them all of the 24, are married. They all appear to be in their very early 20s. Some of them have had a 5-day walk to reach us. Even if they can go by bus as far as Tehri they may have another 2 days walk to get home. They get cured after some time with us and of course their anxiety is to go home – particularly the women – to go home and look after their families. The danger is they then break down. And so, our latest venture - entirely due to an Australian girl, Ann Young - has been to start a mobile unit that goes out into the foothills. We visited her, both of us 3 ½ weeks ago and saw her in her little mountain clinic at Tehri and from there she follows up the patients who’ve been in our own unit, sees how they are, if necessary gives them further treatment, or as a last resort brings them back. She has no vehicle at the moment – has to do it by bus. We are hoping that Oxfam may perhaps give us a vehicle, but 7 months have passed and we haven’t yet had an answer. The government of India has given us all the drugs needed for the TB clinic free and will continue to do so as far as we know in perpetuity. The government of India has also given us facilities in which to start clinics in that area and has been very helpful, although of course they have many problems in fact. There are a number of projects of course that we need to undertake – an extension to the Little White House for the boys as they grow up. Water is very short unfortunately in that district and we may be forced into having to dig a tube well. There also will have to be a bungalow for the doctor, the full-time doctor, ‘cos we feel he should live on the spot and not a mile or so away in the town. Nonetheless the cost of Raphael – $4500 a month – is being borne at the moment entirely from Australia and New Zealand. And when I think back to the day in 1959 when Sue and I first came to your country in the hope of obtaining some help for a burden we couldn’t quite carry ourselves, and think of what has been built up over those years, we have indeed reason to be grateful, and we are particularly grateful to you here in south Australia for the last of the foundations started in this country and for all the help we have had. I know that what we are doing is only a tiny little drop in the ocean. I know that there are many, many priorities, more urgent than looking after the long-term disabled, people who will never get better. Nonetheless it is a priority that because it’s often so low on the list is perhaps one that deserves all the more to be given some attention to. But be that as it may, I would just like to say that on behalf of those at Raphael whom I can picture as I stand before you today, to say what it means to them to be given this opportunity to be sponsored as they are by somebody or some group in Australia and New Zealand, to know that there is a small body of people far away in a distant land that is going to enough trouble to give them the means of being looked after and the opportunity of a new life. And in a world that has divisions and misunderstandings, a world in which we all look for unity and peace, however little this link may be, I do feel that it’s worthwhile. And I can only say that coming to Australia as we’ve done these last 3 weeks and meeting those who’ve gone to so much trouble to help us and to help the disabled has been an enormous inspiration. It’s been a relaxing and happy … and for me my last night in Adelaide before I go to Mount Gambier first thing in the morning. I do say thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

20:19 [applause] to 20:23

20:19: Speech ends
20:23: End of recording

End of Transcription