Leonard Cheshire speaking at a Public Dinner in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1974

Leonard Cheshire speaking at a Public Dinner in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1974

Talks about the role that disabled have to play in the world. Gives background for the world, himself and his wife before the war. Continues with talk of cost of war. Mentions his wife had been involved with special forces. Continues with her work with refugees and ex concentration camp victims. Relates story of him meeting ex-servicemen dying of cancer and discovery of world of the disabled, Continues with description of his organisation and its world-wide work. Continues with discussion of problems starvation in the world which need to be solved. Talks of the differences between his and his wife's organisations as well as more details of other projects. Submitted with caption 'Written on container "Aust N. Rec. with 50Hz Pilot. 3/3/4 IPS Roll 1 1/4" Lift off SN NAGRA" Side 1: October 14th, Newcastle, New South Wales public dinner. Leonard Cheshire speech about his life, WWII and work in the field of disability, talks about disability activist Hilary Pole and is fundraising for the work of him and Sue Ryder in India, namely Raphael which has been supported by Australia and New Zealand since 1959. Speech at St Ignatius School, Abbottsville, Sydney. Leonard Cheshire talks to the children about the dambusters and explains how the bouncing bomb worked'.

1974-10-14

Audio recording 00:31:15

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SCheshireGL72021v20023-0001, SCheshireGL72021v20023-0001-Transcript

Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project

Title: Leonard Cheshire speaking at a Public Dinner in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1974
Duration: 31:18
Transcription date: 22 May 2020
Archive Number: AV_S 421 [1]

Start of Transcription
Male voice: October 14th, Newcastle, New South Wales public dinner.
[clapping].
[00:13] Group Captain Leonard Cheshire: President – am I going to have to hold this?
[00:16] Male voice: No, I think you might be alright…you’ve got it.
[00:23] GCLC: President [Lez], Chairman Dick, and friends. Well I – it’s a very happy occasion indeed for me to be back once again in Newcastle. And I’d like to thank everybody most warmly for the opportunity this evening of meeting you. Above all, I thank you with all my heart for that wonderful gift that’s just been presented of 1800 dollars because that’s a very large sum of money, and I think I know something of how hard one has to work to raise money, so I do thank you for that gift. When [Lion] Bob introduced me and said that I was a little diffident about talking of my time in the air force, et cetera, there’s a certain reason for that, because quite a number of things are better left untold, Bob.
[audience laughter]
[01:38] GCLC: And I must thank him for having been a little selective in what he did say about my past. I think that I am invited this evening to talk for a little while before, I think, you ask questions if you wish to about the work in which Sue, my wife, and I are engaged and which is of course the reason for my being here tonight. But I would like to do so particularly in trying to say something about the part that I believe that the disabled, no matter how disabled they may be, and indeed everybody, no matter what his condition, however poor or helpless he may appear to be, the role that he has to play in the world. It was never my expectation that I would find myself living and working amongst the disabled. I’m not going to go into the story tonight of how that came about because for one thing I think I’ve told it at least once, if not twice in Newcastle. But at any rate, both for my wife and myself, the story began a little before the war, when each of us was fairly young, I being a little bit older. We belonged to a generation that rejected war as a means of solving disputes between nations, but the trouble was we were so against war that we weren’t able to see the signs of war coming. We didn’t want to. Probably that generation between the wars was a generation that was very inward looking. We were concerned about our own problems: the economy; balance of payments, unemployment. They were very real problems, of course. But there was a much greater problems arriving over the channel which we did not pay attention to until it was too late: Hitler. And whereas at the beginning we could easily have stopped him, whereas even as late as 1938 we had something like four times – talking about the western allies – four times the military strength that he did, when it came to war, we were outnumbered. And so we were thrown into a second world war, the generation before us having fought a world war in the belief that it would bring peace. And this, I think, was the belief that sustained us, in our generation, that at the end of it there would be the foundation on which governments could build peace and freedom and justice and the opportunity for all the lead the kind of lives they wanted. But now as we look back, we see that it has not really come about. As so I say that the little story that I have to tell tonight began in that era. In the 1930s, when, through failure to pay enough attention to what was happening in the outside world, we fell into war. And at the end of the war, which is perhaps, you may know, or perhaps you don’t cost 55 million lives altogether, there still remained a question: what does one do as an individual to work to eradicate the causes of war? To say that one doesn’t want war is easy, but what really matters is doing something to help see that it will not come about. It was a question that I on my side couldn’t answer. It was a question that Sue, my wife, didn’t ask herself because she, having been a member of special forces – that was the unit that used to drop behind the lines. She did not drop behind the lines but she was responsible for helping brief and debrief and drive them out to the aircraft and so on – she found herself, immediately after the war, in Germany, where, as you know, or probably know, there were all those who had been released from the concentration camps. And so her time was fully taken up in their problems and the problems that they faced as human beings, are problems that today, thirty years later, are very difficult to picture. Not so very different to those in the disaster areas of the world, who suffer from no food, nowhere to live, floods, and so on. For me, unexpectedly, I came across one particular man, dying of cancer, whom the hospital couldn’t keep. He was an ex-serviceman and in Britain with the welfare state, not only was a great deal done for anybody who was ill, but even more was done for those who had been in the service – one of the services. The hospital couldn’t keep the old man because there was nothing more to be done for him. And so when I set out to try and help him, I found myself, in a sense, walking through a door that opened into a completely new world: the world of the disabled. And there I discovered that amongst the disabled, one particular group seemed to be left out, and that was the young adult disabled. A boy or a girl of twenty, shall we say, or a little bit older, or sometimes younger, who might perhaps dive into a lake and hit his head on a submerged rock that he didn’t know was there and break his neck, and become paralysed, or have a motor-car accident, or perhaps just suffer one of the many diseases that make one disabled to a greater or lesser extent. Now such a person, in those days in England, and even to a certain extent still today, having been through hospital and rehabilitation centres and so on, having had everything done for him that the highly skilled medical services can do, finds himself in a position where the doctor say, ‘you’ll never get any better’. Now that person, although in his body he is disabled, perhaps sometimes almost totally, in his mind he is the same as any other young person, and he or she wants for his life just what everybody wants for our lives when we’re young. He wants to lead a normal life, he probably wants to marry, he certainly wants to feel needed and wanted, but most of all, I think, he wants to be useful. He wants to feel there will be an opportunity for him to express himself in his own way, to be creative, to feel that there is some way in which he can give something to the world. But, of course, his disability makes that very difficult. And so, my own work, for homes that bear my name, consists in trying to provide for such people a home environment in which, as much as possible, they can flower and blossom. As small home of not more than 30, which will be homelike, as much as possible, a minimum of rules and regulations, informality, integrated as much as can be into the local community, but also with the highly skilled aids and gadgets and nursing and physiotherapy that exists today, to give the disabled independence. You probably know that if one has a gadget that is called a ‘possum’, which is an electronic box, even though you have no use in your hands or feet, you can still do a great deal. We have one boy who is exactly like that – he can’t use his hands or his feet – but he types, and he types to professional standard. It operated like a Morse code: if it’s short long [blowing sound] – or that was the other way round – it was long short – it’ll be ‘n’. If it’s short long [blowing sound], it’ll be ‘a’. And that actuates the key on the typewriter. And he will type a fully professional letter; you would not know that it had not been done by a stenographer. There is one particular girl who has no movement in any part of her body except her big toe. She’s kept alive by a breathing machine; she can see and she can hear but she can’t talk, and she lies, totally helpless, in bed except for a little movement in one big toe. That toe is connected to a little microswitch by means of which she can put on a hi-fi, adjust the volume, select what she wants, turn on the telly, radio, but she can also type, and if you go to see her, you’ll have a conversation: you talk to her, and she talks back to her through her typewriter – you get a little typewritten slip. I might say that she’ll size you up pretty quickly; quicker perhaps than many fit people. She composes poetry. She’ll have a joke with you. And when one considers somebody like that, and considers not only the determination and courage in her, but also the technical skill of the engineers and the doctors and the nurses, and the friendship and companionship of her neighbours, everybody who’s been connected with her, I think one sees a little glimpse of what we human beings can do as a team. It’s not only a question of those of us who are fit or wealthy or powerful doing something for the helpless, which indeed we should, it’s also a question of the helpless doing something for us. And over these 25 years in which I’ve been connected, or I should say privileged to be connected with the disabled and sometimes the very poor in different countries, I’ve come to think that it isn’t the achievement that counts, but it’s the effort, the sacrifice. An achievement can be washed away overnight; a whole lifetime’s achievement can go by a sudden catastrophe or whatever it might be, and is lost, but the effort isn’t lost. It remains. And I’m quite certain that the real criterion for what we do, for what we achieve, is what we’ve done relative to our opportunities and our resources. And I’m quite certain that that is the criterion by which God will judge us. In other words, it’s the true criterion. So that what we need to do is not to look at a problem in its totality – shall we say, the starving millions of West Bengal or Central Africa, where there was the recent drought. If we look at the totality of the problem, we’re put off: we think it’s impossible. ‘There’s nothing that I can do to alter that’. What we should look at is what we, as an individual, can do, and do it. And then have faith that others will do their part and that bit by bit, it will make an impact on the problem. Well now, although my wife and I have separate organisations – she works largely, but not entirely, in Eastern Europe, in the countries that were overrun and almost totally destroyed by the Nazis, so that her work is a little different from mine – we do in fact, in one or two places, combine. And the once place where we combine is here, in Australia, and New Zealand. We came to Australia in 1959 in order to try and get a little help for a particular settlement that we run together in Northern India. All the other homes that we run – there’s 60 or so that Sue has and 130 or 40 or whatever it is that bear my name in different countries – all those homes are locally financed and locally run, even in the poorest of countries, even in the middle of Biafra, in the Nigerian Civil War, as it was for a time called. Two homes there ran and finances themselves. The 18 homes that we have in India finance and run themselves, but in order to help a little more, and in order to deal with certain specialised needs, we decided to found, in Northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas – in Dehradun – a settlement for the disabled which would be financed from overseas. And this we call ‘Raphael’. It has a sister settlement in the south called ‘Gabriel’. Now this year, Australia and New Zealand have just decided, most generously, to take over full financial responsibility for Raphael. And over the years, since 1959, a network of little support groups has gradually spread across the continent. Raphael consists of a number of different units, so it’s like a village of little homes for the disabled. There is a leprosy colony, with 120 leprosy patients, a home for mentally defective children – or some of them a bit older now – and they are very mentally defective. The little white house, as we call it, which houses children who have no home backgrounds that can look after them, some of them are orphans, some cases have parents who have active TB, or active leprosy, so that it’s not safe for them to live at home, or some other reason, and hospital unit. And in that hospital unit is a TB wing, that is the only residential TB centre in the entire huge district of Tehri Garhwal. The policy of WHO, as some of you may know, is that TB should not be treated in hospital, but at home, and of course in theory that’s very sound and very good, but those that we have, the 24 girls in the girls’ wing, and the 20 or so men in the men’s wing – I think all of them under 24 – have come about a five day walk, some of them, to get there, so you can picture the difficulties. And when they get better, and cured - particularly the girls, all of whom are married – they have only one desire, and that it to go to their homes and continue their work. And so, of course, they break down again. And, two months ago, an Australian girl, Ann Young, who’s done a specialised course in TB, has started a mobile clinic, which goes out into the mountains, the beautiful mountains near the source of the River Ganges, at Tehri and beyond, which follows up the patients who have been to our unit, and makes certain that they are alright, looks for new ones and brings them in where necessary, so if possible, of course they’re treated in their home. So that is a brief picture of Raphael. You heard about the gift of 1800 dollars which was given the build the causeway. Now Raphael is on a 30-acre estate, which government of India gave us, but it’s just outside the city limits, separated from the city by a riverbed. It’s a dry river for 9 months of the year; in the monsoon it becomes more or less a raging torrent. And in the past we’ve had to make do with a sort of makeshift causeway, which always gets semi-demolished. Now we think – well, we know – the time has come to build a proper, submersible bridge. And that is a 15,000 dollar project. And yesterday, when we held the all-Australia council meeting in Sydney, with a New Zealand representative there, it was decided that if it was possible to get approaching 2000 dollars from Newcastle, it would be possible to build the causeway. In a word, the cheque that you have given or that’s just been given to Lions, has in fact completed that project.
[clapping].
[25:00] GCLC: And I think tomorrow a cable is going to Raphael telling them that they may go ahead. There’s a little story behind that. In order to be certain that the bridge was well constructed, they got the engineer-in-chief of the Indian Army, recently retired, to supervise the design. And one of the senior engineer officers serving in the army, is stationed at Dehradun. And when we were both there – I mean Sue and I were there – a fortnight ago, this engineer received a posting to Calcutta, so the Indian generals, who are on our council, got together, spoke to their friends in the – spoke to the army commander, and requested that this engineer’s posting be deferred for three months until he could complete the causeway. Don’t know if that would be possible in Australia, but it has been done in India. In order to keep Raphael going, Australia and New Zealand have to five 4,500 dollars a month, which looks after 320 more or less helpless people. And in addition, of course, there are, from time to time, projects like the causeway, like the jeep for Ann Young’s mobile until – there’ll have to be a little extension for children as they begin to grow up, to separate the boys a bit further from the girls, and so on. And we can never be grateful enough to the help we’ve received from this country. And for me, it’s a tremendous pleasure to be amongst you, who have not only helped us but I know are working, as I’ve been told, nearly all of you, for so many different causes in this city. But before I sit down, there’s just one last thing that I would like to say. The little story that I’ve tried to tell began, as I said, before the war. In the years when, as I see it, everything went wrong because we were too inward looking. Well the world has changed a great deal since the 1930s. We would never have guessed how many changes were coming about. But I wonder whether we are perhaps not in the same danger as we were then. I know that there’s no Hitler threatening us - or at least I don’t think there is – but there is another threat, and that is the gap between the poor parts of the world, and the wealthier parts. And I wonder whether really we are paying the attention that we should do to that gap and to its implication. When we know that other members of the human family are living with literally nothing, as we do know, we owe it to them, in justice, to help. But there’s another reason why we should help. It’s in our own interest that we do something to level this gap, because if we don’t, I personally am sure that we are leaving to our children the most dangerous legacy. I cannot see that the world has any hope of living in peace and security, has little hope of giving freedom and justice to everybody, is such disparity is allowed to continue. In other words, because perhaps we want to hold on to a bit too much, and are not willing to let enough go, a little go now, after all I know we all have interest that must come first: those of our families and our country and so on, but there’s no use in safeguarding our local interests if we’re going to be overwhelmed by another confrontation. And somehow, I feel that if we’re not careful, if we don’t do a little more than we are doing, we may do exactly that, and end up in another world confrontation of one kind or another. And if we say to ourselves, ‘what can we do?’ then I feel the answer is each of us just does a little that comes our way and the feel that we can do in whatever field. We are all human; whatever we do will be inadequate and little, but the important thing is that we do it. And so for many reasons, I thank you most warmly, both for your invitation and for your gift today, which will mean so much for those who live at Raphael. Thank you very much.

31:10 End of Speech
[clapping 31:10 – 31:18]
31:18 End of recording.
End of Transcription