Some of the country’s leading disabled activists have paid tribute to the “immense” contribution of Maggie Davis, an outspoken “rebel”, a powerful advocate and a pioneer of the independent living movement, who died last week at the age of 81.
She was best known for designing – with her late husband Ken – the Grove Road housing scheme, Britain’s first integrated co-operative housing development, which was opened in 1976 in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.
But friends and fellow activists this week also remembered a string of other ground-breaking projects, as well as her vision and determination to fight social injustice and oppression, while also being “a strong advocate for the voice of women” in the disabled people’s movement.
She had struggled for nearly a decade, before moving into Grove Road, to escape from a series of segregated residential units and care homes after becoming disabled in 1967.
While setting up Grove Road, and living in accommodation in nearby Derbyshire, she and her husband came up with the idea for DIAL – the first telephone advice and information line provided by and for disabled people – because of the problems they had had searching for disability-related information.
They set up DIAL in an unused cloakroom, with a single telephone, both provided by Derbyshire County Council, and with help from disabled colleagues.
In an interview with Disability News Service (DNS) in 2019, she said of their work: “There was no time for self-congratulations, and there was no place for it, it was just something that needed to be done.
“If we didn’t do it, nobody would. It was just hard work. It was a struggle for everybody, but it was galvanising at the time.”
Grove Road was a new building with three ground-floor flats designed for wheelchair-users, and three flats on the first floor for volunteer non-disabled tenants who would provide personal assistance support on a rota basis for the disabled people living on the ground floor.
She and her husband lived in the Grove Road development for six years before securing a mortgage and a grant to buy and adapt – including the installation of a through-ceiling lift – a semi-detached home of their own in Clay Cross, Derbyshire.
But the DIAL project also laid the foundations for the country’s first coalition of disabled people, Derbyshire Coalition of Disabled People, and then Derbyshire Centre for Integrated Living.
Maggie and Ken Davis had also helped set up the pioneering Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), which played a crucial role in the development of the disabled people’s movement and what was later known as the social model of disability.
They had been among those disabled activists who responded to a letter in the Guardian written by Paul Hunt in 1972, which described how disabled people were being forced into “isolated unsuitable institutions where their views are ignored and they are subject to authoritarian and often cruel regimes”.
John Evans, a fellow independent living pioneer, described Maggie Davis as “one of the last remaining persons of the golden generation” of disabled activists, and he said her death was a “personal and historic loss”.
The contributions that she and her husband made to the independent living and disability movements were “immense”, he said.
He added: “They were both pioneers in opening the door of opportunities for other disabled people to live independently.”
Maggie and Ken Davis had joined Evans and other activists in setting up the first informal independent living network in the late 1970s, while Evans and fellow residents of a Leonard Cheshire care home in Hampshire were preparing their Project 81, which eventually secured their own escape into independent living.
He said: “We constantly stayed in touch with each other, sharing our ideas and inspiration and eventually the network grew into a wide-ranging group of independent living activists throughout the country.”
That network helped to “inspire and encourage others to do likewise as part of empowering ourselves to be more political in seeking further progress for change in the UK”, he said.
Baroness [Jane] Campbell, another independent living pioneer, from the generation that followed and learned from Maggie and Ken Davis, said the couple had provided “a blueprint” for developing centres for independent living across the country.
This blueprint also allowed the movement to start drafting a plan for laws that would eventually provide disabled people with the option to replace social services or NHS care with personal assistants, she said.
Thanks to their vision, and that of John Evans, independent living became “one of the essential components” of the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP), said Baroness Campbell.
She said that the “vision, determination and bloody mindedness” of Maggie Davis had “spawned other younger women to join the independent living mission and develop her work liberating disabled people from residential care, or their childhood home with mum and dad with little prospect of leaving”.
Paul Hunt’s widow, Judy, a close and long-standing friend of Maggie Davis, said that when she reads articles her friend has written she is still “struck by the force of her words and power of her personality”.
She told DNS: “There was a rebel deep inside her that would not be silenced, and she put it endlessly to good use.
“She was never willing to give in to oppressive administrators of institutions, or others who treated people unjustly.”
She said that the contribution of Maggie and Ken Davis to the struggle against a disabling society was “profound”, and that they had broken through “many of the housing and community care barriers” that were still keeping many disabled people trapped in institutions in the 1970s.
She said: “They travelled to Scandinavia to bring back new ideas for accessible housing with support and showed by example what could be done” through the Grove Road scheme.
And she said they had moved “from one pioneering project to the next with insatiable determination”.
Judy Hunt said: “Maggie spoke with a refreshing directness against injustice of all kinds but particularly against oppression towards disabled people and women and set out to do something about it, such as campaigning for an accessible women’s refuge because there was nowhere locally disabled women facing violence could go.”
Maggie Davis was, she said, “a fighter and a fundamental believer in collective action”, and also “a great support to many people who turned to her”.
Frances Hasler, who would later become a founder and chief executive of the National Centre for Independent Living, said it was Maggie and Ken Davis who had first introduced her to the social model of disability.
She said: “I remember Maggie being a strong advocate for the voice of women in the movement. She was also great at articulating the right to be ordinary.
“She was outspoken and determined because she needed to be, in order to get an ordinary thing – a home to live in and the wherewithal to live there.
“What set her apart was her willingness to share her experience and insights with other disabled women.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Davis had described the institutions she had been forced to live in after becoming disabled and before she met her husband, including years at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and in a hostel in its grounds, describing the “dehumanising” lack of any kind of privacy.
She told the Guardian: “Institutions are just tarted up poor law institutions.
“Where I was I could have been in two centuries ago – all the same attitudes.
“You were given pocket money – you’re impoverished, you are socially dead. It’s just an existence.”
The disabled writer and researcher Jenny Morris, who helped write the Labour government’s Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People white paper, said she hadn’t known her well, but she had “admired and learned from women like Maggie”.
She said: “The story of Maggie and Ken’s struggles and successes in living independently were an inspiration to me when I became disabled in 1983.
“They were an illustration of not only what individuals could do and change but also of the growing disability movement.”
In the 2019 DNS interview, Davis had spoken of how she feared that much of what she and her husband helped to achieve could be put at risk by the austerity policies of successive Conservative-led governments.
She said: “I think we all feel very proud of what we did but we are desolate about what we think we know is going to happen and that they will destroy it all.
“If no action is taken, then we could quite easily end up where we began, being incarcerated away from society, out of sight and out of the public mind.”
She said she was “terrified” about whether she would continue to receive the funding she needed for 24-7 support.
“With the constant eroding of funding, I am in constant fear of this being removed and me being forced back into institutional care, which I would not allow,” she said.
“It’s just horrendous. I can see it being taken away from me and being taken away from us. Every time they come to do an assessment, they try to take a bit more off me.”
She appealed then for disabled activists to “shout their outrage from the rooftops” about the government’s austerity policies and the creeping return to segregated, institutional living.
Picture: Maggie and Ken Davis with their dog, Sally