Disability Arts Online

Ann Young, wizened disability art chick and groupie, contributes towards a piece of Disability History.

Prologue

Most people know Lord Nelson was one of Britain's most famous naval heroes. However, what history has failed to record is that Horatio Nelson was, for much of his naval career, a disabled person. Even today, as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, very little has been written by the media and mainstream academics revering Nelson as one of the most famous disabled people in British history. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson didn't say, “I see no ships”. Instead he said, during the Battle of Copenhagen, … I have only one eye. I have a right to be blind sometimes” and, raising his telescope to his blind eye, “I really do not see the signal”.

It always amazes me how contemporary society seems to feign cultural blindness when it comes to recognising impairment and disability. Is this because disability, today, is considered an undesirable trait in people we revere as talented or heroic? After all, have not disabled people, in-valids, been the bane of civilized western society since the industrial revolution when able bodiedness became directly linked with capitalism? Disabled people have been systematically medicalised, sterilised and segregated, out of the mainstream society so successfully that we have all forgotten that impairment is part of normal life and was, in the past, accepted as such?

Perhaps it is for this reason that our society finds it difficult to recognise and celebrate the fact that, for much of his life, Nelson was a disabled person. As was, Frida Kahlo, Franklin Roosevelt and our very own Winston Churchill, whose statue depicting his depression and mental health issues, caused such an outcry from his family and the public, that the charity, Mind, had to remove it.

However by not acknowledging Nelson and others as a disabled people, we rob them of their own reality and we dishonour their life and the lives of all disabled people. This sketch attempts to add another small crack in the armour of denial that surrounds our cultural heritage, not only as disabled people, but as real heroes and active contributors to life.