Marshall - Wheelchairs, Perjury and the London Marathon

In September 1972 I was climbing in the Peak District with a friend from work, on the gritstone at Birchens Edge just above the Robin Hood pub where the road from Baslow to Sheffield splits off from that to Chesterfield. Late on the Saturday afternoon I was trying to pull up a narrow crack on finger jams, but failed, and fell off, about 20 feet, landing full square on both feet and getting a compression fracture of the spine. Taken first of all to Chesterfield Royal Infirmary, two days later I was transferred to Lodge Moor Hospital in Sheffield, the regional centre for the management of spinal injuries. This was to be my home for the next eight months.

The hospital was high up on the moors at the western edge of the city, with no buildings beyond it. In the acute ward, you could hear the clip-clop of horses from the local riding school as they trotted along the roads beyond the grounds of the hospital; and, depending which way you were facing when lying in bed, you could see the helmets bobbing up and down above the dry stone walls, the sight accentuated when, as often seemed to happen that winter, the fields were covered in snow. Round to the right, and way down in a deep-cut valley, was the A57 road that came out of Sheffield, over to the Ladybower dam, and on to the Snake Pass, offering access to the high moorland of the Dark Peak. It was inviting, even if the immediate prospect of getting there was non-existent.

But the outdoors wasnt entirely out of bounds. One day I woke to a snow-covered paradise. It had snowed overnight, well over an inch, and the sky was a crystal clear blue; I decided to go out and enjoy this.. Despite the blazing sun, it was very cold as I pushed the wheelchair through an inch of snow up to the helipad at the back of the hospital, and sat there surrounded by the snow, in utter quietness, soaking in the pleasures of being outside, in the country once again. Almost everyone thought I was mad, but the ward sister who could beat me at Scrabble, and was altogether a very impressive lady knew, for me, what that experience was about; simply magical.

The physiotherapist assigned to me, Harry Charles, was a leading light in the hospital sports club strictly speaking, the Spinal Injury Sports Club so even though I was stuck in bed for the first 10 weeks, there was an early introduction to the sports side of rehabilitation. The gym, in which all the sports took place, had originally been an ordinary ward (South 2, or S 2) when the whole hospital was an isolation hospital for infectious diseases; and there was still one ward functioning as the regional infectious diseases unit. But S 2 became the gym when the Spinal Injury Unit was established there in the early 1950s.

While I was still in bed in Lodge Moor I had seen a clip on the BBCs Saturday afternoon Grandstand programme taken from the Paralympic Games held in Heidelberg. They showed a British athlete in a wheelchair doing what the programme called a slalom, pushing the wheelchair along a pre-set track, tipping the wheelchair onto its rear wheels to bounce up or down a step, ducking low like a limbo dancer to get under a low tape, and so on. My memory of this broadcast finished with the man in the wheelchair doing a back-wheel balance on the two rear wheels, and in my memory the wheelchair fell over backwards and the man fell out. The programme had introduced him as Philip Craven.

A few weeks later, still stuck in bed, I had a letter from France. I didnt know anyone in France; what on earth was this about? It turned out to be from the same Philip Craven, who at that time, he told me, was teaching wheelchair basketball, and other sports too, at a rehabilitation centre at Kerpape in southern Brittany. (The connection to him was obscure: a daughter of some friends of my parents had been at university with Philip, already in a wheelchair from a climbing accident at the age of 16. She contacted him about me, and so he wrote to me.) This was the first instance of contact with Philip that was to continue, on and off, for the next 40 years.

Once I was allowed to start getting up the gym was an obvious destination. Other than Wednesdays it was used routinely as part of the rehabilitation programme, but on Wednesday afternoons it was used by ex-patients who came up for a sort of mini sports day, when as far as possible the gym was cleared of moveable equipment to enable people to play battington (a kind of badminton but with solid rackets), table tennis, snooker and wheelchair basketball. The size of the central section of the gym, maybe 15 yards by 6, made basketball no more than 4 a side at maximum and more usually 3 especially exciting to watch.

It was Harry Charles (actually a Remedial Gymnast rather than a physiotherapist) who got me playing table tennis, along with his successor John Honey, just finishing his training in physiotherapy. Swimming was also sometimes on offer, very good for paralysed limbs, but Id never been a water sort of person, had never learned to swim, and I didnt take up the pportunity then. It was Harry, though, who first aroused my interest in wheelchair sports, and who encouraged me to go to the national championships held annually at Stoke Mandeville.

My first visit there was straight after being discharged from hospital. I had supposed that going to The Nationals, as the games were universally described, would involve a rigorous selection procedure. I had no idea what that might be, but presumably through some regional or club-based structure based on performance: were you good enough? The presumption was partly correct, in that the hospital sports club made the entry for you, including such details as sex, level of disability and which sports you were going to do; but it seemed that anyone could go, regardless of ability, provided that they were attached to an existing sports club. At that time the clubs were essentially hospital-based, and the hospitals were those with spinal injury units. So, there was my club Lodge Moor Spinal Injury Sports Club and clubs from other hospitals: Stoke Mandeville, Pinderfields (Wakefield), Southport and so on. The only exception to this that I could discover was the Scots, who came down as the Scottish Paraplegic Association, rather than from Musselburgh or Philipshill, the two hospitals in Scotland then offering specialised treatment for spinal injuries.