A Short History of the Deaf Community, by Stephen Iliffe
The UK deaf community is an astonishingly diverse mosaic.
For over 200 years, the mosaic has evolved out of a vast spectrum of socio-economic class, ethnicity, religion and culture.
As I push open the swing doors to one London’s ‘deaf pub’ gatherings, I’m as likely to be pulled into sign language gossip by a friend of Lithuanian or Sri Lankan descent as I am by a cockney or a Scot. Joining the next circle of deafies, I might sign to a chief executive or bricklayer, doctor or office cleaner.
At times, it seems as if deaf people mingle with each other across demographic boundaries more freely than hearing people do. Why so?
The answer is not hard to find: whether their deafness is genetic or otherwise, deaf babies – and children who become deaf – appear randomly in families across all ethnic and socio-economic groups.
And, nine out of ten deaf people grow up in hearing families with no experience of deafness, often with limited or no sign language abilities. So, the deaf community fills a gap in our lives.
Enter any deaf gathering and you’ll instantly feel the ‘electricity’ in the room as deafies throw off the limitations of listening and lipreading and sign freely - about anything from climate change to last night’s football results.
The result: a community vibrant enough to bring together people who’d otherwise be unlikely to gather under one roof.
In recent decades, our 70,000-strong UK deaf community has been enriched by migrants from the Commonwealth and European Union (EU) nations. War and famine have also bought deaf refugees to our shores.
It is this incredible diversity which Deaf Mosaic celebrates.
And yet in the 21st century, as social and technological change accelerates faster than ever, fresh questions arise. Will the deaf community survive or disappear?
Before we speculate about the future, let’s revisit the past.
The origins of sign language
If we go back into the mists of time, references to ‘deaf’ or ‘mute’ people in Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norman literature are rare.
Most Britons spent their whole lives in small farming communities. So deaf people were geographically isolated from each other and without a common sign language. We can only speculate about their lives. We may assume they improvised ‘home signs’ with their families and neighbours; for basic needs like food, shelter, work tasks.
Home signs don’t pass from one generation to the next and aren’t shared beyond the user’s immediate circle. As soon as the deaf individual dies, their home signs disappear too.
So invisible were these home signers that it’s not until 1576 we even get a name. Step forward, Leicester deaf man – Thomas Tillsye – who gestured his marriage vows to his bride. Local church records (above) state:
‘Thomas Tillsye and Ursula Russel were marryed: and because sayde Thomas was and is naturally deafe and dumbe… For the expression of his minde, instead of word, used these signs. First he embraced her with his arms, and took her by the hande, putt a ring upon her finger and layde his hand upon her harte, and held his hands towards heaven; and to show his continuance to dwell with her to his lyve’s end he did it by closing of his eyes with his hands and digging out of the earthe with his foote, and pulling as though he would ring a [funeral] bell….’
The roots of modern British Sign Language (BSL) lie in these home signs. As Britain’s towns and cities grew over the 17th and 18th centuries, so did opportunities for deaf people to meet.
In 1666, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys writes of an urgent conversation between George Downing and a deaf boy about news of the Great Fire of London:
‘He made strange signs of the fire, and how the king was abroad, and many things they understood, but I could not’.
It’s a revealing quote as it indicates how at least some previously isolated home signers were now enriching each other’s limited vocabularies to the point of being able to discuss news of wider events.
Even so, it’s not until we fast forward to 1792 and Britain’s first free, non-fee paying deaf school, the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (above), that we see the beginnings of modern ‘sign language’.
The deaf community emerges
As deaf historian Peter Brown explains: “At first, the Asylum had just six pupils. One, Sarah Pounceby, was already a home sign user - as she had three deaf siblings. Sarah shared her family’s home signs with the other pupils. The teachers were able to build on this and expand it for use in formal instruction.”
“Any method of signed communication with less than 100 signs is merely a ‘sign system’,” adds Peter. “Once we reach 100 signs or more, including signs about abstract concepts, it starts to become a ‘sign language.”
By 1801, as the Asylum had expanded to 50 pupils, its sign language grew exponentially with it.
From the early 19th century onwards, deaf schools emerged in many of Britain’s regions and major cities. The schools made for lifelong friendships and marriages, and so became the foundation of what we now call ‘the deaf community’.
In 1822, we see the first known record of a ‘deaf club’ with a formal structure and rules. This Glasgow society met in a single room dedicated to worship of God and social activities.
In time, deaf clubs became the community’s heartbeat. Hundreds of deafies would linger until darkness. At closing time, they’d spill outside onto the streets, signing merrily under the gas lamps.
And yet even as the deaf community grew in size and sophistication, sign language faced huge odds. In 1880, an international congress in Milan infamously passed a resolution declaring that sign language inferior to ‘oralism’ (teaching by listening and speech only).
By 1889, this resolution leaked into British government policy and a majority of deaf schools became oral only – with often abusive punishment of those who dared to sign in class (hands tied to the chair, etc).
As a result, sign language went ‘underground’ – used discreetly by pupils in school toilets or dormitories at night – or within the safe confines of deaf clubs.
Even so, the spread of affordable transport via train in late-Victorian times empowered deaf people to network via regional and national conferences, festivals and sporting events. In 1924, deaf Britons sailed to Paris for the first International Silent Games (now Deaflympics).
From the 1930s, home movies offer tantalising glimpses of a vibrant deaf culture. If you visit the British Deaf Association’s Share visual archive, it’s impossible not to feel moved by these flickering black and white vignettes of seaside day trips, rambling clubs, football matches, ballroom dances, drama nights and signed songs.
The Post-war years
Yet the wider environment was still hostile to deaf culture. After World War Two, the National Health Service (NHS) saw ‘audiology’ become the driving force behind the education of deaf children. By the 1960s, the mass prescription of body-worn hearing aids led to deaf school closures – in the belief that assimilating deaf children into hearing schools would somehow eradicate deafness itself.
In 1964, the little Stephen (that’s me, above) became part of this social ‘experiment’. I’d just spent a year in Leicester’s Stoneleigh Deaf School’s nursery when the decision was taken to mainstream me into a local hearing school. There followed 15 years of systemic isolation from sign language and deaf culture (we’ll come back to this later).
As my Stoneleigh nursery teacher, Mrs Woolfe told my mother: “The bigwigs at town hall reckon that now we have more powerful hearing aids there’ll be no need for sign language. I disagree. I think there’ll always be a human need for it, but my views are sadly going out of fashion”.
False myths about deaf people’s language continued to typecast signs as mainly pictorial and limited in scope. In 1975, an Edinburgh team of linguists led by Mary Brennan challenged this. Deep video analysis illustrated that our signs had a rich and complex vocabulary, syntax and grammar. A language as sophisticated as any spoken language, capable of being deconstructed, recorded and taught. Brennan duly proposed that this language be named British Sign Language (BSL).
Suddenly, BSL acquired a new status; the UK’s fourth indigenous language – after English, Welsh and Scots Gaelic.
The civil rights era
This critical discovery breathed new fire into deaf people and led to the emergence in the 1980s of deaf civil rights – inspired by earlier women’s, black and gay movements. The radical National Union of the Deaf (NUD) called for a regular state-funded TV programme in sign language. In 1982, they got it when BBC TV launched See Hear!
That same year, I was now 21 and half way through my university photography studies. I felt down at the continued exclusion from full participation in classes and social life. I realised that something needed to change, but had no idea what to do.
One Sunday, I switched the TV on and – by random chance – the BBC See Hear! programme was on air. I stared at it for a while thinking “well, it’s very nice but this is for deaf people, and I’m not deaf. I’m just a hearing person who uses hearing aids. It’s not for me”.
At this time, See Hear! had two charismatic presenters, Maggie Woolley (above) and Clive Mason. I kept watching and began to think: “They’re deaf people. So, how come Maggie and Clive look so confident and assertive? And I’m not?” I became curious, and began to watch See Hear! weekly. And a whole new world opened out for me: Deaf clubs! Deaf culture! Deaf rights!
It was as if a light had been switched on in a dark room.
See Hear! revolutionized my thinking about my place in the world. Suddenly, I realized that I WAS deaf, but that it wasn’t deafness that was the issue, it was barriers that hearing society puts in front of us.
From there, I was inspired to visit Leicester’s Centre for Deaf People where Pamela and Frank Sly were warm and welcoming and encouraged my efforts to acquire BSL as a second language.
Yet the ongoing struggle between the ‘social model’ (of deaf people as members of a linguistic minority) and the ‘medical model’ (as a pair of broken ears) continued. In 1984, Jessica Rees from Oxford went under a surgeon’s knife as the world’s first recipient of a cochlear implant. The news generated world-wide headlines and fierce debate as deaf activists protested at their human rights being brushed aside in the rush for a medical cure.
Even so, the 1990s saw deaf campaigners pull off a series of breakthroughs including: the Disability Discrimination Act (now Equalities Act), TV subtitles, a newly-established profession of sign language interpreters, plus financial support packages for deaf students and employees.
By 2000, as millennium fireworks exploded in the skies, it felt as if the onwards march of equality laws, public services and technology would usher in a 21st century UK ‘golden age’ for deaf people.
Into the future
And yet, as I write this in 2020, the future looks uncertain. For each step forward, one step backwards.
A volatile mix of social and technological drivers is pushing and pulling the deaf community into new shapes.
Austerity and privatisation have bitten off a huge chunk out of state-funded deaf support services. Britain’s exit from the European Union is widely forecast to see the shredding of human rights that have underpinned deaf advances. Covid-19 has dramatically reduced income for deaf organisations.
Allied to this, the ongoing closure of deaf schools has now isolated generations of deaf children and young people. 90% are mainstreamed into hearing schools.
While some deaf people, like me, eventually find their way to the deaf community, many do not. And if and when they do arrive, they’ll find the traditional deaf club almost extinct in many parts of the UK, replaced by social media hubs.
And yet, and yet. Half a century after the deaf community’s demise was prophesised by the Oralists, it is still here. Despite mainstreaming, hearing aids and cochlear implants, deaf people are still connecting with each other.
My old Stoneleigh nursery teacher Mrs Woolfe was right, 45 years ago, when she told my mother, that sign language will survive because it meets a deep-seated human need.
Mobile phones now empower BSL signers to call each other. We no longer have to jump into a car, bus, train and travel miles to chat. We do it in just a few seconds via Facetime or WhatsApp. It’s the new normal for me to walk into my home kitchen and find my wife Emma in the middle of a BSL video call to Ipswich or India.
Digital media is reconfiguring the deaf community into new shapes. Black, Asian, LGBT and single-issue groups – like BSL Save the Earth – have mobilised to create vibrant new mutual support networks.
BSL performers like Richard Carter and Vilma Jackson are further stretching BSL’s linguistic potential in poetry and song and reaching wider audiences via the internet.
For the next generation of deaf babies and toddlers - like Harriet and Poppy who appear in the Deaf Mosaic exhibition - they will grow up into a deaf community that may not be the tight-knit monocultural one we see in those 1930s home movies, but a looser and multicultural constellation of niches.
The deaf community is a tiny minority - a mere 70,000 out of 60 million plus hearing Britons. So, the Intersectionality between these deaf niches – which is crucial for campaigning to the hearing world – is both a challenge and an opportunity. A new generation of deaf leaders and activists is required to harness the collective frustration, energy and talent.
Because, looking ahead, it won’t be just a ‘deaf community’ in the traditional sense that we knew it before, but a rainbow-coloured ‘deaf mosaic’.