Disabled Motoring UK - Disabled Motoring UK is the charity for disabled drivers, passengers & Blue Badge holders.

Suselle Boffey  tells us about her early adventures with her mother, who inspired Suselle’s lifelong love of travel.

My mother was quite an unusual person.  From an early age, she bucked the trend – a trait she probably inherited from her father, who chose to follow a professional career and so alienated his family of traditional Jewish business-people.  Mum’s own mother was absent for most of Mum’s life (she was sent to a distant psychiatric hospital when Mum was seven years old). As a result, Mum’s upbringing was left to her dad and the housekeeper. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she followed her own thoughts and ideas as she grew up, developing an enquiring mind and a passionate curiosity about the world.  Even in the early 1950s – still a period when convention and tradition ruled, she chose to go into nursing and to hitchhike across France and Germany with her nursing friends! Continue reading »

UPDATE: For information on the memorial tribute to O A Denly, please click here.

It is with great sadness that Mobilise has to announce the death of our founder and president, Oswald Arthur Denly, known to many of us as “Denny”. He died at the age of 86.

O A Denly was born in 1924 in London, and entered the Royal Navy in 1942. He contracted polio whilst in Ceylon and returned to the UK in 1945. Paralysed from the waist down, he was invalided out of the navy and became a hospital administrator. The expectation of many might have been that Denny’s adventuring days were firmly behind him, but the handsome 22-year old thought differently. He had planned to spend his first Foreign Service leave in Switzerland and saw no reason to change his plans despite his disability. In June 1947 he set off to conquer the Alps in his 147cc petrol-driven Argson tricycle, or “Invalid Carriage”. His was to take him 1,500 miles over the Alps, including a climb of almost 8,000 feet through steep mountain passes. Continue reading »

Jim Rawlings visits the 2009 London to Brighton Veteran Run for a look at some classic vehicles from the early days of motoring.

Contrary to popular belief the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run (LBVCR) is not a race. The annual event takes place on the first Sunday of every November and commemorates the Emancipation Run of 14 November 1896, which celebrated the passing into law of the Locomotives on the Highway Act. This raised the speed limit for ‘light locomotives’ from 4 mph to 14 mph and abolished the requirement for these vehicles to be preceded by a man on foot. Over 30 vehicles commenced the first run in 1896 run but only 14 completed the journey. One, it is alleged, was taken by rail and covered with mud before crossing the finishing line. The next run was staged in 1927 and has been held, war and petrol rationing permitting, every year since. Continue reading »

What do museum artifacts tell us about the experience of living with a disability in the past? Ruth Burwood, Senior Access Curator from the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service decided to find out and uncovered a wealth of hidden stories.

For some time museum staff in Norwich had been aware that the displays in museums often only represent a particular version or experience of the past, and therefore exclude some of the community. Our own Disability Access Advisory Group had told us that they did not see themselves in the displays, and felt that the stories of disabled people in the past were missing from our museums.

To address this we decided to find out what relevant objects existed in our collections. Why had they become hidden? We wanted to ensure that in future, anyone could discover these objects and the stories they told. With approximately 1.5 million objects and specimens in our store, we were excited about what we might find…
Continue reading »

2008 saw the 60^th anniversary of the launch of the Morris Minor, and 2009 marked a very happy 50^th birthday for the Mini. Jim Rawlings raises a toast to two British classics.
Few cars engender more genuine love and devotion in their owners than a Morris Minor. The development of the  Minor has given rise to many stories, some apocryphal but some more reliably documented. Sir Alex Issigonis’ own recollections are particularly interesting. He described the final refinements of the design process thus: “I wasn’t very happy with the final version, so I went to the shop one evening and told the mechanics to cut it in half!” The original prototypes were 57 inches wide, but Sir Alex ordered the two halves to be moved apart until he felt the proportions were right. This added four inches to the width of the car – and a reminder of this decision can be seen on all Morris Minors, in the flat strip that runs down the centre of the bonnet. Continue reading »