UK Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: “I thought that there was no deaf and dumb but me”
UK Disability History Month runs from 16th November to 16th December.
Accessibility and Archives: “I thought that there was no deaf and dumb but me”
This is one of a sequence of blogposts from the Accessibility Working Group of the Diversity Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith shares some of the history of signing before Irish Sign Language and British Sign Language, and the ongoing fight for Deaf community and equality. It is important to remember that British and Irish Sign Languages are different from each other and from the spoken languages in the countries where they are used. The title is drawn from a reminiscence of a young deaf woman about her isolation in childhood, before attending an Asylum.
Back in June a blog in this series reflected on the challenge of finding Deaf community in sources that prioritised normalisation through oralism (lip reading and articulated speech) over signing The intentions behind this prioritisation are captured in a review of a 1918 novel King Silence whose characters were mostly “deaf mutes”. This disparages the (hearing) author Arnold Hill Payne as “one of a steadily dwindling sect who would make the deaf a finger-spelling, signing class by themselves. This tends to intermarriage and is bad socially and especially bad eugenically.” However, even in the present-day, parents of deaf children can still be discouraged from teaching the sign language that would help them to become part of the Deaf community. It is important to note that although 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, it can be expensive for families with deaf children to learn signing as a second or additional language.
The sign language taught in the nineteenth century could be quite localised, but John Kitto (1804-1854), himself Deaf, observed that “two or more deaf and dumb persons are enabled to hold instant converse with each other, though brought together for the first time from the most distant parts.” George Samuel Cull (1840-1904) recalls meeting someone Deaf like himself in the 1850s and notes “I was very comfortable conversing with him in signs” although “I could not well understand him as he was educated at the London Asylum” and “the signs taught there are not like the signs taught at Manchester.” Nonetheless they spent the day together in the Dockyard, exploring the Steamship ‘Jason’ and trying (without success) to get admission to a convict ship.
Shortly after Cull met the London signer, he emigrated to Canada, where he was involved in a life-changing accident. In recovery he was visited by a “deaf and dumb lass, aged twenty years, who… saw me every day for eight weeks. She taught me to talk with one hand” – the American, French and Irish system. He records meetings with other signing people including some Deaf Irish children, with whom he spent “spent three days, and was much charmed with them in conversation, of course by signs and fingers.” Even in comparatively unpeopled territory, Deaf people were finding each other. But urban centres like London were increasingly places where there was potential for building Deaf Community. In 1871 there were thirteen signed church services across the metropolis, and a central church in Oxford street which opened two years was designed for 250 signing worshippers, with space for a ‘cradle-to-grave deaf club’ underneath. The then Princess of Wales (pictured in the preview inage), herself increasingly deaf, not only laid the cornerstone, but would sometimes attend services.
Four hundred years earlier, a king of Scotland’s daughter is recorded as signing. This “muta domina” was Joan Stewart (d. 1493). Her silence had not precluded her from marrying the Earl of Morton and having four children. The funeral monument in Dalkeith depicting her and her husband is the earliest surviving portrait of an identifiable user of signing. She had been educated in a French nunnery, and one possible source of her signs was the long-established tradition of non-verbal communication in religious houses. John Bulwer’s Philocopus of 1648 perhaps suggests another. In addressing the two deaf brothers who were its dedicatees he notes: “yet you want not speech, who have your whole Body, for a Tongue, having a language more naturall and significant, which is common to you with us, to wit gesture, the generall and universall language of Humane nature, which… wee joyne in commission with our wordes, and when wee would speak with more state and gravity, wee renounce wordes and use Nods and other naturall signes alone.” Although there is some exaggeration here in deeming sign language universal (notwithstanding the links between Hand-Talk and the emergence of American Sign Language), it is bracingly refreshing to see highlighted both the potential for non-verbal communication to be shared between the hearing an non-hearing within a culture, and the inadequacy of speech. Samuel Akerley, in 1823, would note signing’s importance as a lingua franca between those who do not speak each other’s languages.
Bulwer further noted “you already can expresse your selves so truely by signes, from a habit you have gotten by using alwayes signes, as wee doe speech: Nature also recompencing your want of speech, in the invention of signes to expresse your conceptions.” This reflects an emerging recognition that not speaking was not, in fact, an indicator of mental incapacity. In theory, a suspect who could not be questioned because they could not hear or speak could be “cont[a]ined for life”. However, if they could be tried and found not guilty, they would be at liberty the same as anyone else so signing can get mentioned in Court records. There remained debate (sometimes in the well of the court itself) as to the adequacy of signing to the purpose of ensuring a fair trial for a defendant. Sometimes the interpreters were family members, neighbours or workmates, whose skills may well have been limited to everyday situations. For example, in 1725, John Hewitt deposed that although he and the defendant “understood one another well enough in Rope-making, [he] could not pretend to be certain of his Meaning in such a Case as this.” At the Cork City Assizes in 1844, the aunt and brother of a victim of sexual assault asserted that “though they knew many of [her] signs, there were many they did not know, and they accordingly refused to swear” with the unfortunate result that the accused was discharged.
Nonetheless, back in 1771 James Saytuss, “otherwise Dumb O Jemmy” was found guilty at the Old Bailey and transported for theft and burglary: “A person with whom he had formerly lived as a servant, [had been] sworn interpreter, who explained to him the nature of his indictment by signs.” Similarly, a man was convicted and transported two years later who “was in the habit of communicating his ideas to a woman of the name of Fanny Lazarus, [who] was sworn and examined as to the fact of her being able to make the prisoner understand what she said… by means of signs.” Equality for jury service is very recent: the first Irish juror using ISL was Patricia Hefferman in 2020, while Karen and Paul were the first English jurors supported with BSL as recently as 2022.
More than sixty years before Payne’s novel, Wilkie Collins’ Hide and Seek, claimed to be the first to include a signing “Deaf Mute” character. We should note that although she was taught finger-spelling, she continued to use the home sign she had evolved for herself. One moment in the novel, though drawn from Collins’ preparatory desk research, resonates strongly with a moment in Cull’s narrative: “Remember that I am deaf and blind too in the darkness. You, who can hear, have a sense to serve you instead of sight, in the dark—your ears are of use to you then, as your eyes are in the light. I hear nothing, and see nothing—I lose all my senses together in the dark.” Cull notes that his life had been saved not just by his mother waking him up in the middle of the night, but by the cabin light being on, enabling him to see when “she spelled to me on her fingers that the steamer was on fire.”
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with records of Deaf and Disabled people, or using historic records with Deaf and disabled people. If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance, contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .
Thumbnail photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash