Niall Strawson - If I knew then what I know now; disabled people reflect on their careers

NIALL (Whole video)
RICHARD>>: So, next is Niall Strawson. I’m going to quote Niall directly as I introduce him, because I couldn’t put this better. Niall says: “I describe myself as an ex-neuroscientist turned conservation biologist, now working as a disability advocate. I have also done a spot of moonlighting as a sommelier, and a dolphin trainer.” That’s a fantastic introduction! So, he’s had this very varied, interesting life. He did his undergraduate study in biology at Edinburgh, finally specialising in neuroscience; went on and did a Masters in biodiversity and conservation at Leeds; and he was all teed up to go and work in the Congo, in fact. And just before he was due to go, he had a really nasty winter sports accident, in which he very sadly broke his back. Nearly died, ten months in rehab, and had to rethink things in absolutely fundamental ways. [At this point the introduction was temporarily interrupted owing to a sound problem.] So, Niall began again, as a wheelchair user. He worked for a while at the Environmental Change Institute in the University of Oxford, and there he was a research assistant to a postdoc analysing bush-meat consumption – in fact, socioeconomics in Gabon. He’s now working as an accessibility adviser for Oxford University, and he’s currently responsible for overhauling their access guide. Niall, thank you.

NIALL>>: So, um, yeah. Thanks very much for the introduction – you’ve stolen half my story, but I suppose that’s my fault! The title of this talk is “If I Knew Then What I Know Now”. I suppose it’s slightly ironic, because I don’t really know anything that I didn’t know before. I seem to have happened upon this quite exciting career; so essentially I’m in the lucky position that I had the majority of my adult life as an able-bodied person, and just three years ago I had this accident in America, where I had quite a severe spinal injury, broke eighteen ribs, double punctured lungs, wasn’t looking very rosy – I was in rehab for a long time – and from that perspective, I have my life beforehand, and all my dreams beforehand, and then trying to fix that into later, so I grew up without knowing what disability was, or without living with a disability.
So, as you can tell from my slightly strange CV, I have been a dolphin trainer, I’ve worked as a sommelier, I did a neuroscience degree; I’ve kind of been round the houses. But I think that’s what my personality is: I just want a fun career, so I always took opportunities that came my way, so’s to do interesting things, and I don’t believe that’s changed very much, actually, off the back of my injury. I think, when I got to the point where I was about to go to the Congo, I was actually really petrified of how dangerous the Congo is. I decided, “Right, one last adventure – I’ll go to America and see a friend.” And that’s when I had the accident. And suddenly, part of me was almost relieved that I wasn’t going to die in the Congo; and another part of me was like, “Oh my God, what am I going to do now? I’ve just retrained to go and live and travel all over the world as a conservation biologist, and they’ve just told me I’ll never walk again.”
So it was really quite a difficult time to kind of get my head around all this; and I just decided to actually say, “Hold on, you don’t have to worry about career. Right now I just have to get better, concentrate on keeping myself together, and my friends and family.” As a result of that, I ended up in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which is in Aylesbury, not a million miles from Oxford. And as part of your rehab, when you get fitter, they send you away for weekend leave. It’s kind of an ability to escape from the rigours of rehab. So I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford, as it was the nearest place that wasn’t Aylesbury – no offence if anyone’s from there! – and then I decided upon my release that I wanted to move to Oxford. I thought, “It makes sense. It’s got a good kind of medical set-up” – because of course I do have some medical needs – “and also it has the University, and what a great place to go and regain my career!”
So, after a stint of reabsorption into the community – so I didn’t work for nearly a year, I decided that I needed to get used to living outside of the hospital environment, and completely differently than I’d ever known before – so I went about doing that, and I had quite good fun. It was a nice warm summer, I did some gardening, the usual kind of early retirement stuff – and then I decided that I should probably go back to work. So I emailed everybody in Oxford who was doing anything related to the kind of stuff that I was going to be doing in Africa. So, the job in the Congo, randomly, I applied for it, it was a chimpanzee researcher. And I had no prior experience of working with primates or chimpanzees, and in the interview the woman said to me, “Why should I give you the job?” And I said “Well, because I’ve lived in West Africa. I know what a nightmare it is. Central Africa can’t be that different. You don’t want somebody that’s going to be a thorn in your side, you just want somebody who’s going to make your life easy. I am that man. And she said “You’re the only person that hasn’t said ‘I love chimpanzees’, so you can get the job!” So, yeah, if you’re a primatologist, that’s the key.
Anyway, so, yes, I went and emailed everybody that was doing bush-meat research. For those of you that don’t know, a lot of people who live in Central Africa, their predominant source of protein is bush-meat. So that’s monkeys, antelopes, anything from the forest, it’s all trapped, and quite, quite grim for us Westerners, but it’s the way it is. So I went about going back to university; I found this post-doc, and I was working with her, doing the kind of stuff that I would’ve been doing before; and I was actually really enjoying it, but then it dawned on me that “Actually, this isn’t the same experience I’d signed up for before my injury”, because the majority of the joyful bits of being a conservation biologist is living and working abroad.
So, that can be done: there is, for example, a guy I know, he’s very into birds, and he goes all over the world – Papua New Guinea, which is inaccessible to the best of anybody, never mind if you’ve got a disability. And he goes there, and he has two guys that carry him round on sticks of bamboo. And he gets all around the jungle, does his research, as happy as Larry. I decided that I don’t know if I was quite up for the different style of experience. At that stage, I suppose I was quite newly injured, didn’t have the confidence to do it.
So in that year off that I had, I also did some work with disabled advocacy. So I went and joined the access committee at Oxford City Council, after a complaint with a taxi driver got picked up, and they sort of seized on me and said “You’re young, you’re articulate”; so I said “OK, if you say so”. And after that, I then had this job at Oxford, and then they found out that I’d been doing this stuff with the council, so I got sat on a committee at Oxford, looking at how they would do retrofits of building, any access issues, working alongside – because Oxford, much like Cambridge, takes up half the city, so any access issues have to be dealt with within the context of the city as well – so I started chipping in on this, and I quite enjoyed it, because you have all these architects that come in, and they’re all fancy, and are like, “Yeah, we’ve come up with this amazing building”, and I’m like, “Yeah, but how do I get there?” And they’re like, “Oh. We hadn’t really thought of that.” “Well, there you go, you can go and redesign that, then.” So it’s quite nice, like a little bit of a feeling of power.
So as part of my campaigning work, I actually used the local paper to try and save somebody’s job in the budget cuts. She was a Disability Access Adviser for the council. And I used the paper, and basically sent a thousand emails to the head of the council, to the point where he emailed, and said “Stop, my inbox isn’t working.” I said, “Well, that’s the point, obviously there’s an issue here.” So one of the editors at the paper then said, “Would you like to write a column?” I thought, “Ooh – I don’t know if I’m a natural journalist, but I’ll give it a go.” So I wrote my first column, and I was just saying to Gary earlier that my first column was: I’m not actually six foot wide, you don’t need to dive into the road to avoid me, I’m about the same width as a pram. And this was taken quite well by the editor, and I’ve now been doing that for nearly a year.
And I think – I just find it really hilarious, because I didn’t actually ask for any of these things, really. I now have this job at Oxford, which is their Accessibility Adviser; and that came about because I sat on the committee, and the people on the committee wanted a bit of work done for Oxford, so they essentially forced me to start my own business. So I did some access consultancy for them, and then the results of that work then led on to them offering me a job. So currently, now, I have my part time job at Oxford; I have my own access consultancy business; I’m a working journalist; and also, through the column, I’ve now been approached by the German Tourist Board, and I’ve been invited away – and I have done this – a four day all-expenses-paid trip to Germany to look at accessible travel – that does include food and booze! And yeah, I’ve met with them, and they want me to be their test driver for all of their accessible holidays. So now, without even trying, I’ve got a column, I’m a travel journalist, I’m working at Oxford; I’ve also potentially got a column in a national disability magazine, dealing with issues of disability and sex, because I like to kind of be a little bit controversial; and all of this just comes by just kind of being a yes man.
And I think one of the things is, if you are that kind of person that wants an exciting life, nothing should hold you back. And being in a wheelchair can, or for me, has allowed me to open loads and loads of doors. Like, none of this would have happened, actually, without me being in a wheelchair. I wouldn’t have been in the paper, I wouldn’t have the column, I certainly wouldn’t be a travel writer; and working for Oxford – I don’t know how I would have got in there without the wheelchair, to be honest. So actually, I sometimes say it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. And people are quite surprised by that, but I really don’t have that many complaints. It’s quite fun going downhill, you get a free car – I mean, there’s lots of fringe benefits. So my advice for anyone who’s entering into a career, who has a disability, is: just go for it. And I kind of joke about using the wheelchair card, but it seems to work for me, so go for it. Thank you.