The National Campaign for the Young Chronic Sick was a group of disabled people and allies in the UK in the 1960s who campaigned for independent living for disabled people at a time when the official provision was to live a lifetime in hospital, often in geriatric wards. Disabled people were called "the Young Chronic Sick" at the time by officials. NCYCS was influential in shaping a landmark social change and law in 1970 leading to the official responsibilities for disabled people moving out from hospitals and into social services departments.
NCYCS was established by the Chelsea Labour Party, mostly likely in the early 1960s and certainly by 1964, by Marsh Dickson, a non-disabled man married to Dorothy Dickson, a disabled woman. They both feared that, should he become unwell or die, that she would have no alternative than to have to spend the rest of her life in a hospital ward, and usually surrounded by unwell elderly people in "geriatric" wards. Accounts confirm that the Chelsea Labour Party, of which Marsh Dickson was an active member, created and then provided practical support to NCYCS, as also acknowledged by Alf Morris MP and more recently by Lord Owen. The constituency changed later to become Chelsea and Fulham.
1966
In March 1966 Pamela La Fane is a disabled woman aged about 39 years, living in a hospital since the age of about 13 years and on wards with elderly people since the age of 16 years, when she reads a letter in the New Statesman magazine / journal by Marsh Dixon and she first becomes aware of NCYCS. She has trained herself as a young writer and produces a leaflet which impressed the NCYCS committee and is published as an article by The Guardian newspaper later in the year, creating a lot of interest and giving NCYCS a national public and political profile. She used the pen-name of Michele Gilbert to avoid reprisals from the hospital staff.
1968
Pamela La Fane is featured in three television documentary programmes that were broadcast on BBC1, 10:30pm on 6th, 13th and 20th June 1968 under the title, At a Time Like This -A Life of Her Own. She later wrote her autobiography, and she spoke about her book and about her 30 years in hospital in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in September 1981.
1969
Alf Morris MP was a backbench member of the UK parliament, and through a Private Members Bill he steered into law starting in 1969 and into early 1970, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970, a wide-ranging law with many new powers and duties given to social services departments to meet the needs of disabled people. There is, however, a set-back within the range of new responsibilities given to hospitals which include the controversial creation of Young Disabled Units, YDUs.
1970s
These controversial YDUs become the focus of future campaigns by disabled people in the 1970s, and especially by the radical Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, UPIAS. Maggie Davis, a UPIAS member, has written about the abuse she endured while living in a YDU in the early 1970s before achieving her independent living as an early pioneer.
Further research
Some further details about NCYCS are currently known and have been published, but this is an emerging area of research and more details are needed.
