The Disability Stories behind Our Christmas Reels

By Karl Mercer, Curating Visibility Fellow

I wish reels were longer, because 90 seconds gives too little time to go into the details I would like. I had a lot of fun putting together the Christmas reels for Dover Museum but there is purpose to my role as Curating Visibility Fellow in it. There is disability history there! So let me address it.

Opening stills from Dover Museum's Christmas Eve reel

Dover Museum
Dover Museum as a whole has shown a tremendous commitment to improving their disability-focused practice. From recruitment, through access, to representation in the stories we tell there has been a huge enthusiasm for promoting disability heritage since my arrival.

The museum also made a bold choice in hiring me. I do not have a traditional museum background, and I do consider myself a disruptor and an activist, particularly for improving what a museum ought to be for disabled and working-class communities. I have often said that while big museums should be the ones leading the way we often find small museums are the ones willing to make those big, bold changes to forge a new path for museums – and Dover has proved this to be correct. So I thank them, truly, for giving me this opportunity.

On that note, I mention in the reel the exciting future of Dover’s heritage offering for 2025 and one such thing in the works is my final project for Curating Visibility. This will be a digital intervention, using technology to expand our abilities to tell our heritage stories to a broader audience. I hope the design principles I have put into place will make this an enriched experience for all visitors, but particularly offer disabled visitors a chance to explore the collection in ways far more accessible to them.

World War I Bombing
I really wanted to buck the trend of the minimisation of the bombing of Dover on December 24^th 1914. I had even seen articles that humorously refer to the blasting of a gardener from a tree. This was no small event. Britain, once having considered itself relatively safe from incursion due to the natural barriers afforded to it as an island, suddenly found it could be relatively easily harmed by air.

Reel still showing shell from the first aerial bomb dropped on the United Kingdom

What is more the nature of aerial bombing cannot be understated. This represented a means of harming morale, harming safety and security, ultimately of harming civilians. The terrible atrocities that would go on to be committed during World War II were prototyped here in World War I. A blueprint set for orchestrated campaigns of terror, civilian lives lost, homes, neighbourhoods, even towns and cities destroyed – and countless people left disabled.

Reel still showing blue plaque commemorating the place first aerial bomb dropped on the United Kingdom

I do not want to see any person harmed or disabled by conflict, but there’s a difference here. An enlisted man ought to perceive wounding as an occupational hazard of fighting in a conflict. Civilians; men, women, children, young and old, in their own homes, minding their own business; they ought to have no fear of such a thing. Yet December 24^th 1914 represents the day that became a possibility and would later prove to be a reality for far too many.

Bertha and Aethelbehrt
Speaking of the reality of injury, we move on to the Kingdom of Kent under the rulership of Aethelbehrt and Bertha. I have struggled to find anything related to disability in Dover’s Anglo-Saxon collection, however there is something here.

Reel still of stained glass depiction of King Aethelbehrt

You see on top of being probably one of the guys most responsible for the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon culture, Aethelbehrt also produced the first Germanic codified system of laws that we know of. Of course that does not mean he was the first to do so, but through the luck of a book, the 12^th century Textus Roffensis, we have a transcription of the much earlier Codes of Aethelbehrt. Their being ascribed to Aethelbehrt dates them likely to around the early 7^th century.

 The disability significance is that a significant portion of the laws relates to the payment of geld (compensatory ‘fines’) to individuals who have been harmed with no legal reason. Maiming, whether through deliberate injury by another, or by accident, is still a common way to acquire disability and such legal arguments continue to this day.

It leads to interesting questions – what value do we place on one eye’s sight? Aethelbehrt’s laws suggest 50 shillings, incidentally the same as for the severing of a foot. ‘Laming’, i.e. injury to one’s leg creating a permanent change in movement or gait, was up for negotiation by one's kinsmen, an interesting contrast to losing a foot which is likely to lead to similar issues. It also contrasts with a ‘lamed’ shoulder which incurs a cost of 30 shillings.

Reel still showing Anglo-Saxon brooch from Dover Museum's collection

There is so much that could be explored with disabled people today, and comparing these old laws with guidance we have today around injury compensation and what exactly the value we place on a body is. Do these perceived values influence ableism, for example?

Signing Off
This is the challenge. For the couple of hundred years organised collections and museums have been a thing disabled people have rarely been a part of their identity – though disability and disabled people have always been there contributing to the societies around them.

We are restricted in what we can do. By support, by staffing, by budgets – But we are working tremendously hard. So the greatest gift you could give us this Christmas is to follow Dover Museum on our social media, follow Accentuate and Curating for Change on their social media, and amplifying our voices and the work we do.