Bearly Inspirational: Florence Attwood and Mavis Rendle
By Emmeline Burdett
A lot of the information in this blog is based on a Merrythought blog post about Florence Attwood, and on sources kindly supplied by Merrythought, including an article entitled ‘A Deaf Toy Designer’, by Doreen Woodford, which was originally published in the Deaf History Journal in August 2002.
Attwood was born on 24th July 1907 at Dawley in Shropshire, England. She caught measles when she was two years old, and, as a result, she became deaf. In common with her brothers and sisters, she seems to have attended Ketley County Infants’ School for two years, before being admitted to the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, England, on 31st May 1915. Following the opening of the school’s Henry Worrall Training Centre for Elder Girls in March 1923, Attwood trained in its Dressmaking Department, and in 1926, she began work at Chad Valley, another soft toy manufacturer, at a rate of sixteen shillings per week. Chad Valley’s Production Manager, Clifton James Rendle, had a daughter called Mavis, who was also a pupil at the Manchester Royal School for the Deaf and had had some brief contact with Attwood, despite being eleven years younger. It may be that Rendle suggested that Attwood channel her creativity into designing toys, and/or helped her get employment at Chad Valley. In any event, when Rendle was asked to join a new firm – Merrythought – Attwood was one of the employees that he took with him. Merrythought opened in 1930.
Merrythought’s first catalogue was published in 1931, and included original designs as well as well-known characters, such as the dog Greyfriars Bobby, who allegedly spent fourteen years guarding his master’s grave in Edinburgh, Scotland, until his death in January 1872. Attwood also designed various pandas for Merrythought, mostly after London Zoo’s acquisition, in 1939, of a panda named Ming. In 1949, Attwood also designed a bear named Punkinhead for the Canadian department store Eaton’s. This was one of the last designs she ever did, for she died of cancer in 1952 at the age of only 44.
Attwood and Deafness
Both the Merrythought Blog and Doreen Woodford’s article in the Deaf History Journal agree that Attwood discovered her talent for creativity during her time at the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, and specifically in the Dressmaking Department of the Henry Worrall Training Centre. [the Centre is also sometimes called a Training School, so I use the terms interchangeably]. This challenges the idea, popular amongst disability activists, that the only thing that mainstream society has ever tried to do is to suppress disabled people, often by preventing them from reaching their potential and then complaining that they are a useless waste of money. For example, in her chapter on school education in the 2014 book Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, Dawn Benson argues that the extent and quality of disabled children’s education has been entirely dependent on the disability movement.
This does rather suggest that nobody else could be relied upon to ensure that a disabled child received a meaningful education, whereas the example of the Henry Worrall Training School suggests that the picture may be somewhat more nuanced. The fact that the Training School was ‘for Elder Girls’ and the fact that it had a Dressmaking Department suggest that the girls were being trained for traditionally female occupations but does not necessarily say anything about deafness. An article which was published in the journal The Teacher of the Deaf in April 1923 took pains to emphasise that many of first intake of girls to the Henry Worrall Training Centre “had the great advantage of starting their ordinary education early in life, between 5 and 6 years of age”, but it is unclear what this means, and whether it relates to the girls’ ability to communicate orally, as opposed to using sign language. It is not known how much oral speech Attwood managed to acquire, as she became deaf when she was learning to talk. By the time she worked at Merrythought, Attwood communicated by using sign language and fingerspelling, as well as by reading what other workers wrote down.
Attwood as an “Inspiration”
The Merrythought blog post about Florence Attwood describes how she “inspirationally overcame the many challenges associated with being deaf and unable to speak”. Though this suggests that not all the ‘challenges’ in question may have been a direct result of Attwood’s deafness, to describe disabled people as ‘inspirational’ (or a related term, such as ‘wonderful’) is a common, and rather unhelpful, response to impairment. Apart from the rather flippant point that no-one designs toys with their ears (and thus that, seen from this point of view, Attwood was not at a disadvantage), describing a disabled person as ‘inspirational’ rather obscures the reality of disability. For example, in a TED talk in 2014, the late Stella Young related how, when she was fifteen years old, an acquaintance had asked her parents if he could nominate her for a Community Achievement Award.
Young’s parents pointed out that Young had not achieved anything. In saying this, they were not casting aspersions upon their daughter, but rather pointing out that nominating her for an award for being disabled was really rather patronising. By contrast, Attwood had achieved something. Although she had been given a helping hand, the fact that she had become a successful and imaginative toy designer was entirely due to her own abilities. So, is the Merrythought Blog right to describe her as ‘inspirational’?
The article in the Deaf History Journal also tells the story (insofar as it is known) of Mavis Rendle, who had been the fellow pupil whom Attwood had mentored upon her arrival at The Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, despite their eleven-year age difference. Rendle had become deaf at the age of five months in 1919, as a result of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919. When she was five years old, her parents had sent her to the Royal Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Margate, England, but when, fifteen months later, her father got a new job in Shropshire, the local Education Authority decided that Mavis should be transferred to the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester. Like Attwood, she had trained at the Henry Worrall Training Centre, but appears not to have flourished as Attwood did, with the only thing known for certain about her future life is that she and her mother met her father for lunch every day for some years at a nearby hotel.
It may be that Rendle had no interest or aptitude for the trade that had been chosen for her. However, having apparently washed their hands of her when she was five years old, it seems that Rendle’s parents (in particular, her mother) belatedly clung to her like limpets, and one wonders if the lunch arrangement was something that any of them actually enjoyed. It is noteworthy that Mavis’s father helped Attwood, a schoolfellow of his daughter’s and, though he may not have been in a position to offer the same assistance to his daughter, one wonders whether he did try to help her and, if so, what form this help took. In addition, the article in the Deaf History Journal highlights the isolation of many deaf people at the time but does not state whether this was portrayed as being a natural consequence of deafness, or a result of the deaf person’s circumstances. One wonders how typical Rendle’s experience, of having her own parents and an education authority decide that she should, twice in early childhood, be uprooted from everything she knew, contributed to this isolation. In addition, it is difficult to avoid contrasting Attwood’s life, which, although it was cut short, seems to have been successful and fulfilled, with Mavis Rendle’s. of which it is not so easy to make such statements. It may be that Rendle’s parents were, by figuring so prominently in her adult life, attempting to protect her from the isolation and lack of opportunity to which she was perhaps considered to be prone, but it may have been that the causes of her vulnerability were misidentified. So-called ‘boarding-school syndrome’ was only identified in 2011 and was described by its identifier as “a set of lasting psychological problems observable in adults who, as children, were sent away from their home at an early age to boarding schools” (Moore 2021) but it does have a bearing on Mavis Rendle’s situation, particularly in terms of having been sent away from home at the age of only five. As many commentators have identified, being sent away to school has a long history in Britain (see for example Emma Jacobs, ‘Lessons in Britishness’, Financial Times).
In addition, it is often the case that anything that happens to disabled people is interpreted as having a therapeutic or otherwise benign purpose, making it more difficult to criticize or complain about. This suffocating insistence on the benignity of everyone else’s intentions was part of the reason why the disability rights movement was slower to get going than movements based on race or gender, for example, but also makes it difficult to discuss things which, if they happened to another section of society, would be unquestionably seen as wrong (Knittel 2015). It may be that Rendle’s life was happy but largely undocumented, but as Stella Young pointed out in her TED talk, “Being disabled doesn’t make you exceptional. Questioning what you think you know about it does”.
This is why it is not sufficient to describe someone like Florence Attwood as ‘inspirational’, because, however impressive her achievements, setting them in context by, for example, discussing another deaf person who lived at the same time, such as Mavis Rendle, helps avoid ‘inspiration porn’, which, to quote from Stella Young’s TED talk again, is to “objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people”. This in turn helps avoid problems such as the assumption that things which happened to disabled people simply ‘because they were disabled’ and are not worth discussing.
References
- Dawn Benson, Education (School) in Cameron, C. (ed.) Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 50.
- Susanne Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 41. Knittel gives the example of Giorgio Agamben’s book Homo Sacer, and its problematic idea that the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme was in better faith than the rest of the Nazi genocide. Although this is an extreme example, it does serve to demonstrate how the idea of ‘being cruel to be kind’ is in some ways particularly acceptable to society as a whole when applied to disabled people.
- Charlotte Moore, “So, what is Boarding School Syndrome?”, Cosmopolitan, 29th November 2021, unpaged.
- Doreen Woodford, ‘A Deaf Toy Designer’, reprint of an article featured in the Deaf History Journal, vol.6, no.1 (August 2002), pp.35-42. Published by the British Deaf History Society.
