Jack Ashley

Jack Ashley was born in Widnes, Lancashire, where his father, a labourer, died when he was five. He left school at fourteen, worked as a labourer and crane driver in a chemical works and was a shop steward at 22. Scholarships took him to Ruskin College and then Cambridge, where he became president of the Union. He worked as a BBC television producer and was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South in 1966.

In December 1967 a minor operation on his ear went wrong, and within weeks he was completely deaf. He could hear nothing at all, not his own voice, and he assumed that his career in a chamber that ran on speech was over. He wrote his resignation. His wife Pauline argued him out of it, and he went back to the Commons relying on lip-reading, on colleagues writing notes, and later on a stenographer typing the debate onto a screen in front of him. He was the first totally deaf member of Parliament.

He chose his causes carefully and did not let go. He led the campaign that forced Distillers to pay proper compensation to the children damaged by thalidomide, made the case for a scheme for children injured by vaccines, which became law in 1979, and pushed through anonymity for rape complainants and better pensions for war widows. He worked for two decades on what became the Disability Discrimination Act.

In 1993, at 70, a cochlear implant restored some of his hearing. He went to the Lords in 1992 and kept working there until shortly before his death in 2012.