Vic Finkelstein

Vic Finkelstein was born in South Africa and broke his neck in a pole-vaulting accident at sixteen, leaving him a wheelchair user for the rest of his life. He went to university, trained as a psychologist, and became involved in the underground against apartheid. In the mid-1960s he was arrested, spent eighteen months in prison and was then served with a banning order that restricted where he could go and whom he could meet. In 1968 he left for Britain.

He arrived expecting to find a country where disabled people were treated as citizens, and found instead residential institutions, segregated workshops and charities run by the non-disabled on behalf of the disabled. In 1972 Paul Hunt, a resident of a Cheshire Home, wrote to the Guardian asking disabled people to form a group of their own, and Finkelstein was one of those who replied. The result was the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, a small, argumentative and enormously influential organisation whose 1976 statement of principles declared that people with impairments were disabled by a society that excluded them, not by their bodies. The idea was later named the social model of disability, and it underpinned the movement's demands for independent living, accessible buildings and anti-discrimination law.

He lectured at the Open University, where he helped create its first course on disability, and was the first chair of the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People in 1981. He was suspicious to the end of charities and professionals who spoke for disabled people, and did not soften his views to make friends. He died in 2011.