The date was 29 July, 1981, Prince Charles and Lady Dis wedding day, and as the Queen arrived at St Pauls Cathedral and waved to the crowds, two women in late middle-age, in shapeless, baggy dresses, shuffled with clumsy gait up to the television and waved and saluted back to her, unable to articulate speech but making excited noises.
It was a poignant moment, recalls Onelle Braithwaite, one of the nurses who cared for them. I remember pondering with my colleague how, if things had been different, they would surely have been guests at the wedding.
The two women were Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon nieces of the Queen Mother and first cousins to the Queen who had been incarcerated since 1941 in the Royal Earlswood Asylum for Mental Defectives, at Redhill in Surrey.
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The sisters were unfortunate to have been born in an era when mental disability was seen as a threat to society and linked to promiscuity, feckless breeding and petty crime, the characteristics of the underclass; associations encouraged by popular belief in the science of eugenics, soon to be embraced by the Nazis.
So the belief was if you had a child with a learning disability, there was something in your family that was suspect and wrong, explains Jan Walmsley, the Open Universitys professor in the history of learning disabilities.
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