My sister Wendy Hassell, who has died of cancer aged 60, was a wheelchair user all her life as a result of spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic condition that causes a gradual loss of movement. In the early 1990s, she was briefly the public face of disabled people when her photograph was used in a media campaign for the Leonard Cheshire Foundation (now Leonard Cheshire Disability). Yet she often battled to escape being defined or confined by her wheelchair.
Wendy was born in Dorchester, daughter of Muriel, a cook, and George Turner, an employee of the local water board. She was sent to Bournemouth, then Malmesbury, Wiltshire, for residential schooling, but when it came to vocational training, there was a fight for her to be educated among the “normals”, at South Dorset College, Weymouth.
The careers service arranged for Wendy to be admitted on a temporary basis to try a secretarial course, but she was soon asked to leave because she was deemed an insurance risk, a fire hazard and a disruptive influence on the class, as fellow students had to pick up her pens whenever she dropped them. A threat to expose this discrimination worked – although it was the 1970s, and years before the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act. The college relented, and Wendy was allowed to continue with her course.
After some years working in local government administration with West Dorset district council, Wendy served as a trustee and chair for two animal charities, Sighthounds Online and the Sighthound Welfare Trust. Her motivation was partly fuelled by being the proud and doting owner of four graceful lurchers and numerous cats. Her love of wildlife and the promotion of animal welfare always featured in her life, whether it was the treatment of former racing greyhounds or protesting against badger culling being extended to her native Dorset.
Wendy once noted, when faced with some fanciful speculation on our family origins, that the only bloodline likely to be traced in the family was that of whippets. (Though the love of dogs must have run in the family – we later discovered that a great-grandfather, a notorious Irish-Welsh mountain-fighter and poacher, had once instituted court proceedings over the ownership of a dog admiringly described in the records as “a very pretty greyhound”.)
Wendy’s seething passion against all forms of social injustice meant that she could be equally forthright complaining about, say, the bedroom tax, in letters to her local MP. Magnificently, she retained a capacity to see the ludicrous and often madly humorous, if frustrating, side of a life where she lacked all the advantages save one – the ability to fight back.
She is survived by her husband, Peter Hassell, whom she married in 1985, and two children, Sophie and Dan.
