Susan Cunliffe-Lister, Lady Masham of Ilton, who has died elderly 87, used to be the longest-serving feminine member of the House of Lords – she used to be made a lifestyles peer in 1970 – and a outstanding campaigner for higher enhance and get admission to for disabled other folks .
Twice a gold medalist on the Paralympics, following her paralysis after a using coincidence, she championed myriad well being reasons and based the Spinal Injuries Association in 1974. Her personal lived enjoy used to be an important spur to her paintings.
“Disability is very complicated,” she stated. Her frustration at widespread screw ups to ease the demanding situations it posed fueled her hobby to impact trade.
In 1958 Susan Sinclair, as she then used to be, discovered her lifestyles dramatically altered when she used to be pursing a point-to-point triumph in Wiltshire. Her horse fell whilst going over probably the most path’s 24 jumps, rolling on most sensible of her. Another horse kicked her within the abdomen, inflicting a huge haemorrhage. Fractures to 3 vertebrae in her again left her paralyzed from the chest down.
Within 24 hours, she used to be transferred from Swindon to the specialist spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville medical institution in Buckinghamshire. Its leader physician, the neurologist Sir Ludwig Guttmann, is now considered the founding father of the Paralympic motion, and wearing interests changed into an very important thread in her 9 months of rehabilitation there.
The preliminary procedure used to be infused with ache. The first time Sinclair were given right into a wheelchair, she handed out on account of deficient movement. Guttmann and his physiotherapists temporarily nudged her to check out archery to assist her bodily and psychological recuperation. A lifelong affection for desk tennis used to be stirred too. She returned to using, using an tailored saddle she helped to design.
Swimming supplied the platform, alternatively, to spirit her to heights in Rome within the autumn of 1960, the primary of her 3 Paralympics. She used to be now Susan Cunliffe-Lister, having married in 1959 David Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Masham, to whom she were engaged on the time of the coincidence.
The Games’ inaugural version used to be a long way got rid of from these days’s monolith. The lodging used to be now not accommodating. “We arrived,” she recounted, “to search out that the Olympic village the place we have been housed used to be constructed on stilts. And how have been they going to get 400 wheelchairs up and down? They needed to carry the Italian military in.”
She collected gold in the 25m breaststroke and a silver in the backstroke, as well as a bronze from the table tennis. Her victor’s souvenir was swiftly lost amid a celebratory dinner near the Trevi fountain. Italian media reported that she had tossed it into the waters. The reality was more mundane, she attested: it had probably fallen from her chair. In 2022, she was presented with a replica, commissioned by the British Paralympic Association, utilizing a scan of her silver medal.
Tokyo’s Games four years on generated five more medals, split once again between the pool and the ping-pong table. In addition to four silvers came a table tennis doubles gold with Gwen Buck from a final in which, after she fell from her chair, her Italian opponents sportingly picked her off the floor rather than profit from a default. Masham and Buck claimed doubles silver in Tel Aviv in 1968. A singles bronze there rounded her tally of Paralympic medals to 10.
Born in Caithness, Sue was the daughter of Sir Ronald Sinclair, 8th baronet, and Reba (nee Inglis), and was educated at Heathfield school in Ascot, Berkshire, and at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. She then worked at a stable in Wiltshire before her accident just before her 23rd birthday.
North Yorkshire became her home, where her husband’s grandmother provided a house that was constructed to facilitate her wheelchair. After her Paralympic successes, Masham launched herself into voluntary work and talks, her activism bringing her to the attention of the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who suggested she enter the House of Lords as a crossbencher. “A complete, overall wonder,” she acknowledged. A delighted Guttmann instructed: “You should cause them to acutely aware of different disabled other folks.”
Taking her seat as a life peer in February 1970, the now Lady Masham of Ilton gave her maiden speech on the chronically ill and disabled persons bill, the first piece of legislation to give rights to people with disabilities. She later served on select committees and parliamentary groups, including on science and technology, administration and works, and HIV and AIDS, with a personal focus on the impact of the virus in the developing world.
She established the Spinal Injuries Association to address the lack of support and information, and specialist medical care, for newly injured people, becoming president in 1982. Masham served as a trustee, patron or president of many health and disability organizations, and chaired the Home Office working group on young people and alcohol in 1987.
For almost three decades, she was joined in the Lords by her husband, David, who inherited the title of Earl of Swinton in 1972 and served as a Conservative whip under Margaret Thatcher. The couple adopted two children, and were married for 47 years until his death in 2006.
Masham continued to enjoy the occasional game of table tennis, even as her physical abilities diminished and she was compelled to use an electric wheelchair. She remained a frequent speaker in the Lords, and contributed until a month before she died, when she asked a question about long-term rehabilitation in emergency care.
She is survived by her children, Clare and Jessie.