Joey Deacon - Later Life

Later Life

The four men formed an inseparable group in the hospital for decades, and in 1974 their relationship was the subject of a Prix Italia and BAFTA award-winning drama documentary for British television's Horizon written by Elaine Morgan and directed by the late Brian Gibson, entitled Joey. This was followed by a second documentary made for Blue Peter.

As soon as 'Tongue Tied' was completed, the team started work on a second book. Joey wanted to write a work of fiction: a novel about a disabled man who was desperate to learn to walk so that he could walk up the aisle and marry his girlfriend. It was never published.

Royalties from "Tongue Tied" and donations raised enough money for the four to move to a bungalow on the Caterham hospital grounds in 1979, where they were able to live more independently. After Deacon died two years later at 61, Blackburn and Roberts moved to a house outside the grounds, where they lived with the assistance of support workers.

Read more about this topic:  Joey Deacon

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.
    Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)

    Thus far women have been the mere echoes of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and the customs of social life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is as yet a dream of the future. A just government, a humane religion, a pure social life await her coming.
    Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)