Creating a life for Gwion.

`What can I tell you but that this boy is subnormal, both physically and mentally?'

Although he and his wife Mary had become increasingly uneasy about two-and-a-half-year-old Gwion's slow development, Welsh solicitor R Gwynn Davies was devastated. Besides the shock, there was a sense of guilt--and of shame. The following weeks were the worst in his life. `I would dream that he was better and then wake up to the continuing reality. Life was like a dark tunnel ahead of me.'

`Everyone told me I must try to forget him,' Davies recalls. `That was what middle class families did in the early Sixties.' Davies steeled himself to send Gwion away to a special hospital. But the doctor friend whom he asked to prepare the papers told him that, under the then recent 1959 Mental Health Act, the local authority had a duty to provide support should Davies decide to keep Gwion at home.

`I was so relieved to think that we could keep Gwion,' says Davies. `From then on my life changed. All my spare time was taken up with the rights of the handicapped and the fight for adequate provision.'

It was one thing to have an Act, it was another for county councils with other priorities to respond to it. Davies, who was then Clerk of the Peace to Caernarfon Council and acted as clerk to several committees, sometimes found himself reading out his own threatening letters when a committee was slow to act.

Largely through his efforts and those of the Bangor Society for Mentally Handicapped Children (later MENCAP), of which he was a founder member, better facilities were provided, such as a special school and a hostel.

One day Gwion, who had become increasingly disruptive, came home from the school beaming. He proudly showed his father a gold star that his teacher had stuck to a page of his squiggles. `In a flash I realized that he, too, had a sense of pride and that he was an individual in his own right, with his own feelings.'

Later, during a lecture, Davies said, `I am determined that, should I die, my child is not going to be shut up in a large hospital.' A student asked, `But what does he want?'

`I suddenly realized how many of my efforts till then had been basically for myself and Mary, for our relief and peace of mind, not for him,' recalls Davies. He now says, `Gwion changed me more than I could ever change him. He has taught me what life's values are all about.'

In the early 1980s the Secretary of State for Wales appointed Davies to a working party to look at future provision for the mentally handicapped in Wales. Their report looked at the handicapped in a radical new light--as people who should be helped to live as normal a life as possible, who had a right to independence and who could contribute to society. `Our philosophy was that they could only be fully accepted members of society if they were enabled to serve it in some way,' says Davies.

Not everyone, even many parents of handicapped people, was convinced. In 1985, Davies decided to start in his own village, and set up a company, Antur Waunfawr (Waunfawr Venture), that would employ disabled people in productive work. There has been great support locally--of 900 villagers, 270 have become shareholders.

Today Antur Waunfawr employs 20 people, 17 of whom are mentally handicapped. They provide a service to local people by mowing lawns, cutting hedges, repairing fences. They run a recycling operation, restore old furniture, run a market garden and sell other produce in their cafe/shop. They have to use public transport and work a normal day.

`The company has to be subsidized and the work teams are led by non-handicapped workers,' says Davies, `but we push them to the limit, allowing them to use powerful machinery such as mowers. Previously most of them would not even cross the road without holding their parent's hand. It's a long way from when they were perpetually "trained" or simply looked after.'