Braintree: Singer Ian Dury honoured at Paralympic opening ceremony (From Braintree and Witham Times)

Braintree: Singer Ian Dury honoured at Paralympic opening ceremony

1:00pm Monday 3rd September 2012 in News

A singer who spent 18 months of his childhood at Black Notley Hospital was honoured in the Paralympics opening ceremony.

London-born Ian Dury, best known as lead singer of his band The Blockheads, contracted polio in 1949 at the age of seven, which left him physically disabled for the rest of his life.

His song Spasticus Autisticus was written as a protest against the International Year of Disabled Persons in 1981, which Dury, who died in 2000, believed to be patronising.

It was performed at Wednesday’s ceremony by the Graeae Theatre Company, made up of disabled performers.

Black Notley Hospital, which closed in 1998, had a specialist unit for physically disabled children for most of the second half of the 20th century.

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