Baroness masham of milton biography sample

The Telegraph 1 June 2022

Baroness Masham: 'They thought disabled people could not get married'

Baroness Susan Masham is a trailblazing Paralympian and peer in the House of Lord's

By Rob Bagchi

As she set off for the Tokyo Paralympics, her husband pushing her wheelchair across the concourse at London airport, Susan Cunliffe-Lister, Dowager Countess of Swinton, Baroness Masham of Ilton, might well have wondered how a disabled person would be received in other parts of the globe in the mid-1960s.

Four years earlier, in Rome for the Ninth International Stoke Mandeville Games for wheelchair users - retrospectively recognised as the first ever Paralympic Games – she had won a gold and four silver medals in the pool, as well as a bronze medal in table tennis.

Rome, she had reflected afterwards, had been "interesting."

"We arrived in Rome to find that the Olympic village where we were housed was built on stilts," she later laughed, "how were they going to get 400 wheelchairs up