4ft hubby was larger than life (From Echo)

4ft hubby was larger than life

8:00pm Friday 15th October 2010 in Memories By Tom King

AS an adult, John Mickleburgh (1930 – 1992) stood just 4ft tall. His body was stunted, but his mind and spirit were XL size.

In 1962, a profile in the Echo’s predecessor, the Southend Pictorial, summed up John in a headline. “Courageous John, 4 feet tall, is a giant among men.”

“He was just that, a giant,” says his widow Monica, who fell in love and stayed in love with the person inside. She was barely conscious of her man’s physical abnormalities.

Now, 18 years after John’s sudden death, Monica, from Thundersley, has summoned the will to put his story into a memoir.

There was only ever one possible title for the book – Giant of a Man, of course. The book is written as a narrative, and at times it reads almost like a novel.

“Every word is true, though,” promises Monica, who spent many hours in conversation with family members in order to get every fact right.

Giant of a Man is part family history, detailing the two strands of genealogy which converged when John and Monica came together.

It is primarily, though, a true life love story, the tale of the glowing relationship between a physically challenged man and an able-bodied woman who towered above him.

Yet like most people who encountered John Mickleburgh, she too looked up to him as an inspiration.

Among his other admirers was Lord Snowden, who has contributed an introduction to the book.

“Lord Snowden thought so highly of John that he made a film about him,” recalls Monica.

The film’s title was Born to Be Small. In many ways it tells the same story as Monica’s book – of how a man born with achondroplasia, whose adult body was shorter than the average ten year old’s, could still make a great go of life.

“Some people with John’s condition have committed suicide,” says Monica. “But he was always happy, he lived life to the full, and his happiness was infectious. He used to cheer up and inspire people, people who had none of his disadvantages. John used to say, ‘It’s not how the cards of life are dealt that counts, it’s how you play them’.”

John’s most significant achievements came as a result of his role as district organiser for the Southend regional branch of the Disabled Drivers’ Association.

The organisation campaigned to allow more disabled drivers to be allowed to take the test.

It also worked with manufacturers to incorporate disability-friendly design features into cars, and was instrumental in establishing disabled parking bays.

Many people who now enjoy the freedom of being able to drive where they like, owe a debt of gratitude to people like John Mickleburgh. “Anyone who met John when he was alive won’t forget him,” says Monica.

“But I also want my grandchildren and their children to know about him and what sort of a man he was. That’s what drove me to write this book.”

By sheer luck, the first copies of the book arrived from the publisher last Christmas Eve, They were presented, gift-wrapped, to Monica’s three grown-up children.

“It was an unusually quiet Christmas,” she says. “The children were just stuck there with their noses in the book.”

The book certainly had the hoped-for impact within the family, but Monica has also been gratified by the response from outside.

“People involved in one way or another with disabled organisations are showing a particular interest. John lives on,” she says.

John, raised in Westcliff, showed clear signs of limb deformity even as a young baby. His parents were told he was unlikely to live beyond the age of 13, and he would never be able to walk.

John’s problems were then compounded by an operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital. His legs were broken, and he was put into callipers. The pain was ferocious, the positive results zero.

However, John was lucky as his dad, Alec, ran an engineering factory. He built his son a special tricycle. The young boy took to three wheels almost as an extension of his own body, and would hurtle all day round the streets near their Westcliff home, “often at dangerously high speeds”.

On one occasion he hurtled straight over the edge of a cliff, though he suffered no more damage than a chipped tooth.

As Alec had hoped, the exercise built up John’s leg muscle. Ultimately the ability to walk, using two specially-shaped walking sticks, developed from this.

The tricycle also, no doubt, helped to develop John’s life-long affinity for wheeled vehicles of every description.

It was typical of the man that, when he reached working age, he went out and found work. For him, there was never any question of living off disability benefit.

He identified a job he could do as well as anyone, and better than most. He became a skilled machinist, working for Keddies, the much- missed Southend department store. Beginning with cushions, he moved on to become a highly- skilled leather worker, fabricating luxury suitcases and other luggage items.

John’s work was built to last, and even now, samples of his handiwork are probably still revolving on carousels in airports around the world. Yet it wasn’t in the workplace, but in another sphere that he made his biggest impact.

John’s father died in 1961, leaving his son effectively the family head. John owned and drove a Harper, a soft-top vehicle designated, in pre-politically correct days, as an invalid carriage.

However, John now insisted he was going to drive his father’s car, a Ford Consul.

“I am going to have it adapted and use it myself to take Mum and I out,” he announced.

In his determined way, he found a way to re-engineer the car for disabled use. He provedit could be done, and set a template for other disabled drivers who wanted to be able to drive ordinary cars.

This is now standard practice, and invalid carriages have become an almost extinct species. John was one of the pioneers who proved it could be done.

A year later, John passed another milestone. He became possibly the first disabled people to pass the demanding advanced driving test.

It was this event that prompted the Pictorial’s Giant Among Men headline, as well as stories in national papers. Something else very significant was also about to happen in his life.

In 1959, when his future wife Monica was 14, her family moved from their original home in Warwickshire to Westcliff, a town where they had spent a succession of family holidays.

Monica joined the Avenue Baptist Church youth club, and it was there, one evening, she first caught sight of “a jolly disabled chap on a three-wheeler bicycle”.

The pair got to know each other as fellow members of the club. Then, one night, five years later, John and Monica fell in love. It was John’s 25th birthday, and Monia brought a present, a record by the Bachelors, around to his house. It ended on a date.

Monica stresses she never thought of their relationship in terms of “falling in love with a disabled man.” Indeed, no one in her circle of friends thought of John Mickleburgh, or Johnny Mick, as he was fondly nicknamed, as any different to anyone else. They were married in 1966, the beginning of a union that lasted 26 years.

Monica writes very fully about the happiness of the marriage and the years spent together. Writing about these blissful times has clearly enabled her to relive them.

The payoff was she also had to steel herself also to write about John’s sudden death.

She was conscious of the sound of her husband’s breathing, wherever he was in the house.

One evening, Saturday, September 19, 1992 , John was in another part of the house. She suddenly noticed the breathing had stopped. When she found him, it was already too late to do anything.

“Neither John nor any of us, was aware of the short time he had left to live,” she says.

John left a hole in the life of Southend and beyond, but now, 18 years later, he is, in a way, back.

Monica sums up her John as “a happy, laughing soul, enjoying life to the full, his character undaunted by any suggestion of disability”.

John Mickleburgh continues to laugh from almost every page of Monica’s book.

He may be just a memory now, but his capacity to inspire lives on, and is likely to affect anyone who reads this devoted tribute.

l Giant of a Man is privately published by Monica Mickleburgh. Copies, priced £14.99, are available by ringing her on 01268 758845.