Additional information
by Helen Parker-Drabble (Author)
Silver Award, Nonfiction Book Awards
Runner-up, Alan Ball Award for Best Hardcopy Publication 2025
Featured in Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, May 2026
"No one believed me. 'Children couldn't have been treated like that.' But we were."
- Harry Drabble
In 1937, two-year-old Harry Drabble was diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis after drinking unpasteurised milk. Torn from his mother's arms, he spent much of his childhood confined to Sheffield's King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for Crippled Children, immobilised in bed, separated from family life, and expected to endure what no child should have had to bear.
Yet Harry's story is not one of defeat.
Told through Harry's own unflinching words and his daughter Helen Parker-Drabble's meticulous research, Yet uncovers a forgotten chapter of British medical and social history. It reveals the emotional cost of long-stay hospital care, the stigma surrounding disability, and the quiet suffering of children whose voices were rarely heard.
At the heart of the book is Harry's life-changing mantra: "I can't... yet."
Told he would never work, marry, support a family, or live independently, Harry refused to be defined by other people's expectations. He taught himself to read, mastered the violin while living with physical disability, gained professional qualifications despite limited schooling, and built the loving family life he had once been told was impossible.
Blending memoir, biography, genealogy, social history, medical history, family photographs, original research, and the voice of a man who lived through it, Yet is both deeply personal and historically important. It is a tribute from a daughter to her father, but also a powerful reminder of the resilience of forgotten children and the lasting consequences of childhood separation, trauma, and institutional care.
For readers of inspirational memoirs, disability history, family history, genealogy, wartime Britain, medical memoirs, and stories of ordinary people who lived extraordinary lives, 'Yet' is a moving testament to courage, hope, and the enduring power of one small word: yet.
