They are all heroes

The 51-year-old wheelchair-bound mum and members of the Swindon Coalition of Disabled People have run a tireless to raise enough cash to maintain the advice and information service which last year helped 4,500 disabled people.

In June she and half a dozen helpers who are also disabled were told their application for a £150,000 National Lottery grant which would have guaranteed the centre's security for another three years had failed.

"It was a huge blow to us," said Sharyn.

It was also the start of an on-going headache as she and the coalition fought to meet the centre's basic overheads such as phone bills and its workers' travel costs. None of them gets a wage-packet.

They have tried appeals to local firms, and to members of the public. The year's final shattering disap-pointment came when poster cam-paign urging Swindon people to give £1 each brought in just £10 from one elderly man

It wasn't until the Evening Adver-tiser carried a story about the appeal's failure that a few more small amounts of cash began arriving.

Sharyn now faces the New Year knowing that unless the centre might no longer be there to provide the disabled with information and advice on subjects ranging from complex applications for welfare benefits to where they can find equipment to help them live independent lives.

She admits the struggle has affected her health.

Sharyn plans to spend Christmas and New Year relaxing with her family.

"But the fight will begin again on January 7," she vowed.

DECLAN Hobbs is a little boy who refuses to give up the battle to be just like other lads.

Born with two fingers, which were little more than stumps, he has come through surgery to replace them by grafting on the second toes from each of his feet.

His mum Angela realised as soon as he was laid on her tummy after his birth on December 16, 1998, that his right hand was seriously deformed.

The ring and middle finger had failed to develop normally and he owes his new fingers to the skill of surgeon Henk Giele of the John Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford.

"We cancelled the operation twice because we weren't sure it was the right thing to do," said his mother Angela of Peatmoor.

But within hours of the nine-hour operation the little hero was sitting up in bed eating chips and trying to play with his toys.

TERRY King may be loathed by some people, but he's loved by others who believe he has truly heroic qualities.

For four years he fought Swindon Borough Council in a vain attempt to defeat its proposals to build 3,800 homes on the so-called Front Garden, the green space between Old Town where Terry lives and the M4.

When he failed to persuade the High Court to rule that the plans were contrary to the law he took his defeat with dignity.

But old soldiers never die. The retired Army officer and former tennis umpire who is in his 70s now vows that as building work progresses he will be watching with gimlet eyes to make sure the council does not overstep planning rules.

Terry King has withstood criticism, rudeness and common abuse. He has been called an Old Town snob and a selfish nimby who is interested only in preserving his own green outlook.

Having lived in the town for only four years he could have sold up and moved, arguing that he has no particular attachment to Swindon.

Instead he stayed to fight. Now, with a five figure sum to raise to cover some of the council's court costs the Army pensioner faces the New Year knowing he could end up seriously out of pocket.

Meanwhile his equally heroic wife Doreen has stayed quietly in the background answering a multitude of telephone calls and taking messages while her husband has been campaigning.

Misguided heroism? Many people might say yes. His supporters would say: Definitely not.

FOR 40 year-old Julie-Anne Booth a visit to the Evening Advertiser office in February was the start of new hope in her two year battle against breast cancer.

Her story inspired hundreds of Swin-don people who in three months raised enough money to send her to Mexico for treatment at the Oasis of Hope Hospital .

This is a place which provides therapies based on holistic medicine and natural vitamins.

After a mastectomy, radio therapy and two long courses of chemotherapy had racked her body but failed to cure the cancer which had spread to her bones, Julie-Anne knew she could face no more harsh drugs, even though a specialist had told her she could expect to die within four years.

Having read about Chippenham teen-ager Lydia Harding who had been treated at Oasis of Hope she decided to pin her final chances on the Mexican doctors whose natural therapies were apparently extending and even saving the lives of terminally ill cancer patients.

Julie-Anne didn't have the money either to get there or to cover the hospital's costs. But offers of help flooded in.

Just three months after the first Adver story appeared Julie-Anne was on a plane to Mexico to spend a month as an in-patient at the Oasis of Hope Hospital.

There she was put on an organic diet, oxygen treatment and laetrile, a compound prepared from apricot kernels.

Julie-Anne is not cured. She has a follow-up appointment at Princess Margaret Hospital every three weeks.

But she looking forward with optimism.

"I'll be spending Christmas at home in West Swindon with my parents Alan and Nora," she said. "And I'll see my sister Trisha Fenton and my nephew Marcus."

They will also be remembering all the warm-hearted people who raised the money to give Julie-Anne hope.

FRANK Avenell's name is synonymous in Swindon with pensioners' rights.

He has lobbied Swindon Borough Council relentlessly in a bid to persuade it not to scrap the tokens scheme which had provided the elderly with subsidised travel

During the year people at the Civic Offices came to regard Frank as a thorn in the flesh but he earned a huge following in the town.

His was the name behind the Fairness to Pensioners campaign.

It was largely thanks to him that 2,000 people signed a petition calling for the tokens scheme to be restored.

His was the influence behind protests at council meetings. It was Frank who researched Government policy.

While the council sought to try to save £13,000 a year by pruning subsidised travel for pensioners, he threw a spanner in the council's works by pointing out that deputy Prime Minister John Prescott had pledged to find £25 million so that local authorities could improve public transport schemes.

Council officers were forced to do a U-turn.

It was the culmination of a long battling tradition for Frank Avenell, who claimed to have one of the oldest recorded names in Swindon. He had been a rail worker for 35 years after being demobbed from the RAF in 1946.

He had joined up at the age of only 17, two months before the start of the 1939-45 war.

By 1942 he had a corporal's stripes and had been posted to Dorset as a founding member of 296 Squadron, 38 Wing.

Months later he had been promoted to sergeant and was flying out to the North African desert.

Frank and his colleagues camped under canvas in the Sahara while Rommel's forces waged war against the Allies and he faced enemy fire over the Bay of Biscay.

Back home he became a member of the RAFA and the Royal British Legion.

He proudly maintained that his name was one of the oldest in Swindon.

And for five decades he has kept up a relentless campaign from his armchair at his home in Beckhampton Street on a succession of issues ranging from the poll tax to nightclubs.

Few people care more about Swindon and its future.

WHEN Mary Lowe realised that her teenage son Richard was a confirmed heroin addict and was stealing repeatedly to fund his habit she could have shut her front door and curled up in a ball of misery.

Instead she set out to provide a beacon of hope to Swindon youngsters whose lives are in a mess.

In the intervening 10 years Mary has refused to give up on her son, who is now 24, in spite of the fact that he has been in and out of prison and has put her through hell.

In July the Advertiser told how this 47 year-old housewife, with the help of other mums who had experienced the same nightmare, set up Stepping Forward, a Parks-based group which provides a sanctuary for youngsters who want to come off drugs.

It shows young truants and drug users that they are not social write-offs. Mary points out that the two problems frequently go hand in hand.

It provides a drop-in centre, education programmes, one-to-one counselling, leaflets which illustrate the better things in life and even acupuncture.

Most of all it offers them friendship and reassurance that they matter.

Nobody except Mary knows what her heroic campaign to help Richard and other young addicts has cost her.

She and her colleagues successfully went through the demanding tasks of putting together an application for lottery funding. They were awarded £21,000 to expand their service.

They also helped to influence Swindon Borough Council's decision to allocate £200,000 to combat the town's growing drugs problem.

The day after out story about the centre appeared a 21-year-old woman from Parks told how it had helped her to escape from drugs and prostitution.

She is just one of many who have discovered that it can be a lifeline.

But behind it all is Mary's devotion to her own son. She refused to be beaten down by the long hours she spent sitting in police stations waiting for him to be questioned and charged, or the repeated visits she made to him in prison.

"I will fight to the death for my kids," she said. "I may not condone what they do, but I will be in their corner until my last breath.

"I could never turn my back on Richard, whatever he did."

In July she reported that after three years in Dartmoor he was clean. Hopefully she has helped him to a new future.