Fighting back from despair to become town mayor
Lee Trewhela meets an inspirational city leader who came back from near-death and homelessness
CHATTING to Mayor of Truro Steven Webb about the challenges which have almost broken him throughout his life is a humbling and inspirational experience.
Steven, 48, was left paralysed from the neck down following a terrible accident when he was just 18 and admits that he became mayor reluctantly and still feels daunted by the role but is passionate about Truro’s future and the part he is playing in its development.
The mayor, who is also dyslexic, first came to the city as part of a homeless family who were housed in a women’s refuge at Malpas. He later lost his beloved grandfather to suicide, took an overdose – a ‘cry for help’ – and was on the cusp of alcoholism as he struggled to come to terms with his disability.
He has fought back from all of this to become a much-loved member of the Truro community who is helping to provide a new dawn for the city, with exciting plans to develop the Pydar area and utilise over £20m promised by the Government’s Towns Fund.
Speaking in the Mayor’s Parlour, Steven told me: “When I broke my neck and was lying in bed paralysed all I wanted to do was take another breath and get through the day. Now, when I’m just doing my day-to-day thing, I sometimes have to step back, look at my life and go ‘you know what, I’m doing alright’.”
Steven first came to Truro as a nineyear-old but it was a tough introduction to the city – not that he realised it at the time.
“I moved from Goonhavern to Truro as a homeless family. For whatever reason my mum lost the place she was renting, so we ended up in a caravan at Truro Heights, which was Kenwyn Caravan Park then. I was in a caravan, it was a cool summer, I was nine. For me it was great, for my mum it was hell. The caravan was not very nice.
“Then we got moved to Trennick House at Malpas, which isn’t there anymore. We pulled up on this large drive, in front of this big house, and I thought we’d made it. I had no idea it was a women’s refuge. I remember we ate cold porridge out of a saucepan – through a child’s eyes it was cool, it must have been torture for my mum.”
Steven, his mum and older sister eventually moved into a house in the city. Then when he was 12 his granddad took his own life. “His death really affected me as I was really close to him – we would go bird-watching together.”
He said: “It sounds like a terrible childhood, but it wasn’t that bad. I think I coped with breaking my neck easier because of all these things that had happened to me.”
As he says himself, the year of his accident, when he was 18, was a “helluva year”.
“My parents [his mum remarried and Steven says his stepfather has been a ‘rock’] got a letter suggesting that I did something else in life as I wasn’t going to sixth form as often as I should. They took it that I was kicked out of sixth form, which I wasn’t. I just preferred to be on the beach.
“I left sixth form and fell in love, my parents weren’t happy because they blamed everything on her. I ran away with her to Exeter and unfortunately found out she was seeing somebody else, and I took an overdose for attention. I don’t think for a minute I wanted to clock out – I was just hurting.
“I remember being sat at the kitchen table and saying to someone, ‘you could break every bone in my body and it would not be as painful as this’. Little did I know I would break my neck two weeks later.”
Steven relives the night of the accident which changed his life in matterof-fact fashion, but it’s chilling to hear.
“I dived in at Truro School swimming
It sounds like a terrible life, but I’ve had the most brilliant time. You cannot have the ups without the downs STEVEN WEBB
pool, it was the deep end, I was sober. Though we had done it the night before when we had been drinking. My friends and I had gone swimming there through that summer. Did I hit the edge? Was there something in the bottom of the pool I hit? I don’t know...
“I remember vividly hitting the bottom of the pool, thinking, ‘damn, that hurt’. You take enough air for 30 seconds because you never think you’re going to be down there for a few minutes. You dive in, go to move your arms and ... damn. I thought I’d broken both my arms. The feeling in the rest of my body had gone at that point.
“I remember floating down to the bottom and I had a really weird experience which I didn’t understand until I studied Buddhism nearly 25 years later. Everything just calmed down – there I was panicking, thinking I was going to die – and then I felt like I became everything else, I became part of the water in the pool, there was no me in the world, just this awareness that I was everything. The limitations of being a human body kind of disappeared.
“Then suddenly there was the big rush of coming back – and they were dragging me out of the pool.
“The ambulance was there in minutes but it took two hours to get me to Treliske because I kept going in and out of consciousness and they had to do chest compressions. I was flown to Salisbury the day after, to the Duke of Cornwall Spinal Unit, which I thought was a nice link – a home from home.”
Steven spent 12 months there and says the staff prepared him for life as a disabled person. He says he then lived a normal life, partying and “trying to reclaim my youth”. He then his ex-partner, whose daughter Kember is now his mayoress and who Steven sees as his own child.
But at 40 Steven hit “rock bottom” which ultimately changed his life and led him on the path to become Mayor of Truro.
A split from his then partner was the “wrecking ball that destroyed me at that time”. “I ended up in Boots in Pydar Street and my chair broke down, and I just bawled out in tears. I had no money, no way to repair it. Forty years old, single, credit cards to the hilt. A security guard in the shop came over to me and squeezed my shoulder, as if to say, ‘it will be alright’.”
Steven was also getting over losing a computer business and going bankrupt. “The reality is we didn’t move with the times.”
In his darkest hour he turned to alcohol.. “as a last resort just to go to sleep as my thoughts were so damaging. My whole life, since breaking my neck, I’d struggled with my masculinity. Part of what defines a man is his abilities. That was taken away to a large degree. That was the biggest destroying thing in my life and I had to silence those thoughts.
“My whole disability was really rising up at that time. There were several weeks of asking the carer for slightly more Southern Comfort, then another one and another one. This is why I understand and feel for the drinkers on the streets now. If I was able-bodied at that time I would have had nothing between me and drink – the fact I had to ask a carer to make it a double or triple, I had that mirror held up to me to say, ‘this isn’t right’.
“I realised the slippery slope I was on. I had to find another way to go to sleep.”
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Stephen found the solution was reading books, despite his dyslexia, about how the mind works. He started discovering about mindfulness and meditation, and became “friends” with his mind.
“That led me to politics without knowing it. I started helping people voluntarily with mindfulness, which helped during the pandemic, and wrote a couple of small books. Then the local Liberal Democrats came to me and asked if I’d stand. Normally I’d have an excuse – my dog’s passed away, my partner’s left me – but at this point, in 2017, I had no excuse. I said okay, but never left the house, didn’t campaign and yet I got elected.”
He really had no idea of how a local authority worked. “I didn’t even know we had a town clerk.”
Four years later the deputy mayor Jan Allen asked if he would be her deputy mayor when she became mayor. “When Jan didn’t get elected, I phoned Kember and said, ‘would you like to become mayoress instead of deputy mayoress and shall I do it?’ She asked me if I’d regret it ten years down the line if I didn’t.”
It’s obvious that despite all he’s been through, Steven loves life and is loving being at the helm in Truro.
“It sounds like a terrible life, but I’ve had the most brilliant time. You cannot have the ups without the downs. Unless you have real down times, you won’t recognise the real up times. “
He added: “I’ve realised it’s what you do with your day that counts.
“I am proud of myself, I’ve done okay. I have this amazing opportunity to do something that counts in my year as mayor.”