Rehabilitation after blindness

These two pages come from a booklet about St Dunstan’s Lodge, Regents Park, a hostel for blinded soldiers and sailors set up as a charity in March 1915. Men were taught different trades to try and make them economically independent. These included poultry-keeping, gardening, carpentry, typing and reading and writing in braille as well as the other trades outlined in the extract. There were social activities, and sports as well. It was maintained by the British Red Cross Society, the Order of St John of Jerusalem and the National Institute for the Blind, and supported by public donations. The booklet comes from pension records about the treatment and training for the blind, (Catalogue ref: PIN15/1054)

Transcript

OUR BLINDED SOLDIERS AND SAILORS

[Photograph of a man with bandaged eyes]

HOW THEY ARE BEING TAUGHT TO BE “BLIND”

 [Photograph of a man being taught how to operate a telephone switch board by a woman

Caption: Telephony for the Blind

London is wonderful and bewildering, and in the workrooms there is laughter, cheery happy voices, and chatting and whistling, for happy sound has to be substituted for happy sight, and a more cheerful set of fellows over their work it would be hard to find. In one corner of the long gallery shoes are being re-soled with a solidity and finish that not many a full-sighted cobbler might envy. Further along doormats are being made- firm and solid; no amateur work this, but stuff to compete with anywhere; baskets of every conceivable shape and size, good and well finished and serviceable, and on the other side of the room a carpenter’s bench where frames are being turned out that would not disgrace the most lynx-eyed workmen. One watches with amazement, not only the precision of direction, the sureness of touch.

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