Accessibility and Archives: “better than anyone else”
In this, the eighth in a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith challenges the idea that blind people are lacking competency or are in any way ‘less than’ sighted people. My first intention is to credit community pioneers, without portraying them as valuable only because sighted people can view them as inspirational. Secondly, I want to underline the importance of intersectional thinking when telling such histories (gender, race, and social status also matter).
In the fourth blog in this sequence we encountered a work for children by Juliana Horatia Ewing (née Gatty, 1841-1885), with multiple disabled characters, and a key role played by a blind piano tuner. The book also includes another blind character – Blind Baby – whom we are told was, in due course, “sent to a blind school, and then to a college where he learnt to be a tuner, and "earned his own living."” It is likely that Ewing had in mind the Royal Normal College which had been in Upper Norwood since 1872. In a June 1891 issue of The Strand we learn that boys at this co-educational College had access to a specially made Broadwood piano designed to be disassembled and reassembled to learn how to make and tune the instruments. Other vocational classes included touch-typing and illustrations show the students at leisure as well as at work, with pursuits including roller skating, rowing and tricycling!
Like the Liverpool School, but in contrast to, for example, the Guild of Brave Poor Things, this College for blind people was the brainchild of blind people. Francis Joseph Campbell (1832-1914) was an American music teacher who had to flee to Europe because of his anti-slavery views. Thomas Rhodes Armitage (1824-1890) was a physician who had to retire from practice when he lost his sight. An anecdote is told of them choosing to travel third class because “our English family alone numbers about 32,000, and they have relatives in all parts of the world” which gives a sense of Blind community. The article stresses that (in contrast to earlier establishments established by sighted people and teaching basic trades) the intention was to turn out ladies and gentlemen. It also notes the founders’ “efforts to rob the blind of any sense of dependence on others, which they find so humiliating… and to make them useful citizens.”
One supporter of the College was Henry Fawcett (1833-1884), who had lost his sight as a student, but went on to serve as the first blind MP and as Postmaster General. Hansard notes that, in the latter capacity, he was prepared to experiment with the employment of “deaf and dumb persons” but records no speech in the house relating to his own blindness. Indeed, his bracing advice to other blind people was: “Do what you can to act as though you were not blind; be of good courage and help yourselves.” Needless to say there was a culture of high expectations at the Royal Normal College, in an era when it was asserted that “the blind trained in the London Schools were… begging in the streets by hundreds” while yet others were confined in workhouses,. Campbell observed that a sighted worker found inadequate would not deter employers from taking on a further sighted worker, but that the case for the Blind minority was such that they “cannot afford to do work which is not the best of its kind. We must raise our standard, and not be satisfied until the Blind, as a class, will consider it a disgrace to do inferior work.”
John Troughton (c.1637-1681), blind since a child, and subsequently a non-conformist preacher and writer, had achieved a BA in Cambridge in 1659, and the musician John Stanley (1712-1786) had graduated from Oxford in 1729. Notwithstanding the example of these outlier pioneers, a 1902 Conference paper reflects on an overlooked equal rights struggle for higher education (for blind men) that in some ways parallels the struggle of nineteenth century women:
‘[T]ill thirty years ago… the Blind lacked the simplest instruments and most elementary books for advanced learning;… I mention them to show that, just as in spite of prejudice and apathy the Blind were capable of attaining the highest rewards of knowledge, so they may be capable of rendering the highest service to their fellow-creatures in many departments of public work. I am convinced, from what I observe and hear, that a great deal of prejudice still exists against the Blind... All that we ask is the "open door."’
An 1898 Supplement to the Blind, Occasional Paper names 41 Blind graduates (most from the past twenty or so years) and 6 current Blind students in subjects including Music, History, Literature, Classics, Theology, Moral Philosophy, Law and Mathematics:
‘20 have been at Oxford, 7 at Cambridge, 12 at Durham, 7 at Dublin, and 1 at London University. All were apparently educated at Worcester College for the Blind Sons of Gentlemen before going to an University, except.. [nine], and the fact that many graduated in Honours, is a conclusive proof that blind boys can successfully compete with the sighted, and, with an University training, are enabled to maintain themselves in the various professions.’
If military or many civil service careers were still closed to them (despite the example of Henry Fawcett), the writer refers to successful businessmen, lawyers and churchmen, and notes of teachers, “We can teach the seeing well enough, and we can teach the Blind in most things, better than anyone else.” Back in 1711, Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739), a blind tutor of mathematics (including Optics) took up the Lucasian Professorship in Mathematics, after an honorary MA had been authorised by Queen Anne. He was described as “a man who had lost the use of his own sight, but taught others to use theirs.”
The same Conference paper, however, observes that “Music is all round the sphere in which most blind persons can get most remuneration, and most renown.” It is worth noting that, as performers, they might be making other people rich rather than themselves. A black man, Thomas Greene Wiggins (1849-1908) is recorded as performing at the St James’ and Egyptian Halls in London and his 1866 European tour as “Blind Tom”, “The Marvellous Musical Prodigy” also resulted in testimonials from Southsea, Edinburgh and Montrose. But Wiggins, who had been born to enslaved parents continued to be unfree, notwithstanding the end of the American Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. A composer as well as a performer, contemporary accounts of him make uncomfortable reading by using dehumanising racist and ableist language to treat him as a ‘freak show’ turn. Probably autistic (diagnosis of the dead is problematic) as well as blind, he was deemed lacking in mental capacity and, as a result, different members of the family which had purchased him as a baby, were empowered to continue making a fortune from him, even (with some gall) publicising him as "the last slave set free by order of the Supreme Court of the United States.”
Blind people have a history and a moral right to access that history (and any other that interests them). How would making archives accessible be different if we actively included blind people?
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you are working with records of blind people or with blind people. If you are interested, in the first instance, please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk