Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives: “We are taught to earn our living by our own labour and not to get it from charity”
In this blog for Disability History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith explores evidence for blind people working, not within the walls of dedicated charitable institutions, but in the community. Past related blogs have drawn attention to, for example, Elisha Bates, and Victorian efforts to open up respectable professional careers (beyond music and artisanal manufacturing).
I want to start with a funeral at Kensal Green Cemetery at the end of January 1874.[i] It was clearly considered noteworthy because of the picturesque assembly of blind people and sighted guides gathered for the funeral of W Hanks Levy, the director of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, which had been founded by Elizabeth Gilbert twenty years earlier. Like her, Levy was blind. Unlike her, he had been poor: “On this account he could feel with them, make allowance for them, and help them more than most others.” One of the mourners is reported to have been elevated “from a beggar to a respectable artisan.” He praised the Association which gave them work: “There is no place where the blind are treated so mercifully as we are here. If we do wrong we are helped to get right again, and we are taught to earn our living by our own labour and not get it from charity.”
In fact, this obfuscates the reality that the Association was a charitable endeavour: “Subscriptions and donations now amounted to between two and three thousand a year,- and goods had been sold to about the same amount.”[ii] At a time now, when there is again a concern that disabled people need to be working to have value, we should observe that there is a clear moral dimension to Gilbert’s Association: its rules make it clear that it existed to “afford employment to those blind persons who, for want of work, have been compelled to solicit alms, or who may be likely to be tempted to do so”. We should also note, seventy years after the founding of the Association, another such enterprise admitting that it was unable to pay minimum wage, but that it was better to pay blind people for work than idleness[iii].
However, I want to pay attention to another object of its work: “to introduce trades hitherto unpractised by the blind.”[iv] Gilbert, then, was not innovating by getting blind people to work (rather than being dependent solely on the generosity of others) – some had already been working. Catching glimpses of them is difficult, but here are a few thrown up by the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. One of the witnesses against Jonathan Wild deposed in 1725 that he had been part of a heist against a seller of Flanders lace and her daughter (both blind).[v] If you were imagining street pedlars, you would be wrong, not just because such a robbery would have been beneath a criminal mastermind, but because the recount is explicit that the premises they operated from, just by Holborn Bridge, had an upstairs store-room. William Standbank similarly kept “a small-coal shop”.[vi] John Higham ran a bookshop.[vii] James Greenlow was a horse-hair weaver.[viii] Henry Pine may have been unable to continue practising as anchor-smith when he became blind, but he now “turn[ed] a wheel.[ix] William Kitchener kept a Public House.[x] Peter Hopkins was a broker (of, for example, furniture).[xi] Extraordinarily the Old Bailey records also offer us John Hall, a watchman of long standing but with limited vision,[xii] and a parish watchman, subsequently dismissed who claimed to be deaf as well as blind.[xiii] Perhaps more usefully to civic life, The Northampton Mercury of 1832 noted that the Town Criers of Somersham and Chatteris were not only both totally blind but named William Briggs.[xiv]
In the 1891 census, we can see John Marsey, a blind Basketmaker living at his father’s inn in Whitby.[xv] Between then and the 1901 census he had removed inland to the nearby village of Ruswarp, an event considered worthy of reporting in the Shields Gazette, published [xvi]some sixty miles or so away. This tells us that John had been educated at the Wilberforce School for the Blind in York (pictured in the preview image), an institution that had now also found a high street cottage for him with a workshop. The article noted that it was pointless for the school to churn out master craftsmen, after seven years, “if their more fortunate fellow-townsmen will not furnish them with work when they return home.” We also hear that he had developed a fondness for the poetic works of Milton – to the extent that a painted sign above the door of his cottage had been commissioned with a quote from one of his sonnets. Unmentioned is that he had married the previous year[xvii], and was able to pass on to her at his death in 1932 effects to the value of £81 10 shillings.[xviii]
In the early 1900s, the Weekly Times and Echo might have celebrated a blind yacht designer as “the first shipbuilder in the United States”, noting that visitors might conduct business him without ever realising[xix], but this was still an era when your former workmates might find themselves organising a benefit football match to support you should you become unable to continue your work due to blindness.[xx] Likewise, enclosure in an institution was still happening – for example William Lyall had completed sixty years of service in the Royal Blind Asylum in Edinburgh as “basket maker, messenger boy and mattress maker”[xxi]. An article about the St Dunstan’s graduate Frederick Johnson says that many blinded soldiers were unwilling to leave it and go out in the world again.[xxii] Mr Johnson had not only been taught mat-making as a trade, but to read Braille and to touch type, and established in his shop with tools and equipment provided. In 1933 the Echo, Mail and Chronicle celebrated a new diversity of careers open to blind people: a recent event had included teachers, a tea agent, machine knitters, journalists, shorthand-typist, printers of embossed books and a gardener.[xxiii]
Thumbnail image credit: Yorkshire School for the Blind, York, England. Tinted lithograph. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection
Notes
[ii] https://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493/page/n233/mode/2up?q=association
[iii] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000766_19140801_031_0002
[iv] https://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493/page/n233/mode/2up?q=association
[v] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) May 1725. Trial of Jonathan Wilde (t17250513-55). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17250513-55?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[vi] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) January 1736. Trial of Mary Thompson (t17360115-21). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17360115-21?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[vii] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) April 1791. Trial of DAVID SIMPSON (t17910413-62). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17910413-62?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[viii] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) June 1794. Trial of ELIZABETH HAWKINS , WILLIAM HAWKINS (t17940604-30). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17940604-30?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[ix] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) September 1796. Trial of JANE RICHMOND (t17960914-100). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17960914-100?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[x] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) April 1819. Trial of SUSANNAH TAVERNER , WILLIAM TAVERNER (t18190421-68). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18190421-68?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[xi] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) May 1826. Trial of ELIZABETH MARTIN , ELIZABETH HARRIS (t18260511-167). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18260511-167?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[xii] Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) April 1796. Trial of JOHN LEVIS (t17960406-82). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17960406-82?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[xiii]Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0) July 1833. Trial of JOSEPH SANDERSON , THOMAS JONES , JOHN SHAW (t18330704-1). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18330704-1?text=blind (Accessed: 4th October 2025).
[xxiii] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005858_18740207_087_0007
[xiv] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000317/18321124/006/0002
[xv] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/6598/records/1119284
[xvi] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000287_18950716_028_0003
[xvii] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/62237/records/2577347
[xviii] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1904/records/1781942
[xix] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000452_19021129_124_0004
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000159_19070119_104_0006
[xxi] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/000452_19021129_124_0004.pdf
[xxii] https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000327_19190409_040_0004