Introduction
Blind people in all parts of the world owe a great debt to Louis Braille, but those in Britain hardly owe less to Thomas Rhodes Armitage; for it was through his tireless energies that the embossed type which bears Braille's name was popularised in this country.
Early life
He was born in 1824 in Sussex, the sixth of seven brothers, and a few years later the family moved to Avranches in Normandy, where they remained until he was nine years of age. They then moved to Germany, where the little boy was sent to a school whose headmaster was a well-known German grammarian, and at the end of two years Thomas spoke German at least as fluently as he spoke English. A visit to England followed, and then a return to France, and study at the Sorbonne, Paris.
In 1840 Thomas Armitage became a medical student in London, but after a year's work at King's College his sight began to give him trouble, and he had to have a long rest from reading. After an interval of two years he was again able to go on with his studies, and in course of time qualified as a surgeon, following this up with the degree of M D (London) and MRCP. After a period of war service in Crimea, he returned to London and worked there for several years, both as a general practitioner and consultant.
His sight begins to fail
But when he seemed to be at the height of his powers his sight once more began to give serious trouble, and in 1860 it became clear to him that if he was to retain what vision he had, he must resign from active medical practice. He was a man of means, so that the loss of his work did not involve poverty, but he had looked upon medicine as his life-work, and his disappointment at having to give it up must have been very great. He was, however, a man of deep religious faith and he soon saw one direction in which his practical experience as a doctor, his private fortune and even his blindness could be employed "I cannot conceive", he wrote, "any occupation so congenial to a blind man of education and leisure as the attempt to advance the education and improve the condition of his fellow sufferers."
Armitage has an idea to help blind people read
Years before this, Dr Armitage had been interested in a blind patient, and in 1865 this man, on recommendation, had been appointed a missioner of the Indigent Blind Visiting Society, founded by the famous philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, to visit the blind people of London in their homes. Accompanied by this missioner, Dr Armitage had himself visited blind people and had seen for himself that what they needed above all was education, and, as a medium of that education, a system of embossed writing which should be uniform throughout the country.
He must have brought into stuffy Committee rooms a fresh breeze of realism and common sense, when he pointed out that the people best fitted to decide what system of reading and writing was most likely to meet the needs of blind people were blind people themselves. So it came about that in 1868, Dr Armitage enlisted the help of three blind men, James Gale, W Fenn (who had been an artist before his loss of sight), and Daniel Conolly BA, and the little group formed themselves into a committee.
RNIB is founded
They took as their axiom the principle that "the relative merits of the various methods of education through the sense of touch should be decided by those, and only those, who have to rely on this sense". Each member of the Executive of the newly-formed Society, which took the name of the British and Foreign Blind Association for promoting the Education of the Blind (known as the Royal National Institute of the Blind) must be a man obliged on account of defective sight to read by touch with knowledge of at least three systems of embossed type, and having no financial interest in any.
Nearly two years elapsed before the little Committee passed judgement. It sounds a long time, but do the readers of braille today always realise how many formidable rivals it had in those days? Today all but braille and Moon type have been forgotten. But in those days there was the plain Roman capital of Fry, the slightly modified form of this type sponsored by Alston of the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind, the other stenographic system invented by Frere, and the several less well-known. During the two years, the Committee worked steadily at its task, studying books written in the various codes, and getting in touch with as many blind men and women as possible in order to find out their views. "Two or three hours were often devoted to a single witness", wrote Dr Armitage, and only those blind witnesses were examined who, by reason of their knowledge of more than one system, were considered capable of giving an unprejudiced judgement.
It will be remembered that Dr Armitage was a man who had travelled widely in Europe and he had a knowledge of French and German which would deliver him from the insularity which might have made a foreign system such as braille suspect. He was always alive to the possibility that other countries might have a contribution to make to solving his problems, and from the first he established contacts with institutions for blind people in Europe and the United States.
The use of Braille becomes more popular
How long it took braille to be generally adopted in schools for blind people here it is not easy to say. In a list of such schools and institutions published in 1871, details are given of 46 organisations - mainly schools and home teaching societies -and in only one is braille mentioned: twelve years later in a second edition of the book, 21 are listed as teaching braille.
In 1878 Dr Armitage, speaking at a Conference, said it was "used for writing" in 25 institutions, though in some of them the pupils were "allowed" to use it but it was not regarded as part of the regular curriculum. By 1883, 27 schools and institutions were using braille though 35 still used Moon. Almost the earliest publication in braille was "John Giplin", printed in 1870, and some Advent hymns. By 1871, "Anecdotes of Dogs" and two of Longfellow's poems had been added to the catalogue of braille publications, and four years later it included braille instruction books, more poems, hymn tunes, the multiplication table and a number of maps.
Today RNIB has one of the largest braille printing houses in the world selling books, periodicals and braille music to blind people at subsidised rates.
Further information
Biography of Thomas Rhodes Armitage by Mary G Thomas - contact our research library for more details on this publication.