A NEW archive has exposed the tribulations suffered by thousands of blind people who survived by busking or ended up in poorhouses in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Feeling Our History was based on research by RNIB Scotland and focuses on so-called 'outdoor blind' people who were not in institutions such as blind asylums.
Eight volunteers carried out the year-long project backed by funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the archive is being launched at an event this evening in the National Records Office of Scotland, where much of the book's painstaking research took place.
Historian Dr Iain Hutchison, who collated the research, said a register of a charity which promoted reading among the 'outdoor blind' had been the start point.
"This contains details of the people the society tried to help through training in reading raised type, by providing tactile books and by later offering limited welfare support," he said.
"Our project has tried to restore flesh and blood to otherwise anonymous names on a dusty register."
Some people had been blind from birth, or lost their sight to illness and accident, he said, and many risked being sent to the poorhouse.
"Some blind and partially sighted people, however, made a modest living through work such as hawking, knitting, playing music or selling tea", he said. "One distinct group consisted of beggars, readers and musicians. These were looked upon with some disdain in contrast to those singled out as music teachers, organists and tuners, all of whom were held in high regard for their skills."
The archive includes details of William Finlay, who lost his sight by 1891 after being kicked by a horse.
According to family lore, damage from the kick had caused a creeping paralysis, which gradually robbed him of his sight and left him unable to work, as he previously had, as a dairyman or a railway lorryman. He died in 1906.
His granddaughter Sheena Irving, of Midlothian, said his relatives had not known what happened to him in the latter years of his life.
The archive shows that Mr Finlay was lucky and able to live in a one room tenement in Lauriston Place with his two daughter Annie and Marion until his death in 1906.
Ms Irving said: "I had his story which had been written down by his daughter Annie. I wondered if he might be included in the register of outdoor blind.
"I got in touch and the project managed to find him in the register. It was very interesting to be able to add this later part of his story to what we already known and to find out more about how people with sight loss lived back then."
Mr Hutchison added: "The people whose histories we pieced together represent diverse life stories. Every one of them was an individual and their life courses embraced varied experiences of dependence and independent, vigour and ill -health, assertive willpower or deteriorating mental wellbeing."
Stories from the Feeling our History book will also be broadcast as podcasts, on the RNIB Insight Radio Channel from tomorrow, and available on Freeview channel 730.
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