In celebration of Norwegian success at the Winter Olympics, I just came across this picture of the Christiania (Oslo) Deaf at their ski club in Barum 1919 and decided to post it.

More Norwegians from Christiania (no snow here!)… click onto the images for a larger size.

Finally some Norwegian Deaf athletes – I suppose from 1919 or so.  The photos are probably connected with Selwyn Oxley’s visit to Scandinavia when he went to several Deaf Institutes.

Om det finnes noen som gjenkjenner disse folk vaer så god å skrive til oss (på norsk om du vil).

[We have been very busy so no time for a proper blog entry again!]

 

By Mina Krishnan

Alexander Graham Bell (3rd of March 1847–2nd of August 1922). Although there is still controversy over who really got there first and whether he did so independently, Alexander Graham Bell is certainly widely credited with having invented what we now recognise as the telephone, a device that turns sound into electricity then back into sound, for which he was granted a patent in 1876.

Although Bell was born in Edinburgh, his father moved the family to Canada when Bell was 23, following the death of his two brothers from tuberculosis.  Bell then moved to the U.S. shortly thereafter to start a teaching career.  His father and grandfather were both experts in elocution and his mother started to become deaf when he was 12, which had inspired him to study acoustics and the mechanics of speech.  In the 1870s he pioneered a system called visible speech, developed by his father, which was a system that indicated oral sounds by the use of written symbols; Bell used this to teach deaf-mute children to communicate with speech.

He worked with many people, for example on techniques for teaching speech to deaf people; his most famous student was Helen Keller, for whom he established a trust fund for her education at Radcliffe College.  An advocate of oralism, he set up a school to train teachers of the deaf.  Directly opposed to his view that communication by speech was what made humans truly human and that deaf people should communicate solely by speech and speech-reading/lip-reading, was Edward Gallaudet (son of Thomas, pioneering educator of deaf people).  A fervent proponent of manualism, Gallaudet embraced deafness, rather than seeking to eradicate it as Bell did.

Not only was Bell dead-set against the use of sign-language, especially in state-funded schools – seeing it as a foreign language that had no place in the U.S. education system – he was in fact one of the earliest modern supporters of the eugenics movement in the U.S, believing deaf people should be kept apart from each other so that they would not marry or produce children.

He published Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race in 1884, warning that deaf people were creating an insular, inbred ‘deaf race’ and claimed that ‘the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world’ and that it was necessary to ‘examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy’.

He attended the first International Congress on Eugenics, held in London and presided over by Leonard Darwin – son of Charles – regarding hereditary deafness and the compulsory sterilisation of deaf people for the betterment of the human race; and he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York.

He also gave evidence – relating to his research on the topic of the causes of congenital deafness – at the Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb, stating for example that ‘hereditary pre-disposition’ was clearly responsible as over 50% of those he studied had ‘other members of their family deaf and dumb’ and that they should therefore not inter-marry or have children.

The library has a copy of the House of Commons parliamentary paper, Report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb.  This is also available in full from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (although the library’s hard copy is far easier to browse!):

http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:hcpp&rft_dat=xri:hcpp:rec:1889-065644

In 1877 he married Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, who had been profoundly deaf from the age of about five following a serious illness.  They had two daughters, Elsie and Marian; they also had two sons who, tragically, died neonatally.  Mabel is considered to have had an immense influence on Bell’s work, having been of great inspiration and encouragement with regard to his commercial success.

The Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf developed in 1956 out of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, which Bell had helped to organise in 1890, serving as its first president.  Its aim is to help with aspects of living with hearing loss such as early diagnosis in children and the provision of resources to parents who wish their children to learn speech and speech-reading/lip-reading in order to ‘thrive in mainstream society’.

Bell had other interests besides – he was also, to give just one example, very interested in botany even as a child and later was a founding member of the National Geographic Society.

Click onto the image below for a larger size.

Some items held in the RNID library:

Mackay, James A.  Sounds out of silence: a life of Alexander Graham Bell (1997)

and other books about Bell, including biographies

Winefield,  Richard, Never the twain shall meet: Bell, Gallaudet, and the communications debate, (1987) 

Volta Voices (1994 – present )

Volta Review (1910 – present; also from 1899 under the title The Association Review)

– journals of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf

Government report:

House of Commons parliamentary paper, Report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb

Online resources available through the e-library:

Jamieson, James, Alexander Graham Bell: Eugenicist, Mankind Quarterly 2001.  42 (1), 65-76.

Greenwald , Brian H, The Real “Toll” of A. G. Bell: Lessons about Eugenics – Sign Language Studies 2009.  9 (3).

Uncertainty over whether AGB was quite so anti-manualism:

The question of sign-language and the utility of signs in the instruction of the deaf: two papers by Alexander Graham Bell (1898). Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2005 Spring;10(2):111-21.

(Freely available Via PubMed)

Freely available web resources:

There is plenty of controversy over who was the real inventor of the telephone:

Bell ‘did not invent telephone’ (German research scientist J. Philipp Reis did):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3253174.stm

U.S. ruling that an Italian inventor (Meucci) did:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews

Or was it Elisha Gray?!

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/242617/Elisha-Gray

Just two of many biographies:

http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?id_nbr=7894

http://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/edu/essay.html?id=59

‘History through deaf eyes’ – Language & Identity, Gallaudet University:

http://my.gallaudet.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/Deaf%20Eyes%20Exhibit/Language-01oraledu.htm

 

Sometime around 1900, a Miss Mary F. Chapman left Britain to become a missionary in the Far East, working for the Church of England Zenana Mission which was active in India, Ceylon and Burma.  Her sister Lena, received an M.B.E. in 1930.  Mary, after being at Kensington High School, did mission work in Tinnevelly, then went to Mount Lavinia in Ceylon, founding a school there in 1911.  After the war Mary went to Burma (1920), supported by the Thankful Hearts League which she had helped organize (Children’s Newspaper, British Deaf Times).  The League had raised a remarkable £27,000 and consequently she was able to start the Mary Chapman Training College for Teachers of the Deaf in Rangoon, where they taught Burmese, Shan and Chinese children “not merely trades, but how to become social and, most important of all, Christian beings.  Around 1930 the work was handed over to the Bible Churchman’s Missionary Society, and in 1931 Mary Chapman was able to fulfill her dream of doing missionary work in Palestine.  Her aim was to train teachers who could then teach Deaf children of their own particular religious or ethnic group.

Bolo Ba Mu Martin (the appended ‘Martin’ coming from the church in Bedford that sponsored him), was born in about 1915.  He ended up in the Rangoon school.  He became a skilled cabinet maker and carpenter, and was a King’s scout.  He wished to go with Mary to Palestine and raised the money for his fare by painting picture postcards.  From the 1933 Children’s Newspaper we learn that Bolo, then 18, was on holiday in England, and gave a broadcast with Mary Chapman on 20th August 1933 about the missionary work.

I found this record on the web, showing Bolo as becoming naturalised in 1963, and working as a porter at a hotel in Dunbarton:

LIST of Aliens to whom Certificates of Naturalisation have been granted by the Secretary of State and whose Oaths of Allegiance have been registered in the Home Office during the month of April 1963.
The date in each case is the date of naturalisation.  Bolo Ba Mu, known as Bolo Ba Mu Martin ; Burma; Hotel Porter; Loch Lomond Hotel, Balloch, Dunbartonshire. 19th March 1963.

Quite what became of Bolo in the intervening years, and after 1963, I do not know, but there may be people who recall him from those latter years.  With all these leads I think someone could put together an interesting story about Bolo and the Rangoon Mission.  Over to the researchers!

A Pioneer again goes pioneering. Further work for the deaf and dumb in Palestine. British Deaf Times 1931, p.75.

Hull, Miss S.E., A few words on the extension of our work. 4 page pamphlet, Historical Collection. ca. 1920

[Article updated with new link 16/12/2015]

12/4/2019 The Children’s Newspaper is no longer freely available and unfortunately I cannot give the exact reference to the issue or pages as I originally linked to the pdf.

 

 

In 1931 the 3rd ‘Silent Games’, or Deaflympics were held in Nurnberg from 21st-24th of August.  The first had been in 1924 in Paris, and the most recent was in 2009 in Taipei http://www.deaflympics.com/games/

The Swedish magazine for the Deaf says there were 6,000 spectators on the last day.

I can find very little in British sources about the games. The most successful Briton appears to have been Cyril Reynolds. He came 3rd in the 200m, an event he had won in 1928. The British team was lead by the Rev. Vernon Jones, of whom more in a later entry. The British Deaf Times also points out the “Two men from Leeds, one from Sheffield, and one from Barnsley represented Yorkshire in the third Olympiad”.  Many of them  were competing both in field and track sports.

From a Finland Swedish magazine for the Deaf I read that the Polish competitors were turned away at the borders. This was of course in 1931, at the beginnings of Nazi rule. Deaf people were to suffer greatly on the following years.

The British Deaf Times, Vol.28, September-October 1931, p.117

Tidskrift főr Dővstumma utgiven af Finlands Dővstumfőrbund, 1931, No.9, p.71-4

Tidning főr Dővstumma, 1931 No.9, p.91