PANEL 64    The First School for Deaf and Dumb Children

Thomas Braidwood founded the first school in Britain designed to teach deaf and dumb children. It was set up in a house in the Canongate in Edinburgh in 1780. Developing out of what he called the ‘combined system’, Braidwood codified the earliest version of British Sign Language. It was based on the use of the hands, the shapes they made, how they were turned, were placed and moved. C is made by curving the thumb and index finger into a semicircle and D by adding the straight index finger of the other hand to the semicircle. Deaf and dumb people talk in a mesmerising flurry of hand movements and British Sign Language has developed regional dialects. Some Scottish signs are not understood in the south of England. Braidwood’s first pupil was Charles Sheriff, the son of Alexander Sheriff, a wealthy wine merchant working in Leith. The school tended to cater for those with the means to pay its fees but Joseph Watson, a relative of Braidwood, founded the first public school for the deaf and dumb. Based in Bermondsey in 1792, the London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb was very successful. By 1783, Braidwood himself had moved to London to found a new school and his grandson set up a school in Virginia in the USA. Scots pioneered this field of education and Thomas Braidwood would have smiled to see British Sign Language recognised alongside English, Welsh, Gaelic and others as one of Britain’s official languages and also to see that his original school in the Canongate is remembered in the nearby district of Edinburgh, the Dumbiedykes.

 

Panel stitched by:

Cammo Quilters

Katherine Forsyth

Rosemary Gordon-Harvey

Avril Green

Elizabeth Reekie

Gillian Swanson

Norma Watkins

Caroline Watson

Stitched in:

Edinburgh