O

Occupational therapist

 

Dorset House, in Bristol, was the first school of occupational therapy in the UK, established by Dr Elizabeth Casson (1881–1954) and opened in 1930. Giving those unfortunate enough to be incarcerated in mental asylums jobs such as weaving or tailoring had a long history, not as a treatment but simply to keep them busy and to produce items either for sale or for use within the hospital. In America and Canada the possibilities of also using occupation as therapy to rehabilitate wounded soldiers after the First World War, giving them the ability to cope with life and to develop new skills, had been fully grasped, but progress was slower in this country.

Dorset House was originally a nursing home dealing with mental disorders, but Dr Casson realised that the use of occupational therapy would also benefit those patients suffering or recovering from physical trauma. In the 1940s trained therapists from Dorset House ran the Allendale Curative Workshop, helping wounded servicemen and women, but bombing forced the school to move to Bromsgrove, where they struggled to provide enough trained therapists for hospitals and overseas.

The Oxford Brookes University website has cine film online of 1940s treatments and training, including students (www.brookes.ac.uk/library/specialcoll/dorset.html), and details of the Dorset House Archive. For a history, see A journey from self health to prescription (‘a history of occupational therapy from the earliest times to the end of the 19th century and a source book of writings’) and A journey from prescription to self health (‘a history of occupational therapy in the United Kingdom during the 20th century and a source book of archival material’), both by Ann Wilcock (College of Occupational Therapists, 2001 and 2002).

Office staff

 

Until the 1880s most company offices were very small affairs and staffed by male clerks who wrote and copied every document by hand. As the commercial and banking world, and the Civil Service (see civil servant), continued to grow, however, there was a huge expansion in the number of office staff required and women took to this new work with enthusiasm. Life was speeding up, with the use of the telephone and telegram becoming commonplace and this was reflected in the office. Isaac Pitman had established the first schools for shorthand in the 1870s, and the first commercial typewriters, produced by Remington, were in use by the 1880s.

Middle class women, and clever girls from a working class background who were for the first time being given access to a basic education, found secretarial work, shorthand typing, clerical and book-keeping tasks in a clean, quiet, safe environment suited them: it was the ‘white blouse’ revolution. This was even reflected in late Victorian/Edwardian fashion, the women dressing in ready-made suits of long skirt and tailored jacket, over a white blouse and a tie, reflecting male office wear. The office also became a place of new freedoms and new social and romantic relationships for women. Unfortunately, as male workers gave ground to women in the office, so rates of pay went down, and female staff were paid less than men right into the last quarter of the 20th century. Women would be expected to leave if they got married. See also secretary; typist.

Optician

 

An ‘optician’ may indicate someone who tested sight, examined eyes, and prescribed and fitted spectacles (in other words, an ophthalmologist or optometrist), or a ‘dispensing optician’ or ‘refractionist’, who provided lenses and spectacles from a prescription made out by an ophthalmologist. Miss Adaliza Dunscombe, the 30-year-old daughter of a Bristol optician, seems to have been the first woman to sit and pass the examinations in ophthalmic optics of the British Optical Association (BOA), in February 1898. She subsequently worked with her father in Bristol, as a ‘refractionist and optician’. The BOA had introduced examinations three years before, in 1895, and Adaliza was only allowed to enter for them because she was a close family relative of a male member of the Association and was able to undertake the required practical training.

Spectacle-making was for centuries controlled by the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers in London (www.spectaclemakers.com), and in the early 19th century there were a small number of female spectacle makers – such as Maryann Holmes, widow, who carried on her late husband’s business in the 1830s. During the 19th century the Company was rather sidelined by the increased industrialisation of the craft, as well as by the growth of interest amongst the medical profession in ophthalmology – Moorfields Hospital in 1807 became the first exclusively ophthalmic hospital in the world, and was followed by others opening around the country, including at Exeter, Bristol and Manchester. In the 1890s the Company introduced its own examinations for opticians, followed in 1904 by examinations for sight testing. Until the later 1950s most practising opticians had taken the examinations of one of the four examining professional bodies – the Company, the BOA, the Association of Dispensing Opticians, or the Institute of Ophthalmic Opticians.

Until 1958, theoretically, anyone could set themselves up in business as an optician; the profession was voluntarily self-regulated from 1926, but in 1958 the Opticians Act made it a legal requirement to be professionally qualified and registered. The first Opticians’ Register was published in 1960; at that time there were 137 female dispensing opticians and 276 optometrists. There is a history of ophthalmology online at the Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ website (www.mrcophth.com /Historyofophthalmology/introduction.htm). The British Optical Association Museum can be visited by appointment (College of Optometrists, 42 Craven Street, London WC2N 5NG; www.college-optometrists.org).

Orange seller

 

Costermongers of the 19th century rarely dealt in  oranges, nuts or lemons and the trade was rather looked down on. Oranges had been sold in the streets since Elizabethan times – hence Nell Gwynne – and in 1607 Ben Jonson had complained of the noisiness of the ‘orange-wives’, on a par with ‘fish-wives’. At that time the oranges were carried in a basket supported on their heads, though by Henry Mayhew’s time in the mid-1800s they were often displayed on a tray supported from the shoulders. Oranges came into the country from October to August. Many of the female orange sellers were Irish. Some hawked round the streets, selling in theatres etc as well as at the door, while others went out into the suburbs. Mayhew estimated that nearly 200 million oranges were imported each year, and that 15 million were sold by the street sellers. Orange sellers might also be nut sellers (described as ‘often wretched’, ill-fed and poor) or lemon sellers, though lemons were not much called for by Mayhew’s time (since prices had gone up because ‘the law required foreign-bound ships to be provided with lemon-juice’), or flower girls. See flower girl; street seller.

 

One of the street trades followed by women, orange selling was a seasonal option.