THE STORY OF A HOUSE (6)
THE OPTICIAN’s FITTING ROOM
This was one of two principal ground floor rooms at 29 Surrey Street in Norwich. It was one of the sunniest rooms in the house with south-facing windows which reached nearly from floor to ceiling. In this view you can see about a quarter of the room. It features two of my father’s display fittings for showing off women’s frames. On the right you can see one of these fittings, a hexagonal cone on an iron column painted pink. The coloured inserts which hold the frames were thin tin plated metal sheets covered with Fablon (or sticky backed plastic). To this the frames were attached by clear plastic supports, located by magnets which clung to the steel sheets.
The second display unit was the lyre table. Lyre tables are not unusual, but my father’s was unique in having real strings, tightened by pegs, on which one could play a simple tune. It was his own idea to have real strings, the design was his and the work was his. The whole thing was typical of his quirky ideas and superb craftsmanship. I believe I still have some letters from him where he sets out his ideas for the lyre table, complete with sketches. There were three oak trays visible through the glass top, and removable by means of a fold-down flap, not visible here. I still have this piece of furniture, although not currently on display. It would not hold many frames, and was kept for the best of his stock.
These fittings were for displaying ladies’ frames. Men were not thought to require anything so elegant to show off their frames, which were also fewer in number. I cannot now remember what indeed there was to show off the male equivalent, though obviously there must have been something. In those days the optical business was trying to be a respectable profession, with any kind of advertising strictly banned. It was Mrs Thatcher who freed the optical profession to advertise and compete in a commercial environment. In fact my father was not against the idea of advertising, but in his case it would have had to be a restrained version. I used to tease him by calling his men’s frame “specs for gents”. Specs was a vulgar slang term to him, and glasses was the acceptable term. Whatever he would have thought of a chain of optical practices called Specsavers I can hardly imagine.
Men had a choice of library frames (these were plastic), Supras (plastic above and rimless below), plastic and metal combined (i.e. a metal bridge and sides and plastic around the lenses) and wholly metal frames. Completely rimless frames were not fashionable at the time I am talking about (the sixties) although they had been in 1940s. There was a completely new language to learn if you were fitting frames; what you might call the arms of the glasses (the bits which go round you ears) were called the sides. The bits that went round the lenses were called the fronts, and the bit which went over your nose was called the bridge. The bridge was also part of the front. Some specialists called the fronts the temples, but my father thought this was an Americanism and not for use in this country. Nose pads and hinges are self-explanatory. The more technical side of fitting, such as the pd (pupillary distance) and optical centres I will mention only in passing. In those days most lenses were made of glass; plastic was available but it scratched very easily and so was nor popular.
My father would go back to work on Tuesday evenings to “cut edge and fit”. This involved taking the optically finished but large blank lenses and cutting them roughly to shape to fit the frames. To do this he used a hand tool called the “shanking tongs”. Then they were finished on an edging stone, basically a fine rotary grindstone but one which revolved in the opposite direction; up from the bottom rather than down from the top. T. This long and tedious job was taken over by an automatic diamond edging machine during the 1960s, which did the whole process in a matter of seconds or at most a couple of minutes. My father had largely given up his Tuesday evening job by then and never moved on to the new machinery. Lastly the ”fit” in this job referred to popping the finished lenses into the frames which normally had to be warmed to soften the plastic using the electric “shell heater“. This name was a relic of the days when frames were made of real tortoiseshell rather than plastic.
The picture of the fitting room must have been taken in May or early June, as there is a display of laburnum on the receptionist’s desk. The floors were of oak in the two main rooms; the floors in the hall and landing were of stone. My father went to some trouble to have the oak floors sanded down when he moved in during 1959, and was annoyed when the fashion for stiletto heels meant women marked the floors with a myriad of little indentations.
At this period the colour scheme was still the pink he had chosen in ’59. Soon he was to have the room redecorated in light green. My father had a coronary heart attack in 1967 and many minor attacks thereafter, which all required hospitalisation and defibrilating, but he was soon up and about again. He retired in 1972, more or less as soon as I had left university, although he continued to work part time for Mr Sergeant, to whom the optician business was sold in that year. He retained ownership of the house. He finally ended work in 1975 and received his state pension in 1976.
JOSEPH MASON
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