| Description | Interview with John Watt, Edinburgh. He continues to talk about his experiences at the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh and the freedom he had as a teenager to go out to dances and to attend football matches. He talks about his experiences at Scottish football matches he has attended recently, and how he feels in large crowds. For part of this discussion he talks to Charles Parker in a set of toilets, and speaks about specific difficulties that arise when asking for guidance in this environment. They then conduct the rest of the interview in another location, and John Watt talks about how the atmosphere of a sports match cannot be recreated when listening at home, his preference for going in the stands at football matches and the response of other people around him. He wants to attend the match himself, as independently as he can, with a companion to commentate for him, rather than as a 'showpiece blind person, who has to be delivered to a certain part of the stand and given a special commentary'. He goes on to talk about the limited opportunities for blind people in the 1930s, who usually ended up in sheltered workshops, his feelings about his own experiences in the workshop, his thoughts about training to become a home teacher, the difficulties that some blind adolescents today have in finding suitable employment, the work of the National League of the Blind in campaigning for better wages and conditions for blind workers, and how hard many blind employees have to work in the trades allocated to them in sheltered workshops (tracks 1-10).
Total: 35.28 mins
Dubber's reference number: PLA KF565D0769380 |