A blind coastguard?

[Barbara Wilkinson]

I have to share this - it may just be my warped sense of the ridiculous, but ...
I have just found my 2xgreat uncle working as a coastguard in Shorwell, Hampshire in 1851 - definitely him, everything fits with other known facts.
He is living at the coastguard station with two others also working for the coastguard service and the head of the household - a boatman for the coastguard service - is shown as blind! A blind coastguard .....?

[michaelpipe]

Probably highly valued for his acute hearing, though

Does seem strange,though, doesn't it?

Michael

[AnnB]

Obviously being blind did not deter people from doing things we would consider almost impossible today. As reported in the North Devon Journal in May 1872, Robert Dummett, Braunton's blind postman (yes, postman) had just died. A sentence in his obituary reads,

"The retentiveness of his memory, and the nicety of his sense of touch, enabled him to deliver his various freight, whether letters, papers, or parcels, to their proper destination, when he had once been informed of what that was; and we never remember to have heard of an instance in which he had made mistake."

Best wishes
Ann