How 18thC Scottish teacher stunned Dr Johnson by teaching deaf pupils to 'hear with the eye'

Doubtless Garrick was chuffed, but booming out thanks to his young fan would have been pointless. The clues are in the poem. The very title itself is “On seeing Garrick act”. Our poet couldn’t hear Garrick speak, loud as he was, because Charles was deaf.

Charles lost his hearing at about three or four. His father, Alexander Sherriff, was a wealthy Leith wine merchant who didn’t let a thing like deafness get in the way of his son's future prospects. He set out to get an education for him, and when Charles was nine, they went up to Edinburgh to pay a call on a teacher called Thomas Braidwood.

An educational dynasty

Charles was a very bright lad. Braidwood took on the task of educating him, and, in doing this, both made history. Charles was the first person in the UK to be taught in a dedicated school for the deaf. He went onto a life of great achievement, a tale for another day. Braidwood became a pioneer, founded a mini-dynasty dedicated to deaf education.

Born in 1715, at Hillhead Farm in Covington, near Biggar, Braidwood studied mathematics at Edinburgh University, and went on to teach at Hamilton Grammar School. When he met Charles, he was running his own school in the Canongate, but he moved soon after to St Leonards Hill. There he set up the first school for deaf children in Britain, 'Braidwood's Academy for the Deaf and Dumb'. We wouldn’t use the word ‘dumb’ today. It’s rightly considered offensive.

Braidwood developed a range of communication tools to teach Charles, and other deaf children. Possibly he knew of Abbé Charles Michel de l'Épée’s work, recording and teaching sign language at the first public school for the deaf in Paris. Braidwood added lipreading and articulation. In order to help his pupils speak, he used a small silver rod, “about the size of a tobacco-pipe… flattened at one end, and having a bulb at the other” to manipulate the tongue and the mouth to create sounds and speech.

Dr Johnson was impressed

His pupils had high standards of literacy, which even impressed the visiting Dr Samuel Johnson, a man not known for being impressed by anything Scottish. When he visited Braidwood’s Academy in 1773, he announced it as something "no other city has to show”. The class solved an arithmetical puzzle “to his satisfaction”. Braidwood's pupils, he wrote, “hear with the eye”. That, from Dr Johnson, is praise.

Braidwood’s fame was spreading. When “On Seeing Garrick Act” appeared in the press in 1768, people wanted to know more about Charles and Braidwood.

This, remember, was an era when childhood diseases such as measles, mumps and even minor ear infections could render children deaf. Wealthy parents from all over Britain sought help from the school. London came calling.

Royal patronage

King George III heard of Braidwood and his teaching. Allegedly he offered Thomas 100 guineas to lure him south. In May 1783, the Braidwoods moved to Hackney and set up England's first Academy for the Deaf.

Braidwood and his wife Margaret took their daughter Isabella, and his nephew, John Braidwood, an assistant teacher. He and Isabella clearly got on very well, because the family had to plan a quick marriage in 1782. Four months later, the newlyweds welcomed a baby boy, named Thomas after his grandfather.

The academy flourished, attracting pupils from as far afield as America. One student was the illegitimate child of firebrand politician Charles Fox. A dinner guest wrote that he watched Fox and his son use sign language to chat at the table. French statesman Talleyrand, another guest, said it was strange to see the “first orator of Europe…talk with his fingers”.

To America

Isabella was left a widow in 1796. She and her two boys, Thomas and John, ran a separate school for a time, but when her father became ill in 1799, she took over the running of Braidwood’s. Isabella was clearly a talented and capable woman who gave her sons great training in their work.

In 1809, John returned to Edinburgh to take charge of the Edinburgh Deaf Institution. He left in 1811 for the United States to set up an academy there. In 1923, the Virginia Association of the Deaf unveiled a bronze tablet in Petersburgh, Virginia, commemorating the foundation of the “first school for the education of the deaf in America”. The teacher is recorded as “John Braidwood… of Edinburgh, Scotland”. To be fair, this John was a Hackney lad, but his grandparents and parents were Scottish. Technically, he could play for Scotland.

Thomas, his brother, went on to be master of what eventually became Birmingham’s Royal Institution for the Instruction of Deaf Children until his death in 1825. Isabella, and her daughter Elizabeth, eventually left London for Birmingham, until she died in 1819.

Modern recognition

Today Thomas Braidwood, his family and their schools are recognised as a huge influence on British Sign Language. In 2015, only a stone's throw away from that original academy, the Scottish Parliament voted to recognise BSL as a language.

That same year campaigners put up a plaque to mark the place where the school once stood. It takes a bit of hunting to find. There is a more obvious legacy. The whole area is now known as ‘Dumbiedykes’, after the word locals used to describe pupils of the school.

It's a reminder of an old-fashioned name with old-fashioned views. People who can’t hear are far from silent. We just have to be better at listening.