John Wilson

Wilson was born in Nottinghamshire in 1919 into the family of a Methodist minister. In October 1931, aged twelve, he was blinded when a test tube exploded during a chemistry lesson at Scarborough High School for Boys; the chemicals had been wrongly labelled. He was educated at Worcester College for the Blind and went up to Oxford in 1937, reading law at St Catherine's Society and taking a second-class degree.

He joined the National Institute for the Blind as assistant secretary at the age of 22. During the Second World War he was involved in arranging factory work in Britain for several thousand blind people. He married Jean McDermid in 1944.

In 1946 and 1947 Wilson made a nine-month tour of British territories in Africa and the Middle East. The scale of avoidable blindness he encountered convinced him that a specialist organisation was needed, and since his employer regarded the work as outside its domestic remit he established the British Empire Society for the Blind on 5 January 1950. The society, later the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind, funded eye care, blindness prevention programmes and rehabilitation and education services.

Wilson and his wife Jean argued that education for children with disabilities was central to social inclusion, and supported integrated education projects. In 1969 they organised an expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro with seven blind men from East Africa, which drew international attention to the case for educating blind children.

He founded the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness and served as its president from 1974 to 1982. He continued to campaign on blindness prevention until his death in 1999.

Wilson was appointed OBE in 1955, made a CBE, and knighted in 1975. In 1979 he received the Albert Lasker Public Service Award. The Sir John Wilson School for blind children was opened in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1995.[2][3][4][5]