DIG FOR VICTORY

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 119, 22 May 1941, Page 5

DIG FOR VICTORY

500 BLIND MEN "GARDEN CLUB" VISION LONDON. Five hundred blind men are digging for victory in England to-day because one of their number saw a vision ten years ago in Greenwich, writes Hugh Redwood in the "News Chronicle." I talked in his house at Patcham with Mr. Gerald Hewitt, founder and chairman of the Garden Club for the Blind.

When he had told me the story of its inception and development, he took me to Rotingdean and introduced me to one of the club's most successful members, Mr. Eyre, who gardens at "The Wilderness" and has made it blossom as the rose. A New LifeThese two men between them epitomise the whole romance of the movement, for they are men whom blindness overtook in success and might easily have overwhelmed, the one a financier and international man of affairs, the other an ecclesiastical architect. Darkness has brought no disaster to either, for each has found a new life and delights in it. Watch Mr. Eyre forking over his soil, his right hand wielding the fork with extraordinary deftness, and the long, slender fingers of his left feeling the lifted earth and learning its secrets. Hear him talk of the peace he enjoys and the sense of productive partnership with nature. How It Began Then get Mr. Hewitt to trace his Garden Club back to its beginnings— to the black gardener who gave him, at the age of five, his first plot of land in Barbados; to his schoolboy purchase, when he came to England,! of a copy of the "Cornhill Magazine"; I with an article on Port Sunlight asj I"A Garden City for Workers"; to I his sojourn, when his sight had gone,! :in a house in Greenwich which hadl I, behind it a derelict garden. I |e It was the roise of children at play in that garden which made him inquire what the plice was like; it was a friendly policeman who took] 'the blind man inside to explore it; I tit was there that the vision came to! .him of a "garden club" for tlindj people. And now. I think, he blesses his blindness because of all that has i sprung from it, particularly of those! 'ifive hundred members—many of [them prize-winning flower growers— !who are now engaged in producing [foodstuffs and marketing them in! paying quantities. i