Keith Clifford Hall - Park Lane, London, UK - Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com

The green plaque sits high on the wall of the Marriott Hotel Park Lane and is showing signs of aging with some of the white paint chipped or faded. The plaque reads:
On the edge:
"City of Westminster / British Contact Lens Association 1997"
In the centre:
"Keith / Clifford Hall / FSMC FAAO DCLP / 1920 - 1964 / Pioneer in the fitting / of contact lenses / practised here / 1945 - 1964".

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Keith Clifford Hall was born in Cambridge and educated in Surrey. He left school at 17 and soon after happened upon a job advertisement for an optician's apprentice in Bracknell. He studied for his FSMC at night school, qualifying in 1931.

Clifford Hall began fitting contact lenses in 1934 and set up the first UK specialist contact lens practice in 1945 at 139 Park Lane in London. He soon moved to larger rooms next door and here he saw patients from all over Britain as well as from other parts of the world. His technique used scleral fitting shells which were modified with wax prior to machining. He also worked with the original Touhy corneal lens.

Clifford Hall met Frank Dickinson in 1939 on board the Queen Mary on his first trip to the US to visit Theodore Obrig. They collaborated on the first UK book on contact lenses in 1946, apparently written over the course of a single weekend spent in the Lake District. Clifford-Hall wrote the more practical chapters.

He made two more visits to the US where he learned various American methods of contact lens fitting. He also visited numerous other contact lens laboratories and clinics around the world, including those in Germany, Brazil and Russia. He was a regular visitor to practices in Norway and Denmark, fitting lenses and teaching fitting techniques to the local ophthalmologists.

Clifford Hall predicted the advent of both soft lenses and disposables as early as 1948. He had planned to visit Otto Wichterle in Prague just before his untimely death 1964. He was awarded the Herschel Gold Medal of the ISCLS in 1958 and was president of the Contact Lens Society in 1963. The Clifford Hall family donated his papers and research notes to the Contact Lens Society which established a memorial collection in the then BOA Library; this is now the BCLA Library at the College of Optometrists. A green plaque was officially unveiled on April 30, 1997, at his old rooms at 140 Park Lane.

Text source: (visit link)

Blue Plaque managing agency: City of Westminster Individual Recognized: Keith Clifford Hall Physical Address: 140 Park Lane London, United Kingdom Web Address: [Web Link]

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