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My name is Oliver Goldsmith and I am third generation of the Oliver Goldsmith eye-wear company
and I would like to just briefly take you through the history of the company.
My grandfather started the company in 1926 in a small workshop in Poland street in London s Soho
making real tortoise shell frames which were allowed in those days.
This is an example of a real tortoise shell frame that my Father wore back in the 30s
and the feature of this design is the fact that the sides don’t fold down
they are cut from the whole one piece of Tortoise shell and its got this curl side which
would stop the frame from slipping down the nose on hot weather
…you cant get these today because Tortoise shell is banned as a material,
but back in the 30s everybody who wore glasses would wear tortoise shell and this is just a very fine example of that period.
My father entered the business in the 30s and… during the second word war
the company was seconded to the armed forces to make all of their spectacle frames
, so there was no question of designing anything special during that period.
But in the 50s my father started designing glasses and realised that if the company was to go forward we had to get publicity.
So he created this sunglass called the ‘Marsha’and it was worn by Diana Dors who was an English starlet being promoted
and she wore this at the Cannes film festival and obviously got photographed wearing it
which was very good publicity for us. The unique feature about the design is the fact that the sides
come from the nose up and around rather than coming from the side here.
I haven’t seen any sunglasses like this on sale since then…
but it was quite unique and very popular and also got plenty of publicity apart from Diana Dors.
In 1956 my father was approached by a dress designer called Teddy Tingling
who was very famous for doing Wimbledon clothing for the matches every year
and he asked my Father to create a sunglass that would be sort of unique to his clothing.
My father designed this particle style called the Tennis Racquet which is fairly obvious which has got two racquet’s,
and on each corner here and here he put three little pearls in a lace bag to act as tennis ball’s.
So this was photographed all over the world and was also instrumental in getting our name well known
and possibly even better than Teddy Tingling.
In 2007 I was approached by the lawn tennis museum, at Wimbledon,
who had spotted my tennis sunglasses because we updated it from the original 1950s one and...
they asked me whether they could buy a pair… which I was very happy to give them actually
because I like to have everything out on display.
This latest sunglass it looks like two tennis racquets, and to make it look more authentic
we have actually drawn onto the lenses lines to act as the gut of the racquet string
and when these were sold they came with three pairs of lenses, so when you went to a party you could wear them with the lines
on and then you could go to an optician and you could swap the lenses over for the regular ones.
So it was a dual purpose pair of sunglasses and definitely the item to wear if you were going to Wimbledon centre court to watch the finals.
So if anybody goes to Wimbledon, have a look at the museum and you will see this on display.