Keith Graham 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 during 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 visit to the
US
to visit Theodore Obrig.They
collaborated on the first
UK
book on contact lenses in 1946, apparently written during 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.After WWII he was asked to go over
to
Norway
by the Norwegian Ophthalmologists, as they wanted to start fitting contact
lenses for their large number of keratoconic patients. They could not ask the
Germans for obvious reasons and
America
was too far away. From about 1946 he visited practices in
Norway
and
Denmark
about three times per year spending about 4 weeks per visit in
Norway
and 2-3 weeks in
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 joint Vice
President of the Contact lens Society with F. A. Williamson Noble in 1946 and
President 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 30 April 1997 at his old rooms at
140 Park Lane
.
An Introduction to
the Prescribing and Fitting of Contact Lenses,
Dickinson
and Clifford Hall,London
1946.
'Keratoconus, with Reference to Treatment with Contact
Lenses', Tr.
XVI, Internat. Congr. Ophth., p. 369, 1951.
'Contact Lens Theory and
Practice', 1962 Doyne Lecture.
'A Comprehensive Study of
Keratoconus', Presidential Address to the Contact
Lens Society, October 1963, British Optical Association, 1963.
