[Oliver Goldsmith] My name is Oliver Goldsmith and I’m third generation of the Oliver Goldsmith Eyewear Company and I’d 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’re cut from the whole one piece of turtle shell, and it’s got this curl side, which would stop the frame from slipping down the nose in hot weather.
You can’t 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 World War the company was seconded to the armed forces to make all 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 going to go forward we had to get publicity. So he created this sun-glass called the Martian 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’s quite unique and it was very popular and also got plenty of publicity apart from Diana Dors.
In 1956 my father was approached by a dress designer called Teddy Tinling, 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 particular style called the Tennis Racquet which is fairly obvious because you’ve got two racquets, and on each corner, here and here he put three little pearls in a lace bag to act as the tennis balls. So this was photographed all over the world and was also instrumental in getting our name well known, and possibly even better than Teddy Tinling.
In 2007, I was approached by the Lawn Tennis Museum at Wimbledon, who had spotted my tennis sunglasses, cause we had 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 sunglasses, it looks like two tennis racquets and to make it more authentic we’ve actually drawn onto the lenses lines to act as the gut of the racquet strings. When these were sold they actually came with two pairs of lenses so when you went to a party you could wear it with the lines on and then you could go to an optician and he would 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 anyone goes to Wimbledon have a look at the museum and you’ll see this on display.