Chapter Seventeen

Iris Stroma had been making a spectacle of herself for years. Her foresight and forward-looking focus meant that she’d excelled as a pupil, been the apple of every teacher’s eye, and now, in the twilight of her career, had her sights set on immortality. Iris Stroma was about to make history.

Hers was a career that had spanned more than forty years, but a life that had been in the making for centuries. Iris came from a long line of optometrists and dispensing opticians, and could trace her roots back to Peter Dollond’s small optical business which opened in London’s Vine Street in 1750. While Dollond and his father were building their reputations, creating a name for themselves and receiving the honour of a royal appointment as official opticians to King George III, Iris Stroma’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was working tirelessly behind the scenes, cleaning their kitchens and stealing their equipment.

By 1780, and with the help of a particularly baggy apron, she’d smuggled out enough lenses to fill her entire back passage, and in 1781, as Peter Dollond unveiled his first bifocal spectacles, Ida Stigmatism, a retired cleaning lady from Whitechapel, was opening her first branch of SpecUsers.

The business was a roaring success. Knowing next to nothing about optometry, Ida was able to offer a far speedier service than her learned rivals, who struggled under the burden of cripplingly high insurance premiums brought about by repeated unexplained burglaries. Ida’s simple eye test consisted of the question “Can you see me?” followed by a lucky dip into her bag of stolen spectacles, and thus she became popular amongst the wealthy and busy merchants of eighteenth century London, who had little time to read eye charts, and a lot more money than sense. Complaints were rare, primarily because her customers couldn’t see well enough to find their way back to the shop.

By the time Dollond met Aitchison in the 1880s, Ida had overseen the growth of SpecUsers from a single one-roomed shop above a tobacconist in Buck’s Row, to a multi-outlet chain of visionaries stretching across the south of England from Dover to Coventry and back again. But only if you counted each branch twice. Ida herself had died in 1812, but following overtures to the 19th century Fox sisters, made forty years after her death, the Stigmatism family were able to reconnect psychically with their lost matriarch, regain their focus, and achieve clarity for the business. With Ida’s guiding spirit at the helm, the Stigmatism name became synonymous with eye care, and SpecUsers emerged as the brand of choice for short sighted southerners.

Fifty years later, Iris was born. Some said it was the second coming. Some, that it was the reincarnation of Ida. Others maintained that it was merely the result of faulty contraception from an east end market stall. Whatever the truth, it was both the birth and the rebirth of a new dawn in optometry. The young Iris focused on her career with a dedication and an enthusiasm that thrilled her parents and annoyed her contemporaries. By the age of nine, she was qualified to dispense prescription glasses, by eleven she could use a slit lamp blindfolded, and by thirteen she was capable of diagnosing glaucoma from a distance of twelve feet. Although she refused to prove it under laboratory conditions.

At the age of just nineteen, Iris married the legendary Len Stroma, senior ophthalmologist at the infamous, and now demolished, Specs-tacular Ocular Academy of the Eye, just outside Reykjavik, or to give it Len’s preferred description, ‘The Capital of Eyes Land’. His death nine years later was a turning point, not just in the young Iris’s life, but in the course of ophthalmic history itself. It wasn’t just the manner of his death - true, he was the first, and possibly only, man ever to slip on an intraocular implant, hit his head on a case of dexamethasone eye drops, and be pierced through the heart by a phacoemulsification probe – but that wasn’t what made him unusual. Len Stroma was a maverick. And he passed that torch on to Iris.

Following a period of private mourning, and a six week holiday in the Maldives, paid for out of Len’s generous life insurance policy, Iris Stroma emerged back into the public eye as the founding editor of ‘Prism Break’ magazine, a leisure and lifestyle monthly for opticians. It was a role she maintained for the next fifteen years, watching as the magazine went from strength to strength, and her own profile followed a similar path. Over the course of two decades, Iris became the public face of optometry, an international ambassador for eyes. Time magazine featured her on its cover, under the headline ‘Iris Through the Looking Glasses’, Newsweek named her ‘Woman of the Year’, and she appeared on page 53 of the Radio Times next to a recipe for summer pudding. She had the world at her feet and a glint in her eye.

And then nothing. To all intents and purposes, Iris Stroma disappeared. Britain had been through tumultuous periods of change: the withdrawal of free school milk; the Winter of Discontent; the Falklands War; the Gulf War; the breakup of Take That. But in the midst of it all, the public face of optometry, the pin-up girl of dispensing opticians, apparently at the height of her powers, slipped quietly out of the back door.

Perhaps it is an indictment on the nature of celebrity, a measure of the fickleness of the general public, or merely a lack of skill on behalf of investigative journalists, that Iris Stroma was allowed to vanish from sight so completely, and with so little in the way of repercussions. The Radio Times, which had once heralded her existence alongside a striking list of fruitful ingredients, now gave her no more than a cursory mention on page 14, in the description of a programme entitled ‘Where Are They Now?’, due to be broadcast at 9:30pm on a November evening on BBC2. As it transpired, the programme was cancelled in favour of a tribute to River Phoenix, and never subsequently shown. Perhaps it was merely unfortunate circumstances.

Perhaps. But, in fact, not. Iris Stroma’s withdrawal from the public eye was a well planned and skilfully orchestrated act. For fifteen years, the ‘Prism Break’ headlines had been no more than cover stories. Iris had formulated a plan. An agenda for change. A structured programme of both evolution and revolution which would take two decades to put into practice, but which, ultimately, would secure her place in history. Iris Stroma wanted to detect diabetic retinopathy without eye drops, without cameras, without graders or screeners. But she wanted so much more than that. She wanted equality for opticians.

Iris had seen the way the ophthalmic wind was blowing. She’d worked in the visual field. She’d seen that for the humble optician, the glasses were becoming half empty, not half full. And she wanted to change that. Optometry was her heritage, her life blood and that of her family for more than two hundred years. And it was under threat, endangered by a new breed of ophthalmologist, a new form of screening programme, and the actions of just one man: Sir Roger Logmar.

Long before the Oxford Office of Ophthalmic Health had opened its doors, Iris Stroma’s eyes had been opened to the threat. Her years as editor in chief of ‘Prism Break’ had enabled her to make not just plans but contacts, to recruit an optometric team of fearsome expertise. As Sir Roger was quietly assembling his squad of eye doctors, ophthalmic nurses, pharmacists and retinal screeners, Iris was doing the same for optometrists and dispensing opticians. Magazine interviews became job interviews. Exclusives became conspiracies. As OOOH was born in the hospitals of public sector health care, so Iris was enlisting her own army in the high street of private eye care.

The result was MOO: the legendary ‘Movement Of Opticians’, a secretive undercover organisation designed to safeguard the interests of optometrists and dispensing opticians past, present and, most importantly, future. It was unseen to the casual observer, unheard of outside the darkened rooms of high street opticians, yet whispered on the air of every glaucoma puffer test. And it had one groundbreaking achievement: the D Generation.

It’s what Iris Stroma had been working towards since the death of her husband. As she’d looked at Len’s implants on the floor of the operating theatre, watched her own tears fall silently into the shimmering pools of dexamethasone at her feet, and pulled the phacoemulsification probe from the chest of the man she loved, she’d vowed to do this for him. To create an intelligent bio-organism capable of accurately detecting diabetic retinopathy without eye drops. It had been Len’s vision. And Iris intended to see it through.