Our story
It began with a girl complaining about her eyes.
In 1962 a lens grinder from Salford got fed up of hearing his daughter say the same thing every Tuesday after swimming. What he did about it is still going on, four hundred yards from where he started.
1962
Arthur Otterwell, and a very bad first attempt.
Arthur ground spectacle lenses for a living. His daughter Jean swam on Tuesdays at Victoria Baths and came home every week with eyes like a rabbit’s, complaining that the chlorine stung.
What existed at the time were rubber eyecups you pressed into the socket and hoped for. Arthur thought he could do better with two proper ground lenses and a bicycle inner tube. The first pair leaked so badly Jean took them off in the shallow end and refused to try again.
The eleventh pair did not leak. Jean wore them for two years, and then the girl in the next lane wanted a pair, and then the swimming club wanted forty. By 1964 Arthur had given up spectacles and taken a railway arch in Ancoats.
“He never called it a company. He called it ‘the goggle job’ right up until he retired.” — Jean Otterwell, 1998
The long version
Sixty-four years, briefly
Eleven attempts in a back kitchen
Arthur Otterwell makes a pair of goggles that do not leak, for his daughter Jean.
Arch 19, Ancoats
The goggle job moves into a railway arch with two employees and a second-hand press bought from a button factory.
Clearcoat, mixed in a bucket
After a winter of fogged-up complaints, foreman Bill Ashworth mixes the first anti-fog coating in a galvanised bucket. The recipe has been improved eleven times since and is still ours.
The Ancoats goes on sale
The frame that is still our bestseller, named after the arch. £2.40 at the time.
Trafford Park
The arch is outgrown. The works moves to Unit 12, Ashburton Works, beside the Bridgewater Canal — where it has stayed ever since. Arthur retires the following spring.
The Test Tank is built
Two metres of glass and eleven hundred litres of water, installed so that nobody has to guess whether a batch seals. It is still the bit everyone remembers.
Mercury Racers at the trials
The low-profile racing frame appears at the national trials on four swimmers. Two of them make the team.
Recycled silicone seals
Off-cuts from the seal shop start going back into the mix rather than into a skip. Today 61% of the silicone in an Otterwell seal has already been an Otterwell seal.
We open the doors
After years of saying no to school trips, we build a proper walkway and a build bench and start running weekend tours. The first one had four people on it, three of them related to the guide.
The twenty-millionth pair
A Ripple Junior in Sherbet Pink, pressed on a Thursday morning. It is in a case by the reception desk and you will walk past it.
Thirty-four of us
Still the same unit, still the same canal, still four hundred yards from the arch.
By the numbers
Where we have got to
Pairs made since 1962
People on the payroll
Recycled silicone in a seal
Tours run since 2019
The people you will meet
Whoever takes your tour actually makes the goggles.
We do not employ tour guides. The person walking you round spends the rest of the week on the line, which is why they can answer the awkward questions.
Rosalind Byrne
Takes most of the Sunday tours. Can tell you the exact dwell time for every colour we make without looking it up, and will if you ask.
Dermot Kavanagh
Twenty-eight years on the press. Does the Saturday afternoon tours and will let a sensible child push the green button.
Amara Osei
The person who decides whether a batch passes. Runs the tank demonstration and has failed more of her own batches than anyone else’s.
The best way to understand any of this is to stand in it.
Seventy-five minutes, £16, every Saturday and Sunday. You will leave wearing a pair you built at the bench.
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