The diocese alluded to in a recent post, How Big is Your Diocese, is Sudak in the Crimea. I’d hitherto never heard of the place and never expected to hear of it again, until a few days ago.
I was a guest at luncheon in a London club and fell into conversation with an affable member in the bar after lunch. His name is Dr Henry Sanford and may best be described as a sprightly octogenarian – although not for much longer as he is three weeks younger than the Queen.
After some general chit-chat we digressed to his working life. After a life time in Orthopaedics, he told me that his patients with backache would ask him to recommend a chair that would not make their problem worse.
“I couldn’t. So on retirement I went back and researched the bio-mechanics of this subject. I found that the only logical answer was a reclined position for prolonged work. This was not practical for an office without a number of requirements which I evaluated with a student team at Cambridge. The concept is both simple and sophisticated but was met by the chair industry with initial incomprehension but they are now coming round to my views, gradually. Much ‘familiarity bias’ has still to be overcome.”
If you want to know more, read about Henry Sanford’s invention at sittingsafely.com
I have a suspicion that his invention owes much to his observation of recumbent members of his club after lunch. The Savile would be an admirable name for a chair but let’s move on to the Crimea and Sudak. Briefly, Henry Sanford’s mother’s family had extensive estates in pre-revolutionary Russia – including Sudak – and tomorrow I will share some of his aunt’s and great uncle’s memories of those days.