‘A house divided cannot stand’, said FODO boss David Hewlett as the champagne corks popped in Park Lane at the official launch of the Optical Confederation back in 2010. Hewlett is no Abraham Lincoln but he knows how to rattle out a decent sound bite and he chose some apposite words.
It wouldn’t be overstating the situation to say it hasn’t been a good week for the OC. A real hope for harmony arrived with the tanned visage of Chris Hunt. A life member of ABDO and the FMO, former President of the AOP and Master of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle makers. He may be better remembered as the MD of Rodenstock and founder of its Club concept. If anyone could weave the disparate strands of optics into a rope of unity for the sector surely he was the man. Sadly no, he leaves his chairmanship of the OC later this month.
But this doesn’t have to be the end of the OC. Hunt added to the cannon of unifying work completed by Sir Tony Garrett, Michael Charlton and affably chaired, before Hunt’s tenure, by Don Grocott.
Over the past seven years the OC has engaged politicians, offered a unified voice and raised the profile of the sector. There has been dissent from those who continue to take a parochial view rather than look at the bigger picture and the broader gains for the whole sector but that can’t continue.
The second half of Hewlett pronouncement at the OC’s lunch ran: ‘In the past perhaps we could have afforded the luxury of division, but no longer.’
That is as true today as it was six years ago.
