Robin Shaw is one of the small minority of men who suffer from some degree of colour blindness. He describes what life is like, never knowing your greens from your reds. 

Are the wine bottles with these labels brown?” I asked my wife, Kate. “No they’re green,” she replied. I added that fact to my store of knowledge that covers for my colour blindness.

As a society we show little awareness of, and not much sympathy for, those who are colour blind. I often get into conversations like this: “Are you really colour blind? Can’t you see any colours?” I pause.  It takes time to explain it fully. I’m what is generally called red-green colour blind. I can see some things are red if I’m close to them in a bright light – a pillar box, for example. But if it’s in the distance I can’t pick it out as you do.

Kate says: “Look at the lovely berries on that tree.” I don’t see any berries. “Can’t you see green either?” I can’t tell green from brown at all. “But what do you see for green?” Trying not to sound rude, I say, “Describe the green that you see and I’ll describe what I see.” It is only at this point in the conversation that people realise we all live in our own heads, and no one knows for sure what another sees.But this gets too metaphysical for most people, so they turn to practical matters.They ask, “What do you do at traffic lights?”“I drive on when they turn blue,” I joke.

Between 3–5 per cent of males have some degree of colour blindness, so it is not that rare. Women are seldom colour blind. Genetically it is determined by a recessive gene which women can carry without being affected. If they carry the gene because they had a colour blind father then there is a 5 per cent chance that any of their male children will be colour blind. Only a woman who has a colour blind father and a mother who is carrying the recessive gene suffers from the problem.

I found out that I was colour blind early in life. I came from a family of artists, so as a little boy I was encouraged to paint. I made mistakes that were quickly pointed out to me. At primary school I was corrected (this dates me) when I coloured the British Empire brown on a map. I was sure I was painting it red. I learned to cope by relying on the paint box labels rather than what I could see. I learned that grass was green, the sky blue, the earth brown. I learned that if you mixed yellow and blue it made green, if you mixed yellow and red it made orange, and if you mixed blue and red it made purple and so on.

I learned to ask people around me. I still do. When I try to buy things in shops I ask for help. “Could you tell me if this is green?” I say. Shop assistants look at me oddly, especially when it is not green. At school I got by until it came to practical chemistry. Here I had difficulty. In chemical analysis you needed to find out if a substance burns with an orange flame. And in titration you add one solution to another until, drop by drop, the colour just changes. I could only tell there was a change if the new colour was really intense. By then I had added far too much of the measured fluid.

This made the difference between pass and fail at chemistry A Level. It never occurred to me to discuss the problem with my chemistry master. I trusted to luck. This is indicative of attitudes then. I had a minor disability. I thought I had to get on with it as well as I could. I wonder what happens now? In my teens, hobbies were more of a problem. I was still interested in art but I gradually gave up painting. I liked bird watching and early in life I taught myself to recognise most of the garden birds by size, shape, movement and the general pattern of their plumage. But out in the field I soon hit problems. Redshanks are distinguished by their red legs. I had not a hope of identifying them from that. I was never going to be a champion twitcher.

Test positive

I didn’t have proper confirmation of my colour blindness until I went to university. New undergraduates at Birmingham University in 1953 were given a very thorough medical, which included the Ishihara test. In this test you are shown diagrams that are complex patterns of coloured dots. There are numbers portrayed in these dots that people with normal colour vision can discern but those with defective vision cannot. Finally I understood my problem.

After university came National Service. I knew that colour blind people are barred from the Navy, the Air Force and infantry regiments, with good reason. I would not be able to identify red or green signal rockets or lights on an approaching ship or plane. I went to my Army medical and I told them I was colour blind. For some reason, they did not test me. Perhaps they thought it a ruse on my part to avoid service. So I was posted to the Royal Artillery and worked as a surveyor. I had to identify distant flags through the lens of a theodolite. The flags were red!

Through a working life in such fields as advertising and marketing I have had to use all kinds of strategems to cover my disability, but in retirement I have become even more aware of its disadvantages. My wife Kate is blessed with what I think is the visual, chromatic equivalent of perfect pitch in hearing. She rejoices in colours and can identify matching colours from memory to a considerable degree of accuracy. Kate loves gardening and plans carefully for colour effects. Before she understood my problem I would say, “What are those pale blue flowers?”, and she would look at me amazed and say, “They’re pink!” Or I would say, “What are those dark blue flowers?” Kate would reply, “They’re purple. Surely you can see that?”

We both love winter skies and sunsets but it is clear that I can only see half the effect. Kate looks at a sky that I see as tones of grey. She tells me of the subtle colours of peaches and lilacs. We both love autumn woods. I see some of the brilliant yellows, but the bronzes, burgundys and glorious reds are lost on me completely. Kate notices the many subtle colours of winter twigs, which I cannot see. She has made me aware of what I am missing.

Green bananas

And everyday life has its hazards. I do not buy bananas because I cannot tell which are green. I pay for parking and the machine says press the green button. Which is it? More seriously, outdoor electrical cable is often orange. To me an orange hedge trimmer cable is perfectly camouflaged against a green hedge. I used to cut frequently through the cable, until I wound bands of white tape around it. Thank God for circuit breakers! I can cope with changing a plug now that wires are not red and green. But all kinds of equipment, such as computers and printers, have red lights and green lights to help people know when things are right or wrong, on or off. They do not help me.

All my life I have tried to cover for colour blindness, as in those chemistry lessons, and not let on. Because people like me do not let on, no one makes allowances. Most of my life I have not expected any. But as I get older and society does more for people with handicaps, I begin to wonder whether there is more that could be done.

From a wife’s point of view

Robin and Kate Shaw.