Dorothy Eustis

Dorothy Harrison was born into a rich Philadelphia family in 1886. Her first husband died in 1917, leaving her with two sons and a dairy farm on which she had begun to take an interest in breeding animals for useful qualities rather than looks. After remarrying she moved to Switzerland and set up a kennel called Fortunate Fields near Vevey, where she and a geneticist bred German shepherds for police and army work and kept careful records of what made a good working dog.

In 1927 she visited a school in Potsdam where dogs were being trained to guide German soldiers blinded in the war, and wrote an admiring piece about it for the Saturday Evening Post. Among the letters that followed was one from Morris Frank, a twenty-year-old insurance salesman in Nashville who had lost his sight, asking whether she would train a dog for him and promising to spread the idea in America. She took him at his word, brought him to Switzerland in 1928 and trained him with a dog named Buddy.

Frank went home and showed sceptical reporters that a blind man could cross a busy street unaided. In January 1929 she founded The Seeing Eye, first in Nashville and then in New Jersey, and put her own money into it. When two Englishwomen wrote asking how to start something similar, she sent a trainer, and the first British guide dogs were trained in 1931.

She retired from the organisation in 1940 and died in 1946.