Ordnance Survey and the GA

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a map is worth a million.

The GA and the OS have a long association going back over a century.



At the 1903 AGM, there was a presentation of OS mapping and efforts were made to secure discounts for teachers on map sheets.
Many articles in 'The Geographical Teacher' at the time were on the use of mapping, and books and information on using them in the classroom were best sellers.

Reading through the various AGMs and other presentations at gatherings of the Association, one sees regular articles referring to the use of OS maps, and the need for teachers to have access to them, at a time when perhaps they were less commonly used than now.

Download a history of the OS here. (PDF)

In Fleure's retrospective of 60 years of the GA, there is a section on the relationship with the OS, which he describes as:
"a most valuable coadjutor of the teachers and the Association. From the early years of the century it has devised schemes for supplying quantities of ordnance maps of a school district to a public authority school in the area at a cheap rate. This virtual alliance between the OS and the Association was to develop later on to the great gain of geographical education and of the Association."

In 1927, the President was Colonel Sir Charles Close, who also served as Director General of the Ordnance Survey from 1911, through the First World War.

I'm currently working as an Ordnance Survey GetOutside Champion, and have previously worked to produce resources for Digimap for Schools, Digimap for Colleges, and the OS Mapstream service.

Plenty more on the OS to come as we move through the 20th Century. See below for updates.

References

Fleure, H.J. (1953) "Sixty years of geography and education", Geography, vol.38, pp.231-264

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/docs/ebooks/map-makers-to-britain-since-1791.pdf (PDF download)

Balchin's Centenary book provided further updates.

Updates
In the early 1930s the GA came to an agreement with the OS that exmaination maps would be provided to schools once the examination results had been published, These were to prove very helpful and also provided relatively cheaply.