The GA and the Second World War (cont.)

Rex Walford's book has a chapter exploring the 1940s and 1950s.
He explains how membership dropped during WWII as teachers enrolled in the forces, but publications and conference kept going, with Mackinder still active in his 80s. This was a period when the nature of the subject, and the different elements were much discussed. Was it a science or a humanity?
During the War, there was much preparation for post-war period and reconstruction.
There was also disruption from 1930 onwards because of evalucation of children from the London area, and other industrial cities which were potentially targets.

1940: The GA postponed the Annual Conference scheduled to be held in London in January. The Conference was held in March 1940 in Blackpool. In December the High School of Commerce in Manchester, containing the GA’s Library and Offices, was saved from an air raid fire by the courage of the caretaker, Mr. Sim, who brought the blaze to a halt by working a hose for several hours. The Land Utilisation Survey, used by the County War Agricultural Executive Committees charged with the task of increasing food production, lost many valuable records in a London air raid. 

The 1944 Education Act was one part of the post-war changes that affected geography teaching.
It was led by Rab Butler, and introduced the 11+ and a tripartite system promising "secondary education for all" but in different institutions depending on 'ability'.

This produced a number of different potential geography 'curricula' to prepare for. There was also a focus on Primary geography, and textbooks were produced for this age range, often involving quite stereotypical stories of young people such as "Bombo of the Congo", but even this was a little more enlightened in its coverage than some of the earlier textbooks had been. Oliver Garnett, sister of GA President to-be Alice, wrote the 'Foundations of School Geography' book used in many schools.
Textbooks by authors such as Thomas Pickles and Preece and Wood were much used in secondary schools.

E. W. 'Bill' Young was teaching at Norwich School when he started writing his series called 'Our World' before teaming up with J. H. Lowry to write books that I remember using in the 1960s at school. These included Sample Studies, such as the Kazakhs of the Steppes and Tooktoo of the Eskimos. More on that to come later... these persisted for decades.

There was also pressure from Social Studies to amalgamate, which placed geography's identity under question. The GA was part of the work to maintain its place within the curriculum, and see a change from Regions towards the Models which appeared during the 1960s. More on that to come as the blog develops and further Presidents show their influence.

Bill Marsden's paper (see references) describes some changes during this period:

Wooldridge was to resurface as a key figure in the geography versus geographical education encounters of the post-war period. He was a trenchant peer critic. In 1950 he addressed the IBG and scorned the contentment of his audience with ‘agreeably titillating’ articles on subjects of minor interest which made ‘no claim whatsoever to scholarship’ (Stoddart, 1983, p. 5). 
To Wooldridge a firm physical basis was the sine qua non of a high quality geography. He claimed that the social/urban orientation of the subject was becoming too strong. Geography, he maintained, was about ‘place’ and not about ‘man’ (Graves, 1975, p. 56). 
On the educational front he abhorred the analogous post-war trends towards introducing social studies into the curriculum. These he blamed on geographical educationists. The tendencies threatened to take ‘the ge- out of geography’, as he put it (1949, pp. 9–18). Social studies would On Taking the Geography Out of Geographical Education Some Historical Pointers in Geography Page 7 of 15 ‘destroy the value of geography as an important medium of education’ asserted the Education Committee of the RGS (1950, p. 181), in a report reputedly the work of Wooldridge. Like Geikie, he argued that the priority in schools should be detailed fieldwork in the rural landscape, developing a ‘laboratory spirit and the careful, indeed minute study of limited areas’ (1955, p. 80)

More on Wooldridge in a future blog post.

There was plenty of note in a chronology by G R Crone.




and this too



Image: my own school exercise book from 1976 ish

Reference

Walford, Rex. “On the Frontier with the New Model Army: Geography Publishing from the 1960s to the 1990s.” Geography, vol. 74, no. 4, 1989, pp. 308–320. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571739.

Boardman, David, and Michael McPartland. “A Hundred Years of Geography Teaching: From Regions to Models: 1944—1969.” Teaching Geography, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993, pp. 65–68. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23753284

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/pluginfile.php/631169/mod_resource/content/1/geog_sk6_06t_5.pdf

Crone, G. R. “British Geography in the Twentieth Century.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 130, no. 2, 1964, pp. 197–220. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1794582.