1993: Professor Andrew Shaw Goudie

Last updated August 2023

What other subject tells us so much about the great issues of our age – global change, natural and human?

Professor Andrew Goudie, University of Oxford.

Andrew Goudie is a geomorphologist, and a leading expert on drylands.

He has published a vast range of books, articles and other papers, and received numerous awards for his work. Andrew sent me a CV which included almost 30 pages worth of links to papers and other publications and contributions over the years.
I have been lucky enough to hear Andrew speak several times, and was on the same 'bill' as Andrew at an Oxford GA Branch conference some years ago. The most recent event we both attended was a 75th anniversary event for the Field Studies Council at the Linnean Society in London, where Andrew gave a presentation which referenced several former GA Presidents.

Much of this entry was made up of contributions from Andrew himself thanks to a questionnaire I sent round to all the GA Presidents I could.


Image: Andrew Goudie supplied - copyright rests with Andrew Goudie

I am grateful to Andrew for sending through a number of documents to help me with the creation of the blog, including images of Presidents I was having difficulty tracking down who have already been featured - I also found some additional images from other contemporary Presidents as the blog has reached nearer to the present day.

I also mentioned him to William Atkins, author of the amazing book on the deserts that he wrote a couple of years ago.

Thank you! I'm so pleased to hear that. I turned to Andrew Goudie's books constantly while writing it.

— William Atkins (@WillAtkins01) August 3, 2018

Andrew also got a mention from a later GA President Keith Grimwade, who went to Jesus College, Oxford. 

He told me: 

"the mid to late 70s was also an exciting time to be an Oxford geographer because having lost out to Cambridge and elsewhere in the quantitative revolution, it was just beginning to pull ahead with its work on the environment and climate, led by someone else who was to become a GA President, Andrew Goudie". 

Andrew also hosted the GA's Centenary celebrations as he was the President of the GA during the Centenary celebrations. I have already shared some of the images that were sent to me by Sheila Jones, who was at the event and passed through some excellent resources, including some photos of the celebration and futher details. They will be posted around the time of this post, so visit the blog to see more.

Andrew was born in 1945 in Cheltenham.

He was educated at Dean Close School (Cheltenham) and went on to Trinity Hall (Cambridge) to study geography (of course).

Qualifications:

B.A. Cambridge (1967) 

M.A. Cambridge (1971) 

M.A. Oxford (1971) 

Ph.D. Cambridge (1972) 

DSc. Oxford (2002)

These also included the highest grades, and distinctions.

Throughout his entire career he has worked as an Oxford academic, and is also the author of many books and papers on a range of topics, notably deserts, drylands and geomorphology.

He has held posts in a number of Oxford colleges including Master of St. Cross College and also Pro-Vice Chancellor. He has held visiting Professorships and posts in a number of other organisations as well. 

He was the first professional geographer to lead an Oxford college.

As with other former GA Presidents, he has a connection with the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.

He has advised numerous committees and other organisations as well.

He has been awarded a great many prestigious awards within the discipline of geography - these include:

• Cuthbert Peek Award of the Royal Geographical Society (1975) 
• Publications Award of the Geographical Society of Chicago (1983) 
• Founder’s Royal Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (1991) 
• Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1991) 
• Gold Medal, Charles University, Prague (1998) 
• Prix de l’Académie Royale de Belgique (2002)
• Linton Award of the British Society for Geomorphology (2009) - named after another former GA President David Leslie Linton.

In many ways, Andrew also has a close connection with many of the GA Presidents of the 1930s-60s in that he has been involved in a great deal of advisory work at the very highest level, which have connected him with many learned societies in addition to the GA, and international bodies as well.

These have included:

British Academy, BGRG, RGS-IBG, Royal Society.

He was also involved in the Action Plan for Geography.

Outside of the academic world, he is also involved in CPRE and a Trustee of the Jurassic Coast Trust - both of which connect him to the work of other former GA Presidents of course, particulary Denys Brunsden.

He has had Editorial roles on a number of publications, and spoken at events around the world. He was linked with this 2018 BBC World Service broadcast.

Andrew has also led expeditions to places such as the Karakoram, Kenya and Australia. I am sure I remember seeing him and/or Denys Brunsden speaking about it at Sheffield University as a 6th former.

When he became the GA President, Andrew was a high profile academic and Professor of Geography at Oxford University - the university associated with the GA's founding a century earlier of course.

Andrew told me:

"I was charged with helping with the Centenary celebrations. 

I have given huge numbers of lectures to GA branches over the years. 

I established, with Denys Brunsden, the Classic Landforms series. "

These books have been best sellers from the GA Shop for some decades and are still available to purchase even now. Here's the Dark Peak volume, which I used myself when teaching, along with the White Peak volume, and the one on the North Norfolk coast. They are many people's first experience of GA publications and activity and will be found on the shelves of many geography departments around the country I am sure.

Andrew had written numerous articles for GA journals, particularly 'Teaching Geography' where he has tried to educate teachers in the correct approach to teaching about drylands.

Andrew said:

"I have always been a Geographer and have always believed that the state of geography in universities depends on attracting good sixth formers to become undergraduates."

This was an important factor in the decision to write my book 'Why Study Geography', which came out in October 2020.

Andrew's Presidential Lecture was called 'The Nature of Physical Geography: A View from the Drylands".

In it, Andrew talked about his career, and the importance of these often overlooked parts of the world, and some of the scholars who had come before and to whom he was indebted - a common theme for many Presidents.

Of landscapes, he said they are:

"one of the greatest gifts to human kind. Let us study them and therefore enjoy them and let us expose our students to great landscapes whether in Britain or overseas! Landscape has a great potential to stimulate interest in Geography in the young and in the lay person..."

He also referenced another former GA President: Sidney Wooldridge, speaking in 1949:

"By what right can we withhold a knowledge of how our terrestrial home is constructed, the meaning of its scenery and the patterns of its sky. The world contains not only factories, farms, railway sidings, market places etc but the blue hills on the skyline, the winding valleys which traverse them, russet bracken covered slopes and heather fells and the ever changing incident of long and varied coastlines."

He also predated the modern movement towards avoiding the use of the term "natural disasters". 

I have my No Natural Disasters badges and stickers.

He said:

"it is probably best no longer to use the term 'natural hazard' because many hazards are only quasi-natural"

Andrew has written on the theme of the divide between school and academic geography, and how this might be dealt with.

He also published a paper in The Canadian Geographer in 2016 on divisions between human and physical geography - another ongoing debate in the subject discipline.

Andrew remains as busy as ever.

I was interested to see that one of the PhD students that Andrew supervised was Rita Gardner, former Director of the Royal Geographical Society. Another was Nick Middleton, who has appeared on TV himself, talking about some of the world's extreme environments.

In 2003, Chris Kington asked a number of former Presidents what had sparked their passion for geography. He lent me the letters that he had in reply and Andrew replied.

He says of his spark that it was:

"I was eight or nine and we had a family holiday that took us to Lyme Regis. I collected ammonites. I then got acute appendicitis and the minister at the Kirk in Cheltenham who gave me a book on fossils... When I was better I sought them out all over the Cotswolds."

Many thanks to Chris Kington for the loan of the letters.

References
Oxford University Staff Page - some details of Andrew's academic work.

Andrew provided me with a CV with hundreds of books, papers and other published output. Here are a few examples to jog your memory perhaps:

Why the Devil’s punchbowl dries up. Geographical Magazine 50(6), 381-386 (1978) (with M. J. Day) Chill winds over India. Geographical Magazine 411-416 (1979) 

Fearful landscape of the Karakoram. Geographical Magazine pp. 306-312 (1981) 

The disintegration of rock by mechanical processes. Teaching Geography 6, 176-179 (1981) 

Man, maker of landscapes. Geographical Magazine (1987)

If anyone has anything else to add about Andrew, and memories of his contributions to the GA, please get in touch.

Update March 2021

New Book Alert! The Queen of the Sciences: Geological Pioneers of the Jurassic Coast by Andrew Goudie and @CharmouthHCC Patron Denys Brunsden. Available now on our online shop: https://t.co/codaT1W1dg pic.twitter.com/lN3iGskiQr

— CharmouthHCC (@CharmouthHCC) March 30, 2021

Updated August 2023

Out in November 2022, in collaboration with Denys Brunsden. 

Details here from OUP.