Margaret Barlow

Margaret Barlow is mentioned in the 1987 Annual Report with some reference to her and her staff, suggesting she was the office manager at the time, and her post was titled Senior Administrator. She oversaw the improvements to the Fulwood Road building that took place in 1987 to improve working conditions for staff. She was active and supportive of the Presidency of Graham Humphrys and Michael Storm.

If anyone knows more about Margaret Barlow, please get in touch.

Conference Officers

The GA Annual Conference has always been a highlight of the GA year, and an opportunity for the President to give their address. For many decades, this was held over the New Year at the London School of Economics. Sheila Jones told me that the conference officer was always a very important person in the GA.

In the conference document that Pat Cleverley sent me, from 1984, the conference officers were listed in the programme as David Green from the Department of Geography at King's College, and Ralph Dunkley from the Geography Section at City of London Polytechnic.

I will be researching each of these people as well as the GA Presidents, so any help with those names would also be helpful.

Denys Brunsden: a former GA President was a conference officer for some years, and passed on details of some of the other conference officers during his time connected with the GA.

Tom Elkins - Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex

“The Geographical Association.” Geography, vol. 63, no. 4, 1978, pp. 369–379. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40569009. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

Jim Bird

Peter O'Dell (or Odell?)

Denys Brunsden - himself a conference officer in the 1970s

David Jones

Nigel Yates

Ralph Dunkley

Russell Chapman

Barrie Morgan - strongly linked to King's College, London

https://www.strandlines.london/2012/08/01/memories-of-the-strand-dr-barrie-morgan/

Also runs the King's College London Alumni twitter feed

1981 Conference

David Green

Russell Chapman and Geoff Dunkley ran the conference for years in the 90s.

In the recent era, Lucy Oxley was in charge of the conference for many years.

The last few years' conferences have been organised by Harriet Brookes and Becky Kitchen. They have had to adapt to an online model for delivery due to circumstances.

As I mentioned before, all memories of GA conferences past, and conference officers would be very welcome.

References

Coates, Bryan E., et al. “Annual Report of the Geographical Association 1981.” Geography, vol. 67, no. 2, 1982, pp. 157–163. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40570513. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

1989-90: National Curriculum Working Group

The National Curriculum Working Group has been mentioned elsewhere on the blog. It included several former GA Presidents.

Graham Butt: a name who has been linked with the Assocation for many years, studied this for his doctoral thesis, which can be downloaded and read as a PDF.
This fed into the Dearing Review, and resulted in an excellent book edited by Graham on Futures in Geography Education. 

Another reminder of how involved in curriculum change the GA has been over the decades.

Patrick Wiegand

Patrick Wiegand was the GA's Publications Officer during the 1980s.

He is referenced in 1987's Annual Report along with other GA documents.

Patrick has also authored a wide range of books, often on the theme of maps and mapping, and I have a few in my classroom library of books from the 1980s and 90s. I found one the other day when doing some tidying to organise new resources.

He taught in Primary and Secondary Schools, before moving to the School of Education at the University of Leeds. He was Reader in Geography Education at the University of Leeds and Chair of the Cartography and Children Commission of the International Cartographic Association. He is a Fellow of the British Cartographic Society, a member of the UK Committee for Cartography and recently held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in GIS in Education. 

He was editorial adviser on atlases for Oxford University Press as well in a long career.

He contributed a think piece on Maps and Mapping to the GA website:

Download as a PDF:

https://www.geography.org.uk/write/mediauploads/research%20library/ga_tp_s_mapsatlases.pdf

He also wrote articles for GA journals:

Wiegand, Patrick. “The 'Known World' of Primary School Children.” Geography, vol. 76, no. 2, 1991, pp. 143–150. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40572062. Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.

https://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/educ02/pap5027/p5027.htm

References

Humphrys, Graham, et al. “Annual Report of The Geographical Association 1987.” Geography, vol. 73, no. 2, 1988, pp. 162–178. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571395. Accessed 14 Nov. 2020.

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Patrick-Wiegand-2002599618

If anyone has other memories of Patrick Wiegand please get in touch.

Dudley Stamp Memorial Award

I received my RGS-IBG bulletin today, which has a feature on the Dudley Stamp Memorial Award, along with details of a packed programme of online events for Spring 2021.

This is awarded by the RGS-IBG. Stamp (1898-1966) was President of both the RGS and the IBG (as well as the GA, in 1950.

The Dudley Stamp Memorial Award was set up by the RGS in 1967, the year after Stamp's death to support geographers in the early stages of their careers to travel. It has supported over 400 PhD students during the life of the grant. You can find out more from the link below.

It was featured in the latest bulletin (Spring 2021) for RGS Fellows. 

Lily Bradshaw has put together a StoryMap all about the Award. See it here and below.

It is also embedded at the bottom of this post. There are some familiar images from the post about Dudley Stamp on this blog.

Sir Lawrence Dudley Stamp (1898-1966) was an internationally renowned British geographer who championed the study of geography in universities and schools. In recognition of his services to education and science, the British National Committee for Geography established the Dudley Stamp Memorial fund from which the award is given. Sir Dudley Stamp had a strong belief in the value of international research and co-operation, and this ethos continues through the award today.

The Dudley Stamp Memorial Award supports research across the whole spectrum of geography from the intersections between sovereignty, territory, and development in Myanmar to the relationship between fluvial sediment characteristics and floodplain initiation in North America.

Scott Polar Research Institute Centenary

The SPRI was founded 100 years ago today. Details on its history are here.

Frank Debenham was the GA President in 1952, and was its first Director, and helped to raise the funding.

The Scott Polar Research Institute was founded in 1920, in Cambridge, as a memorial to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, RN, and his four companions, who died returning from the South Pole in 1912. When Scott's last words, "For God's sake look after our people" were made known to the British nation, the response was tremendous. Scott himself had emphasised the importance of science and from this plea, the Institute was born.

Frank Debenham, Geologist on the British Antarctic Expedition 1910-13 (Terra Nova), was the driving force behind the founding of the Scott Polar Research Institute. He wanted to establish a place that brought together polar researchers and resources for the improvement of polar expeditions and scientific investigation. Debenham asked that the new institute perform two roles: it should be a centre of study, preferably as part of a university, and it must also stand alone as a national memorial to Captain R. F. Scott and the men who died with him in the Antarctic. As Debenham and other veterans of the British Antarctic Expedition 1910-13 (Terra Nova) had found themselves in Cambridge writing up their findings, and, as Debenham argued, because Cambridge had 'furnished more polar scientists than all the other English universities put together', a home within the University of Cambridge was the obvious choice.

Happy Centenary Day!

It has not escaped my notice that I will be the GA President 70 years on from Frank Debenham and he will get a mention in the Presidential Address that year. 

Sheffield's Rain Shadow

Inspired by work by Alice Garnett, GA President in 1968. The 2nd female Professor of Geography.

Read the story of its creation here.

Worth remembering that Alice also has her photo on the wall at the RGS along with other female pioneers of geographical endeavours. 

See if you can track it down next time you are down there. 

The "home of geography" has been shut to visitors for most of the year, but will be slowly reopening as we move into 2021.

1989: Professor Richard A Daugherty

Updated April 2023

After a first degree in geography at the University of Oxford and a Diploma in Education, Richard Daugherty taught geography at Manchester Grammar School before moving into academia.

He became Lecturer/Senior Lecturer at Swansea University and Dean of the Faculty of Educational Studies before becoming Professor of Education and Head of the Education Department at Aberystwyth University, providing a connection back to the early days of the GA, when H J Fleure moved to work there, and took the growing GA library and office with him.

Richard also became Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Aberystwyth where he is an Emeritus Professor.  In October 2010 he was appointed Director, of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment (OUCEA). 

Richard writes: 

My working life in education was in two distinct parts. From the mid 1960s to the late 1980s I was very much involved in geography both as a teacher and through GA activities at national level. After teaching at Manchester Grammar School I moved to Swansea University as a Lecturer in Education. That brought me into fruitful contact with many geography teacher colleagues, through initial teacher training, in service courses, the Swansea GA branch and a term as Chief Examiner for WJEC A level Geography. I was learning from them about the day to day realities of teaching the subject that my own experiences at MGS had only partly prepared me for. 

Being appointed in 1987 to be a Council member of two Government advisory bodies, the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) and the Curriculum Council for Wales (CCW) took my career in a new direction. Since then my work has focussed, as an adviser and an academic researcher, on the school curriculum more broadly, educational assessment and education policy. Among publications from that period are those with colleagues in the U.K. based group of assessment researchers, the Assessment Reform Group, and policy papers commissioned by governments. Some of those papers date back to the early 90s when I chaired the CCW and others include the Daugherty Assessment Review Group’s report for the Welsh Government In 2004. More recently I have been contributing as an adviser to the Welsh Government and to Qualifications Wales on the radical school reforms currently under development following the 2015 report, Successful Futures. 

My life has, however, always been coloured, professionally and privately, by my love of geography. That goes back to an inspirational teacher at my grammar school in Birkenhead, George Willan, who later became an HMI. It was further fostered by two of my tutors at Oxford, Ian Scargill and Frank Emery. When I moved to Swansea I discovered that Frank Emery had been a much respected local landscape historian, in particular of the Gower peninsula, before he moved on to a distinguished academic career in historical geography. Returning in retirement to my own interest in landscape history, inspired originally by Frank Emery as my tutor, I have joined the ranks of local landscape historians myself with several articles in the two local history journals.

Richard has spent a lot of his career exploring curriculum and worked along with Eleanor Rawling on this sort of work, another former GA President, who was President three years after Richard.

‘The idea of progression is implicit in any discussion of the nature of the learning we hope students will engage in. If we did not hope that our students would, in some sense, progress we would have no foundation on which to construct a curriculum or to embark on the act of teaching’ 

(Daugherty, 1996).

Here, taken from an issue of GA News in 2005, is the news of the award of an OBE to Richard for his services to education in the New Year's Honours List that year.

1989, Richard's Presidential year was an important one for school Geography given the changes to the National Curriculum and the need to cover many attainment targets as they were called. I started teaching in 1987 when the National Curriculum was coming in, along with changes to other assessments. He wrote a book for Macmillan to help teachers prepare for the changes that were to come - this was at a time when I was just starting teaching, so I never actually taught the 'O' Level as the change to GCSE came in just as I started teaching.

Richard had already been working as Honorary Secretary of the GA from 1976-1981 and he has kindly provided more information on Presidents from that period from his own memories of the time, which saw quite a few important events. He also wrote a book for the GA, "Geography in the National Curriculum", published in 1989.

GA NC Book Cover 1989 by Alan Parkinson on Scribd

 

To a greater or lesser extent I knew all the GA presidents from 1971 (Bill Balchin) through to 1999 (Mike Bradford). I worked more closely over a longer period with some of them - Sheila Jones, Rex Walford, Graham Humphrys, Bryan Coates, Eleanor Rawling - and have a particular respect for how much certain others on the list, such as Michael Wise, Stan Gregory, Patrick Bailey and Denys Brunsden, gave to the Association.

I am grateful to Richard for his additional details on many of these Presidents that he worked with, but also for sending this biographical note which adds extra details to those I was able to discover from my own research. He has also reported on the GA's involvement in curriculum development.

"My involvement with the GA at national level was from the mid 1960s to the early 1990s, from the exciting prospect of a 'new geography' challenging what should be taught, and how, in schools to the near disaster of a poorly designed National Curriculum for Geography. 

I was a newly appointed teacher in 1965 for whom a sleepy and unchallenging degree course at Oxford had told me nothing about the way the academic subject was transforming itself (at Cambridge, amongst other places). The chance in 1966 of a GA weekend course in Sheffield, led by Professor Stan Gregory, was too good to miss. Much to my surprise I then found myself invited ("we need young classroom teachers") to join a newly formed GA committee. It must still surely lay claim to have had the longest GA committee title ever - 'Standing Committee on the Role of Models and Quantitative Techniques in Geography Teaching'. I was thus fortunate to find myself learning from an exceptional group - including Rex Walford, John Everson, Brian Fitzgerald and Vincent Tidswell (my own PGCE tutor at Hull University) - who were seeking to translate the academic 'new geography' into approaches appropriate to school level learning. 

My own first book, 'Science in Geography: Data Collection' (OUP 1974), would not have happened if Brian Fitzgerald had not been series editor. That period was also the beginning of a longer term collaboration with another schoolteacher and future GA President, Sheila Jones (see recent post on Sheila by Richard). 

By the early 1970s I was Chair of what had thankfully become known more snappily as 'M&QT' and I was also therefore a GA Council member. I picked up on a general recognition that the GA's committee structure was in need of reform which led to a working party chaired by another future President, Denys Brunsden. The proposed reforms would prove to be vital in that they ensured the Association was much better able than most subject teacher associations to respond when the 'secret garden' of the school curriculum was opened up to wider scrutiny following Prime Minister Callaghan's Ruskin College speech in 1976.

Concurrently with the GA's committee structure reforms the Association also responded to pressure from a group of younger teachers, including myself, to establish a second journal, 'Teaching Geography'. Although the initiative had come from others, Patrick Bailey, as its first editor, was to provide the shrewdness and energy to ensure that the new journal was an immediate success (see article in Teaching Geography, October 2003). 

From 1976 until 1981 I was the GA's joint honorary secretary, a role initially shared with Malcolm Lewis and then with Bryan Coates. The new committee structure meant that the Association now had two main policy committees, one dealing with Publications & Communications and the other with Education. As secretary to the latter I shared responsibility for responding to radical changes to the school curriculum being proposed in England with its Chair, Rex Walford, plus a committed group of committee members. The national developments led to lively internal debates about justifying geography as a school subject, policy papers and presenting our case to a House of Commons Committee.

Richard told me:

"My term as President coincided with the turbulent period when the way the subject should be defined in the new Natonal Curriculum was being hotly debated. A delegation from the GA made representation to the Government's Working Group and I found myself involved in the case made to the Group by the Curriculum Council for Wales. Even when I turned up at the Group a third time, as the then Chair of the Assessment Council's (SEAC) Geography Committtee it was to no avail. In spite of the valiant efforts of some Working Group members, notably Eleanor Rawling, it was determined to define what later emerged, a deeply flawed blueprint for geography in the schools of England and Wales."

More to come on this area in the years ahead...

Richard was also present at the 125th Anniversary of the GA dinner. The image above was taken by Bryan Ledgard at this event, and shows Richard with a number of other former Presidents.

References
GA News - Summer 2005 - OBE announcement

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1989/may/05/geography - involvement in curriculum development

https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/DaughertyR

Images: Richard Daugherty and Derek Spooner (GA President 2000) at the 125th Anniversary Celebration of the GA and other former Presidents group - copyright Bryan Ledgard / Geographical Association

If anyone has other details on Richard's time as GA President, please get in touch.

Update: December 2020

In 2003, Chris Kington asked a number of former Presidents what had sparked their passion for geography. He lent me the letters and here is the response that Richard sent:

He talks about being a new Scholarship boy arriving at Birkenhead School at the age of 10 and enjoying and achieving in geography. He talks about his teacher: George Willan, who was then HoD at Birkenhead and subsequently an HMI before retiring to the Lake District being a great influence on him.

He describes George generously as being:

"an exceptionally efficient and endlessly enthusiastic teacher who was able to embrance the full range of geography syllabus content from the regional geography that was then in vogue to the recent developments in geomorphology. His field trips were classic experiences in the best tradition of Wooldridge. It is some measure of his success with my year group that at least two of my exact contemporaries: Ian Evans and Glen Norcliffe went on to careers in academic geography".

George Willan apparently went to Tbilisi in the 1970s and helped formulate an important environmental declaration.

https://naee.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/NAEE-TRUSTEES-ANNUAL-REVIEW-2016-17_Compressed.pdf - PDF download from NAEE

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

Update April 2022

What a real pleasure to meet Richard for the first time at the GA Conference 2022. Thanks once again for all your help with the blog Richard, and for attending the Long Standing Members' meal. I hope to see you again next year.

Lovely to meet up with Richard once again in April 2023 at the GA Conference in Sheffield.

Presenting... the Presidents

I'm working on a Presentation at the moment, which will form part of a future presentation or two, where I share this blog project more widely, and the information that I have gained about the GA.

Working on one Presentation with a slide on each President and a picture... taking shape, and taking quite a bit of time.. Should perhaps have done this from the beginning, it would have been quicker...

A reminder that if you have a decent image of any GA President, please get in touch. There are a few where I have no decent picture at the moment.

Thought for the Day

 "Geography untouched by the human hand is dull to an extraordinary degree"

Sir Charles Close, Royal Geographical Society, 1932

GA President, 1927

Computer Assisted Learning in Geography

This book was first published in 1980 and written by CET in association with the GA.

It was written by Ifan D H Shepherd, Zena A Cooper and David R F Walker.

At this time, the GA was linked with the creation of GAPE: the Geographical Association Package Exchange.

At the time, this was coordinated by David Walker from the University of Technology in Loughborough.

The GA also had its Educational Computing Working Group, based out of Fulwood Road.

Charles Sweeten ran MUSE (Microprocessor Users in Secondary Education) in Oundle.

I used a quote from this book and some other elements when I was asked to write a chapter on educational technology for Routledge.

It's a quote from Page and Kitching's 1976 book: "Technical aids to teaching in higher education" and was the following:

"The teacher's traditional ally is a piece of chalk, and the closer any modern aid approaches this still indispensable material in some respects, the more likely he is to use it."

1989: Geography in the National Curriculum

Thanks to Richard Daugherty for sending me this image of the front cover of a book he was involved in producing for the Geographical Association in 1989 to support teachers with the new National Curriculum. The arrival coincided with my teaching career beginning, so I now realise I was starting teaching at an interesting time.

I'd be pleased to hear other memories from colleagues from around that time and other books that were used...

GA NC Book Cover 1989 by Alan Parkinson on Scribd

1988: Michael Palin

Michal Palin has now been GA President of course (yet), but he has featured in the GA's journal, when he was involved in an organisation called Transport 2000.













References

Palin, Michael. “Changing Transport.” Geography, vol. 73, no. 4, 1988, pp. 308–317. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571463.

1988: Mr. Michael J Storm

Updated September 2023

Michael Storm is another geographer who will be familiar to many from the books he has published over the years. He was the ILEA Advisor for Geography and Environmental Studies and worked across London in a range of roles including school inspections and international visits.

One of these was mentioned by Keith Grimwade, GA President in 2006, who told me:
"I did a PGCE at Goldsmiths and was accepted into the ILEA ‘pool’, having been interviewed by another future GA President, Michael Storm".

Michael was Staff Inspector for Geography and Environmental Studies for London (the Inner London Education Authority or ILEA as it was called, from 1976 to 1990) and was active throughout that period.

He was also the Chairman of the GA's International Committee for some years too, showing a long-term contribution to the work of the GA through that important committee which makes international connections.

From the snippet above, he obviously worked widely in other countries in the sphere of teacher education as well as in the UK.

He was involved in the assessment of the National Curriculum which was in place when I started teaching in 1988, and development of Attainment targets, in a group which also included a range of prominent GA people. This was a busy time for the GA, dealing with th DES. He also helped with the improvements that were made to Fulwood Road during the late 1980s to improve working conditions for GA staff. 1988 was a busy year to be President with the discussions over the National Curriculum and geogarphy's place in it. Michael worked closely with Richard Daugherty.

1988 was also the year when Primary came to the fore, with Primary Geographer magazine launching and a new feature of conference as well. Primary has gone from strength to strength since then.

From the 1988 Annual Report

His Presidential address was on Geography in Schools: The State of the Art.
He reflected on the fact that it had been 20 years since an inspector had been President, and discussed the contribution the GA had made to teacher education and also the influence on the new curriculum. He also talked about the importance of positive reinforcement: by teachers to students, and also to teachers and headteachers. He makes mention of the Higginson proposals, of which more in a separate blog post.



I enjoyed reading this address, and there is plenty that would be familiar to teachers today, over 30 years on from the conference. A few sections that I particularly liked were:

"Geography teachers have been active in releasing information technology from the ghetto of computer studies, and have pioneered the inventive and analytical development of video material."

He refers in his address to his predecessor Dr Eric Briault, who was the Education Officer for ILEA.

He was pleased about the popularity of geography, particularly the curriculum development projects such as Avery Hill (GYSL) and the 16-19 project. 

Of the subject he says:

"Not even the most intellectually megalomaniac geographer, I imagine, would claim that the suject delivers all the knowledge, understanding, insights and values needed by tha environmentally-educated citizen.... geography's enduring concern with the nature of places, their connections and dynamics, inevitably means that the subject becomes the major repository for the hopes of those who look to the schools to implant an environmental ethic".

He also shared a few memories from his time inspecting teachers, with a few funny anecdotes of teachers coming a cropper by over-thinking their observation lesson. 

Late in the address, he moves onto some 'growth areas' for school geography. First is the subject of a lot of debate at the time (I remember this as I was starting my teaching career at this time): which is geography's "general locational knowledge". He revisits familiar territory: the newspaper stories saying that 'kids don't know where places are"... and the contradictions this would place on curriculum design, and geography's role in this 'pub quiz' acquisition.

I liked his stories from Soviet Russia, which wasn't well covered by UK textbooks at the time.

Teacher shortages were a problem at the time - although I don't remember finding it easy to find a job back then - I had loads of interviews before securing my first job, and even then I was second choice. Michael says that:

"Geography in schools is affected by hidden shortages. 

He also mentions an issue which I remember well at the time: the transfer of content which was obviously geographical into the science curriculum, so that earth science, acid rain, weather etc. was taught twice in slightly different ways.

More to come on Michael Storm in a future blog post.

He also developed a key set of questions for Primary Geography, which are shown below.

The Five Basic Questions for Primary Geography

Michael Storm.

·      What is this place like?
Where is this place?

·      Why is this place as it is?

·      How is this place connected to other places?

·      How is this place changing?

·      What would it feel like to be in this place?

The following images were taken by Jo Norcup, and shared on Facebook during the compilation of her thesis, which referenced some of Michael's work.

In 1998, he wrote a letter to the Independent during a debate about the 3 Rs and the 'literacy hour'.

Children have to want to communicate. Many primary teachers would acknowledge that the investigation of their local environment, and some contrasting environments elsewhere, not only accommodates the child's basic curiosity, but generates this all-important motivation. Such work, far from being an optional curricular frill, creates a genuine need to talk, read, write, calculate, draw.
In contrast, jumping through linguistic hoops for an hour a day is likely to be far less motivating.

Michael J. Storm,
Chairman, Geographical Association International Committee.

I also came across this document in my PGCE folder from 1986-7, showing his influence and work at this time into ITE.

Michael Storm Document by GeoBlogs on Scribd

Another document of interest perhaps

Anti Racist Teaching by GeoBlogs on Scribd

Sheila Jones told me:
Michael Storm shares a love of cricket and we have met annually at the Cheltenham cricket festival

Here is a picture of Michael from an image sent by Sheila Jones, speaking at an event during the GA's Centenary year, in 1993

I was also pleased to get Michael Storm's memories on what gave him the 'spark' for geography which was part of Chris Kington's project around his own Presidency. Chris loaned me the letters.

Michael Storm talked about the importance of his teachers. These included Maurice Beresford and Maurice Kirk.

He talks about the importance of the BBC's geography series on the radio when at school. He describes the importance of books with maps, such as Treasure Island, and the writings of the author 'BB'. Stamp collecting was another influence, such as the names and shapes of countries like Djibouti.

Michael's father was a Master Mariner who connected him with the world through his stories.

References
He has no Wikipedia page.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1989/may/05/geography

Storm, Michael. “Geography in Schools: the State of the Art.” Geography, vol. 74, no. 4, 1989, pp. 289–298. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571737.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0305763800060212

Storm, Michael. “The Geographical Association.” Geography, vol. 73, no. 3, 1988, pp. 268–271. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571429. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Storm, Michael, et al. “Annual Report of The Geographical Association 1988.” Geography, vol. 74, no. 2, 1989, pp. 173–183. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571611. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Thoughts on Development Education (PDF download): https://think-global.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/dea/documents/dej_7_1_storm.pdf

Image credit: Jo Norcup
Jo's THESIS is fascinating by the way: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6849/1/2015NorcupPhD.pdf

I'm particularly grateful to Michael's wife Jacqueline for further information, and also to John Westaway for more assistance.

Thanks also to Mike Rigby, who sent me the image of Michael at the top of the post, which was taken on a study visit to South Africa.

Any further memories of Michael Storm would be appreciated.

Updated November 2020

I am grateful to Steve Brace, Head of Education and Outdoor Learning at the RGS-IBG for the following additional story about Michael:

Michael was a great support particularly at the start of my career in the early 1990s when I arrived at the GA conference in Manchester with three – soon to be empty - boxes of the Chembakolli a Village in India pack. I’d just written this resource for ActionAid & Michael was one of the GA's ‘elder statesmen’ who took time out to help connect me with the wider community, encourage my work & also give feedback on ActionAid’s developing education work. 

 He was really generous with his time and networks & I always looked forward to catching up with Michael over subsequent GA conferences.

Updated December 2020

I referenced Michael in a Presentation for the TeachmeetGeographyIcons event, which was scheduled to take place in early December but was postponed for technical reasons on the day. It mentioned his Presidential Address and the term that he used: "professional zest".

I recorded my Presentation and it is here on Loom.

I also received some memories of Michael from another former GA President: Professor Simon Catling.

"While a young primary teacher I did two week long courses which were influential. In early 1975 I did a Place, time and Society 8-13 course run by Ray Derricot, Hazel Sumner and Gordon Elliot at an ILEA centre. In early 1978 I did an environmental course at Avery Hill College in Eltham, run by Colin Ward. Both were influential in my thinking. Gordon Elliott introduced me to a producer at the BBC which led from the autumn of 1975 to me being an adviser, alongside Michael Storm (who had just become the geography adviser in the ILEA), to a new series of primary geography programmes."

He told me a little more about Michael in another personal communication:

"Way back in June 1993, we had a centenary conference in Oxford and quite a number of past presidents were present when a photograph was taken in the room in Christchurch College where the meeting which initiated the GA was held. Other photographs were taken over the years at Past Presidents' lunches at GA Conferences, quite a few of which Michael attended. 

I knew of him back in the 1970s but first met him when we both acted as advisers for the BBC's new primary geography series for schools, which I think was called Landmarks, but that title could be wrong. That was in 1975! 

He moved to be the Geography Adviser for the ILEA from September 1975 and he developed a strong reputation for developing geography in schools. He initiated a geography education centre, which John Westaway ran, and he managed to add a second secondary adviser to his team and engage a part-time primary head as a primary adviser.
He was active in the GA, but I know little more about that, other than during his junior, senior and past presidential years.
In the later 1980s, around 1987, several of us pushed for the introduction of a Primary geography newsletter ( similar to that which the ASE had recently begun to provide). This led to a small working party being set up, chaired by Michael, to explore the proposal. It recommended an annual newsletter. This was taken to GA Council, at which Patrick Bailey proposed in 1988 that we be more adventurous and go for a full magazine/journal issued three times a year. He said the GA could fund it, and it was agreed. Wendy Morgan then became the first editor. So Michael had a key role in initiating Primary Geographer/Geography.

Michael was instrumental in promoting geography in the ILEAs primary schools. In the early 1980s he set up a group of us, including myself as a primary deputy head in those days to produce geography guidance for primary schools. His co-adviser, Michael Hewitt headed the group. The outcome was "The Study of Places in the Primary School". Michael Storm always wrote and spoke very strongly about the importance and value of geography in primary schools."

Updated September 2023

He contributed a chapter to the book 'Perspectives in Geographical Education', co-edited by John Bale, Norman Graves and Rex Walford.

Accessed via Internet Archive.