Gus Caesar

Updated August 2023

Gus Caesar was described by former GA President Ashley Kent as arguably the ‘source’ of an extraordinary group of geography professors across the world: Haggett / Dury / Hall / Randall et al...a remarkable ‘father figure’ to many.

He was a tutor at St. Catharine's college, University of Cambridge. (Twitter account link)

He came up on a £20 Exhibition to St Catharine's College in 1933, gained double Firsts in Geography and was elected to a postgraduate scholarship in 1936. After the war he returned to a university lectureship and fellowship at Selwyn College and in 1951 moved back to his old college. For the next 30 years he was to hold almost every senior college post except that of Master.

He was Senior Tutor for Geography, working with Dr Keeble.

The above text is taken from his Obituary, written for the Independent newspaper by the famous geographer Peter Haggett.

Peter Haggett also said of Gus:

No one who experienced the hour-long inquisitions in his rooms on Main Court at St Catharine's, delivered through a haze of Three Nuns pipe smoke, will forget the process. Essays were disassembled, the reasonable parts retained, new components added, and the whole reassembled into something that was well ordered, logical and, above all, geographically sound. 

He had an innate sense of what gave coherence to a geographical point of view and drove that relentlessly into those he taught.

A story from the memorial address for J A Steers, who taught Gus:

Gus Caesar's splendid story of his own undergraduate days, when he was woken one morning, admittedly somewhat late, by a severe pain in his chest. Opening bleary eyes, he discovered that the cause of this pain was a walking stick, jabbing him in the ribs. And at the other end of the stick was, of course, Alfred, immaculately dressed as usual, with hat and briefcase, exclaiming "get up, get up, I'm lecturing to you in ten minutes!" 

References

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-gus-caesar-1600981.html - obituary in the Independent newspaper

With growling voice and the massive bulk of a second-row forward, Gus Caesar appeared ferocious. And as a Dean on the warpath after a rowdy boat-club supper, this image could stand him in good stead. But the reality was of a gentle and ever kindly man for whom the individual undergraduate (particularly if from St Catharine's) could always ask for support. 

His college house on Grantchester Meadows was a haven through which hundreds of visitors passed each year. 

His wife, Margaret, and daughter, Pat, could calculate to a nicety the strength of undergraduate appetites after the towpath walk back from Grantchester.

https://www.society.caths.cam.ac.uk/home/?m=page&id=1923 - St. Catharine's Society Journals

Image above is taken from the St. Catherine's Society Journal

https://www.society.caths.cam.ac.uk/Public_Magazines/1971r.pdf 

https://www.society.caths.cam.ac.uk/Public_Magazines/1987r.pdf 

Updated August 2023

Sir Peter Hall - Town Planner

https://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/assets/qualibank/6226themext016.pdf

I was taught by an outstanding teacher in economic geography, a guy called Gus Caesar, whose full name was almost unbelievably Alfred Augustus Levi Caesar, and he was a legendary figure in British geography...  He was not a researcher, he’d got a very poor research record, I don’t think he’d have got tenure nowadays, but he was an absolutely inspiring teacher in close supervision, because the style was, you would write an essay every week, of course, and he would read it, and he would tear the essay to pieces!  He’d say, “Look, old lad” – his favourite term – “Look, old lad, you’re putting the conclusions before the evidence.  Say what you think the hypothesis is, and then produce the evidence carefully, in logical order, and then the conclusions”.  He absolutely [analysed] your essay.  Everyone who was taught by Gus, has this extraordinary kind of intellectual discipline of being able to argue A to B to C to D, which none of us ever lost, I think.

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10042912/3/Hebbert_PH%20for%20GBS%20final%20ms.pdf

His path was determined by the offer of a geography scholarship at St Catharine’s College. Hall found Cambridge initially uncongenial, what with the snobbery of privately educated undergraduates towards provincial grammar schoolboys, the relatively low 3 academic esteem of his chosen discipline, and the bias of first year teaching towards the physical geography he least enjoyed. 

But in 1951 the situation was transformed by the college's appointment of A.A.L. Caesar (an alumnus) to be Fellow and Director of Studies in Geography. 

As the only Cambridge college offering geography scholarships, St Catharine’s attracted the pick of the crop and for the next 29 years Gus Caesar was their academic mentor. The weekly supervisions in which Caesar deployed his ‘formidable powers of critical dissection and logical rearrangement’ (Haggett 1965, ii) nurtured many rising stars of the discipline (Johnston and Williams 2003, 309) and Hall recollected them as the high point of his undergraduate career (2003b, 2014f). 

He had already learned from George Orwell how to write clearly without resort to jargon; now he learned how to construct arguments, marshal empirical evidence, and submit to relentless self-criticism—‘progress is a mistake-making business’ was one of Gus’s aphorisms. 

More than this, Caesar was a committed advocate of geography as an applied science, with regional planning as its practical outcome. He had coauthored the chapter on the ‘North-east of England’ and written those on ‘Gloucester–Wiltshire–Somerset’ and ‘Devon and Cornwall’ in G.H.J. Daysh’s Studies in Regional Planning: Outline Surveys and Proposals for the Development of Certain Regions of England and Scotland (1949). The authors conceived regional planning to be a self-contained policy process in which the geographer ascertained trends, constraints, and requirements so that planner might devise proposals for administrators to implement. 

For his presidential address to section E of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Southampton in August 1964, A.A.L. Caesar spoke on ‘Planning and the geography of Great Britain’. He emphasized the inexorable geographical trends of economic centralization on South-east England and the midlands, the decline of peripheral regions, road transport growth and extensive railway closures. ‘The Twentieth Century pattern must be accepted—there is need to contemplate that of the Twenty first Century. 

If Megalopolis is coming, let us at least be aware of it and let us plan for it’—a challenge for geography indeed (1964, 240). 

Caesar himself had little direct involvement in public policy, but his teaching of geography as an applied science was profoundly influential, as seven of his distinguished former students—Michael Chisholm, Peter Haggett, Peter Hall, David Keeble, Gerald Manners, Ray Pahl and Kenneth Warren—acknowledged in their Spatial Policy Problems of the British Economy (1971).

Memories from the late David R Wright - another legend who has appeared on the blog

https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/files/alumni/landmark/landmark1/landmark1.pdf