Belloc and the Pyrenees

While in the excellent second hand bookshop at Blickling Hall in Norfolk earlier I spotted this book in the Vintage section.

It was written by Hilaire Belloc. Belloc was the GA President in 1915 - quite a while back. You can read his entry by searching the blog.

It's a chunky book all about the Pyrenees which helps with Belloc's credentials. It was published in 1923.

Thanks to Denise

Today is the last day of Denise Freeman's Presidency.

Today is the last day of @geography_DAF's presidency of the @The_GA. For the last 12 months she has tirelessly promoted her message of 'Geography for Everyone' visiting all four nations and engaging with every phase of Geography education. A brilliant President: Thank You Denise! pic.twitter.com/wWlcuRWEJl

— Alastair Owens (@AlastairHackney) August 31, 2024

That means there will be a new President added to this blog tomorrow! Watch out for the new post...

It also means an additional new role for Denise, to take a little pressure off Alastair Owens.

We've worked closely together over the past year and I am really pleased that Denise not only continues as 'Immediate Past President', bur it also taking on the role of Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees from tomorrow.

Big day tomorrow for @RobboGeog and @GeogMum...

— Alastair Owens (@AlastairHackney) August 31, 2024

IGU - 1964 - London

While exploring something else, I was reminded of the IGU meeting in London in 1964. I've blogged about this before, as I got a copy of the stamp set which was released at the time as a First Day Cover. (PDF download)

I also have a copy of the booklet which was used for field excursions in London during the event. It has some interesting details to this date. Would be interesting to follow the route of one or two and see how much it has changed in the intervening 60 years.

The RGS was involved in hosting the event, and one can imagine the delegates entering the building from Kensington Gore, and then heading along the road to the Royal Albert Hall.

I'm going to see if I can find details of this event.

There was also a dinner at Regent's Park Zoo.

Source:

https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/files/263517541/Clayton_2019_AAAG_geography_sempire_AAM.pdf

Wilma Fairchild's piece in the RGS journal:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/212857

“The Record.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 129, no. 2, 1963, pp. 242–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1792705. Accessed 18 July 2024.

Decolonising geography - early days

While looking for something else I came across Daniel Clayton's paper from the University of St. Andrews.

In it he talks about the emergence of decolonising and the early proponents of looking back at the nature of Empire, with Felix Driver's work being mentioned prominently.

In the aftermath of World War II, two British geographers, Sidney Wooldridge and Ronald Harrison Church, implored colleagues to take the study of colonial geography more seriously.  Wooldridge (1947, 202) ventured that “it appears to me to throw a strong light on the position of Geography in this country that we are so calamitously and shamefully ignorant of our Colonial Empire”.  And Harrison Church (1951, 116-17) sought to make amends with a primer entitled Modern Colonization, noting that Africa was “ripe for rearrangement” (albeit colonial reform more than independence).  

As Britain’s sprawling empire shrank, the type of geographical study and imagery associated with it became less acceptable and feasible, and Alastair Bonnett (2003) asserts that geography soon abandoned its bequest as a “world discipline” and geographers sought to make their discipline ‘useful’ again by focusing on pressing domestic problems.  Yet geography was not taught at many of the new universities established across the United Kingdom in the post-war decades, in part because politicians continued to view the subject as having “a somewhat ‘dated’ look about it”, as Ron Johnston (2003, 69) puts it. 

 Indeed, the ‘conquest’ of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in June 1953, coinciding with the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was arguably the crowning glory of 1950s British geography and points to the post-war extension rather than liquidation of geography’s empire.  

The RGS was a proud sponsor of the Everest Expedition, and through to the 1970s its learned organ, The Geographical Journal, kept a populist foot in the imperial past by publishing excerpts “from the journal a hundred years ago”, most of which were manly tales of expeditionary derring-do.   

Source: (PDF link) to read the whole paper.

https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/files/263517541/Clayton_2019_AAAG_geography_sempire_AAM.pdf