I've been reading around the future of geography and came across a piece by Michael Wise in a collection which was edited by Russell King for the GA back in 1985.
He referred to Dudley Stamp's "Geographical Agenda" which was laid out in his Presidential address when he was President of the Institute of British Geographers in 1957 before they joined up with the RGS.
Available on JSTOR.
Dudley Stamp was the President of the GA in 1950, 75 years ago this year.
I posted previously about a display at the RGS of one of the 24 plaster relief models that was produced to be used for photographic plates in his 1951 book 'The Earth's Crust".
You can also watch a talk that George gave on the link here. Part of the 'Be Inspired' series.
I was down at the Royal Geographical Society earlier in the week, and they had a display of Dudley Stamp related items including one of his plaster relief models. I'd seen these in storage when I had a tour of the Society's HQ about 6 months ago, and it was good to see some of them now out in one of the display cases near the Map Room. They are the best collection still existing.
Images: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license on Flickr.
Sussex University holds the Laurence Dudley Stamp archive.
This holds 53 boxes of papers linked to Laurence Dudley Stamp.
I'm interested in the unpublished autobiography that is in one of the boxes.
Download the document here (PDF link)
This document references the work of Robert Ogilvie Buchanan and Robert Steel: two former GA Presidents.
They were involved in developing universities across the Commonwealth through the 1950s and 60s.
R.O. Buchanan was born in New Zealand and came to Britain in 1925 to study at the LSE, where he was later chair of geography. Buchanan was one of the founders of the Institute of British Geographers and, like Steel, served on several committees throughout his career including the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Geographical Association and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. These connections, combined with the hierarchical and informal processes of academic appointments across Britain and the wider colonial world, put both in pivotal positions for hiring decisions in Nigeria and for geographers seeking to (re)join UK academia.
Steel regularly received requests for suggestions for appointments from contacts working in African universities.Many of those at Ibadan were appointed on recommendation: he was referee for Terry Coppock, visiting scholar at Ibadan 1964-1965, and advised Dick Hodder (lecturer at Ibadan 1956-1962) on how to make the necessary connections to apply. He was on the selection panel for the chair of geography and head of department role, appointing Michael Barbour to the position in 1962. Steel’s archives abound with informal letters reflecting the continuing value of ‘writing to friends’ in the appointments process across the former colonies in Africa, South East Asia and the Caribbean until the 1960s.
Source: Craggs, R., & Neate, H. (2019). Post-colonial careering and the discipline of geography: British geographers in Nigeria and the UK, 1945-1990. JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY, 66, 31-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2018.05.014
It was interesting to see that Buchanan was referenced....
Buchanan was a colourful character who refused to conform to the expectations of senior university administrators. According to his colleague Pugh, Buchanan ‘had a wide range of acquaintances in Ibadan Town … and never hesitated if he saw a party of drummers heading somewhere – he would follow …’. He would wear shirts ‘made from cloth from the local market with a pattern of rosebuds or Crown birds’. His lectures touched on issues of colonialism and development, and showed signs of the more radical critiques of his later scholarship. Eventually the UCI principal deemed that Buchanan’s clothing showed he was inappropriate for the job, leading to his departure in 1951 for LSE, then what was to become the University of Wellington in New Zealand.
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.
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:In early 2024, Alan Kinder left the Geographical Association to become the Chief Executive of the Regional Studies Association.
While researching a few GA Presidents I came across some connections between the GA and the RSA.
This document was produced for their 50th Anniversary in 2015. (PDF download)
There are some familiar names.
It was no surprise to see Dudley Stamp mentioned there, or Patrick Abercrombie.
He was also the founding President of the Transport Studies Society and for ten years (1973–1984) chaired the Executive Committee of the Association of Agriculture and, although he held no office, he was much involved, as his unpublished 1992 paper shows, in the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Regional Studies Association.
"A British Group of the organisation was later formed with membership including influential figures such as Sir Patrick Abercrombie, Sir Dudley Stamp, Otto Koenigberger, Percy Johnson-Marshall, Robert Gardner-Medwin and Robert Grieve. The British Group’s underlying principles originated from the work of C.B. Fawcett and Patrick Geddes in employing empirical approaches to regional planning and physical development, and contrasted with the quantitative methods and theories being developed and promoted through regional science. The older generation in this group had been trained in the tradition of the arts and crafts movement."
A second post on the Memorial volume for Dudley Stamp, published by the IBG in 1968.
A final chapter was provided by former GA President Michael Wise.
In it he references the impact that Dudley Stamp on School Geography, including the mention in the TES at the top of this piece in 1955.
It also references the GA and their role in supporting the production of textbooks to set out an 'ideal syllabus'. The influence of the topics chosen back then persist even now. I may have to go back to that AGM to find out more.
There is also reference to Geographical Publications Ltd. set up by Stamp.
Another discovery while following a few leads.
It's a memorial volume to Professor Dudley Stamp.
Can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.
Image: Dudley and Elsa Stamp
It was published in 1968 by the Institute of British Geographers.
The contents are a Who's Who of prominent geographers at the time,
He talks about his first encounter with Dudley Stamp.
More to come in future posts.
Thanks to Steve Brace for the link to a new research project making use of Dudley Stamp's Land Utilisation Survey UK project.
We scanned Dudley Stamp maps & compared them with modern satellite data to record the extent of land-use change across Britain in mid-20thC. Our map outlines land conversion for every 10km x 10km sq. @andysuggitt & @AGAuffret#geographyteachers #NEA https://t.co/UIEk3Sw9Lj
— Steve Brace (@SteveBraceGeog) November 5, 2023
The full piece in 'The Conversation' explores a new project.
Our answer was to use the detailed maps that a huge army of volunteer citizen scientists (many were schoolchildren!) collected under the leadership of Sir Dudley Stamp in the 1930s/40s. His team visited every county of Britain, noting down the land-use of the time... 🗺️(3/17). pic.twitter.com/2PVljhHbA2
— Andy Suggitt (@andysuggitt) November 1, 2023
The outcomes are reported in this research paper. (Open Access at the time of posting).
The full piece outlines further changes affecting particular species.
All the maps are available for free download.
Our answer was to use the detailed maps that a huge army of volunteer citizen scientists (many were schoolchildren!) collected under the leadership of Sir Dudley Stamp in the 1930s/40s. His team visited every county of Britain, noting down the land-use of the time... 🗺️(3/17). pic.twitter.com/2PVljhHbA2
— Andy Suggitt (@andysuggitt) November 1, 2023
I enjoyed this account of going to Oxford University in the 1950s... by Michael Cross.
There are mentions of quite a few former GA Presidents along the way.
I wonder why he was Deadly Dudley... as in deadly dull?
In 1954, the annual meeting of the British Association was held in Oxford and thus the accompanying volume The Oxford Region was an up to date source. Edited by my tutor A F Martin and by R W Steel, other familiar names are listed on the Contents page (Dr Steel left midway through my time at Oxford and went on to become Professor of Geography at Liverpool.)Reference:
https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/alumni/news/181127-mcross-1950-geog.html
"most land can be upgraded into a sphere of usefulness which is not inherent to it, but can be upgraded only to a certain extent, depending on the starting point which is the inherent character of the land.."
Dudley Stamp
Special thanks to Richard Clarke for his work on this research.
Born in Ireland, raised in Scotland, she made her life as an adopted Slovene, having lived in a number of European countries.
In this capacity, she welcomed a field trip from members of the Le Play Society, which I have mentioned several times on the blog.
This section talks about Copeland's involvement:
She had invited George Ingle Finch, to lecture.
Finch was also an activist within the London Le Play House Organisation (LPHO).
The LPHO was a key organisation in the development of inter-war British geography.
It had been established in 1920 by a curious mix of geographers, sociologists and educationalists to take forward ‘regional studies’ using an interdisciplinary analytical framework based on the trilogy of ‘place’ (the natural environment, physical and biological), ‘work’ (the economy, and daily life of its people) and ‘folk’ (their community and social organisation).
This approach was itself derived from the work of the 19th century French sociologist Frederick Le Play (who emphasised ‘family’ as the basic unit of society, rather than ‘folk’).
The LPHO provided a home for several bodies, including student groups and a ‘foreign fieldwork committee’ whose emphasis on ‘human ecology’ during the late 1920s became increasingly at variance from that of the Sociological Society (another body within the LPHO which was championing the ‘professional’ disciplinary practice of academic sociology).
The two bodies split in 1931, with the Sociological Society recasting itself as a professional institute - the Institute of Sociology - and the foreign fieldwork committee becoming the nucleus of a separate organisation, the Le Play Society (LPS), under its first President, Patrick Geddes. Geddes died in 1932, shortly after the formation of the LPS and was succeeded as its President by Halford Mackinder.
I'd been unaware of this earlier incarnation of the Le Play Society, or the close link with the IBG. I need to go back to some of my earlier sources perhaps.
The LPS (a precursor of the Institute of British Geographers) became a major influence on the development of geographical fieldwork between the two World Wars. Its first ‘foreign study’ (in August 1932) led by Dudley Stamp was of Solčavsko, a then ‘remote’ Alpine valley system on the Slovene - Austrian border.
It resulted in some outputs:
This review of the book mentions two other former GA Presidents:
"Halford Mackinder in his Foreword to Slovene Studies described it as ’an honestly made brick for the palace we are rearing.’ (in Stamp 1933) The LPS subsequently held up the 1932 visit as a model of how regional studies should be carried out. The Society's own (1935) guide to regional fieldwork describes it as 'An excellent example of regional survey by a Le Play Society group doing field work as a summer vacation course abroad'. (Barnard 1935: 114, 1948) Thirty years later (after the LPS had been wound up) the visit was described by Beaver (1962: 236) as 'one of the best examples' of the LPS’s work. Beaver did much within the Joint School of Geography at King’s College and LSE during the 1930s to promote fieldwork and his own interest in the Balkans were fostered by his leadership of several LPS ‘expeditions’ (Phillips and Turton 1975)."
At this point the British Association and Section E appear - something else which has appeared quite a few times on the blog.
And this is followed by two more references to former GA Presidents: Sir John Russell (President in 1960) and K C Edwards.
"In 1947, well before the Society’s eventual closure, its ‘student group’ had become a separate body (Turnock 1991), recasting itself as the ’Geographical Field Group’ (GFG) with K C Edwards, by now Head of Nottingham University’s Geography Department as its President. The GFG as a body of ‘professional geographers’ regarded the LPS as elderly amateurs and too ‘sociological’; the emphasis on civics and the Le Play method was dropped (Merchant 2000)"
I now need to find out more about the Geographical Field Group (GFG).
References can be found in the bibliography of the article below.
Copeland lived a long life, full of mountains and connections, and she was described as a "buzzing fly" (hopefully in a positive way).
Clarke says of her:
"In Copeland’s own work one can find elements of the idealism of Patrick Geddes, the mysticism of Vaughan Cornish (especially in her writing on mountains) and the pragmatism of Dudley Stamp."
Hilda Ormsby crops up here too - I love all the connections and interconnections here. There is so much that could be done with this era and the work of GA Presidents...
Source:
Clarke, Richard (2011) "Fanny Copeland and the geographical imagination. Scottish Geographical Journal 127(3) ,pp.163-192
https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/8156/1/ClarkeAnteric_2011_FannyCopelandGeogImag_SGJ_Pre-Pub.pdf
Stamp, L. Dudley, ed. 1933. Slovene Studies: Being Studies Carried Out by Members of the Le Play Society in the Alpine Valleys of Slovenia (Yugoslavia). London: Le Play Society
Edwards, K.C. 1932. Anglezi studirajo Slovenijo. Planinski vestnik, no. 10: 193-198
Beaver, Stanley H. 1962. The Le Play Society and Fieldwork. Geography 47: 225-240
A quote I got from here as well:
‘Geographical knowledge needs to be understood as something that is constituted through a range of embodied practices (such as travelling, seeing and recording).
The ‘field’ is not some self-evident place, something ‘out there’ to be ‘discovered’ in an unproblematic sense, it is produced in the ideas and the recorded or remembered movements of geographical actors, created through their discourse and shared through the networks of academic (and amateur) exchange.’
(Stoddart and Adams, 2004)
Stoddart, David R and William M Adams. 2004. Fieldwork and Unity in Geography. In Unifying geography: common heritage, shared future, ed. John A Matthews and David T Herbert, London: Routledge.
A website section on the LSE website which appeared in June 2023.
It's written by Anna Towlson to go with an exhibition of mapping earlier in the year (which I missed completely). She works at the LSE.
A reminder that Dudley Stamp was GA President in 1950, well after he started work on the survey. He was also a million selling textbook author.
It outlines the background to the survey:
Sir Dudley Stamp’s aim was to undertake a detailed field-by-field survey of England, Wales and Scotland to find out exactly what the surface of the land was being used for. The idea grew out of his work as Chairman of the Regional Studies Committee of the Geographical Association in the late 1920s. British agriculture had been facing a long and severe depression, mainly because of the increase in world food supplies and competition from cheaper producers. Many towns and cities had been growing at a steady rate since the industrial revolution, with low profits and low wages in the countryside speeding the drift of labour from the land.
Stamp L.D. (1931). 'The Land Utilization Survey of Britain'. The Geographical Journal, 78, 40-47.
Stamp L.D. (1948, with later editions in 1950 and 1962). The Land of Britain: its use and misuse (Longman, London).
Source:
Obituary from 2000: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/17/guardianobituaries4
He also helped J A Steers with his survey of the coastline of England and Wales.
His Obituary in 'Geography' was written by GA President Professor Michael Wise
Willatts had trained as a teacher 1930-31 and, at a time when good teaching posts were difficult to find, had received an attractive offer from Hulme Grammar School, Manchester. As he was already undertaking fieldwork for the LUS in Surrey, Willatts seized the new opportunity offered by Stamp for a year at an annual salary of £200. The decision brought great good fortune to the LUS. Willatts' work involved visiting education officers to win support, recruiting schools and student volunteers to undertake the field work, writing and publishing leaflets and instructions, supplying the six inches to the mile quarter sheets, collating and analysing the completed sheets, arranging the publication of the one-inch maps and, later, the production of the County Reports.
Source:
There was a strong representation of former GA Presidents at this event, held at the Dorchester Hotel - very posh.
In the speech that followed, the GA gets a mention, alongside the previous explorations and expeditions.
The work of the Geographical Association and its Presidents has spread around the world, and while creating the blog I have come across their influences.
This article is an interview from the Geography Teachers Association of Victoria (GTAV).
It is an interview with John Collins.
He describes a two year leave of absence in 1958/9 from a teaching job in Australia where he travelled to England and to the IoE under the mentorship of a teacher called John Rigg.
"fairly boring stuff" apparently the history of the Geographical Association :)
Following that, he had a remarkable career around the world.
He returns to discussing some other well known names - including Molly Long.
I came across the details of Dudley Stamp's Memorial Service in one of the boxes of files.
It was held in November of 1966.
"It is upon the surface of the land, its natural beauty or its man made ugliness that we are compelled to gaze on most of our waking hours"
L Dudley Stamp
I was pleased to hear yesterday that I have been awarded one of the Fawcett Fellowships for 2022-23
Fawcett Fellowships are awarded each year by the UCL Institute of Education.
Edith Fawcett endowed annual Fellowships in the Department of Geography at UCL in 1987 in memory of her father, Professor C B Fawcett, who was head of the department between 1928 and 1949.
Updated post. Sad news at the end of last week from colleagues who have organised the Charney Conference over the years of the passing of Ma...
