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.

Lantern Slides

I was watching the film 'Amundsen' over the weekend, and there were a couple of scenes 'set' in the Royal Geographical Society. 

Roald Amundsen and his brother are explaining the plans for their expedition to the North Pole (before they head South) and use a projector, top right, to show magic lantern slides to some RGS members...

The GA was founded partly to share these slides and help teachers use them to advance their pedagogy.  Good to see them mentioned. 

More on lantern slides to come in the New Year in some other blog posts.

If you have any lantern slides of your own, please feel free to share some images with me.

1967: Mr. E C Marchant HMI

Last updated October 2023

E C Marchant was a teacher at Marlborough College, a Headteacher in India and HM Inspector of Schools, but also a cartographer and scholar who travelled with J A Steers.

I was not able to find out as much about Ernest Cecil Marchant as I was about some of the other, older Presidents, which is a feature of this period generally, but eventually developed a suitable post with the thanks of others.
Marchant had featured in a previous article from 1960, describing a conference in Manchester, where he spoke in his position as HMI. He was also mentioned by Michael J Storm, when he became President 20 years later, who was also a school inspector. 

I then discovered a link with Marlborough College, C C Carter and Cyril Norwood. This led me to go back to the very helpful Archivist at the college - see later.
https://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/~rsgs/cgi-bin/ifa_series1.pl?series=3624

The link, which can be seen above describes a bequest of lantern slides to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, who I may have to visit perhaps as well during my Presidential year to discover any further artefacts they may have relating to previous GA Presidents with a Scottish connection in particular.

This collection was donated to the RSGS in 1997 when Marlborough College was undergoing refurbishment. The materials date largely from between WW1 and WW2. At that time the Geography Department at Marlborough College was directed by E C Marchant who later became Senior Inspector of Schools. He was assisted by C C Carter whose text "Landforms and Life" was one of the best sellers for a generation. Carter and Marchant established a tradition in which Geography was firmly rooted in practical work and case studies long before these became so fashionable elsewhere. A great deal of mapwork was done, and the relief models were clearly made to illustrate famous areas, such as the Isle of Purbeck. 

Lantern slides were used to illustrate teaching and practical work, largely surveying, was employed.

Acknowledgements to Christopher Joseph, Head of Geography, Marlborough College for text.

During this time, in the late 1960s, the GA's Council was being chaired by H. J. Fleure.

Marchant is also quoted in Ivor Goodson's book, with some thoughts from inspections.

The advances in university geography after the Second World War partly aided the acceptance of geography as a subject suitable for the most able children, but problems remained. In 1967 Marchant noted: 'Geography is at last attaining to intellectual respectability in the academic streams of our secondary schools. But the battle is not quite over'. He instanced the continuing problem: 'May I quote from just two reports written in 1964, one of a girls' grammar school and the other on a well-known boys' independent school. First, 'geography is at present... an alternative to Latin, which means that a number of girls cease to take it at the end of the third year... there is no work available at A level'. Or second, perhaps a more intriguing situation: 'In the ‘O’ level forms, the subject is taken only by those who are neither classicists, nor modern linguists, nor scientists. The sixth form is then drawn from this rather restricted group with the addition of a few scientists who failed to live up to expectations'

To seal its acceptance by the universities and high status sixth forms, geography had to embrace new paradigms and associated rhetoric.  The supreme paradox is that the crisis in school geography in the late 1960s led not to change which might have involved more school pupils but to changes in the opposite direction in pursuit of total academic acceptance. This push for university status centred around the 'new geography', which moved away from regional geography to more quantitative data and model building. The battle for new geography represented a major clash between those traditions in geography representing more pedagogic and utilitarian traditions (notably the fieldwork geographers and some regionalists) and those pushing for total academic acceptance.

Marchant's Presidential Address connected with his interest in school inspection - which I guess went down well with the audience - and was called 'Some responsibilities of the Teacher of Geography'.

In it, he talks about the role of the teacher, with some interesting quotes, from the perspective of the school inspector, and also relating to his travels in what he called the 'Old World'.
He started by mentioning Professor Haggett, who had spoken at the IBG conference he had attended the previous year in Sheffield, and said that although it had been fascinating the discussions that had taken place had mostly been beyond what most teachers would usefully apply.

I wonder what impact that work had on schools from the perspective of the school inspectorate of the time.
He said of the geography teacher that, "he (sic) must remember that he is preparing the majority of his pupils not for degrees in geography, but pretty soon for living to the full, and perchance for contributing to the full, in a bafflingly complex and ever-changing world".

This was an era of the quantitative revolution, and the Madingley Conferences, which I have blogged about previously, which happened about this time. Marchant's views are interesting.
He referred to the comments of Joseph Acton Morris in 1965 who called for more reality in teaching.
He said of some teachers that they "deceive themselves intop believing that once a pupil has drawn a sketch map or looked at one in a textbook, he knows what a landscape looks like, and what it is like to live there." He shared a map of most of the SE which was labelled "Fruit and Vegetables", and of a textbook in a primary school on the Geography of Norfolk which had a map labelled "Wheat and Turkeys".

A few other quotes from his address:
"we have a vital responsibility to ensure that our subject is not superficial, but is intellectually rigorous".

He also introduced me to a new word: pabulum.

He talked of a student whose "mind had been cloyed with a pabulum of what were, to him, quite meaningless abstractions".
He says that this (the late 60s) was "the era of mathematical geography".

Marchant also wrote a book called 'The Teaching of Geography at School level' which contained his thinking, based on his experience of school inspection.

He also co-wrote a book on geography of Europe with another GA President: C C Carter, with whom he was connected at Marlborough College. Carter was also mentioned in his Presidential address, where he talked about the need to have the grammar in geography to help with the rigour of dealing with its vocabulary.

At this point, I had no image or further information, but contacted Marlborough College.

The archivist Grainne proved very helpful once again and provided further details for me.

Ernest Cecil Marchant

Perse School

Scholar of St John’s College, Cambridge

1^st class Geography Pr.1

Marlborough College 1931-38

Principal of Daly College, Indore 1939

An impressive building, built from concrete it appears.

CIE 1946

HM Inspector of Schools

The link with the Perse School proved to be interesting as that is local to me, in Cambridge.

I also managed to get an image from Grainne, taken as part of a staff photo. ECM is the gentleman in the middle of the photo.

In 1972, he led a Working Party of the GA and RGS exploring Geography and Careers.

"The eminent French geographer, Henri Baulig, insisted that there was nothing in the realm of the natural sciences which gave a more fundamental training of the mind than "placing the student in front of a landscape, or a map or photograph, and inviting him, drawing also on his previous knowledge, to make certain individual deductions and to be prepared to defend his conclusions. He may not get very far: certain aspects of the problem may escape him : but his conclusions will be none the less valuable; for they will be based on his own observations, supported by previous knowledge, and arrived at through the chain of argument by which he links up the one with the other."
Source: MARCHANT, E. C. “Geography for Careers. REPORT OF THE FINDINGS OF A WORKING PARTY OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION AND ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.” Geography, vol. 57, no. 4, 1972, pp. 327–332. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40567916. Accessed 3 June 2020.


Marchant died in September 1979, aged 77.

References
No Wikipedia page - perhaps one needs to be made for Marchant.

Shepherd, W. H. “A One-Day Conference on the Teaching of Geography: A REPORT.” Geography, vol. 45, no. 4, 1960, pp. 300–303. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40565188.

Presidential Address

MARCHANT, E. C. “Some Responsibilities of the Teacher of Geography.” Geography, vol. 53, no. 2, 1968, pp. 129–144. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40566906.

Obituary in Geography by J W Morris
Morris, J. (1980). MR. E. C. MARCHANT. Geography, 65(1), 58-58. Retrieved August 26, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40570277

Book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3554461-the-teaching-of-geography-at-school-level

Thanks to Grainne for her help with this entry.

More on Daly College:
Daly College website also had a small photo of Marchant when he was the Principal from 1939-1945, before returning to the UK to work in school inspection.

He was mentioned in a Principal's report from 2007, attended by his children apparently.

The fourth and last personality I will highlight is a former Principal who again has nothing named in his memory. Mr. E C Marchant, with the support of the then President, Nawab of Bhopal, and the then Vice President, the Maharaja of Panna, visualised an independent and egalitarian India and had the courage to transform the Daly College from a Chief’s College into a Public School. He not only reorganised the system along modern day lines but met with the Heads of some other schools and thus made the Daly College a founder member of the Indian Public Schools Conference.

He helped found the Indian Public Schools' Conference in 1939, and attended the inaugural meeting.


He was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire (CIE) in the Birthday Honours List in 1946.
Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (CIE)

If anyone has further information on E C Marchant (ECM) please get in touch.

Updated July 2022

A small piece in Marchant's obituary mentions the Great Barrier Reef exhibition, which he undertook with J A Steers.

This led me back to that expedition

Inventive cartographer E.C. Marchant charted the Great Barrier Reef during a 1928-1929 expedition with a plane table composed of wooden board, a camera stand, and…floss? 🤨 #GreatBarrierReef #Cartography @CityLab https://t.co/7FiGPYoM3x

— USC Spatial Sciences (@USC_SSI) July 9, 2019

And a Maplab article with an example of a map that he produced.

The Low Isles, from a survey by M.A. Spende, T.A. Stephenson, and E.C. Marchant, 1929.
Great Barrier Reef Expedition 1928-1929 Scientific Reports, Volume III, No. 2

Updated August 2023

He lived at 7 Melbourne Place, Cambridge in 1911- his father was born in Downham Market - a town I pass through on the way to work.

Updated October 2023

He took part in a 1960 conference in May, at Manchester University, attended by 200 teachers.

The opening lecture was given by Mr. E. C. Marchant, H.M.I., who spoke on Geography and Education. Mr. Marchant suggested that the impact of geography on the education of the pupil might be looked at at three levels

1. The level of purely factual information

2. The level of intellectual training

he late Mr. C. C. Carter, remembering his own training in the classics, wrote a Geographical Grammar which had to be learnt as a preliminary to a course in geography, by which means he hoped to impose a rigorous training equivalent to the one he himself had enjoyed. Mr. Marchant believed that there is a "grammar" of geography and that it is salutary to the discipline of the subject that that grammar be at some time acquired. However, modern language teaching largely derives the grammar from the language, not the language from the grammar; and scientific method requires that generalizations be built up empirically, not learnt at the outset. Working from the particular to the general is desirable also in order to enlist the active interest of the child. In geography, field work and its methods - observation, recording, interpretation of pictures and statistics - are important illustrations of this.

3. The level of geography as a humanity

 If in addition to selection the geographer can use the overtones of words to evoke the spirit of a region then he is truly being both a scientist and a humanist. Roxby, Fleure, Mill and Vidal de la Blache have used the evocative power of words.

"Mankind must be made much more aware of the world it lives in, its rigorous limitations and its limited possibilities. Above all it must be assisted and persuaded to think of the world as a whole"

D. L. Linton