Dr. Vanessa Lawrence - Honorary Vice President

For a period, the GA had several Honorary Vice Presidents, and they have also been featuring on the blog.
Vanessa Lawrence was formerly an Honorary Vice President of the GA. I met Vanessa several times, including at the SAGT Conference, where she was speaking in a year when I was also presenting.

She also presented me with my Ordnance Survey Award at the RGS-IBG back in 2008.

She is a board member of the Turing Institute, from which the following biography is taken:

Dr Vanessa Lawrence CB works internationally as a senior advisor to governments, inter-governmental organisations including the World Bank and large private sector organisations. She is a Director of Location International Ltd which provides strategic advice and full operational capacity globally, to the public and private sectors, as to how to gain from improving their own use of location information to enhance their decision-making and to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers and stakeholders.

In addition, Vanessa is a Non-Executive Director of the Satellite Applications Catapult, the innovation centre for satellite use in the United Kingdom, on the advisory boards of Seraphim Space LLP, the Space venture capital fund backed by the British Business Bank, the Spatial Finance Initiative, the Urban Big Data Centre and also she is the Honorary Colonel of 135 Geographic Squadron Royal Engineers.Vanessa is a Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southampton and a Patron of MapAction, the UK-based international charity which specialises in supplying geographical information for humanitarian relief operations.

From 2000-2014, she was the Director General and CEO Ordnance Survey, Britain’s National Mapping Authority and the advisor to the British Government for issues involving mapping, surveying and geographic information. She is the longest-serving Director General and CEO of Ordnance Survey since 1875.

From 2011-2015, Vanessa was a founding co-chair of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM).

In January 2008, Vanessa was appointed as a Companion of The Most Honourable Order of the Bath (CB) in the Queen’s New Year Honours List.

Image above was taken back in June 2008 at the RGS-IBG

Roger Jeans, then Education Manager, Ordnance Survey - I remember his retirement 'do' at conference.
Louise Ellis, fellow Ordnance Survey award recipient 2008
Dr. Vanessa Lawrence, then Director General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey (and also Honorary Vice President of the GA)
Me....

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Lawrence

https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/board-trustees/vanessa-lawrence

Andy Buck - Honorary Vice President

For a period, the GA has had Honorary Vice Presidents, and they will also feature on the Blog.

Andy Buck continues to support the GA in various ways, particulary with respect to subject leadership.

He is described here as "a geography teacher by trade".

A geography teacher by trade, Andy went on to become a headteacher for thirteen years at two schools in east London. In the last year of headship, his school was judged outstanding in all categories and Andy was designated a National Leader of Education. In 2009 he become a Director at the National College for School Leadership, leading on the London Challenge programme. He was subsequently responsible for setting up the government's flagship Teaching Schools programme before being appointed as Managing Director at United Learning, one of the country’s largest academy groups.

Since 2014, Andy has founded Leadership Matters which aims to improve the educational outcomes for pupils by supporting great leadership development. Leadership Matters is a web-based membership organisation that offers school leaders access to high quality online development tools and other leadership articles, videos and blogs.

Check out Andy's website here.

Hetan Shah - Honorary Vice President

For a period, the GA had Honorary Vice Presidents, and they will also feature on the Blog. The current Honorary Vice President is Peter Jackson, who I will mention in a later post. Their role is advisory and to provide a sounding board for GA activity. They have previously attended meetings of Governing Body. I have previously mentioned Doreen Massey, who had this role.

Hetan Shah was an Honorary Vice President for some years.

Hetan is the Chief Executive of the British Academy, a Visiting Professor at King's College London and Deputy Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute. 

He served as Executive Director of the Royal Statistical Society from 2011 to 2019.

Doreen Massey - Honorary Vice President

For a while, the GA has had several Honorary Vice Presidents, and they will also feature on the blog as they offer guidance to the Governing Body, which the President serves on as a Trustee and played a part in the history of the Association.

Doreen Massey was a geographical legend.

When I joined the Geographical Association in 2008, my first meeting, even before I started officially with the GA, was at the Open University with Doreen, Clive Barnett and Joe Smith.  I travelled over to the Open University with David Lambert. I remember being particularly excited as I was just about to embark on a new career after 20 years in the classroom and was suddenly in the company of such wonderful thinkers and listened carefully to what Doreen had to say about the way that the OU and the GA could work together - in the end, our plans never quite came to fruition. Joe Smith has certainly gone on to slightly different things in recent years of course... It was such an exciting time for me personally.

Doreen was such a great sport that she also joined in with our Mission:Explore missions at the University of Derby, flicking the V's to Bryan Ledgard.



Doreen went from Manchester High school for Girls to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she gained a first in geography, and became more politically aware. Between 1968 and 1980 she worked at the Centre for Environmental Studies, researching into urban and regional problems, and a sabbatical enabled her to study for a master’s at the University of Pennsylvania (1971-72). Doreen was a great fan of Liverpool football club and would no doubt have been celebrating their victory in the Premier league last year.
My review of her lecture at the GA Conference is here. It was a wonderful talk which got rave reviews at the time. (PDF download)

I remember going to see Doreen at the BBC as well, for a recording of the Radio 4 Thinking Allowed programme, with Will Self and Richard Sennett. An edited version of their discussions is available here.

I also had a chat with her when I met her with Margaret Roberts at the Derby Conference. I was wearing a Google T-shirt with a map pin and the words 'I am here'. It remains a favourite t-shirt of mine. She saw it and commented on the fact that noone was really anywhere for very long... this was later the theme of her lecture of course.

She was involved in a little posthumous dispute at the University of Oxford when a picture of her was joined by a picture of another Oxford geography graduate Theresa May. This led to a campaign to remove the picture of Theresa May #notallgeographers
Some people wondered how she would have felt about sharing a wall with a picture of a Conservative PM.
There was a tribute to Doreen at the GA Conference the following year.

Check out Doreen's work. There is plenty to go at with an internet search or two.

There are some YouTube clips where you can hear Doreen speak. A few of them are included below.

I remember hearing of Doreen's death. I was awake early at Rhyd-y-Creuau in March 2016 and the news came up on my Twitter feed... the day started and I took a wander in the grounds and thought about what she had achieved. When I told my colleague Claire she was similarly upset at the news.

References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doreen_Massey_(geographer)

An obituary in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/27/doreen-massey-obituary

RGS Obituary

An obituary by Rob Kitchin. This gives a really full picture of her massive contribution to truly radical geography and deep thinking on space and place in the tradition of David Harvey.

Image: Bryan Ledgard / Geographical Association

Memories of Doreen would be very welcome...

Norman Pye - someone who was never President but "should have been"

Updated October 2020

That is according to former President Sheila Jones and several others...
I decided to find a little more about him.
Norman Pye was Professor of Geography, and later Emeritus Professor at the University of Leicester.

Born in Wigan, where he attended the local grammar school, Professor Pye graduated from the University of Manchester in 1935 with a first class honours degree in Geography, followed by a Diploma in Education ( Class I ).

He then pursued postgraduate studies at Cambridge and in 1938 was appointed assistant lecturer at Manchester. Between 1940 and 1946 Professor Pye was seconded to the Admiralty, Hydrographic Department, as Cartographic Officer and upon return to Manchester was made lecturer and in 1953 senior lecturer.
At various times he held visiting Professorial positions at the Universities of Alberta, Edmonton, Vancouver, Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.

Professor Pye’s main research interest was in the field of physical geography particularly climatology, cartography and surveying and he published in all these three sub-fields. He was a member of the 1938 Cambridge expedition to Spitsbergen to study the movement of glaciers and many of its findings are used as the benchmark for several contemporary studies.
In 1946 he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for research in climatology and in 1952 a Fulbright award for research in geomorphology in the Mojave and Sonora deserts, USA.

He also served on the councils of a number of academic societies including the Royal Geographical Society, Geographical Association, Institute of British Geographers and Royal Meteorological Society. Between 1965 and 1979 Professor Pye was editor of Geography and in 1972 he edited the volume, Leicester and its Region, to coincide with the British Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held at the University.

He took over as Editor of 'Geography' from another former President David Leslie Linton.

Throughout his career Professor Pye strove to enhance the reputation of the University and the maintenance of standards during periods of rapid change. Those values that he held so strongly and which guided his contribution to the development of the University were expounded at length in his last seminar to the department in February 1979. From reading Tony Budd’s notes made at the time it is significant that so many of the points he made over a quarter of a century ago are still relevant today; for example,

“the most precious thing in a department is not the gadgetry but the students. I cannot conceive of a University without teaching but without research it would degenerate into a high school” 

“students need to distinguish between discussion (working towards truth) and debate (working towards victory of one’s own argument)” “on University members of staff…….there is a danger of them becoming so expert that they cannot be contradicted but are not worth contradicting. There is always need for stimulating contradictions”

In 1979, he was made an Honorary Vice President of the GA and elected as an Honorary Member in 1983, when Sheila Jones (who mentioned him) was made an Honorary Vice President.



In his retirement Professor Pye remained a great advocate of the University, always keen to hear news of new developments. He was Chairman of Convocation from 1982 to 1985 and a regular supporter of University events including his beloved Wine Club of which he was a founder member and President.

References
https://www.le.ac.uk/ebulletin-archive/ebulletin/people/bereavements/2000-2009/2007/04/nparticle.2007-04-18.3867066183/index.html

Lovely descriptions here:
https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/50105/page/13

Update
A picture of Norman Pye (Honorary Editor, 1965-1979) with Mrs. D M Ellis (Assistant Editor) was included on p.59 of the Balchin Centenary book.

Norman was also mentioned by other Presidents including Richard Daugherty.