1977: New Officers and posts - updated post

Updated October 2020

In 1977, there were big changes afoot at the GA with changes in membership and in the nomination of officers and branch representatives on the GA's council.
This introduced the current system (due to end in a couple of weeks) where a Senior and Junior Vice President of the GA was nominated and elected.
There were also a series of other posts created, and quickly filled.

The Honorary Librarian post was changed to become Library and Information Officer for example. There were also terms added for the length that someone could occupy these posts.

Reference
“The Geographical Association.” Geography, vol. 62, no. 1, 1977, pp. 49–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41415171. Accessed 16 Aug. 2020.




Daugherty, R., Lewis, G., & Mills, D. (1978). The Geographical Association. Geography, 63(2), 126-137. Retrieved August 25, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40568896

Updated 12th October 2020

As seen above, Richard Daugherty was involved in writing the Annual Report of 1977, when he was heavily involved with the GA.

He has very kindly been sending detailed updates to a number of posts on the blog as I got in touch with him earlier in the month.

Here is his update on these new posts, which contain useful additional constitutional detail on this phase of the GA's development.

There were two radical developments in the Association's activities in the mid 1970s both of which, in their very different ways, would have significant impacts on the GA's responsiveness to change in subsequent years. 

One of those developments, publication of 'Teaching Geography' from April 1975, has been well documented and is still central to the GA's work to this day. The other major change, a new constitution for the Association, was just as important but most members would have been unaware of it. 

As Bill Balchin's Centenary History of the GA has recorded (see page 60), the process of change had been initiated in 1973 with the formation of a committee to review the Association's aims and functions. After several years of detailed discussions the new constitution was eventually introduced in 1977. 

The 1977 Annual Report, quoted here, suggests that change would only be justified if it created a service that was both 'more responsive to members' and brought about 'more effective involvement nationally and internationally'. 

I was not a member of the committee drawing up the new constitution but I was, as a Joint Honorary Secretary whose term of office straddled the old and new constitutions, very much involved in implementing it. So in what ways did the Association become more responsive and more effective? 

The three new standing committees - Education, Publications & Communications, Finance & General Purposes - were each remitted to shape GA policy in their respective areas and to make recommendations to Council. From 1977 there would be much fuller discussions than hitherto about policy and strategy. 

To take just one example, the Association's more extensive range of publications from the 1980s on emerged from those discussions, led by the newly created role of Publications Officer (first Rex Beddis, followed by David Boardman). 

The change to an Education Standing Committee came just in time for the GA to become better able to respond, speedily and effectively, to the national debates in England over the decade that followed Prime Minister Callaghan's Ruskin College speech in 1976. Each time a new set of curriculum proposals emerged the Education Standing Committee, chaired initially by Rex Walford and with myself as its secretary, would frame a response. More broadly, the 1977 constitution also ensured that the holding of any of the Association's honorary offices should be time limited to a maximum of six years (except for trustees). 

As Balchin has reported, this brought to an end 'a tradition of individual lifelong service to the Association' and replaced it with 'a relatively rapid turnover of officers to ensure a continued flow of new ideas and prevent any incipient stagnation'. 

Constitutions can be mind numbingly boring documents but they do matter. I have so far not been able to find a record of the members of the 'Organisation and Development Committee' (chaired by Denys Brunsden?) who must have spent many hours shaping and framing that new constitution. But their contribution to the Association's vigorous health in the late 1970s and beyond should not be underestimated.

I shall perhaps try to find out from Denys who was on that committee.

And I have also noted the change to more frequent turnover, rather than the (almost literally life long) service of people such as H J Fleure and others...

The reason for the blog

Why am I writing this blog?

Back in October 2018, I was asked by several colleagues, including former GA Presidents if I would consider putting my name forward to be GA President.
I have had this as an ambition for some time now, having worked at Solly Street for three years, and seen the working of the GA from a different angle, becoming aware of the hard work that goes on day in and day out at HQ. I've also been involved in GA committees for over 15 years. There was also a feeling that very few people were teaching when they became GA President.

In November, I heard that I was going to be taking up the role, and started planning out this blog, which will be a legacy of my Presidential tenure, and hopefully continue to develop as more details on the former Presidents of the Association are added over the years to come.

I started thinking about how many former Presidents were teachers. Not many it turned out.

I found Sheila Jones, who became the first serving teacher to be President in 1977 while at Colston Girls' School in Bristol, and Mike Morrish, who was also teaching at the time he took up the role: at Haberdashers Aske's School. Quite a few Presidents were former teachers before moving into academic geography of course, and there were also retired teachers such as Sydney Suggate who took up the role. I think other more recent Presidents also have some teaching aspects to their work when they were Presidents, but need to go into that in a little more detail.

Having started to research the lives and contributions of all of the past Presidents, I fleshed out some of their biographies, and links to the development of the Association itself. Some trends started to emerge in terms of links to the RGS-IBG, LSE, Oxford University, IoE at UCL and a few other organisations.

There are a few sources of information available for those wanting to find out more about the GA.

The JSTOR copies of 'Geography' and 'The Geographical Teacher' available to subscribers, provide details from the AGMs and other meetings which were posted in these journals, and many Presidents' Addresses to Conference (or these AGMs) are available to read and give a flavour of the development of the Association, and the way that it works. I also had Balchin's Centenary of the Association, and Rex Walford's history of School Geography (which the GA was intertwined with)

Each of these Presidents spent a year leading committees, and providing their own particular steer on the 'direction of travel' of the Association's work.

This blog is also a chance to remind people of how the Geographical Association came about, and what shaped the current format of the GA. It has had a HQ in several cities, and connected with many others.

Here's the news on my school's Facebook page as well, for more details:


At the GA Conference 2019, I launched the blog and let people know that it was available to view in my Teachmeet Presentation, which can be seen below:

Learning a lesson from history from GeoBlogs

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If you know more about any President, please get in touch.