The Geographical Field Group (GFG)

I was directed to search for information about this group after reading a paper by Richard Clarke.

This links to my entry on K C Edwards.

GFG is mentioned in Edwards' papers.

Professor Edwards was keenly committed to the promotion of serious field studies as an important element of undergraduate study. He was for many years the chairman of the Le Play Society's Students' Group, before becoming president of its successor, the Geographical Field Group, after the war. He remained president until his death. He also held the presidency of the Nottingham branch of the Geographical Association. From 1937 to 1958, he was convenor of the Standing Conference of Heads of Geography Departments in British Universities.

His wide geographical knowledge of the East Midlands led to his being released on secondment between 1944 and 1946 as the Regional Research Officer for the newly-established Ministry of Town and Country Planning. In 1956, he launched The East Midlands Geographer and in 1966 he edited Nottingham and its region for the British Association's Nottingham annual meeting of that year. In 1967, Professor Edwards was nominated to the East Midlands Regional Economic Planning Council, and his services to planning and the region were recognised by a CBE in 1970.

As a result of pre-war field studies and doctoral research, Edwards became an authority on the geography of Luxembourg. This experience was used in wartime intelligence. He subsequently initiated and edited the National Atlas of Luxembourg, published in 1971. He was also familiar with Poland through field study and led the first official post-war delegation of university geographers there in 1959. Professor Edwards died in Beeston, Nottinghamshire on 7 May 1982.

The Edwards Resource Centre at the Geography Department is named after him. They also offer Edwards Prizes.

This UoN Blog explores his fieldwork and explains the link above to the name of the university's resource centre.

In the 1930s Nottingham lecturer K.C. (Kenneth Charles) Edwards was ‘in the forefront of those geographers who were actively promoting field studies and making them an integral part of academic training’, developing a range of local and European ‘field camps’. That training – which today might range from learning how to conduct interviews or retrieve archival information, take soil samples or measure water quality – also equips geography graduates for a world of work beyond University research.

Teaching through fieldwork can also help develop an important ethical concern that reaches beyond the processes we might be studying to consider what it means to research and work in a place. Edwards’ local commitment, for example, bore fruit in 1962 in a volume of the New Naturalist series devoted to The Peak District, with contributions on geology from the former head of the Department H.H. Swinnerton. 

 It was also seen outside of the University, where Edwards supported the work of the Ramblers’ Federation and the Youth Hostels Association and assisted the Nottinghamshire Footpaths Preservation Society to plot rights of way on six-inch scale maps

Sources:

https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/472738d20933a32c722007f440d8429613fe887bf05a8794e65845e7b16534e1/588348/Anteric_Clarke_2009_as_published_version.pdf  

https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/2019/09/04/coal-cotton-and-the-value-of-local-fieldwork/

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/about/history.aspx

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/5234/1/5234.pdf - work in Poland (PDF download)

Edwards was one of several former GA Presidents to contribute a volume to this well known series of books with distinctive colours.


K.C. Edwards (1962) The New Naturalist: The Peak District (London: Collins)

Fanny Copeland and the Le Play Society

I didn't know anything about Fanny Copeland until I came across this article while looking for something on the work of Laurence 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:

Dudley Stamp (1933) 'Slovene Studies'

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. 

More memories of Fulwood Road

My thanks to Hilary Bradley (nee Todd) for sending me some memories of her time as a GA Staff member.

My apologies also for not having posted them at the time as well. I rediscovered them when looking for something else recently.

I was a member of the GA staff, starting in September 1969 and leaving in spring of 1974 (cutting my ties with Sheffield). 

I ran the library and information service, with support from the Hon Librarian Mr (Jim) Jay (we were so formal back then, I had to look up his first name!). 

He was a lovely man and very supportive. I shared my office on the ground floor with the delightful Mrs (Mary) Ellis who was the editor of Geography. 

 My role also included editing assorted publications, including British landscapes through maps (series editor Professor KC Edwards of Nottingham University). 

We would travel to the Peak District to discuss issues in some convivial pub or other! 

I launched a new publication – Resources for geography - which would seem to still going strong in a new guise. And I shall not forget compiling the Dudley Stamp Memorial Index to Geography. 

All the entries were hand-written on index cards which were then alphabetised by computer at the University. So revolutionary was this technology that we wrote an appendix to the index explaining how it was done! (I was taken to see the computer, my second encounter with one – it filled an entire room.)

343 Fulwood Road was a substantial Victorian or Edwardian mansion set in a large garden in a very upmarket suburb of Sheffield. 

The Fleure Library took up most of the ground floor and the admin team worked upstairs. 

My office had a wonderful outlook over the garden – it was an idyllic place to work in, if a little unreal. It was a real treat then to travel to London for regular meetings of the executive committee, usually held in a room at LSE or King's, and the annual conference. These were happy times – a sense of shared purpose, a passion for geography, many wonderful and inspiring people. I looked up to them all as demi-gods.

I need a bit more time to put together a cast list of who was involved at that time. Sheila Jones is the person I best remember. As President she was unique as she was a hands-on secondary school teacher ‘working at the chalk face’ as she put it in her presidential address (I still remember that much!). 

All of her predecessors were in higher education I think. As most of our members were in secondary education, she must have been a real role model.

If this post has prompted some memories I'd love to hear from you.

British Geography: 1918-1945

This book was edited by Robert Steel, who was GA President in 1973.

There are several chapters written by former GA Presidents, such as K C Edwards.

Click here to access a PDF of the book.

There is quite a bit here about the idea of regions: something tied to the work of Herbertson, Fleure and R J Unstead.

This includes terms such as 'stows' and 'tracts'.

The GA also had a committee on regions for a while. There is mention in this part of the book of Leonard Brooks, who also later became a GA President (and about whom I know relatively little), and also mentions the work of Eva Taylor, who I need to investigate in more detail I think.

Spring Conference Programmes

A few from the archives at Solly Street.

Spring Conferences were a theme for some decades. Some well known names and former Presidents involved in these particular events. More detail to come as time permits once I visit Solly Street again.

The last one was held in the year I was born. Note the address of the GA at the time: at the Park Branch Library on Duke Street.

Also note Marguerita Oughton, who has been mentioned on the blog.

1967: The Broadening Vista

I came across reference to this paper in Robert Steel's obituary of Kenneth Charles Edwards. It was read at a joint meeting of the GA, RGS and IBG in 1967.



here's the paper, in 'Geography' - it's worth a read via JSTOR.




References

EDWARDS, K. C. “The Broadening Vista.” Geography, vol. 52, no. 3, 1967, pp. 245–259. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40566323. Accessed 4 Apr. 2020.

1963: Professor Kenneth Charles Edwards, CBE

Updated October 2023

Professor Kenneth Charles Edwards was an academic geographer, with a particular interest in fieldwork and  biogeography, who was closely associated with the University of Nottingham.

He was born in Hampshire in 1904, and went to Itchen College and the University of Southampton.

He started out at as an Assistant Lecturer in Geography, as far back as 1926 at the University of Nottingham, where he stayed until his retirement in 1970.

He was a Fellow of the RGS too. He was also President of the IBG in 1960 - another GA President to have been closely linked with that organisation.

He was appointed to the first Chair of Geography in the University of Nottingham in 1949 and held the post until his retirement in 1970.

His Presidential address was titled: "The importance of Biogeography" and was delivered at the London School of Economics.
He was the President in the year of my birth.
Image from Balchin Centenary volume.

From Robert Steel's obituary:


In his Presidential Address, he described the importance of this branch of the subject as connecting lots of others.


It was interesting to see the use of the Wallace line, developed by Alfred Russell Wallace was still used at the time, and featured in his talk.

A collection of essays in his honour was published in 1970.

He was the editor of 'Geography' for a period.

Edwards also contributed to the classic Collins illustrated series of regional geographies with a book on an area I know very well: 'The Peak District' - a book I am sure I have read before in that edition.

He also contributed pieces to the Royal Meteorological Society's journal.

He was the editor of "British Landscapes through Maps".

He worked in local planning as well, getting involved in planning decisions in the East Midlands. He helped set up the 'East Midland Geographer' journal, and was also active in the Le Play Society, which has been featured on the blog several times before.

He died in Beeston, Notts in 1982, apparently "peacefully in his sleep", which is a good a way as any to go.

An obituary was published in Geography in the same year, and Robert Steel also wrote about his life and work.



A memorial lecture was announced later that year too, as reported in 'Geography', as part of the Nottingham GA Branch. He gave more than 50 years of service to the GA Branch. I wonder whether this annual lecture is still part of the Nottingham GA Branch programme.


References

Professor Edwards' address can be read here:
EDWARDS, K. C. “The Importance of Biogeography.” Geography, vol. 49, no. 2, 1964, pp. 85–97. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40565787

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.49705623708

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/about/history.aspx

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Geographical-essays-honour-K-Edwards/dp/0900572159

Edwards, K. C. “THE NEW TOWNS OF BRITAIN.” Geography, vol. 49, no. 3, 1964, pp. 279–285. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40566379
Papers: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/bbf12dfb-1e04-3f1e-a5ee-9592722edfc7

Obituary, written by another GA President Stanley Beaver:

Beaver, S. H. “Obituary: Professor K. C. EDWARDS CBE, MA, PhD FRGS (1904-1982).” Geography, vol. 67, no. 3, 1982, pp. 267–267. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40570571

Steel, Robert W. “Kenneth Charles Edwards, 1904-1982.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 8, no. 1, 1983, pp. 115–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/622282. Accessed 4 Apr. 2020.
From the JISC archives, some details:

Kenneth Charles Edwards was born in Hampshire in 1904 and educated at Itchen Grammar School and University College Southampton. He joined University College Nottingham in 1926 to teach as an assistant lecturer in the department of geography and geology. When the department divided, Edwards became lecturer in charge of geography. He was promoted to a readership in 1939 and in 1948 was elected to the newly-independent University of Nottingham's first Chair of Geography. Beyond his subject responsibilities at the university, Edwards was also chairman of the University Club and the first Dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences.

Professor Edwards was keenly committed to the promotion of serious field studies as an important element of undergraduate study. He was for many years the chairman of the Le Play Society's Students' Group, before becoming president of its successor, the Geographical Field Group, after the war. He remained president until his death. He also held the presidency of the Nottingham branch of the Geographical Association. From 1937 to 1958, he was convenor of the Standing Conference of Heads of Geography Departments in British Universities.

His wide geographical knowledge of the East Midlands led to his being released on secondment between 1944 and 1946 as the Regional Research Officer for the newly-established Ministry of Town and Country Planning. In 1956, he launched The East Midlands Geographer and in 1966 he edited Nottingham and its region for the British Association's Nottingham annual meeting of that year. In 1967, Professor Edwards was nominated to the East Midlands Regional Economic Planning Council, and his services to planning and the region were recognised by a CBE in 1970.

As a result of pre-war field studies and doctoral research, Edwards became an authority on the geography of Luxembourg. This experience was used in wartime intelligence. He subsequently initiated and edited the National Atlas of Luxembourg, published in 1971. He was also familiar with Poland through field study and led the first official post-war delegation of university geographers there in 1959. Professor Edwards died in Beeston, Nottinghamshire on 7 May 1982.

Economic Planning Councils were established by the UK Government in 1964. They were responsible to the Department of Economic Affairs and replaced the regional boards operated by the Ministry of Production and then the Board of Trade. The East Midlands regional council was based in Nottingham and was active in economic planning and development in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Rutland and Northamptonshire. The council investigated a broad range of issues including new towns, sewage, rivers, and housing.
He was pictured in  Balchin's Centenary volume as shown at the top of the entry.

Articles in 'Geography'
Edwards, K. C. “CHANGING GEOGRAPHICAL PATTERNS IN LINCOLNSHIRE.” Geography, vol. 39, no. 2, 1954, pp. 78–90. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40564570.

British Geography 1918-1945, Editted by Robert.W Steel - published in 1987.
Chapter 12 was by J A Patmore, where he gave a personal perspective on the period.
He described Kenneth Edwards as "a patient and courteous external examiner of a postgraduate thesis, always anxious to retain the link with the student".

Updated August 2021

He seems to have been an expert on the country of Luxembourg.

https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/bbf12dfb-1e04-3f1e-a5ee-9592722edfc7 

Updated July 2022

In 1970, a collection of essays in his honour was published by the University of Nottingham.

The foreword to this book turns out to have the best biography of him that I have found.

The book also describes a little about his time as President of the GA, where he helped "supervise the move to a new headquarters".

If anyone has further information about Professor Edwards please get in touch so I can add more detail to this post.

Updated August 2022

Professor Edwards delivered the 15th Herbertson Memorial Lecture in May 1973.

Updated October 2023

I am now researching the Geographical Research Group... that Edwards was closely connected with.

Thought for the Day

"...like most academic geographers I gave regular support to the Geographical Association. It was our own organisation... I responded to its needs whenever I could"

This quote is attributed to Kenneth Charles Edwards, former GA President.

British Geography 1918-1945, Edited by Robert.W Steel - published in 1987.
Chapter 12 was by J A Patmore, where he gave a personal perspective on the period.

1960: A note on teacher training

A report of a discussion on teacher training was published in Geography in 1960.

I liked this section:



Given the growing number of entry points into teaching and different pathways and providers I wonder whether this would be possible today.

References
Jay, L. J. “The Training of Geographers. Report of a Discussion on Specialization in the Training of Geographers and the Teaching of Geography in Schools.” Geography, vol. 45, no. 1/2, 1960, pp. 120–122. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40565119