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.
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.
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.
From a piece on Emyr Estyn Evans.
"When Estyn Evans (EEE) completed his honours degree course in Geography and Anthropology with H. J. Fleure in 1925, Fleure's Department at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and P. M. Roxby's Department at the University of Liveipool were then the only two honours Geography Schools in the British Isles. Fleure had invited Sir John Linton Myres to act as external examiner. Myres realised that EEE had exceptional ability and suggested that he did his graduate work with him at New College, but EEE never got to Oxford - he was found to be suffering from tuberculosis and spent the next months in a sanatorium near Ironbridge. Fleure rescued him and arranged that he be looked after physically and mentally by R. M. Fleming's medical friend."
"Throughout the 1920s, the battle for recognition of Geography as a university discipline was being bitterly fought. Geography grew out of various university departments, some out of Geology and others out of History, thus there was diversity of input to the new schools. H. J. Fleure FRS had previously been Professor of Biology, and EEE found that the knowledge he acquired from his close contact with archaeologists over this period to be an extension of what he had learnt in Fleure's Department. He began to think like an archaeologist and to see man's development in a context of thousands of years. However, EEE always felt that he was a professional Geographer and archaeology was his relaxation - EEE was back at Aberystwyth, working under Fleure's supervision on geographical items for Encyclopaedia Brittanica."
"He founded a local branch of the Geograpbical Association shortly after his arrival. In 1917, after the sudden death of Professor Herbertson, Fleure took over the management of the Geographical Association which was then at a low ebb. He appointed R. M. Fleming as assistant secretary and under her management membership rose rapidly. The office remained at Aberystwyth until Fleure moved to Manchester in 1930. What was more natural than that a student who had grown up in the shadow of its head office and had been appointed to promote Geography teaching, should establish a branch in a new area? His objectives were to facilitate meetings between Geography teachers and perhaps to help raise the standard of their teaching and the quality of students entering the University. His aim was to promote the quality and status of his subject and not to glorify the state of Northern Ireland as Stout suggests."
"Stout says that EEE was 'Ireland's only professional geographer at this stage ' - this is not true. I do not know the position in the Republic. J. W. Darbyshire (an honours graduate of Liverpool University) had come to Belfast's Royal Academical Institution two years previously. Mr Murray lectured at Stranmillis Training College and there were geography teachers at Belfast's Royal Academy, Methodist College and other secondary schools and Thomas Dunne at the Technical College. After he had founded the local branch of the Geographical Association, teachers met monthly - there were lectures and excursions, and this kindled friendships and mutual support that became the strength of the Geography Department.
In the early 1930s, EEE ran a series of popular Geography Summer Schools. During the first years EEE was laying the foundations of what became one of the largest and happiest departments in the University it attracted students from Britain, Europe and overseas. He had to devise courses, compose and deliver lectures, supervise practical work, fight his corner at the University's Faculty and other meetings, all with no help - not even a lab assistant! In his foreword to the 1978 Jubilee Publication of the Geography Department, Eric Ashby (Lord Ashby of Brandon and Chancellor of Queen's) wrote of EEE: 'He had to establish the discipline of Geography against material resistances, such as shortage of cash and space, and psychological resistance. He succeeded also in mobilizing some of the expertise of the Department to tackle important social and economic problems in the community".
"At the end of the first year, in July 1929, he joined H. J.Fleure, R. M. Fleming, and other British geographers on the Llandovety Castle, and sailed with the British contingent to the British Association meeting in South Africa. He did not publish an account of the experience but later donated his diary notebook of the trip and his sketch book to the Royal Geographical Society. I have the letter the Society sent him expressing their thanks."
Source:
Patrick Geddes - Renascence Man from Stephen Robinson on Vimeo.
Patrick Geddes was an amazing late Victorian polymath who had far reaching ideas about the environment and Man's place within it. I was commissioned by McManus Galleries, Dundee to film and direct a short documentary to accompany an exhibition about his professional life.
Updated October 2023
Last updated September 2023
