British Association (BAAS) Section E (and L)

From a PhD thesis, and discovered while searching for information on Richard Arman Gregory. It has plenty about him here, as well as references to John Linton Myres, Halford MacKinder and others as part of his work with the British Association for Advancement of Sciences - founded in 1831.

Section E was Geography.

Chapter XII is particularly relevant for Geography, although there are over 150 references to the term.

It repeats something I've read elsewhere:

The Royal Geographical Society (founded in 1830), which together with the British Association had been instrumental in establishing geography at the ancient universities, set up the Geographical Association in 1893 to represent secondary school geography teachers. 

Which is not the case of course...

It describes the GA as acting as a "pressure group" for school geography.

Thec hairman of the Manchester branch of the Geographical Association, T. W. F. Parkinson was elected Secretary of the new Manchester Geographical Society (still in existence today)

In a conference in 1919, Parkinson delivered a speech where he emphasised Geography's links with Empire - not everyone agreed that focussing on this was a good idea:

C. B Fawcett said that geography's sphere of interest was the whole world, not the Empire.

The Prince of Wales also appears speaking up for Geography.

Another pair of former GA Presidents get a mention here: Halford MacKinder and Sir John Russell.

H.J. Fleure then pops up!

Various committees and Sections discussed and passed around the idea of a proper report into school geography. It ended up in the hands of T Percy Nunn.

He chaired a committee with the following members:

Respectively W.H. Barker, L. Brooks, H.J.Fleure, O.J.R. Howarth, H.J. Mackinder, J.L. Myres andJ.F. Unstead; G.H.J. Adlam, D. Berridge, C.E. Browne, Richard Gregory, E. Sharwood Smith, E.R. Thomas and Miss O. Wright.

One woman only.. and Richard Gregory was not listed as a geographer at the time...

Some very familiar names and almost all of them GA Presidents in their time - that seems to have been the route into the Presidency at that time.

Speaking at the end of the First World War

Source: PhD Thesis - University of Leeds - 1978 - Peter Michael Digby Collins

https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/4621/1/uk_bl_ethos_574464.pdf

In 2009, BAAS became the British Science Association (BSA). The new association has expanded on the original mission of putting science at the center of society, culture and education, and is focused on increasing the number, range and diversity of people actively engaged with scientific studies, activities and developments.

Other reading:

Charles W. J. Withers, et al. “Geography’s Other Histories? Geography and Science in the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831-c.1933.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 31, no. 4, 2006, pp. 433–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4639988. Accessed 24 Aug. 2023.

A great many former GA Presidents were involved here, and received grants from the BAAS.

See the Grants page in the article above for some examples...

Here's an extract from the table:

For more on the BAAS I referred to a paper by Stanley Henry Beaver (also a former GA President with his own entry on the blog...)

Section E was set up in 1851.

Early meetings are described here:

There was a close link with exploration and travel...

Geographical education then emerged as a new facet of the work of Section E, again thanks to former GA Presidents:

In 1885, Scott Keltie, who had been appointed Inspector of geographical education' by the RGS in the previous year, spoke on 'Geographical education'; he criticized heavily the very unsatisfactory position of the subject, which 'scarcely counts at all as a subject of education', largely owing to overcrowded school curricula and the ignorance of teachers, an ignorance that was hardly surprising in view of the absence of the subject from universities. 

In 1887, the Section Presidential Address, by Col. Sir Charles Warren, was on 'The teaching of geography'. He defined the subject as 'all that knowledge of common things connected with the surface of the earth, including the seas and the atmosphere, which it necessary for every human being to be acquainted with in order that progress in other knowledge may be acquired and acquaintance with the world be made which will fit man for life in any capacity'. 

He stressed the need 'to train the minds of youth in the power of observation', and in regretting the absence of geography from the public schools, emphasized the importance of geographical knowledge to government servants. 

At the same meeting, H. J. Mackinder, a young Oxford University Extension lecturer, was speaking on 'Geography at the universities', and J. J. Cardwell on 'A natural method of teaching geography'. Mackinder was about to take up his appointment as Reader at Oxford; he referred to the necessity to teach physiography, because the schools did not do it; but, he went on, 'physiography is not geography; it lacks the topography, which is the essential element in geography'. 

This paper is packed with former GA Presidents.

Source:

Beaver, S. H. “Geography in the British Association for the Advancement of Science.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 148, no. 2, 1982, pp. 173–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/633769. Accessed 24 Aug. 2023.

Freemasonry and the GA

I noted when doing some research on Presidents that several of them were members of the Freemasons, which was only open to men at the time, but now has parallel branches for women.

Sir Thomas Henry Holland (1938) and Sir Richard Arman Gregory (1924) were both members of the Imperial Lodge college of Freemasons.

I wondered to what degree membership of the Freemasons may have been a factor in selection to the GA Presidency, if at all. I guess this not something that we are going to find out, and it may not be relevant at all. I also think it's fair to assume that many organisations would have had Freemasons at this time.

I know very little about this, and it may be those were the only two Presidents who were Freemasons and they didn't even know each other, but I'm guessing there may have been others, given the high profile of many of the Presidents in the first third of the 20th Century in particular.

More information would be gratefully received if anyone knows anything further.

Update
Doing some image searches for various Presidents, I found that John Linton Myres became a Freemason in 1899 and also came across some images of badges and recognition of work that he had been awarded.

1924: Professor Sir Richard Arman Gregory - (1st Baronet)

Updated August 2023

The surname Gregory has cropped up a few times in the Presidential ranks.

Sir Richard Arman Gregory became the GA President in 1924.
He had a background as an astronomer and scientist rather than a geographer.

He was also editor of 'Nature' during the time of his Presidency, and helped secure the reputation of the journal as a learned source.

He had an inauspicious start, as the son of a cobbler. He started out working as an apprentice in a boot and shoe factory, before moving into a laboratory as an assistant. He was also a Science demonstrator at HM Dockyard School in Portsmouth (an intriguing title).
He eventually became assistant to Sir Norman Lockyer (editor of 'Nature', and later became his assistant on 'Nature', before eventually becoming editor himself from 1919-1939, when the journal was growing in prominence.

He published a book in 1894 called:
The Planet Earth: An Astronomical Introduction To Geography which sounds useful.

According to his biography:

After 1919 (when he was knighted) Gregory became more and more a public figure. With his boundless energy and curiosity and his optimism about new causes, he was a member of some seventy organisations and served as president of twenty-five.

He was a serial President it seems, as were quite a few GA Presidents.

He was a member of over seventy different organizations, and of these he became Vice-President of twelve and President of twenty-five. 

1924, when Gregory was in office, was described in 'The Geographical Teacher' as being "one of the most difficult and depressing in the educational world", which threw up a bit of a mystery as to why. I looked back through other issues, but couldn't find out why, other than perhaps some prominent deaths amongst GA officers, and the growing sense of financial issues that would result in the depression of the 1930s...

The article also welcomes Gregory, and thanks Sir John Russell for his time in office.


Gregory's Presidential Address was on the theme of British Climate through history.

It starts with a curious phrase for me: that he had feelings of 'diffidence and satisfaction'. I feel proud and excited...
Firstly he says that he "offered himself for election", so we have now moved from Council deciding, to some sort of election or choice (although not yet amongst all the membership I don't think...)
The topic of his lecture would certainly have been of interest to one of my lecturers at Huddersfield Polytechnic back in the early 1980s: Lance Tufnell, who spent many years reconstructing past climates, and wrote widely on the topic.



He goes on to talk about the Association's great work in supporting school geography, and moving from "a voice crying in the wilderness" to "the established centre of geographical progress in instruction in school, college or university".

It also mentions an early connection with the GA back in 1908, when he gave a lecture as part of a GA organised series.




In 1925, he was thanked by the Association for his support, and also served on the Executive for the year after his Presidency.

Apart from that, I couldn't find further mentions of what Gregory might have done during his time as President. Would be interested to find out more.

The University of Sussex keeps an archive of his letters and correspondence in an archive called the Gregory Papers, should anyone want to delve deeper than I intend to do for this blog post.

In particular he was the moving spirit of the British Science Guild until its merger with the British Association for the Advancement of Science - to which he also had a very close attachment, serving as president throughout the Second World War.

He was created a baronet in 1931, and elected, for 'conspicuous services to the cause of science', a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1933

In 1924, when Gregory was the President, the GA was in a strong position, with a membership, according to the Annual Report, of 4,610 (up 100 on the previous year). The GA has a library of over 500 Lantern Slides and an active library loan system. This year also saw the death of Grenville Cole (President in 1919). There was also mention of Frank Debenham (another future President) for assisting with the delivery of the Herbertson Memorial lecture in that year.

Gregory sadly died in 1952 after a short illness.

His obituary by the Royal Society stated: 

"Gregory was always very interested in the international contacts of science, and in the columns of Nature he always gave generous space to accounts of the activities of the International Scientific Unions."

Image credit:
Sir Richard Arman Gregory, 1st Bt
by Lafayette
whole-plate nitrate negative, 16 March 1928
NPG x49604
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Image sourced from National Portrait Gallery, and shared under CC license
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/use-this-image.php?mkey=mw177784

References

More details of the University of Sussex's collection of papers is here: http://www.thekeep.info/collections/getrecord/GB181_SxMs14
Images: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp01900/sir-richard-arman-gregory-1st-bt

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Richard_Gregory,_1st_Baronet

I edited this entry to add the fact that he was the GA President.

Books
Discovery: https://archive.org/details/discoveryorspiri00greguoft/page/n8
https://www.amazon.com/Sir-Richard-Gregory-life-work/dp/B0007KFICI

Presidential Address: Gregory, Richard. “BRITISH CLIMATE IN HISTORIC TIMES.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 12, no. 4, 1924, pp. 248–258. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40556482.

As always, if anyone knows anything more about Professor Gregory, and his connections to the GA, please get in touch.

"Science - ranked with arts and religion as the guide and expression of man's fearless quest for truth."

Richard Arman Gregory

Updated August 2023

Not sure how I missed this Royal Society biography first time round.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1953.0007

It includes a picture of Gregory later in life, and a signature.

It has a great deal of information about his life and exploits.

Following details and image opposite from that document:

Other offices held:

Presidency of the Ethical Union and his Vice-Presidency of the Rationalist Press Association; but that his interest in religion had been maintained is clear from his membership of the National Unitarian Fellowship and his Vice-Presidency of the World Congress of Faiths, the body founded by Sir Francis Younghusband.

In 1889 Gregory returned to South Kensington to work under the Solar Physics Committee as a computer and as assistant to J. N. (later Sir Norman) Lockyer. During the three years that he spent at South Kensington Gregory was engaged for the first and only time in his life in active scientific work, but it was mainly of a routine nature: measurement of the positions and areas of sunspots, examination of the spectra of spots and prominences, study of the direct heating effect of solar radiation, comparison of the solar spectrum with those of various elements, photography of the flame spectra of elements —these would be the lines upon which he was working. 

For twenty-one years (1897-1918) he was Professor of Astronomy at Queen’s College, Harley Street, London. 

He also lectured in 1918 to troops in France and Belgium, under the auspices of the Y.M.C.A., becoming Chairman of its Education Committee and later, for many years, Vice-Chairman of its National Council

It has been said that Gregory made Nature a journal of science, published for men of science and written by men of science. In his farewell message on his retirement from the editorial chair {Nature, 7 January 1939), he wrote: ‘Throughout its existence Nature has had the active support of leading workers in scientific fields in many parts of the world. The aim has always been to record results of research of wide interest or particular importance, wherever it has been carried out and to present authoritative thought and opinion upon progressive scientific developments and their influence . . . My particular mission has been to make men of science conscious of their power and influence in shaping civilized life.’

He was knighted in 1919 after organizing for the British Science Guild a successful Exhibition of British Scientific Products; he became a Baronet in 1931. He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Leeds, Bristol and St Andrews. He was elected to the Athenaeum under Rule II. Perhaps the honour which pleased him most was his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1933 under section 12 of Chapter I of the Statutes for ‘conspicuous service to the cause of science’.

I wonder whether I can find a cheap copy of this book: