1938: Sir Thomas Henry Holland KCSI KCIE FRS

Last updated October 2019

Thomas Henry Holland was another GA President with a background in geology.
He worked for the Geological Survey of India before returning to Scotland for a career in University administration and other work.

From his Wikipedia entry - shared under CC license

Thomas Holland was born on 22 November 1868 in Helston, Cornwall.

In 1884, Thomas won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Science, graduating with a first class degree in Geology. The dean at the Royal College of Science, Thomas Henry Huxley, made a great impression on Holland. He stayed on as an assistant to Professor John Wesley Judd and was awarded a Berkeley Fellowship at Owens College, Manchester, in 1889

At South Kensington, Holland took a First-Class Associateship in Geology with Honours (1888), winning also the Murchison Medal and Prize.

In 1890, Holland was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Geological Survey of India and curator of the Geological Museum and Laboratory. In 1903, he was appointed Director of the Geological Survey of India and in 1904 he was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1908, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (KCIE) for his services to the Geological Survey of India. 
He returned to Britain in 1910.

Holland was Rector of Imperial College London from 1922 to 1929 and Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1929 to 1944, during which time he took on the GA Presidency.

His Presidential address was on 'The Geography of Minerals'




In it, he discussed the possible lead famine that might occur in the future, given the rate at which it was being used.



Derek Spooner was the GA President in 2000. I contacted him but he had no further comment to make. :)

Holland was active during the 2nd World War, when there were several caretaker Presidents of the GA who had extendeed terms, and the Association had some challenges - more on those to come in some future posts on the way that the GA dealt with the challenges of a second global conflict of the century. Fleure was a constant of course during that period, as outlined in Balchin's Centenary volume.

His GA obituary was published in 1947, and written by Alan G Ogilvie.


A little brief so far this entry.

References

Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Holland

I amended this page to add his GA Presidency as usual.

Royal Society obituary: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsbm.1948.0021

A later picture taken during his time in Edinburgh: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/sir-thomas-henry-holland-18681947-94072

Ogilvie, Alan G. “SIR THOMAS H. HOLLAND, K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S.—1868–1947.” Geography, vol. 32, no. 3, 1947, pp. 139–139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40565037.
Presidential Address: HOLLAND, THOMAS H. “THE GEOGRAPHY OF MINERALS.” Geography, vol. 24, no. 1, 1939, pp. 1–9. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40560828.

If anyone knows more about this President's contributions to the GA, please get in touch.

Image source: Wikimedia - CC licensed

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.