1955: Leonard Sydney Suggate

Last updated August 2023

Leonard Sydney Suggate, who became GA President in 1955 published several regional Geography books along with L Dudley Stamp.

The 1950s were interesting times for the GA in the post-war period, as with the years following the First World War, when many changes happened as a result of the recovery from war.

Suggate originally worked in the printing trade, but then studied psychology before taking the University of London's Teacher's Diploma in geography.

This led to him becoming a teacher, a fairly rare beast as we have seen so far with the blog. 

Few teachers become GA Presidents historically.

Suggate taught geography at Dorking High School, and later at St. Clement Danes Grammar School during the First World War (eventually retiring from there in 1949), which means he is one of a minority of people who had substantial experience of teaching geography before becoming President.

He took over the Presidency six years after retiring from what seems to have been an outstanding teaching career at a number of schools, and it is great to see that someone who was predominantly in the classroom for their career was able to step up to the role.

He was very much influenced by the 'new' geography of Halford MacKinder, and used these ideas in his teaching as well (although by now they were not as new as they once were), writing about them in his work.

He also attended lectures by Mackinder, Garwood, Lyde and Unstead - familiar names from this blog. The War also provided for him an opportunity to radically rethink school geography. This is great to see someone taking on the chance to hear the important people of the time, and factor those ideas into his practice - something which teachers of today do with some success, building on the evidence of research and taking inspiration from academic geographers and practitioners.

There are several contributions that Suggate made to geography teaching in the post-war period.
He wrote some of the first textbooks for the new analytical geography, such as 'Africa' - pictured to the right (one of the first school texts on the continent), and which ran to several editions.

He also campaigned for the use of maps and photos to be made available to candidates in school geography examinations, as well as greater use of visual aids in teaching.

He served concurrently on the Council of the RGS as well as the GA, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1921. Another GA President to have a strong connection with the RGS.

He was also a Chief Examiner for the London General School Certificate - another GA President with  significant examining experience as well.
He served on the RGS Education Committee as well, which is of interest as another connection between the two organisations. The work of the RGS's Education Committee continues to be important, and I was involved in supporting the application of several representatives for RGS Council positions in the last few years.

Suggate attended the GA Conference every year apparently, "pipe in hand" - no smoking allowed these days of course.

He was also a Labour party councillor for Hendon.

In 1928, he started to make some changes at Clement Danes School.

When the school moved to a new site, Suggate created a special "Geography room" with a light table (which I remember from geography classrooms I sat in during the 1970s) and cases for equipment and showing artefacts.

I liked the story from his obituary, regarding his apparently indicipherable handwriting. A student asked what he had written at the bottom of their work, to which he replied "you must improve your handwriting, obviously...."

One of the projects that he started (along with another President Leonard Brooks was to develop a scheme where schools could "adopt" ships and send letters to their Captains. It was called the Ship Adoption Society. This has been featured in more detail in the entry for Leonard Brooks, as he mentioned it in his Presidential Address.

Also in 1955, he attended the 125th Anniversary dinner of the Royal Geographical Society, along with other former Presidents such as L Dudley Stamp and J A Steers.

His Presidential year's conference is also described here - in this Nature piece.

Suggate wrote a series of books, which went into several editions.
He described his Presidential election as "at once an exciting and sobering elevation", which I sympathised with.

His Presidential Address was on the theme of geography teaching in Grammar Schools, making it of particular relevance to his audience no doubt.


Two years after completing his GA Presidency, Suggate and his wife emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 67, to join their two sons. 

There, he was also (at that age) Secretary of the Second Triennial Conference of the New Zealand Geographical Association, and continued to write for books. A well deserved and long retirement was enjoyed.


He died in 1970 - another GA President to live to an old age (81) and with 60 years of service to the GA.

I am grateful to Fiona Hirst, Archivist at Clement Danes School for the wonderful image of Leonard from the school magazine at the top of this entry. She very kindly sent me a range of documents and other information to help add detail to what was previously quite a slight entry on the blog compared to some of the previous ones.

An obituary was published in 'Geography' in 1971, written by A D Nicholls, who was a long standing colleagues as well as also being a Former GA President by that time - he is yet to appear here.



References

No Wikipedia entry available. Perhaps a further extension of this project would be to create them for the missing GA Presidents.

Nicholls, A. D. “LEONARD S. SUGGATE, B.Sc., A.K.C. 1889-1970.” Geography, vol. 56, no. 2, 1971, pp. 152–153. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40567514.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.224015/page/n5 - one of Suggate's books

SUGGATE, L.S. Aspects of Geography Teaching in the Grammar School Geography 1956 41 1-14

https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-78392752/oskar-h-k-spate-1911-2000 - a pupil of Suggate's remembers his teaching

“The 125th Anniversary Dinner.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 121, no. 3, 1955, pp. 392–404. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1790929.

Something in the IoE archives: https://archive.ioe.ac.uk/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo==%27IE/JUB/B/1%27)

R. J. Harrison Church. “Obituary: Leonard Sydney Suggate, BSC, AKC.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 137, no. 1, 1971, pp. 136–137. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1795429.
Africa Book: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.227333

If anyone knows anything else about this President, please get in touch. This is a relatively brief entry.

Thanks to Fiona Hirst for the additional details and image from the school magazine 'The Dane'

Updated August 2023

https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/leonard-sydney-suggate-24-fhrdcp?geo_a=r&o_iid=41013&o_lid=41013&o_sch=Web+Property

1930s: Geography and Films

During the 1930s, a new classroom aid appeared in the shape of educational films.
The 1928 conference saw the arrival of some work in this area as having great potential.
This was spearheaded by a future GA President: James Fairgrieve.
Fairgrieve worked with volunteers to explore the potential of cinema, even hosting an event at the Annual Conference in 1928.

People like Jon Grierson started to make documentary films, which had more geographical potential than other films. Films like 'Night Mail' (1936) were the result of his work. These were less than 30 minutes and were useful in the classroom. Modern teachers like short clips rather than feature length films (unless it's the last week of term).

Fairgrieve worked widely with London based teachers to promote the use of films.

Radio broadcasts were also started around this time too. I remember tuning in to the assembly at Primary school, and having the programme lead what we did.

In 1931, Fairgrieve wrote about the use of films.






This was well before Bernard Clarke and the rest...

References

“How B.B.C. Lectures and Films Are Utilised.” Geography, vol. 15, no. 8, 1930, pp. 672–672. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40559754.

Fairgrieve, J. “USE OF BROADCASTING IN TEACHING GEOGRAPHY IN SCHOOLS.” Geography, vol. 16, no. 1, 1931, pp. 34–44. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40557798.

Visual instruction / the visual method

This is an area which the development of the GA was linked with from the beginning.

I have previously blogged about Emily Haye's article and PhD thesis on the lantern slide, and its link with the work of the RGS and the support of teachers.
Halford Mackinder was a proponent of the visual method, and used visuals in his many lectures.
In his entry, I wrote about a speech he delivered called "On the scope and purpose of Geography".

The Diagram Company was set up to loan, and then sell, copies of lantern slides and accompanying notes.
In turn, these would become the film strips which I remember from my own schooling, which then became the VHS cassettes and the TV in the cage.

Here's one that was in my department when I first started teaching in the 1980s, from a company called 'Pictorial Charts'. There were also the 'Common Ground' filmstrips.

I'll share some more images of these film strips later in the blog, when we get to the era where they started to be used in more detail and appearing in books written by GA Presidents.


Image credit: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license
TV image: https://www.weareteachers.com/old-school-classroom/

References
Emily Hayes
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/147447409400100203?journalCode=cgja

Some pictures of mine: https://www.flickr.com/photos/geographypages/albums/72157623495566973/with/4433343010/

MACKINDER, H. J. “THE TEACHING OF GEOGRAPHY FROM AN IMPERIAL POINT OF VIEW, AND THE USE WHICH COULD AND SHOULD BE MADE OF VISUAL INSTRUCTION.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 6, no. 2, 1911, pp. 79–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40554112.

Magic Lantern Slides

One of the facts that is often quoted about the formation of the Geographical Association's origins is that is was founded in part because of the desire for teachers to share resources in the form of lantern slides, which were accompanied by lesson materials. The GA worked with a company called the Diagram Company, which started by loaning slides, and moved on to selling them. I have a few lantern slides, which are not of any great age, and there used to be a large selection down in the warehouse at Solly Street for a while. Some of these were donated by Presidents, such as Vaughan Cornish, and others. H J Fleure and his assistant in the library also used to coordinate the loan of these slides from Aberystwyth (see Fleure's entry for more details)
A later blog post will outline some of the work that this company did, and influences on Pedagogy.

There are some connections here with the Royal Geographical Society once again, of course, as they also have a large collection of lantern slides.
Emily Hayes has been researching the different views on the use of magic lantern slides, which mirror some of the debates currently being had around the use of traditional and progressive pedagogies.

I am grateful to Emily for sending me a copy of her paper, which made good reading. The events here predate the blog largely, as they took place in the run up to the formation of the Association in 1893, but the role of the RGS is mentioned.


The role of women within the RGS was significant of course, as previous blog posts have outlined.

Emily's thesis broadens out the use of lantern slides into the 1920s, but from the title and synopsis focusses on the role of the RGS rather than the Geographical Association.
The chapters below explore how these innovations in visual technologies and practices arose, how they circulated knowledge and their effect on geographies of geographical knowledge making. By harnessing the lantern the RGS attracted an expanding and diversifying audience demographic. The thesis demonstrates the interactive nature of RGS lantern-slide lectures and audiences' important role in shaping the Society’s practices and geographical knowledge. The chapters below argue that it was via the use of the lantern that geography was disseminated to new places. The thesis therefore brings additional perspectives and dimensions to understandings of the circulation of geographical knowledge.
Read more at https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/23096#PSdvQPc7baSCXDiL.99

I read about the way that slides turned some lectures into a type of 'performance', the forerunner to the Powerpoint driven sessions that many of us will have given, or sat through.




COVIC is the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee. It was set up in 1902, and lasted through the First World War. Mackinder was associated with its work.



As Emily goes on to say:

"The Map Room accepted lantern-slide donations from 1888. 543 Donations increased from 1892-93 when the GA was founded.  The Society advertised the fact that it was seeking to acquire lantern-slides in the Year Books throughout the late 1890s. From 1918 Fellows or their executors, family and friends offered the sale of lantern-slide collections to the RGS."

When following up on this, I came across reference to an article by Professor Joan Schwarz, which sounded like it might be useful. I contacted Joan, who works at the Queens University in Ontario, Canada and she kindly sent me a copy of the article, and showed interest in the blog project.
More on this to come in a future blog post.



References
Emily Hayes: 'Geographical light: the magic lantern, the reform of the Royal Geographical Society and the professionalisation of geography c.1885-1894
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748817300427

Thesis:
https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/23096

Fleure, H. J. “SIXTY YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY AND EDUCATION. A RETROSPECT OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION.” Geography, vol. 38, no. 4, 1953, pp. 231–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40564702.

C. Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination In The Nineteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, 1991, 153-54 and 262-5; Driver, Geography Militant; and Withers, Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth-century British geography, 167-179.

Ryan 'On visual Instruction' in
The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JAuPcgxiT0QC&lpg=PA149&ots=1Klyeu0FxB&dq=canadian%20high%20commission%20COVIC&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=canadian%20high%20commission%20COVIC&f=false

MACKINDER, H. J. “THE TEACHING OF GEOGRAPHY FROM AN IMPERIAL POINT OF VIEW, AND THE USE WHICH COULD AND SHOULD BE MADE OF VISUAL INSTRUCTION.” The Geographical Teacher, vol. 6, no. 2, 1911, pp. 79–86. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40554112

Image: Lantern Slide from my collection, image CC licensed by Alan Parkinson

Update
You can buy a postcard set of lantern slide images from the GA shop.