Cuchlaine Audrey Muriel King (26 June 1922–17 December 2019)

Abstract

Mapping at Austerdalsbre, Norway. Courtesy Prof J.D. Ives [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] Cuchlaine King was born in Cambridge to Margaret Amy King (née Passingham) and William Bernard Robinson King. Her father was a demonstrator and assistant to the Professor of Geology, John E. Marr, and later Woodwardian Professor at Cambridge, FRS, and with a distinguished record as a military geologist in both world wars. Cuchlaine grew up in an academic and geologically focused environment in Cambridge and with family holidays in Wensleydale. Cuchlaine King graduated with a certificate (and later degree) in geography from Cambridge in 1943, a year after her sister Margaret, where she specialised in physical geography and surveying. Her meteorological knowledge was useful as a Women’s Royal Naval Service “wren.” She was posted to RNAS Dale, Pembrokeshire, Eglinton near Derry, and then Sydenham near Belfast, but felt that her meteorological work could have been done by “anyone.” She learned topographic surveying at Cambridge under Frank Debenham (co-founder of the Scott Polar Research Institute) and gained an interest in sand movement on beaches with William Williams, who later published his work on beach surveys at St Annes, in preparation for the Normandy landings. She completed a PhD with Williams on sand beaches in 1949. At Cambridge she was also influenced by William Vaughan Lewis with his innovative investigations of waves on beaches and on glacial erosion. In 1951 Cuchlaine King joined the Geography Department at the University College Nottingham, where she was an inspirational teacher and took field trips (which usually involved surveying beaches and beach terraces) in locations as diverse as Finland and “Skeggy” (Skegness). She greatly inspired her students as teachers and fellow researchers. Perhaps with a little encouragement from her father, she persuaded an undergraduate tutee, Jack (later Professor) Ives, to take her and Helen Brash from Newnham College as surveyors on an “all male” expedition to south Iceland. Her work on the mass balance and ogive banding on glacier outlets of south-west Vatnajökull (Iceland) took place on such expeditions in the early 1950s. Although not part of Vaughan Lewis’ Cambridge Expeditions to the Norwegian corrie glacier on Vesl-Skatutbreen, she did take part in the Cambridge Austerdalsbre Expeditions (Norway, 1955–7). An objective was to study wave ogives on an outlet glacier of Jostedalsbre, which contributed to the theoretical work of the late John Nye. Such expeditions fostered student research capabilities and showed her integrity as a woman in a basically male-dominated fieldwork world. Later, and at her instigation, she worked on Baffin Island (Nunavut, Canada) with Jack Ives and John Andrews (also one of her students at Nottingham) on the glacial geomorphology and chronology of the Henry Kater Peninsula. Ives had to persuade the Canadian Government to accept a woman investigator in the field. Later, she successfully and uniquely, for a British geomorphologist, obtained funding from the US Office of Naval Research to fund her surveys at Gibraltar Point. Professor King was an early proponent of “quantitative geography” in advance of her time. “Spitsym” was a FORTRAN IV program she wrote in 1970, with Michael McCullagh. She wrote Quantitative geography (1968) with John P. Cole, and Numerical analysis in geomorphology (1971) with John Doornkamp, all colleagues at Nottingham University’s Geography Department where a laboratory is named in her honour. In addition to these books, she was also well known for her texts: Geomorphology, glacial and periglacial (1968) with Clifford Embleton, Beaches and coasts (1972), Techniques in geomorphology (1971), Introduction to physical and biological oceanography (1975), as well as the more general Physical geography (1980). She contributed to the “Northern England” volume (1976) of the Geomorphology of the British Isles as well as to the British landscape through maps series. She edited Landforms and geomorphology: concepts and history (1976), which contained some 46 facsimile papers of important articles and provided two substantial commentaries. Professor King was one of only two women in the original group of geomorphologists that emerged as the British Geomorphological Research Group, later the British Society for Geomorphology (BSG), in 1961. In 1981 she was awarded the Linton Prize from the BSG for her contributions to the subject. Together with Jean Grove (Cambridge) and Marjorie Sweeting (Oxford), she was one of the three pre-eminent women researchers and teachers of post-war geomorphology in the UK. After her retirement from Nottingham in 1982, she moved back to her family home in Worton, near Askrigg in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire. She was an enthusiastic campanologist and a commemorative plaque in St Oswald’s Church, Askrigg bears the inscription, “In 2017 new bell ropes were provided through the generosity of Prof Cuchlaine King, bell-ringer, 1988–2003.” Always unassuming, although with an individual grit, scientific integrity and wry sense of humour, she was an inspiration for many students over the years, both at Nottingham and over the world through her textbooks. She passed away peacefully in December 2019 in Wensleydale. Her commemorative service at St Oswald’s took the same form as for her father in 1963. She will be greatly missed by all who knew and were taught by her.