Geography at Bedford College, London : Mr. Gordon Manley

Abstract

MR. GORDON MANLEY will go to the newly created chair of geography at Bedford College, University of London, with wide experience of university life in Britain and as an acknowledged authority on climatology. Mr. Manley graduated at both the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner of Gonville arid Caius College, and he has held university posts successively at Birmingham, Durham—as first head of the Geography Department —and Cambridge. His interests in the meteorological aspects of snow-cover may have derived from his enthusiasm for the Peanines and the Lake District as a keen mountaineer and rock climber as well as geographer. A visit to East Greenland as a member of Mr. J. M. Wordie's expedition of 1926 confirmed these interests. More recently he has analysed long-period temperature records in the north of England and revealed the gradual warming of our winters since 1820. The close resemblance between these changes and those for Stockholm suggests that this matter is of far more than local significance. In these early records Mr. Manley sees a valuable source of information that may throw light on the greater climatic changes of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Mr. Manley is, too, a keen but balanced advocate of the geographer's contribution to meteorology. This was the theme of his second presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society. The Buchan Prize in 1943, the Symons Lecture in 1944, and the Murchison Grant of the Royal Geographical Society in 1947, all marked Mr. Manley's contributions to climatology ; but his papers also include other branches of geography, particularly the history of cartography. Mr. Manley remained at Cambridge long enough to see the university give somewhat belated recognition to meteorological studies by setting up a Meteorological Committee, of which he was the first secretary.