Herbert John Fleure, 1877-1969

Abstract

Herbert John Fleure died at his home in Cheam, Surrey, on 1 July 1969, at the advanced age of 92 years. His great eminence in not one, but a range of disciplines that in the course of his career he professed as head of university departments of zoology, geology, anthropology (physical and social) and geography (particularly human geography) must be unique. Even to his last days he was engaged in research in fields of physical anthropology and human history to which subjects he was closely drawn throughout his life. To him, Man was a part of Nature; living organisms and their environment were inseparable, and must be studied together, hence his desire that geography and anthropology should form a combined study. For more than half a century he was revered as a father of British geography, first as one of a small group of pioneers in the subject’s early formative years, and later as a lone survivor and leader known personally to, and regarded with warm affection by thousands of teachers of geography the world over. For their interests he strove relentlessly, seeing in the teaching of that subject a keystone in the promotion of international understanding and peace—a theme for which he was pleading to the end of his career, and which coloured his whole philosophy. Family history He was born on 6 June 1877 in Guernsey and by his ancestry was very much a ‘Channel Islander’. His father, John Fleure, accountant to the States, Guernsey, lived from 1803 until 1890, and was a member of an old family of both Guernsey, Alderney and Sark ancestry. He married Marie Le Rouge tel of Jersey, who lived from 1841 until 1914. There were two children of this marriage; Herbert John was the younger (his elder sister died unmarried in 1913) and he was in fact only thirteen years of age when his father died at the age of eighty-seven. This remarkably long combined lifespan of father and son—from 1803 until 1969—must surely be rare, covering, as it did, a momentous period of world history and social and technological changes.