Progress in Geography: The Record of the I. B. G.

Abstract

The foundation of the Institute of British Geographers came as the culmination of the movement to establish geography in British universities which began with Keltie's report to the Royal Geographical Society in 1885 (Keltie, 1886) and Mackinder's subsequent appointment to Oxford in 1887. After Oxford and Cambridge a lectureship was established at Manchester in 1892, and the first decade of the new century saw appointments at Aberystwyth, Reading, Sheffield, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Leeds and Glasgow. By 1920 there were also lecturers at Southampton, the London School of Economics and Aberdeen. Success was not assured, however, until the institution of honours courses (at Liverpool in 1917, London School of Economics and Aberystwyth in 1918, Cambridge in 1919, Manchester in 1923 and Sheffield in 1924) and the establishment of chairs (University College London in 1903, Reading 1907, Oxford 1910, Aberystwyth and Liverpool 1917, and Birkbeck College London 1920). Paradoxically success was long delayed at Oxford, where Mackinder had been the pioneer, with the Honour School not established until 1933, 46 years after Mackinder's appointment (Stoddart, 1981). Thus by the 1920s not only was geography being taught to degree level at a number of universities, but the first graduates in the subject were themselves seeking teaching positions. Thus Alfred Steers, for example, who took first class honours in the first Tripos examination at Cambridge in 1921, was appointed to a demonstratorship by his old university in 1926. The body of pioneer geographers was numerically small, and most had originally been trained as geologists, classicists, historians or explorers. Their research interests were eclectic and even disparate. Rudmose Brown, for example, best known as a polar botanist, also studied sea urchins and starfish in Burma and Mozambique, yet nevertheless managed to write a textbook on principles of economic geography in 1920. Coherence and a sense of identity began to develop at the time of the 12th International Geographical Congress, held in Cambridge in 1928. This brought the British geographers into contact with men of the stature of Brigham and Atwood, Boggs, Bowman and Douglas Johnson from the United States, de Martonne, de Margerie, Demangeon, Cholley and Sorre from France, and Biasutti and Almagia from Italy (Germany was not then a member of the Union). The British contingent, dominated as it was by such figures as Sir Charles Close, Sir Percy Cox, Sir William Goodenough and Sir Halford Mackinder from the Royal Geographical Society, nevertheless included some thirty academic geographers who were to dominate the subject in British universities for the next quarter of a century.' Coincident with the Congress was the publication of the volume edited by A. G. Ogilvie, Great Britain: Essays in Regional Geography (1928). Of the 26 authors who contributed to this, 14 attended the Cambridge Congress, and 13 were subsequently Founder Members of the Institute. The ten contributors who fell into both groups formed a nucleus of British geography at the time: they were C. B. Fawcett (1883-1952), H. J. Fleure (1877-1969), W. W. Jervis (1892-1959), R. H. Kinvig (1893-1969), A. G. Ogilvie (1887-1954), Hilda Ormsby (1878-1973), O. H. T. Rishbeth (1885-1942), P. M. Roxby (1880-1947), R. N. Rudmose Brown (1879-1957), and A. Stevens (1886-1965).