Reflections on Cartography as the British Cartographic Society Celebrates its Golden Jubilee

Abstract

When John Keates sent out an invitation to as many as he could identify as working in cartography in early 1963, I was in the throes of moving from Cambridge to LSE where there were prospects of a relatively permanent academic post in geography. I had previously given my name to Brigadier Gardiner who had from 1961 been scoping the extent of the cartographic community in the UK. This was initially to establish a basis for the UK’s membership of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) which was being established. I could not spare time to attend the founding meeting of the British Cartographic Society (BCS) in Leicester, but joined as soon as there was a society to join. By then I was certain that I would, if possible, follow an academic career in geography. At that juncture, cartography for me embraced map making and map use, the study of maps over time and their curation. I saw maps as central to the discipline of cartography, as I still do today. The definition of cartography produced by the BCS was essentially accepted by the ICA’s working group on Technical Terms. I was a member of the working group on that subject which was chaired by W. D. C. Wiggins for the Royal Society. Although in 1964 I was unable to participate in the ICA meetings in Edinburgh, I was in contact with several of the founding members of BCS, notably Maling and Willatts. The latter had been a mentor since I was at school. We were related and lived in the same parish, Horton, Buckinghamshire. Thus, I was well aware of the importance of the Land Utilisation Survey (LUS) directed by L. Dudley Stamp. Willatts was the organizing secretary of that survey and its influence on the Geography departments of both LSE and King’s College London, where I spent 3 years as an undergraduate, was immense. Joint teaching arrangements between the two colleges in geography in the interwar period, renewed post-war, offered a huge choice of special courses by experts. Cartography was foremost a practical discipline covering topographic map interpretation, thematic map design often from statistics, but concepts of map design were assumed to exist in the minds of the map makers. Geographers versed in systematic and regional analysis illustrated their research in map form. Their approach to understanding the locality, the region, the country was regarded by Willatts as part and parcel of cartographic training – the aim being to train individuals to produce meaningful maps. Not only had Willatts, as a student, focused his thoughts through sketch maps, but his grasp of how best to portray a phenomenon across geographical space had been tested in the 1930s. This proved sufficiently effective to support his claim to head the maps office set up under Lord Reith in 1941. The Ten Miles to One Inch maps (actually 1 : 625 000) of the Ordnance Survey (OS) published National Atlas were only the first of a series of maps for government, initially for England and Wales, then for its regions. The government Maps Office employed many of those who had been recruited to work on the LUS project at LSE a decade earlier. Several who had joined university geography departments and newer recruits were the core members of the new cartographic organisations of 1963. Thematic maps drawn competently by cartographic illustrators according to the drafts provided by academic map authors became the norm. Their use was limited only by the funds available for block making in journals and books. Black and white hand-drawn linework, later aided by printed patterns on waxed transparent sheets, achieved a very high state of competence in depicting the patterns required by the authors. At times by further exploration of the data, usually manually, cartographers would present authors with patterns which they could make sense of. But sometimes it was thought best to produce the neutral or most objective pattern. In the government Maps Office, ministers or officials raised questions, statistics were plotted by small areas, maps were drafted and discussed. Handling the data manually meant that the cartographers had to manipulate them transparently in the full knowledge of the effect of classification and symbolisation. University geography courses in the 1950s were supported by texts by Debenham, then by Monkhouse and Wilkinson in Britain. The USA had seen the first edition of Elements of Cartography in 1953 supplementing Raisz’s General Cartography updated from a 1938 original edition in 1947. During a 3-year spell in South Africa as a geographer employed to conduct a land use and regional survey of an area the size of Kent (UK), I soon discovered the practicalities of mapping. Working in an inter-disciplinary The Cartographic Journal Vol. 50 No. 2 pp. 105–108 50th Anniversary Special Issue, May 2013 # The British Cartographic Society 2013