This PDF document that I came across when researching my GA Presidents blog also has some interesting information on the RGS's involvement in higher education. Click the link to download.
It relates to the Manchester Geographical Society and their centenary.
Professor Emeritus T. W. Freeman retired from a Chair of Geography at the University of Manchester in 1976.
Along with commercial expansion there was a constant demand for educational advance. This was emphatically shown in the address by H. J. Mackinder with the significant title ‘On the necessity of thorough teaching in general geography as a preliminary to the teaching of commercial geography.’
He stated that commercial geography was ‘applied geography’, dealing with such matters as mining, agriculture, raw materials, the sale of manufactured goods or retail trade. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘for the merchants to state their demands – for the teachers to supply them’ and an adequate commercial geography must be worked out with the advice of universities, Chambers of Commerce, the Royal Society of Arts, and other relevant sources of wisdom.
As noted above he was prepared to include in such commercial geography historical studies, even those of a somewhat esoteric character. With such an education there could be merchants who were ‘ready, accurate and imaginative.’
In the effort to improve geographical education in 1892 the Society, though well aware of the failure of the Royal Geographical Society’s scheme abandoned in 1884, ran an examination for schools on the geography of India, with Boyd Dawkins, T. H. Core (respectively professors of geology and physics at Manchester University) and Rev. L. C. Casartelli of St. Bede’s College as examiners. Over one hundred young people, with an average age of 15 years and 3 months, sat the examination and prizes were awarded for the best scripts.
The candidates were drawn from schools, Mechanics Institutes and other educational institutions. A group of papers on India in the Society’s journal probably helped the examinees and, even more, their teachers.
On occasion the Society’s journal had a group of papers on one part of the world but editors know that many readers may not be interested in an area or subject so treated: two years later the 1894 examination, with sixty candidates, was on the geography of Yorkshire.
As always Mackinder stressed the relevance of the map in all geographical work.
And in this he was supported by H. T. Crook (1890), who showed that there was a need for a thorough revision of the British Ordnance Survey maps, as indeed Sir Francis Galton had shown at the Brighton meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science eighteen years earlier, in 1872.
The Manchester Society’s delegate to the 1890 British Association meeting reported that the Committee of Section E (Geography) had sent a resolution to the Association’s Council asking
‘That the Council urge upon Government to take steps to hasten the completion of the Ordnance Survey and to afford the public greater facilities for the purchase of Ordnance Survey maps.’
Another strong advocate for geography was Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, the ‘gentle anarchist’ who visited Manchester to give an address on ‘What geography ought to be’ reported in the Society’s journal (1889)
Also a reference to Sydney Wooldridge here - another former GA President.
On links with the RGS and the other regional societies:
At times the officers of the Society had misgivings about their future success and prospects. Fortunately in 1893 Eli Sowerbutts noted that the Society had become a ‘Corresponding Society’ of the Royal Geographical Society, so that visitors to London could attend RGS meetings, use the library for reference purposes and buy RGS publications at a reduced rate.
The Royal Geographical Society was interested in the other British societies, the Scottish (founded 1884), Tyneside (1887), Liverpool (1891) and Southampton (1897) all founded by the end of the century.
Sir Clements Markham, a man of great power and enterprise at the RGS, called a meeting on June 6th 1899 of these societies, attended by Rev. S. A. Steinthal and Eli Sowerbutts as delegates from Manchester. Opening the meeting, in effect a conference of great potential value, Sir Clements hoped that the five provincial societies might join with RGS in encouraging Antarctic exploration, developing geographical exploration, arranging for the ‘cheaper and easier’ sale of Ordnance Survey maps for colleges and schools, assisting the scheme of the Geographical Association for collecting lantern slides for educational purposes and finally increasing the provision for training in commercial geography.
All these aspirations were in accord with those of the Manchester Society and indeed with its achievement by 1899, including the collection of lantern slides: there is for example a note in the journal for 1890 [6 (1890) 47] that at the first of their children’s lectures 500 youngsters had been entertained with 150 ‘magic lantern’ views. On 2 May 1900 the Manchester Society wrote to the RGS suggesting that the agenda of the next meeting should include two items, of which the first was that geographical societies could receive, free or at a nominal price, all Government books and Foreign Office papers related to geographical and commercial subjects. This was approved at a meeting on 22 May 1900 but no decision was taken on the second Manchester item, that geographical museums should be formed and commercial geography brought into the curriculum of the new secondary grammar schools then being planned. By this time both the Manchester and the Tyneside societies wanted further meetings to be held in the provinces and, having asked other societies to come to Manchester, the Society declined to attend the London meeting on 21 May 1901. Apart from a sparsely attended meeting on 12 November 1901, nothing more was arranged. The representatives from Edinburgh agreed with those from Manchester that there were no urgent problems needing attention and the Liverpool society apparently agreed while the Southampton society was ‘para1ysed’ by the final illness of its president. With hindsight it would seem that a splendid chance of co-operative enterprise was cast aside and the societies were left to exist in unnecessary isolation.
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