5 - The Oxford School of Geography

Summary

The role of individual departments of geography, notably in the years immediately after the First World War, is outlined in several of the essays in this volume. The special position of Cambridge has been emphasized by more than one writer, and the importance of the University of London – with its close relationships with university colleges in a number of places, including Exeter, Hull, Leicester, Nottingham, Reading and Southampton – will have been made obvious in other essays. The School of Geography in Oxford, with which the writer was associated from 1934 as an undergraduate and later as a member of staff until 1956, also made very significant contributions to the development of the subject in the inter-war period. The geographical tradition in Oxford is indeed as old in Oxford as in any other British university. The history of geography in Oxford has been described by, among other people, J. N. L. Baker (1963), E. W. Gilbert (1972) and D. I. Scargill (1976), and it is, therefore, unnecessary even to summarize it here. An appropriate starting point is the establishment in 1887 of the Readership in Geography held by H. J. (later Sir Halford) Mackinder. This was made possible by the generosity of the Royal Geographical Society which provided money for the appointment, largely as a result of the publication of the Scott Keltie Report on ‘Geography in Education’ in 1886 (Gilbert 1972; Scargill 1976). H. J. Mackinder was elected the first Reader.