The development of Geography as a university subject in Dundee

ABSTRACT

In the mid-1980s W.H.K. (Keith) Turner drafted a short history of the emergence of Geography as an academic subject taught and researched at what is now the University of Dundee. The unpublished mimeograph containing this history was drawn upon in one published account of Geography at Dundee [Findlay & Werritty, 2010. Putting geography in its place. Scottish Geographical Journal, 126(4), 215–230], but remained itself unpublished. Prompted by a chance rediscovery of this mimeograph more recently, there is warrant for now making Turner’s account more widely available as part of the present journal’s ‘Making Scottish Geography’ series. Attempting to keep something of the original typescript appearance of this account, it is reproduced here alongside a foreword that briefly outlines something of its content, as well as drawing out certain threads for further consideration.

KEYWORDS:

• Dundee
• history of geography
• W.H.K. Turner

Foreword

In 2010 Allan Findlay and Alan Werrity published an article opening a special issue of the Scottish Geographical Journal (SGJ) celebrating – while also providing a critical-academic assessment of – 75 years of Geography as a taught and research-based discipline at the University of Dundee (Findlay & Werritty, 2010). That article sits alongside several other contributions, ones that can be cast as institutionally-focussed additions to scholarship on the history of geographical inquiry, introducing or being part of SGJ special issues commemorating key anniversaries in the establishing of academic (capital-G) Geography at other Scottish universities: at Aberdeen (Chapman & Gemmell, 2019; Philip & Edwards, 2019), Edinburgh (Withers, 2008) and Glasgow (Lorimer & Philo, 2009; Philo et al., 2009; also MacAlister, 1921). These issues also contain ‘recollections and reflections’ from long-standing or retired staff members, lending both a more personal flavour to the histories and a close-up account of institutional details pertaining to buildings, facilities, organisational structures, curricula, field classes, student experiences, and more (Dickinson et al., 2009; Fisher, 2019; Howell et al., 2008; Walton, 2019). A less happy piece addressing the institutional history of Geography in Scotland is Chan (2011), ‘mourning’ the closure of the Geography undergraduate programme at the University of Strathclyde.

Speaking about the appointment in 1948 of Keith Turner – often known as W.H.K. Turner – to a lectureship in Geography at Dundee, Findlay and Werritty (2010, p. 218) note that ‘it is Turner’s detailed but unpublished account of Geography at Dundee that forms the basis of the timeline of key events in the emergence of Geography as a discipline in [their] Table 2.’ At several other key moments in their paper, these authors draw upon the same account, while an accompanying endnote (Note 6, p. 229) provides a reference and a further acknowledgement:

W. H. K. Turner (1986). ‘The development of geography as a university subject in Dundee’, unpublished mimeograph. The account given in this paper of Geography at Dundee in the 1950s and 1960s draws extensively on Turner’s paper and we are most grateful for the opportunity to draw on his work.

By happenstance, this Turner mimeograph – typed on an electronic typewriter or using an early word-processing package – has recently come to light again, retrieved from the back of a filing cabinet at the University of Glasgow, transferred there by a Glasgow staff member who had previously worked in Dundee. It has something of the character of those more personalised ‘recollections and reflections’ mentioned earlier, but with a more systematic treatment and fully worked-through narrative.

It strikes the author of the present foreword that this document sheds valuable light on an important aspect of the history of geographical thought-and-practice in Scotland, sufficient to warrant it now being properly published as part of the ‘Making Scottish Geography’ series recently established in the SGJ. Following this foreword, then, the original Turner mimeograph is reproduced, and – following the recent example in the journal where Ron Johnson’s lost-but-now-found ‘Inaugural Lecture, 1975’ at the University of Sheffield (Johnston with Harris, 2022) has been published – an attempt is made to render Turner’s piece in something like its original typeface, clearly distinguishing it from the foreword preceding it. Virtually no changes have been made to the original text other than to insert one obviously missing word, a handful of commas to assist with grammatical flow, and three additions (in square brackets) that either introduce or ‘write out’ abbreviations used in the original.

Given that Turner was first employed at Dundee in 1948 and then retired in 1985, as stated in the mimeograph, he would likely now be over or approaching 100 years old, although, as in the case of James M. Houston (see Philo, 2022), it is certainly possible that he might still be alive. Efforts to confirm whether this might be the case have been inconclusive, but our hope is that, if indeed W.H.K. is still alive and happens to see what has been done here, he will be happy that his original text – dated 1986 by Findlay and Werritty (2010), although there is no actual date on the mimeograph itself – is now being made more widely available. By another coincidence, Turner’s own academic oeuvre – notably a substantial back catalogue of detailed, empirically-rooted inquiries into the historical geographies of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland, with particular attention to mills, their physical-environmental contexts and energy supplies, and their wider spatial relations with population, settlements and markets – has recently been subject to a detailed reappraisal (see P. Jones et al., 2023). In fact, the claim is that Turner’s Scottish emphasis and distinctive approach to understanding the locational dynamics of industrial sites – and specifically his attention to the ‘industrial inertia’ often stalling what might otherwise seem to be rational restructurings of the nineteenth-century space-economy – still offers much of value for research on ‘the First Industrial Revolution in Britain’.

Turner’s mimeograph is essentially a quite factual accounting of how Geography came to be taught at the University of Dundee (and its various ‘college’ predecessors), whether initially under the auspices of Geology or subsequently in its own right – by dedicated Geography lecturers within an emerging Department of Geography – as interestingly aligned with teaching in Social Sciences, Arts and, briefly, an amalgam known as Environmental Studies. Unsurprisingly, it is in some measure a record of people, recalling key figures – all male, unlike in more recent times, as Findlay and Werritty (2010) underline – who were instrumental in advancing the cause of Geography in Dundee. The most notable figure in Turner’s account – or certainly the individual most name-checked in the mimeograph – is S.J. (or Stanley) Jones, who was appointed as the first dedicated ‘Lecturer in Geography’ at Dundee in 1946. Jones brought a catholic sense of the discipline to Dundee: indeed, his Geography entrained a rich mixture of historical, cultural and social interests, always with the physical environment somewhere in the picture, that reflected his education under H.J. Fleure at the University of Aberystwyth refracted through time spent studying with Carl Sauer at Berkeley in the United States. As a further coincidence, the author of this foreword had long ago become intrigued by Jones in the context of an unusually theoretically-turned paper from 1940 that Jones had co-authored, with Bristol historical geographer Frank Walker, on the concept of ‘the total environment’ (Jones & Walker, 1940; discussed in Philo, 2001).

It is possible to map across from the cast of characters mentioned in Turner’s narrative history to articles published in the SGJ before the mid-1980s, in which regard there are circa 40 obvious instances, excluding multiple book reviews.¹ Some comprise straightforward geographical descriptions of specific Scottish landforms or places, but a few could lay legitimate claim to being innovative statements keying into emerging debates and fields within the orbit of academic Geography. Turner himself published many times in the SGJ, with a remarkable series of articles on the historical geographies of industrialisation in Scotland (Turner, 1953, 1957, 1958, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1985a, 1985b) covering the textile industry in its many guises from Early Modern times to the 1800s, including the processing of all manner of fibres (wool, cotton, jute, flax) in different kinds of industrial settings, from hand-powered sites to water- and then steam-powered mills, with reference to town-country relations, urbanisation, wider trade links and what Turner called the ‘political controls’ of state and burgh. Several of these articles have been pivotal in that recent reappraisal of Turner’s scholarship by P. Jones et al. (2023) already mentioned.

In a study of California pre-European settlement, S.J. Jones (1951) argued – in a Sauerian vein – the need to appreciate the ‘regional geography’ of the human imprint on the land, notably in terms of agriculture, associated with ‘indigenous’ peoples, here native Americans, a claim that might now be cast as in tune with recent Indigenous, maybe ‘postcolonial’, turns within the discipline. J.B. Caird (1951, 1964, 1987), before and then when at Dundee, detailed the settlement geography of crofting landscapes in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, exploding any lurking sense that crofting is an ancient, traditional, indeed indigenous practice by firmly locating it as the alien imposition of powerful external forces. Thus, when describing crofting as comprising ‘a rural landscape of geometrical lines, similar to the colonial landscapes of the more recently settled lands’ (Caird, 1964, p. 72), he lightly anticipated more critical accounts reading crofting through colonial and post-colonial lenses (e.g. MacPhail, 2002). A. Small (1969) addressed the Shetland Isles – the ‘apex’ of the British Isles as this ‘triangular peninsular’ projecting from mainland Europe – as a site of cultural ‘fusion’, with Norse influences that have continued down the centuries to resist ‘Scottification’.

Shifting from historical geography to the human geography of modern times, several more examples can be mentioned: D.C.D. Pocock (1972) offered an early example of behavioural or perceptual geography attuned to the ‘city of the mind’ and alert to how identification of localities and landmarks across Dundee varied depending on people’s variable usage of city neighbourhoods and different senses of ‘time-distance’ across the city; P.L. Knox (1976) furnished an early example of an ‘environmental quality’ or more broadly ‘quality of life’ study, mapping the uneven ‘surfaces’ of environmental quality measurable across the English city of Sheffield; H.R. Jones (1986; and see Obituary, this issue) innovated with a Marxian-inspired ‘social relations of production’ approach to population geography, or more specifically migration geography; and D.E. Short (1996) reviewed, with particular reference to debates about the ‘subsumption’ of family farms into agro-capitalism, theoretically-inflected challenges to a political-economy perspective in agricultural and rural geography.

Pioneering contributions to physical geography and earth sciences prior to the mid-1980s are less obvious in the SGJ, but J. Rice’s (1962) inquiry into the morphology of the Angus coastal lowlands advances understanding of relations between geology and relief, noting ‘erosion surfaces’ transgressive of ‘structure’ and coining the term ‘dens’ to refer to lowland streams dramatically deepening parts of their reaches during phases of glacial retreat. A.S. Tricker (Tricker & Scott, 1980), meanwhile, showed what could be deduced about the ‘chemical denudation’ of river catchments from carefully measuring ‘solute levels’ in the main river, here the River Eden, draining a catchment.

Returning to the Findlay and Werritty (2010) piece, it is worth underlining its interpretative remarks about how Geography at Dundee has been influenced by its places: whether the port-industrial city context given by Dundee itself, the tangled place-based ‘political’ relations shaping Dundee as a sometime ‘college’ incorporated into the University of St. Andrews, and the quite specific physical accommodation – for many years distinctly unprepossessing – occupied by the Dundee department’s Geography staff and students. While influenced in this respect by David Livingstone’s claims about histories of science needing to pay attention to the ‘spaces’ of knowledge production and consumption, a claim that can of course be extended to other forms of scholarship, including Geography itself (Livingstone, 1992, 2003; also Werritty & Reid, 1995), it can be argued that Turner’s account itself offered enticing clues about how such a stance might be turned back on Geography at Dundee. Indeed, Turner makes plain the complex – sometimes fraught – institutional ‘politics’, both in Dundee itself and between Dundee and St. Andrews, that, at various times and in various ways, inflected what Geography could comprise as a taught subject in both institutions. In a very real sense, therefore, a certain kind of institutionalised place relations between the educational establishments in Dundee and St. Andrews really did texture the character and progress of the discipline, at least in its taught forms, in Dundee. What Turner’s account also emphasises is the immediate material geography of where Geography at Dundee was based – for instance, its post-War home with Geology ‘in a converted garage near the head of Small's Wynd’ that fuelled ‘a shared sense of the ridiculous in pioneering intellectual development in such an unpropitious and extremely draughty setting’ (Turner, below; Findlay & Werritty, 2010, p. 219 & Note 7, p. 229) – in a manner that might now acquire still greater pertinence in the light of recent calls to recover the ‘small spaces’ or ‘hidden spaces’ of geographical knowledge production (Lorimer, 2003; Lorimer & Spedding, 2002; Philo, 2002).

With these introductory notes completed, it now remains to hand over to the Turner account itself. While self-evidently a highly localised and descriptive piece that, for these reasons, was likely never intended for publication, it adds helpful detail to (and for) the Findlay and Werritty (2010) piece, particularly to capture elements of Geography at Dundee in the immediate post-WWII period and when leading into – as particularly charted by Findlay and Werritty (2010) – how it experienced and responded to the challenges of the ‘Robbins Era University’² and then more recent eras of intensive assessment and governance of both teaching and research.³ Moreover, the Turner account conceivably adds something more broadly useful – as resource, even provocation – for future historiographers of the discipline attentive to what might be termed the ‘micro-physics’ of site-based, institutional and even (small-‘p’) political historical geographies of Geography. Indeed, as Allan Findlay reflects, something arguably surfaces from Turner’s text that leads ‘the reader to a conclusion about the significance of the interactions between “site”, “institution” and “discipline” which one might hope future historiographers would use as their launching pad’ (Findlay, personal communication, 19/02/2024).

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The development of Geography as a university subject in Dundee

(unpublished mimeograph, 1986)

In its early stages the development of Geography as a University subject in Dundee shows similarities to that in other university institutions of comparable age in Britain, but its evolution was handicapped by the status of University College and the implications this had for independent initiatives. Official interest in the subject may be traced to the University Extension Lectures on geography and geology given to adult classes in Dundee in 1875–6 by Professor Nicholson, who occupied the Chair of Natural and Civil History in St Andrews. These classes were given when the proposal to establish a College in Dundee was first acquiring strength, though it was not until 1882 that University College Dundee [U.C.D.] was founded.¹ This pairing of subjects and of institutions, following an initial period when U.C.D. taught for London University degrees, persisted long after U.C.D. was absorbed in the University of St Andrews in 1890. The first systematic courses in General Geography were introduced in St Andrews and Dundee in 1935–6 when D.E. Innes, who occupied the Chair of Geology 1936–1954, was assigned duties in both centres. That Innes already had some interest in the subject is suggested by a course of lectures on Railway Geography given by him in 1925 to L.N.E.R. [London North Eastern Railway] staff in Dundee.² It was left to other members of his Department, however, to develop Geography on traditional lines. The first of these was G.A. Cumming, later to become the first head of the Department of Geography in St Andrews, who was appointed to teach geology and geography in St Andrews and in Dundee. He was succeeded in his duties in Dundee by J F Scott.

JF Scott was the first resident lecturer to teach Geography in Dundee. A geologist, Scott is thought to have studied Geography as part of his degree course at Glasgow University, under Alexander Stevens, who later occupied that University's first Chair of Geography. Scott freely gave advice to those who succeeded him, especially where interpretations of the geomorphology of the local area were involved. Nor was his expertise forgotten when Geography in Dundee first came to be taught by geographers, for his specially invited leadership of one of the early Student Geographical Society excursions to Glen Clova evoke[d] memories which remain warmly in the minds of those who knew him.

The development of a General class in Geography from 1935 followed the visit of the University Grants Commission [U.G.C.] the previous year. Catalytic though this visit was, the opportunity to develop the subject further did not come until a decade later, when World War Two ended. Recommendations then made to the U.G.C., based on the recognition that Geography together with History were subjects to be encouraged for their educational value, led in 1946 to a reappraisal of teaching arrangements and to the separation of Geography from Geology. In that year S.J. Jones was appointed Lecturer in Geography, given the task of developing the subject, and the Department of Geography was founded. A Special course, sanctioned at this time, extended teaching in Geography to two years, both General and Special courses forming part of the traditional Scottish M.A. Ordinary Degree syllabus.

S.J. Jones brought to Dundee a wealth of experience. Through his efforts Geography became firmly established, though it took several years and no little effort to achieve the kind of progress hoped for. Indeed, when in 1948 Honours teaching in Geography in the University was sanctioned but only for the department in St Andrews and not for that in Dundee, an impasse was created that remained unbreached until the reorganisation of the University and the reconstitution of U.C.D. as Queen's College in 1954. The years between 1946 and 1954 were thus difficult and full of uncertainty. The degree of consolidation achieved then, however, gave a firm base for further development when institutional change yielded opportunities hitherto denied.

The development of Geography in Dundee reflected both an awareness of conventional teaching needs and S. J. Jones’ own approach to the subject. A student of H.J. Fleure at University College Aberystwyth, where advanced teaching of Geography began in Wales and which long enjoyed a reputation for the incorporation of anthropological studies in Human Geography, Jones subsequently became a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Bristol University. There, under the direction of W W Jervis, his interests broadened to include the teaching of branches of the subject which complemented his earlier training, notably surveying, of value in his early archaeological work and which he taught throughout much of his time in Dundee. His greatest intellectual delight, however, was in Historical Geography, his studies at Bristol enriched by contacts at Berkeley, especially with Carl Sauer, on his visits to the U.S.A. This, together with courses on the History of Geographical Thought and on North America and France were his main contributions to teaching in Dundee as Geography developed.

In 1947 S J Jones was joined by J Oliver, one of his students at Bristol, and W.H.K. Turner took Oliver's place when he left in 1948. As for the material circumstances of that time, the lean post-war years saw the Department accommodated with Geology in a converted garage near the head of Small's Wynd. That the relationship between the two departments was a friendly one owed much to the geologist, James Scott, though a shared sense of the ridiculous in pioneering intellectual development in such an unpropitious and extremely draughty setting undoubtedly played a part. A ‘grace and favour’ arrangement allowed geographers occasional use of the Geology lecture room, and this supplemented teaching in what previously was a car showroom and in a room assembled within the garage forecourt which accommodated on one side a collection of books to form the Department's first library. Relativities of status between the two departments reflected the historic position between the subjects. All technical and secretarial needs were serviced by the sole Geology technician, and as Geology occupied the upper floor Geography's humble circumstances needed no underscoring.

Geography was taught as an Arts subject and its timetable based on hourly divisions. Students taking General Geography, however, were persuaded to accept an extension of teaching time for practical work. The first regional field studies also were on a ‘voluntary’ basis. Most students were of local origins, their numbers, after the ‘post- war bulge’, not great, a position no doubt influenced by the lack of an Honours course in Geography in Dundee and the inconvenience involved in completing studies in St Andrews under other staff. Handicapped thus by physical circumstances, by a limited student intake, and by intra- institutional rivalries, the early years of the Department were frustrating ones in which curbs to progress were more conspicuous than opportunities for growth.

Constitutional change in the University of St Andrews in 1954, when U.C.D. became Queen's College, altered circumstances dramatically. The Department, newly located at this time in Bonar House (the former School of Economics), found in its association there with the Departments of Modern History, Economics, Philosophy and Political Economy, a milieu as stimulating intellectually as, by contrast with its previous ramshackle home, it was satisfying materially. Out of this grouping evolved opportunities for developing those aspects of Geography which interested S.J. Jones most. One of the first fruits of integration was the establishment of Joint Honours courses in 1955–56 in which Geography was coupled with History and also with Political Economy, though the latter combination had little significance in terms of attracting students, most carrying forward what was by now a traditional combination first formed when Geography and History were selected for development in the immediate post-war years. Four Honours papers were taken in each subject, Geographical Thought and History of Discovery, Human Geography, S.E. Asia and France forming a core of teaching in Geography which long remained compulsory. In 1960 integration between subjects went a stage further with the founding of the first Faculty of Social Sciences in a Scottish university. Single Honours Geography was one of the curricular changes introduced then, and after a tiring journey, it seemed that Geography had finally arrived. Courses in Historical, Economic and Political Geography and a Dissertation were added to those already established. Joint Honours students in Geography took Human Geography, S.E. Asia or France, and one, two or three other courses as best combined with their other subject. Practical Geography in the Final Honours year was compulsory for all Single Honours candidates and for all Joint Honours candidates taking more than three Geography papers.

The earliest teaching in the Department encompassed all conventional aspects of the subject, the two lecturers involved wearing whatever hat the timetable specified. Modification of this pansophic approach first came with the appointment of A.J. Butler (1951–55), succeeded in his position as Assistant Lecturer by J. Rice (1955–9), both men geomorphologists and, as graduates of the University of London, much influenced by S W Woolridge. Both were keenly interested in the regional sequences of deglaciation, and indeed, thanks largely to James Scott and to the early preoccupation of Scottish Geographers at their annual meetings at The Burn, this fascination was shared by the earliest teachers in the Department. Much of this brushed on to students, most notably at field courses at The Burn, the first of which had been held jointly with the St Andrews Department. When a second field course was added it seemed a necessary corrective to go beyond the limits of the last ice advance, to the Weald, then thought by some to be Professor Woolridge's own field laboratory. There the gently modulated and locally varied landscapes gave the first relatively untravelled Scottish students pause to wonder at their English experience. All this paled just over a decade later when foreign field courses were added and the whole of Britain taken for sampling, and some students were as far travelled as their teachers among the enlarged staff of that time.

Influenced by earlier and more ambitious developments at the University of Keele, one of the most notable features of the Social Sciences curriculum introduced by the new Faculty in 1960 was a common first year foundation course, to which Geography contributed, focussed on Britain. Accompanying this change from the traditional General M.A. courses and in turn supporting it was a large influx of students, at least 60 per cent from England. The character of the Department thus altered. A sense of relative isolation gave way to a sense of participation in a competitive and widening academic community. The loss of the one Assistant Lecturer at this time, however, meant that all the work necessary to provide teaching to Single Honours standards was done by two men, S.J. Jones and W.H.K. Turner. Indeed, they taught all Honours courses from their introduction in 1955 and for many years after, the arrangement not altering significantly until 1968. The appointment of H.R. Jones in 1961 was the first of a series of appointments which progressively improved the situation in the first three years of teaching, and with it students and the world at large no doubt felt confirmed in their belief that tutorially the Department – its three members of Staff graduates of the University of Wales – was a Welsh exclave, a position not without its humour and more easily tolerated as a result.

The appointment of S.J. Jones to its first Chair of Geography in 1967 when the University of Dundee was founded was followed by the addition of new staff, and the character of the Department broadened. The Honours syllabus, hitherto rigorously unified, altered from 1968 onwards as Honours options were allowed to multiply, giving a progressively increasing degree of choice to students. Thus, Geomorphology, Urban Geography, Biogeography and Cartography were developed as specialisms by, respectively, A. Scarth (1962, Cambridge), D.C.D. Pocock (1963, Nottingham), W.G. Berry (1964, Liverpool), and H R Jones taught Population Geography. The supervision of equipment, maps and the one technician who served all was undertaken by W G Berry, who also had prime responsibility for much of the Practical work. Liberalisation of the Honours syllabus was the most notable change at this time, but at first year level the introduction of a Demography-Biology course, given jointly by H.R. Jones and F.L. Waterhouse (Biology) and administered by the Department of Geography was significant among the cross-faculty links then formed. Geography thus expanded its influence and diversified its appeal.

In 1968 the Department with other Social Science departments, migrated to its present position in the centre of the campus, occupying buildings newly erected to cater in part for this displacement. For the first time the Department enjoyed laboratory, technical and secretarial services for its own specific needs, a fitting though belated coming-of-age gift for a subject whose autonomous development in Dundee dates from 1946. The sense of status this gave was heightened as new members of staff were appointed – A. Small (1969, Aberdeen), M.B. Cottam (1971, St Andrews), P.L. Knox (1972, Sheffield), D.E. Short (1973, Hull), A.S. Tricker (1973, Sheffield) – so that in the dozen years in which the Department had been allowed to grow it achieved its maximum complement of ten academic staff, D.C.D. Pocock having left in 1970.

The expansion and increased specialisation of teaching interests thus made possible occurred in a period when the parent Faculty broadened to include Arts with Social Sciences, and when in 1967 conventional subject combinations replaced the first-year foundation course full scope was afforded at both basic and advanced levels of teaching for increased liberalisation of subject choice. In the latter years of S.J. Jones’ tenure of the Chair of Geography the only Honours courses held to be essential were the History of Geographical Thought, a regional course and a dissertation, and all other options were chosen freely from those available. More than this, choice was allowed to extend to one of a number of courses in other subjects in the Faculty where interests were related. Specialisation and cross-subject link-ages thus gave opportunities to cultivate preferences to the full, creating a variable pattern of learning very different from that first adopted in Honours teaching when all students shared the same courses.

Latterly, S.J. Jones became the first Dean of an embryonic Faculty of Environmental Studies when Geography was transferred to that Faculty in a move which aimed at partial integration of the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art with the University by linking the Department of Geography with the College Departments of Architecture and Town and Regional Planning. There had been an earlier association between the two institutions when Geography had provided service teaching for Planners. In this new venture, however, there were difficulties in forming syllabuses, in which the aim was to benefit by cross-fertilisation the three departments involved, and the failure to secure agreements which satisfied both academic and professional standards prejudiced the success of the scheme almost from the start. This was the position inherited by James B. Caird when he was appointed to the Chair of Geography in 1975 when S.J. Jones retired. From this time both continuity and change are evident.

J.B. Caird's own interests in Human Geography were a guarantee that the academic character of the Department remained largely unaltered, but important developments were initiated, especially the strengthening of ties with Science subjects, notably Geology and Biology, and by developing Degree courses for Science students. Until this time only foundation courses in the first and second years of study had been available to Science students, but now syllabuses were devised which gave the opportunity to take Geography in Ordinary and Honours B.Sc Degrees. The infusion of interest and intensification of teaching prompted by these developments more than compensated for the withdrawal of Geography as a leading partner in the Faculty of Environmental Studies and gave a surer guarantee for the future of a Department which now returned to its old niche in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Many of the changes made by J.B. Caird were influenced by his experience elsewhere in institutions larger than the University of Dundee. Project work was introduced for students taking an Ordinary Degree, Honours courses were lengthened so that they extended over two years, and an Essay paper was made compulsory for all Honours candidates. Subsequently, however, choice of Honours options was unrestricted, and even a dissertation, traditionally a testing-ground of research capability, was no longer mandatory, an alternative to it provided by advanced teaching and project work in the final Honours year which extended work already done the previous year. The introduction of a new Arts & Social Science syllabus in 1981 gave further opportunity for change. A series of modular courses in the first two years of teaching, introduced then, gave a degree of integration between aspects of study traditionally taught separately, at the same time heightening the appeal of the subject generally. All in all, these changes occasioned a drastic revision of courses at all levels. More than this, Departmental administration was formalised and extended, links were established with Geography teachers in local schools and ties strengthened with the local branch of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and the equipment of the Department was progressively upgraded. Support for this spirited lead was given by A. Small, appointed Reader in 1975 when J.B. Caird was appointed to the Chair. The leadership provided by both men gave not only a new sense of direction and of purpose but invested the Department with a Scottish character, hitherto lacking, an appropriate change in a period when Scottish students in the University came to out-number those from elsewhere.

J.B. Caird's interests in rural settlements, crofting and land-use, and population distribution in Scotland, nurtured in his earlier years in the Universities of Edinburgh, Rennes and Glasgow, helped to consolidate this new identity; while his administrative and teaching experience in Africa, by complementing that elsewhere, sustained much of the change undertaken and broadened the Department's reputation. It should be clear from this retrospective view, however, that whatever the personal lead given at any time the fortunes of Geography as a University subject in Dundee have been closely bound up with institutional change, and this seems to be a continuing feature. Now, in a period of academic retrenchment and with the departure of P.L. Knox and W.H.K Turner in 1985, academic staff have been reduced to eight.³ Linkages newly formed with the Department of Town and Regional Planning, offering an exchange of options at Honours level in which Geography students can take courses on Housing and Urban Development, compensate in some measure for the loss of specialist teaching in Urban Geography. These new options complement those available in the Department and among other subjects in the Faculties of Arts & Social Sciences and of Science. Geography in Dundee thus occupies a key position in a mesh of inter-relationships. Its strength derives as much from this as from its innate sense of identity.

Notes (to original paper)

1. Donald Southgate, University Education in Dundee Edinburgh, 1982 15–16.

2. Ibid. 158.

3. Present members of staff and their specialist interests are as follows:

   J.B. Caird (Human Geography, Europe, Geographical Thought),

   A. Small (Historical Geography, Norden),

   H.R. Jones (Population Geography, North America),

   A. Scarth (Geomorphology, France),

   W.G. Berry (Biogeography, Cartography),

   M.B. Cottam (Conservation),

   D.E. Short (East Asia, Economic Geography),

   S. Tricker (Hydrology, Climatology).

Acknowledgements

Very big thanks to Allan Findlay for his support and suggestions in the preparation of this contribution to the journal’s ‘Making Scottish Geography’, and also to Susan Mains and colleagues currently worked in Geography at the University of Dundee for their encouragement. Thanks as well to an anonymous reviewer for their input and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In what follows, the foreword emulates Turner in using initials (rather that first names) for Dundee staff named by him in his account.

2 The 1963 ‘Robbins Report’ encouraged a substantial expansion of Higher Education (HE) capacity throughout the United Kingdom.

3 With a particular concern for the hugely growing significance of UK national research assessment exercises (RAEs, now Research Excellence Framework [REF] exercises).