Disorderly Archives and Orderly Accounts: Reflections on the Occasion of Glasgow's Geographical Centenary

Abstract

The Centenary of Geography at the University of Glasgow has occasioned a gathering together of various materials that illuminate 100 years of teaching and researching the subject in this ancient seat of learning. Visits to the University Archives to recover the ‘official’ record from Court and Senate Minutes, and much else besides, have been supplemented by foraging through and in departmental rooms, cupboards, shelves and filing cabinets, sometimes intruding into the personal ‘holdings’ of colleagues. The result has been to assemble what might be said to comprise the department's Geography ‘archive’, incomplete and fragmentary as it undoubtedly remains. The present paper offers reflections on this archive, considering the different registers of order and disorder that it embraces. In addition, critical attention is given to the different modes of recounting Glasgow Geography's history that can be constructed with these varying archival remains. The objective is to open windows, orderly and otherwise, on Glasgow's Geographical Centenary, but also to wonder at what might be gained by allowing more disorder into the archive.

Key Words:

• Centenary
• archives
• history of geography
• University of Glasgow
• order/disorder

Introduction

Some years ago, in response to a survey1 from Charlie Withers asking about the extent of the ‘archive’ held by the Department of Geography and Geomatics at the University of Glasgow,2 one of the authors responded as follows:

Does your Department/institution (ie. University Library) have an archive or clearly-identified collection of holdings regarding the history of your department?

No, although there are a few random items in the University archives (eg. some ‘Geography notebooks’ from the 1930s). I personally have most of the Drumlins (our student geographical magazine) ‘published’ since 1955, as well as copies of our Occasional Paper series (32 numbers between 1978 and 1995).

[…] we do have records of staff meetings, etc., and also things like TQA/Programme Specification documents going back into the 1980s – but a great deal of earlier stuff has simply been binned.

Please make here any other observations you would wish to concerning the archives or other records of your department's history and activities.

Nothing specific, except to note that there probably are bits and pieces … held by individual staff members; but we have done nothing to create anything more systematic. Since our 100^th birthday is coming up (in 2009), this may be an occasion to do a ‘trawl’ for materials – I will talk to Hayden! (Philo, 2005[pers.com.])

The belief was evidently that no departmental ‘archive’ existed as such, certainly not assembled in any coherent, consultable fashion, except for some of the most recent records called into existence to satisfy the bureaucratic demands issuing from the likes of Teaching Quality Assessments and the need to create ‘paper trails’ for more legalistic reasons. The suspicion was nonetheless that there might be quite a lot of materials ‘out there’ somewhere in the department, likely dispersed around colleagues and rooms, that potentially could be gathered to create something akin to such an ‘archive’. Intriguingly, and the author had not remembered this claim until rediscovering the above responses, it was even mooted that the 2009 Centenary of Geography at the University of Glasgow could be the occasion to conduct just such a gathering of materials.

In effect, such a gathering has come to pass,3 because the Centenary has indeed been the prompt for establishing exactly what materials remain available to us for illuminating 100 years of teaching and researching Geography here at the University of Glasgow. Without it ever being that sustained an attempt at retrieval, we have managed to assemble a diversity of materials from various sources, to an extent surprising ourselves with exactly what has surfaced, and only now appreciating that the Centenary has proved to be strangely productive, generative even, and hence actively embroiled in the ‘making’ of our departmental history by dint of allowing unknown or at least forgotten materials to arise. We would now have more to say in answer to Withers' survey about what we know that we do possess or can access, and what the materials involved can feasibly reveal or evoke. We also begin to appreciate what we have often written and taught about more abstractly: namely, that archives are exceptionally complex things, containing multiple layerings of items produced for a plethora of reasons – highly official in some cases and entirely unofficial in others; some seemingly very complete in their provenance, others seemingly just shards in isolation; some engagingly chatty and revealing, others resolutely mute and unyielding – and all telling something, albeit in no neat fashion, about differing plays of ‘power-knowledge’ circulating through the words, numbers, images and surfaces4 (and thereby bouncing around their many authors and audiences, us included: see eg. Derrida, 1995; Foucault, 1972; Withers, 2002).

It almost goes without saying that no neat, singular ‘story’ of Geography at Glasgow emerges from this archive, which immediately casts into doubt the orderliness of accounts based on a relatively narrow range of sources that sporadically have been written about the department and its past (eg. Miller, 1960a, 1960b, 1966, 1972; Tivy, mid-1980s, 1988). Maybe, though, what a comment about ‘orderliness’ reveals is that there is a significant task to be undertaken – at once epistemological and ontological – to reflect upon the differing registers of order and disorder present in the differing archival remains themselves. Which materials might be said to possess their own intrinsic order, reflecting how they were generated and stored in the first place, and which are seemingly more disorderly, maybe because there was no originating imperative for them to display orderly qualities? Can it be assumed, however, that an ordered archive necessarily should give rise to an orderly account based upon this order? Possibly the researcher needs to be suspicious of the apparent order, and instead to seek out ‘cracks’ in the façade: for misunderstandings, for other questions needing to be asked that the sources, in their neatness and completeness, arguably evade. Conversely, can it be assumed that a disorderly archive necessarily gives rise to a disorderly account simply mirroring that disorder ‘at source’? The researcher might yet find ways to tell coherent tales on the basis of such a partial archive, perhaps detecting strange consistencies in, say, things said and not said, images shown and not shown, which end up demanding a fresh look at their more orderly archival cousins.

It is these questions that preoccupy us in this paper, deploying what follows as a series of windows, orderly and disorderly, on Glasgow's Geographical Centenary.5 More narrowly, we take four sets of materials from our Centenary archive, reflecting upon their relative orderliness or disorderliness – positioning them on a hypothetical spectrum between these two end-points – and asking about what, respectively, they can reveal or obscure as ways into our departmental history. We also worry at the problematic of just how orderly or disorderly might, or should, our accounts become on the basis of utilising these varying sources from the archive. We will work from what might straightforwardly be construed as the most disorderly materials (scantly captioned photographs of a 1930 ‘fieldclass’ pasted into albums) through less disorderly materials (the department's ‘grey literature’ in the shape of Occasional Papers and fieldwork reports) and into more orderly materials (the evidence from University Court minutes) and, finally, into what at first blush appears the most extraordinarily ordered of materials (a complete set of examination questions dating back to the first days of Geography at Glasgow). Our inspiration partly derives from the latter, given that so many examination questions from the earlier half of the last century kept asking students to give ‘an orderly account’ of some region or geographical phenomenon. Such a phrasing led us to thinking about exactly what is an ‘orderly account’: what are its features, how might we recognise it, what does it conceal or possibly misrepresent? And on the basis of what kinds of evidence – what data, how arrived at and assembled? – is it possible to compose such an ‘orderly account’? And what, conversely, might a ‘disorderly account’ entail, on what might it be based, and is it really such a bad thing? Many difficult epistemological and methodological matters are entangled in such queries, and we tread but lightly upon them.

Photograph Albums of the 1930 ‘Continental Excursion’

Languishing on a high shelf in a room until recently occupied by postgraduate students – at some point it had been the ‘Student Library’– we stumbled upon three albums of photographs compiled following the Department's 1930‘Continental Excursion’. This trip, taking in five countries and made by a party of forty-one geography students and accompanying staff, is recorded in this visual record, but with no written back-up that survives.6 Inspecting and describing the albums' contents in isolation invites explanations for original processes of composition and compilation. This task enables further reflection on variants of preferred geographical conduct, field-class experience and collective documentary endeavour (Lorimer, 2003a, 2003b). Each of the three photograph albums is identical in size and style: cover illustration, an embossed graphic of ploughman and plough-horses at work in fine weather; spine bound by a simple tie of string so as to open in ‘landscape’ format. Left-hand pages are blank. Right-hand pages display a selection of mounted images, numbering between six and nine, arranged, roughly-speaking, into columns and rows. The subject matter of Volume One documents passage through Northern France, a visit to Paris and time spent in Switzerland (both the Jura Mountains and Alps). Volume Two records the tour moving into Northern Italy, followed by Tuscany and Venice. Volume Three pictures return passage, northwards first through Germany (Black Forest and Rhineland), and thence to Belgium. The photographs are accompanied by neat, sparing annotation at the base; all carefully printed by one hand, upper case, in black ink. In some instances, pen has overwritten preparatory text in pencil. Almost all photographs are coded numerically: two numbers, followed by a decimal point, then two further numbers. But no key is provided; or has long since gone missing. In spite of this, something of the original cataloguing system may yet be deciphered.

Inspecting the photographs closely, a number of differences are visible: size, bordering, chemical process for film development, and subsequently, the images' susceptibility to fading. Such variables seem to confirm that a good number of students in the party (perhaps staff too) carried their own camera. Conceivably, on return to Glasgow, with spools of film developed, individual students' photographs were coded, then pooled, before a wide assortment of images was selected to illustrate different stages, stop-offs and episodes from the itinerary. Ultimately, a grand total of 271 photographs were arranged page-by-page, chronology cross-referenced with European geography, to achieve the end result. The system speaks of care in design: a collective enterprise, an aggregated archive, and orderly visual chronicle of the Continental Excursion. Among 22 numbered contributors, pictures taken by student-photographers 13, 28 and 29 are the most numerous. While they remain otherwise anonymous, something of individual habits, geographical aesthetics and picturing preferences can be ascertained from the bank of images: student 30 had a taste for portraits of rural life, and studies of agricultural landscapes; student 13 framed scenery at the panoramic scale, showing long prospects, and countryside seen from high elevations; student 5 seems more given than most to have turned the lens back on peers, having them shuffle up in group formation or pose in comical, stagey fashion. Sometimes subjects seem to have been snapped unawares.

A more general review of photographic content from the students' point-of-view offers other sorts of return. The scenes fixed in the frame are self-evidently seasonal, those of early and mid-spring. For the ‘excursionists’, escape from Glasgow did not mean a departure from sullen or swollen skies. The trees in the town square at Bienne were still bare of leaves. Varsity scarves and hats muffled the chill felt on Parisian boulevards. Citizens swept a late and heavy fall of snow from the streets of Andermatt. A sleigh ride at the edge of town produced predictable ‘horse-play’. Sun worship and a bathing parade liberated all on arrival at the Italian Riviera. Meanwhile, greater events of history tinge the edges of some pictures. In a few, the past sits centre stage, fixing places in time. The countryside of north-eastern France still bears the scars of conflict. In towns, reconstruction continues. Portraits of ordinary life have a brooding darkness, suggesting that Europe has entered into the grip of Depression. Even the most metropolitan scenes are sombre, lacking in expected glamour.

The student-photographers' choice of subject matter is diverse, if generally unsurprising. As such, the albums' content can also be said to tally with recent observations about conduct in the staging of geographical travel as a fact-funding mission (Matless et al., 2008). A great many pictures were taken to convey the precise details of sites, the addition of text below simply pairing up picture and place-name. Falling into this category are studies of architecture (churches, cathedrals, hotels, memorials, monuments), of engineering (tunnels, bridges, highways, turbines, pipelines) of landforms (‘contortions’, ‘slopes’, gorges) and city landmarks (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe). But the albums also speak up for documentary and landscape photography as popular – though lesser – geographical field techniques.7 There is plentiful evidence of the students searching out areal difference, embodied in regional types: people (wayfarers, policemen, shepherds, farmers, woodcutters, tramps), boats (‘Rhine tow’, ‘Rhine tug’, ‘Rhine steamer’, ‘Rhine barges’) and landscape (Alpine foreland and meadows, Black Forest settlement, Mediterranean terracing). The exercise of photography also confirmed certain human universals, the cuteness observed in children, for instance, proving an irresistible lure for the travelling camera. Other photographs can be interpreted as efforts to capture ‘that something’ which is unsayable, or those atmospheric aspects of ‘abroad’ likely to prove untranslatable for family and friends back home in Scotland. These few show, not scenery as such, and rather, the mood of sights (see Figure 1). With the addition of annotation to photographs, student geographers showed other kinds of artistry: their abilities to notice (identifying the exotic in the commonplace) and to hint at narratives emerging from the camaraderie felt among Excursionists (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. Landscape photograph from the Department's 1930 ‘Continental Excursion’

Figure 2. Group photograph from the Department's 1930 ‘Continental Excursion’

Finding the right combination of photograph and caption or label-text is a craft skill of yesteryear, and too easily overlooked. In the Excursion albums, those words in use are too few to fit at all accurately the composite genre of photo-essay. Yet there is language enough to give voice to group experience. Words toy with, and chafe against, the images. Playful regard is shown for the boundary separating academic staff and undergraduate students. A pair of shots from one gallery page pokes gentle fun at professorial privilege, hinting too perhaps that favouritism was sometimes in evidence. The first shows a huddle of students seated on a park bench, and is labelled ‘Starving at Heidelberg’. The second, a comparator image, shows Professor Alexander Stevens (then Head of Department) and three students enjoying picnic food. It is entitled ‘The Rich Man's Table, Heidelberg’. Respectful subversion, expertly executed. By degrees, academics' own status can be seen to dissolve among a community of fellow geographical travellers. In Switzerland, Stevens is figured the mannerly gentleman-guide, ushering female students down from a train carriage. In Italy, he can be spotted lounging at the centre of a group shot, the party relaxed and unbuttoned on the beach at Levanto.

Of course, students were as likely to use photographs to make jokes at their own expense, or to subject classmates to gentle joshing about their appearance or tendency toward excess. Among those compiling the photographic retrospective, wry comment and comedy were devices for happy recollection. Examples abound. For a reclining – and possibly fragile – figure at the stern of a tour boat on Lake Como: ‘He lay like a warrior taking his rest with his Chianti flask beside him’. For two male heads, turning in opposite directions: ‘Who said beer?’ For an array of bathing costumes, hats and partially-clad bodies: ‘Beauty chorus and Robert!’ The phrasing is choice, rendering the exclamation mark superfluous – which is not to say that showiness did not also find its place. The names and faces of the class' court jesters (Robert, Sandy) become familiar, as willing goofs for the crowd, ever-ready to play up for the camera: doing handstands, fixing beer-mats to the soles of their boots, cuddling up to livestock. Eighty years after the event, such silliness is re-assuring stuff for the leader of any undergraduate field class. The comic turn remains a standard currency for geographical conduct, and teaching, in the field. The albums were also a medium for quietly cutting or incisive kinds of remark, reflecting the mixed-sex make-up of the student group: ‘Woman's work is never done’ (for a portrait of Italian women on a river bank washing clothes at the water's edge). Other labels seem bound to have produced the reverse effect: ‘Fair Maidens on the Bummel, Ticino’. There is evidence too of pleasure taken in the expressive and evocative language of labelling: ‘Oh! For a beaker full of the warm south’ (for students slaking their thirst on a stiff climb up the Pfänder Pass); ‘Toilers of the Deep’ (for fishermen and their flimsy vessel on Lake Como); ‘The Hope of Belfort’ (for a line of young French boys, arms companionably slung around shoulders). On occasion, the plain facts of regional description produce an equally satisfactory poetics of place: ‘Almond blossom and vine terraces near Niederlahnstein’.

There are undoubtedly other narratives embedded in the photograph albums' contents, but these must await later scrutiny. And there are other surviving albums too; a couple dating from the Continental Excursion made by the Department the following year, one only from 1932, and a later volume celebrating the 1956 summer tour of Scandinavia by the Glasgow University Geographical Society (known with affection by its membership as ‘G.U.G.S’).8 This last brings events in the field within the scope of living memory, where anticipated research might open different windows on the collective experience of the Department's past, and allow other means to dramatise the many aspects of geographical teaching and learning.

The Department's Geographical ‘Grey Literature’

Lying about the Department, seemingly unwanted in odd corners of teaching rooms and staff offices,9 we have found many representatives of what might be termed our geographical ‘grey literature’:10 semi-publications that might be expected to travel beyond the department, unlike the photograph albums, but with a precarious status as ‘proper’ academic productions.11 The most obvious, mentioned in the response to Withers, is the Geography Department, Glasgow University, Occasional Paper series,12 which generated 32 papers between September 1979 and June 1995 (see Table 1), available for the princely sum of £3 each. To the initial glance, this is an orderly part of our archive, since all of the papers survive; all produced as double-sided A4 booklets with standard red covers and black ring binders, and covering a substantial recent period of our history. It is hence possible to offer orderly reflections on this series, although in the process its seeming order somewhat evaporates, since the contents of the series vary so greatly in their scope, focus and purpose that more questions arguably are posed than answered about what ‘Glasgow Geography’ over these sixteen years entailed. Tellingly, one long-time editor of the series, Allan Findlay, recalls that: ‘I began to feel concerned at the problematic message that was being sent out,’ with ‘papers appearing on a very diverse range of topics,’ reflecting ‘the individualistic nature of most staff members’ work and the lack of any strong systematic research focus in the Department’ (Findlay, 2009[personal communication]).13

Table 1  . Geography department, Glasgow university, occasional papers 1–32

#1	Various, 1979, Problems of the Peripheral Regions of the E.E.C.: Proceedings of a Symposium held at Glasgow, 1978
#2	Gibb, A., Shearer, J.W. & Kennedy, D., 1980, Siggiei – a Maltese Casal
#3	Findlay, A. & Findlay, A., 1980, Migration Studies in Tunisia and Morocco
#4	Lowder, S., 1980, The Evolution and Identity of Urban Social Areas: The Case of Barcelona
#5	Rees, J. & Tivy, J., 1981, Vegetation Structure and Landscape Appearance – A Methodology
#6	Morrison, A., 1981, LINPOINT: A Program for Drawing Maps of Lines and Points: User Manual
#7	Abichou, H., Findlay, A., Findlay, A. & Paddison, R., 1981, The Socio-Professional Characteristics of the Residents of Central Tunis
#8	Oglethorpe, M., 1982, Maltese Development Issues
#9	Thompson, I.B., 1982, The Commercial Centre of Oran
#10	Dickinson, G., 1982, An Assessment of Pathway Damage and Management: The West Highland Way
#11	Morris, A., 1983, Afforestation Projects in Ecuador: Potential Land-Use Conflicts and their Resolution
#12	Findlay, A., Findlay, A. & Paddison, R., 1983, Patterns of Ethnicity and Class in Central Rabat
#13	Briggs, J., 1984, Peasant Farmers and Crop Choice: A Study of Agricultural Decision-Making in Central Sudan
#14	Cruickshank, A.B., 1984, The Lofoten Spawning Cod Industry: Remote Area Resources Development – A Model Under Threat
#15	Jowett, A.J., 1985, China: The Foodgrain Sector
#16	Paddison, R., 1985, Some Structural and Spatial Correlates of Modern Retailing in the Third World City
#17	Tait, D.A., 1985, Basic Landsat Image Processing – B.L.I.P.
#18	Briggs, J., 1986, Reduced Agricultural Price Support in West-Central Scotland: A Study of Possible Consequences
#19	Armstrong, A., 1987, Urban Control Campaigns in the Third World: The Case of Tanzania
#20	Findlay, A.M., 1987, The Development Implications of Skilled International Migration for Host and Sender Societies
#21	Jowett, A.J., 1987, Famine in the People's Republic of China
#22	Rogerson, R., Findlay, A.M. & Morris, A., 1987, The Geography of Quality of Life
#23	Moore, J.N., 1988, A Line of the Coast: The Development of Coastal Mapping and Hydrology in Scotland from 1540 to 1707
#24	Gibb, A., 1988, The Demographic Consequences of Rapid Industrial Growth: A Case Study of Glasgow 1801-1914 (also an Applied Population Research Unit paper: see main text)
#25	Morris, A.S., Dickinson, G. & Priestley, G., 1989, Land Use Change and Conflict in the Bay of Roses, Costa Brava
#26	Shearer, J.W., 1989, ‘AZIM’ A Basic Program for Computing and Plotting Oblique and Transverse Aspect Azimuthal Map Projections
#27	Briggs, J., 1989, Agriculture and Farmers' Choice of Crops in the Peri-Urban Zone of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
#28	Al-Najim, M. & Briggs, J., 1990, Overstocking in Somalia: A Study of the Carrying Capacity of Bay Region's Rangelands
#29	Morrison, A., 1993, User Manual for LINPOINT Version 3.4: A Packaged Program for Drawing Maps of Lines and Points
#31	K.I. Gordon, 1993, Fundamental Trigonometry and Geometry for Topographic Science: A Summary of Trigonometric Formulae and Proofs
#30	Forrest, D., n.d., The Development of a Frame-based Cartographic Design Expert System
#32	Moore, J.N., 1995, Glasgow Surveyors, 1719–1854: An Index

It is intriguing to reflect upon such a series: why did it appear when it did, last as long as it did, but then disappear? There was undoubtedly a period from the mid-1970s when a limited ‘mass’ production of such occasional or working papers became relatively easy, with electric typewriters, the early days of word-processing and of course cheaper forms of reproduction (notably photocopying). British Geography departments – with Glasgow being no different – evidently saw an opportunity to publicise, distribute and even produce small income streams based on their academic output (Larkham, 1987). Findlay concurs, observing that ‘[a]t the time every department of Geography in the UK seemed to have its own discussion paper series, and Glasgow was right to have its own publications to display at the annual Institute of British Geographers conference’.14 Interestingly, he adds that ‘this was in a pre-RAE [see below] world a signal of academic virility’ (personal communication). The Glasgow series appears to have lost steam in the early-1990s, probably in line with what happened in most other departments, challenged by a mixture of Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)15 demands and the advent of on-line publishing, allowing pre- and other kinds of ‘publications’ from departmental staff to be made available as virtual paper series16 or, more likely, as ‘pdfs’ linked from research group or individual webpages.

Some papers in the Glasgow series anticipated significant research directions taken by departmental staff – on agricultural decision-making, ‘quality of life’ indicators, the historical geography of Glasgow, and cartographic design; to name a handful – while the very first paper, the largest at 77 pages and containing contributions from notable authors such as the economic historian T.C. Smout, grew out of a major academic and policy-relevant event organised by the Department in 1978.17 The Department's commitment to researching beyond Britain is evident from these papers, few having an explicitly British or even Scottish focus, and it is notable – echoing a long-standing concern for looking outside the West or ‘Global North’ (see Briggs & Sharp, 2009) – that nearly a third of the titles tell of research interests, and in some cases collaborations, in different parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. A clear subgroup of papers are devoted to ‘technical’ dimensions of what was increasingly known in the Department as ‘topographic science’ (now geomatics) teaching, with four or five basically comprising ‘user manuals’ or reference documents for undergraduate and Masters students. One small nugget – in effect a disorderly survivor in the archive, kept on a printout folded into the relevant number by one of the authors – is an e-mail communication from James Sidaway regarding John Jowett's Paper #21:

It was the first ‘scientific’ account of the [Chinese] famine of 59–61 which had been covered up by Mao. It was based on a reconstruction from demographic data. The famine has since become well-known (indeed, a book-length study called Hungry Ghosts by J. Becker was published in 1996), but I think that Jowett was the first to use then newly available demographic data (released by the post-Mao authorities) to reconstruct what has happened. […] It appears to have been the worst famine of the twentieth century. Jowett's piece was a pioneering analysis which should really have been published in a mainstream journal … I don't think it ever was.18 (Sidaway, 2001[personal communication])

There was probably a notion that some of the papers would rehearse work that might then appear in the wider literature, although there are one or two items here, such as Jowett's piece or Stella Lowder's Paper #4 (on the social areas of Barcelona), that were substantial pieces of serious Glasgow geographical scholarship for which there is no or limited other ‘published’ trace.

Another body of materials toppling out of our cupboards has been a chaotic mix of (variably formatted) field surveys and expedition reports, with much to enlighten claims about the ‘field’ or ‘local geography’ research tradition of many mid-twentieth century academic geographers (Cloke et al., 2005, pp. 10–13). Central to this tradition was the importance of geographers, often comprising teams of student geographers led by staff members, undertaking sustained field study – surveying topographies and land uses, counting and measuring aspects of both physical and human environments, landscape sketching, even chatting to ‘informants’, supplemented with documentary (especially map but possibly census) work – in the production of regional reports, occasionally with a thematic edge, that would be properly printed, bound and circulated.19 Most notably, the so-called ‘Outer Hebridean crofting surveys’ conducted by Glasgow staff members H.A. Moisley and J.B. Caird between 1955–56 and 1961, on the islands of Barra, Benbecula, Harris and South Uist, were complemented by two seasons of research on Lewis with members of the ‘Geographical Field Group’ (an organisation committed to improving professional geographers' abilities in rigorous fieldwork: see Beaver, 1962; Wheeler, 1967). The 1958 visit was to the Park district of Lewis, and the 1959 visit to the parish of Uig. While reports from the previous surveys have not immediately come to light20 (but see Moisley, 1961; also Campbell, 1958; MacSween, 1957, 1959), the two Lewis seasons produced substantial ‘publications’: Caird's (c.1958) Park: A Geographical Study of a Lewis Crofting District and Moisley's (c.1961) Uig: A Hebridean Parish, Parts I & II.21 These are impressive documents on any count, containing lengthy text alongside numerous maps, diagrams, tables and graphs, and they are clearly the product of intensive inquiry in the field, on maps and from historical sources. Caird and Moisley authored the main geographical descriptions and others then fleshed out the details of specific townships or sub-districts, demonstrating teamwork but also the academic leadership of the Glasgow staff. These documents reveal an approach to ‘practising’ Geography deeply anchored in the discipline's regional tradition, albeit with little obvious signposting of underlying intellectual coordinates except in a stray observation such as ‘Park is a ‘region of difficulty’22 (Caird, 1958, p. 1), but with also a hint of an emerging quantitative turn in the discipline suggested by the use of simple descriptive statistics and the inspection of graphs for bi-variate relationships (teetering on the brink of calculating correlation coefficients).

These crofting surveys, including their key role in British Geography's ‘field’ orientation, are relatively well-known to historians of the discipline (especially MacDonald, 2009; Merchant, 2000, particularly pp. 171–178). Less-remembered may be Ronald Miller and Susan Luther-Davis's (1968) Eday and Hoy: A Development Survey (see Figure 3), and it is worth quoting from their preface:

This study was undertaken at the request of the Orkney Council of Social Service, who are concerned at the high rate of depopulation in Eday and Hoy [two small islands in the Orkney group]. They were able to obtain funds from the Highlands and Islands Development Board to cover the cost of transport and half the expense of maintenance and publication. The field-work was carried out in the summer of 1968[…]

The report is written primarily to serve the purpose for which it was commissioned but we hope that it may be of relevance to others with similar problems and perhaps also of interest as an exercise in applied geography. (Miller & Luther-Davies, 1968, vii)

Figure 3. Front cover of Ronald Miller and Susan Luther-Davies (1968) Eday and Hoy: A Development Survey

In effect, this was a piece of consultancy, albeit seeking to provide decent ‘applied geography’ research – and it is revealing that this term was used at such an early date, long before ‘applied geography’ emerged as a genre of endeavour named as such (Pacione, 1999, 2009) – in the service of places enduring economic and social problems. This survey does not appear to have involved students, but a smattering of student ‘expedition’ reports have been recovered from the 1970s through to 1980,23 most of which enjoyed some staff involvement – often from the lecturing staff or occasionally a teaching assistant – and display a measure of standardisation if with variations on a theme. Most of the surviving accounts include administrative, financial, logistical and other practical ‘reports’, sometimes also including medical, insurance and hazards information, and most contain some element of ‘personal’ reflection, perhaps attempting to convey the comical moments in a manner akin to those spied in the photograph albums covered above. A major difference arises in the extent of the reporting on the academic geographical research completed, with the Kimberley Expedition Report (1997) being exemplary, notably for its physical geography content. Despite staff member Dave Evans's dedicated input to initiating research-led teaching expeditions to glaciated regions from 1991 to 2004 (see Evans, 2009), it is only with John Briggs and Joanne Sharp's recent mounting of Africa expeditions that the tradition of ‘publishing’ final reports24– and hence of contributing to the departmental archive – has been resumed.

Another contribution to the department's ‘grey’ literature warranting a mention is (The) Drumlin, the student-led departmental magazine, which was first ‘published’ in 1955 and has appeared on and off ever since (with a sad absence of several years now being remedied by a Centenary issue off the presses in June 2009). (The) Drumlin can be configured as a hybrid or ‘middle-order’ production sitting between the concerns of the Department's lecturing staff and those of its student constituency, whose writings (and drawings) echo, extend, challenge and parody the versions of academic Geography that ‘we’ advance in teaching situations and through the readings set. As such, it is a valuable lens on the Department's various scholarly and teaching ‘life-worlds’, but, having already been inspected as such in print by one of the present authors (Philo, 1996, 1998; Withers & Philo, 1996), there is no need to re-tread that ground here. What can be concluded in this section, however, is that this departmental ‘grey’ literature, notwithstanding certain semblances of order, actually comprises a fairly disorderly, chaotic and even frustrating box in our archive. There is a considerable amount of material, numerous documents with plenty of inky text, maps and images, and it is possible to arrange items chronologically in such a way that outline trends begin to insinuate themselves – in ‘our’ changing research affinities, teaching philosophies, worldly relevance and broader sympathies (towards given people, places and problems). Yet the material is patchy: in terms of what has materialised, its temporal coverage, which is desperately limited prior to the 1950s, the form and quality that it takes, and in what opportunities it now offers us for any orderliness of interpretation.25

The Department in the University Archives

It is not only in the Department's own spaces that we have searched for our archive, since records about ‘us’ are distributed elsewhere in the University and, to a limited extent, beyond.26 In terms of the former, a recently-finished PhD student, Allan Lafferty, has trawled in detail through materials deposited in the University Archives27 as part of this Centenary gathering exercise, and in the process has generated notes and lists that in themselves now become core items in our own archive. Unsurprisingly, the University Archives contain all manner of miscellaneous documents potentially of moment in reconstructing our history, including the deposited papers of one ex-Head of Department, Professor Ronald Miller,28 and also occasional sets of student lecture notes (used to a limited extent by Philo, 2009a, 2009b). But the Archives also divulge what appear to be much more orderly materials, ones with full temporal coverage and, to an extent, logical consistency of content, precisely because they have been created, organised and catalogued by what might be termed a ‘bureaucratic’ mind-set. Specifically, we are talking about the likes of University Court and Senate Meeting Minutes (revealing key strategic and also more routine decisions about Geography in the University), University Calendars (containing regulations and, in earlier times, curricula of the Geography course [and later degree]), student Class Catalogues (revealing class lists of students taking Geography and related courses), records of departmental staff employed by the University (dates of appointments and promotions), and records of postgraduate theses (which we have cross-checked against University Library data). These latter materials do enable a relatively orderly account to be written of the Department's official history, a ‘top-down’ version derived from the University vantage-point on Geography at Glasgow, and we have begun to author such an account, albeit concentrating first on the early years for which few other sources (including oral histories) remain. This account has been mounted on the Departmental website (Philo with Lafferty, 2009), with links through to the originals of Lafferty's own notes and lists.

The Court Minutes reveal the phases, procedures and persons involved in the origins of Geography at Glasgow, although the precise motivations of the key figures in those months from March 1908 to January 1909 – when it was mooted that a ‘Lectureship in Geography’ be instituted, a small Committee met to consider this proposal, plausible candidates were considered and Sir Henry Lyons was appointed – cannot be retrieved from the Court transcripts. What these records suggest is that, notwithstanding Lyons's brief tenure, he did work assiduously to set Geography at Glasgow on a proper educational footing, devising a syllabus, sorting out course textbooks, and agitating for resources as fundamental as tables, stools, map press and drawers, traveller's accounts and ‘a boy’ to assist with menial tasks (likely cleaning blackboards, sharpening pencils and folding maps). The University Calendar tells more about the intellectual content of the first Geography course, and hence about the vision of Geography as an academic subject possessed by Lyons, and in Box 1 below we repeat passages from Philo with Lafferty (2009) that quote from the Calendar and provide elaboration of what ‘Glasgow Geography 1909’ seemingly encompassed. Taken together, the top-down record paints a picture of a departmental ‘life-world’ in which Lyons, the one staff member, with his conjoint surveying, meteorological, regional and ‘overseas’ interests (see also Briggs & Sharp, 2009), met regularly with small classes of student geographers, poring intently over tables full of maps, travellers' tales, survey data and (a few) textbooks, all engaging – as either master or apprentice – in what might be described as ultimately the ‘craft’ of being a factually knowledgeable and thoroughly practical Geographer.

Box 1 . Geography as taught at Glasgow in 1909–10 (from Philo with Lafferty, 2009)

This is the […] entry from the University Calendar laying down the Geography course to be delivered in the academic session 1909–10, and as subsequently summarised in the Senate and Court minutes:

VIII. Geography

This lectureship was instituted by the University Court in 1909.

Lecturer – 1909. H.G. Lyons, FRS [Fellow of the Royal Society]

Ordinary Class– The course of 75 lectures with supplementary tutorial instruction, treats of the subject generally, and qualifies for graduation in Arts. It falls into 3 main divisions, viz.– I. Mathematical Geog.; II Physical Geog. or Geomorphology; and III. Anthropogeography or Geography in relation to Man. Under the first head will be treated Map Projections, Cartography, Land Measurement, and Surveying; in the second division will be discussed Meteorology & Climatology, with Plant & Animal Distribution; and the third will be devoted to Economic and Commercial Geography on the one hand and to Political and Historical Geography on the other.

Advanced Class– In this class of 50 lectures the Lecturer will deal with (a) a typical geographical region, & (b) a special branch of geographical science, these being varied from year to year. In session 1909–10 [ie. the first ever running of the course] he proposes to take up under (a) the geography of arid regions, and under (b) Cartography, Land Measurement, and surveying, more exhaustively treated than in the general course. (UC 1909, SEN 10/51: 92)

This is a strange passage to read, at once disconcerting familiarly and yet in other ways quite unfamiliar. Let us think first about the main terms included here. ‘Physical Geography’ is explicitly named, for instance, a designation utterly commonplace for today's students, but some puzzlement might be felt by the implication that the term is interchangeable with that of ‘Geomorphology’, itself still an entirely familiar designation. That interchangeability is immediately belied, however, by the suggestion that the study of Physical Geography will include ‘Meteorology and Climate’, surely quite distinct from if related to Geomorphology, as well as the study of ‘Plant & Animal Distributions’. Meteorology and Climate continue to be acknowledged as crucial bases of Physical Geography, albeit it now being rare for them to be taught at any depth within present Geography programmes. Similarly, studying the distributions of flora and fauna, while now subsumed within and sometimes taught under the umbrella of ‘Biogeography’, ceases to have anything like the same prominence at the core of undergraduate programmes.

One might have expected a term like ‘Regional Geography’ to surface in thiscourse outline, given that from the early-1900s the region as the organising device for geographical studies was increasingly coming to the fore. That Lyons regarded the region as such a pivotal organising device is clear, even so, since the advanced class was supposed to deal with ‘a typical geographical region’, presumably meaning a given type of region – since in 1909 he proposed looking at ‘arid regions’, doubtless reflecting his own Egyptian experiences – rather than one particular world region supposedly typical of all regions.

Perhaps what is most obvious from this Calendar entry, though, is the emphasis upon the more technical or practical aspects of Geography. Given Lyons's own background, previously he had been Director-General of the Egyptian Survey Department, it is unsurprising that survey, both topographic and land ‘measuring’, was given such emphasis. […] Cartography was strongly to the fore as well, thus instituting an extremely strong thread of geographical education at Glasgow over the intervening years: namely, a concern for the interrelated skills of cartography, surveying and associated analytical techniques, all clustering under the now all-but-defunct heading of ‘Mathematical Geography’. Glasgow Geography has always possessed this particular association, arguably more so than virtually any other British Geography department of higher education, leading in Glasgow to the distinctive teaching (and research) contributions in what became known as ‘topographic science’ and, more recently, ‘geomatics’ (see R.M., 1967).

‘Human Geography’ is not named as such and the term popularised by the German scholar Freidrich Ratzel, ‘Anthropogeography’, is adopted instead (with the awkward clarifying phrase ‘Geography in relation to Man’, further reminding us that we are in an era lacking gender awareness and hence being entirely unselfconscious about the ‘exclusions’ implied by speaking of ‘Man’ not ‘Man and Woman’). That said, there are terms here –‘Economic’, ‘Political’ and ‘Historical Geography’– referencing well-known subdisciplines of Human Geography with which today's students will be familiar. The term ‘Commercial Geography’ is rarely used now, but at the time, when G.C. Chisholm's various editions of his Handbook of Commercial Geography littered the shelves of British universities, its presence in this ‘Commercial Geography’ is rarely used now, but at the time, when G.C. Chisholm's various editions of his Handbook of Commercial Geography lined the shelves of British universities, its presence in this course outline is wholly unsurprising. The terms ‘Cultural’ and ‘Social Geography’ are absent, reflecting the fact that they were almost if not completely unknown at the time, but also perhaps indicating that the more immaterial subject-matters of these subdisciplines – the realms of meaning and sociality – were as yet little-recognised as legitimate for serious geographical consideration.

What the central records do qualify are certain assumptions about both what we mean when talking about the origins of a ‘department’ and the pantheon of individuals reckoned to have been the ‘Heads’ of this department, particularly in the earliest days after 1909. It is too easy to project back our current understandings of a ‘department’, as a largish organisational entity, including various staff members and a clear division of their labours, together with an obvious physical space in which departmental business – not just teaching, but also research and administration – is transacted. It can be inferred from the Court Minutes that such a ‘department’ did not really arise until the 1930s, even if the term was occasionally used to denote the status of Geography as a subject taught in the University from as early as 1909, when Court agreed ‘to the addition of the subject of Geography under Depts. of Study’ (CM, 1908–09, C/1/1/16, p. 98f). In 1912 a ‘private room’, presumably an office, was provided for ‘the Lecturer in Geog.’ (CM, 1911–12, C1/1/19, p. 102; our emphasis), but it was not until 1934 that we hear about the need ‘[to] provide room for two of the Geog. Lecturers for whom there is no accomⁿ’ (CM, 1934–35, C1/1/42, p. 18). The references here to research and lecturers are both significant, the former signalling the emergence of a research function and the latter signalling that the ‘Lecturer in Geography’ now had genuine academic colleagues, not just ‘senior demonstrators’ or an ‘assistant’. This argument is more fully developed, with additional evidence, in Philo with Lafferty (2009), but the implication is that the extent of the ‘Department’ in these early years was indeed just the Geography taught course, the one Lecturer and very limited accommodation. This was a decidedly small ‘life-world’ in every respect.29

One corollary is that it is perhaps injudicious to refer to Lyons and his immediate successors as ‘Heads’ of a Department, since what would it really mean to be designated a ‘Head’ over such a tiny dominion? A further finding from the official record is that, even if we decide to continue with the term for these early years, the succession of the earliest Heads of Department (HoDs) is not quite what we thought in advance.30 For whatever exact reason, the succession that the present authors were led to expect of the earliest HoDs was Lyons-Newbigin-Stevens, perhaps reflecting a wish to claim the highly significant woman geographer, Marion Newbigin, a pioneer most notably in the spheres of animal and plant geography, as ‘one of our own’, and not merely as what she really was, primarily an Edinburgh scholar and leading light (Maddrell, 2009, especially Chapter 331). What the Court Minutes chasteningly reveal is that, when Lyons stood down in 1911, he was replaced by J.D. Falconer –‘Falc.’, as he was sometimes named in the minutes – then the Principal Officer of the Mineral Survey of Southern Nigeria (and hence seemingly having a background, professionally and in terms of his take on Geography, close to that of Lyons). Falconer was the Lecturer in Geography until 1916, when he requested leave to return to Nigeria as a temporary Assistant Director in the Northern Provinces (apparently at the request of the Colonial Office). It is noted in the Court Minutes that: ‘As a sub. For next session, Dr Falc. Has suggested Dr Marion I. Newbigin, ed. of the Scot. Geog. Mag. Principal to make arrangements’ (CM, 1915–16, C1/1/23, p. 37). And that, remarkably, is the only mention of Newbigin located to date in the official record, with it never even being confirmed whether she did take up this post as ‘substitute’. In the event, a new post emerged, ‘Temporary Lecturer in Geography’, to cover Falconer in what became his extended absence, a post held by Newbigin (1916–17), James Cossar (1917–18) and Alexander Stevens (1919–21). Thus, even if these individuals are retrospectively designated HoDs, they were only stand-ins for the absentee Falconer. When Falconer did finally resign in 1921, he was replaced by Stevens, who appears to have become the de facto Lecturer in Geography before this date, and Stevens very gradually did accumulate around him the accoutrements of a ‘true’ department, with other lecturing staff, the outlines of a research culture, an Honours Geography degree and a number of dedicated rooms. As such, he can with some justification be described as a HoD, whereas this appellation is dubious for all those before him. To underline, the Centenary's provocation to consult archival sources, here the Court Minutes, has fundamentally altered our grasp on Glasgow Geography's most ‘formal’ history.

For all this, it would be mistaken to over-estimate the orderliness of such materials, for they too are beholden to the vicissitudes of exactly what University ‘bureaucrats’ have elected to record, how they have worded items, notably Court and Senate minutes, and, beyond that, to the varying demands of University plans, strategies and procedures (dictating what gets regarded as essential for retention in the institutional memory). Indeed, issues of power-knowledge are stark here, since there is an aspect of these materials that demonstrates the University's ‘disciplining’ of Geography, approving (or, crucially, disapproving) appointments, expenditure and even changes to the syllabus. While we are not suggesting anything that insidious in this regard, there maybe remains something to be asked about, for instance, why it was that ‘Geographers’ such as Lyons and Falconer were so in favour with the University authorities in those early years. Maybe more profoundly, though, we are also wary of the orderly account that it is fairly easy to write on the basis of what might be termed the ‘official transcript’ (eg. Philo with Lafferty, 2009), not that this is somehow erroneous but because it is more partial than it might initially appear, embodying a species of ‘institutional history’ fabricating an order based on ‘facts’, ‘dates’ and pronouncements from ‘on high’, a singular story that then supersedes all others. Indeed, if it argued that early Glasgow Geography embraced the features that we claimed a few paragraphs back, how was this Geography actually experienced by both Lyons and his students? How did it feel to them, how satisfying was it, how edifying, how challenging, how boring, and so on? These are questions that cannot but elude the official transcript, queering the order of any account asserting that Geography was ‘secured’ at Glasgow when – from this part of the archive at least – we cannot judge whether this ‘securing’ of Geography at Glasgow permeated not only minds but also hearts and bodies.

The Department in a Century of Examination Papers

The sitting of degree exam(inations)s by undergraduate students is a traditional feature on the university calendar. In their organisation and operation, exams remain largely unchanged as the preferred exercise for the evaluation of student ability, and in their occurrence as event, exams convincingly perform the University's status as an ancient seat of learning. Likewise, the design of exam questions, and the arrangement of exam papers, represents something of a constant in Glasgow's geographical century.32 The continuous run of such papers retained by the Department represents a telling resource by which we can explore local configurations of geographical knowledge, teaching and learning; and one thus far unexamined in an otherwise productive period for historiographical inquiries centring on geography's place in the British university.33

At a date unknown, papers arising from the first seventy-one years of geography degree exams were carefully glued into three hard-bound volumes: the first, designed originally for keeping newspaper cuttings, the second set in standard ruled pages, the third an accounts book with specialised ledger paper (‘double cash with headline’).34 Taken at face value, there is much about the overall look and basic layout of the very first Geography degree paper that would put students in our Centenary class of 2009 at ease (see Figure 4). Indeed, the great majority of questions in exam papers dating from the earliest years fall into familiar categories of question design, still recommended by experts in higher education teaching and learning. The categories will be instantly recognisable to geographers of different generations, and are, variously:

Speculative

‘How may the geographical position of a state influence its development?’ (1910)

Write on

‘Write a short account of the main structural features of South America’ (1912)

Describe or explain

‘Describe the physical features of the plain of England, and show how they influenced the distribution and development of the inhabitants’ (1910)

Discussion

‘Discuss the movements of the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean’ (1910)

Compare and contrast

‘Compare in origin and extent the deserts of (a) Africa (b) S. America, (c) Australia.’ (1913)

Evaluation

‘Give some account of Huntingdon's views on the place and influence of climate in civilization. How far is the climate of the British Isles favourable to human development?’ (1918)

Assertion

‘The Chinese are a steppeland people who have settled in a monsoon region.’ Assuming that this statement is true, what light does it throw upon political, economic and social conditions in China?’ (1923)

Quotation

‘But while the migrant shepherd originates nothing, he plays an historical role as a transmitter of civilization.’ Discuss this statement. (1922)

Definition

‘Define latitude. How would you find the latitude of any place at noon on March and June 21^st? Illustrate by accurately drawn figures.’ (1918)

Figure 4. Examination Paper, 1910

Predictably enough, across the entire ‘bank’ of exam papers (running to some several thousand questions) there are plentiful examples of stylistic difference in design, reflecting kinds of geographical knowledge specific to period and earlier episodes in the intellectual history of the discipline. While cautious about subjecting our predecessors to teacherly admonition, for the modern-day academic some questions now read as alarmingly open-ended, lacking a clear sense of what exactly was being tested35:

‘Write notes on: Moscow, Peshawar, Caracas, Auckland, Singapore.’ (1923)

‘Describe the geographical observations you have made on any excursion in the south of Scotland.’ (1927)

‘Plan a month's excursion in France, explaining the object of each section of the trip.’ (1931)

What is clearly evident from the greater mass of papers set during the first fifty years of Glasgow's Geographical Century is an emphasis placed on the disciplined articulation of geographical knowledge. ‘Write an orderly geography of …’ was an injunction much favoured by examiners. The phrase was first used in 1929, appearing with notable frequency thereafter in questions requiring an account of a given country, region or river basin, and it was still in use in 1950. The production of orderliness speaks of the systematic, categorical approach taken to the (sometimes rote) learning of regional geography: according to topography, settlement, vegetation, climate and resources. Any such digest of geographical facts and figures undoubtedly benefits from structure, but the orderly imperative can be unpacked further when cross-referenced with other features to be found in early exam papers. Orderliness of knowledge was aligned with, valued similarly to, and could not be separated from, concision of expression. The rhetoric of brevity is everywhere apparent: answers must be ‘short’, ‘brief’, ‘concise’, ‘very concise’ and ‘describe shortly’.36 In truth, there was little option. Long-winded answers would seal students' fate since degree regulations required them to attempt five questions in an exam lasting three hours. Given the possible scope of any individual question – eg. ‘Write a short orderly account of the physical and human geography of the Vistula Basin’ (1930) – we are left to marvel at what must have been the impressive organisational abilities, and unflappable nature, of students at the time. Thus, a powerful logic of orderliness governed those worldly geographies internal to each exam, working to shape the students’ successful and timely completion of the exam paper. Of course, the necessity of order, and a corresponding preference for the art of geographical description, might be set against a lesser valuation of critical analysis in answers by student geographers.37

A great deal could be said about the epistemic content, the terminology, and the geography, of geographical subject matter chosen for exam questions; much more than space here permits. Suffice to say, that the human aspects of geographical inquiry encompassed familiar versions of endeavour and development, variously industrial, expeditionary, and commercial. Expressions of expansionism, imperial hubris and racial prejudice were characteristic, reflective of geography's martial aspect and the lasting ideological legacy of nineteenth century thought. In some world settings, the need for trade-offs between social and economic purpose formed the basis of a question. Meanwhile, physiographic, hydrographic, climatic and meteorological phenomena, or systems, were considered naturally occurring. Accordingly, many of the questions posed about emergence or existence figured such phenomena and systems in isolation. It was equally commonplace that students be invited to demonstrate an entirely integrated form of understanding however, where the impact of the physical environment was reflected in patterns of human development and significance.38 While it is possible to establish general trends such as these, certain questions are more likely to surprise, or give pause for reflection; sometimes at the invention shown by setters, sometimes at the nature of the task set, sometimes by the type or tenor of language used, sometimes by the choice of topic under examination. Instances which are exemplary of each follow.

In some of the very first papers set, we find geographical novelty of an older coinage, and here we can confidently presume the influence of Lyons. For the testing of students’ surveying and mapping techniques, elaborate exercises were devised, based upon corresponding sets of measurements, bearings and times (see Figure 5). Tasks could require sophisticated abilities in geographical visualisation: figured notionally as ‘a traveller’, students were occasionally asked to envisage a traverse over imaginary topography, ultimately constructing ‘a sketch of the country’ covered. Subsequent to Lyons's departure from Glasgow, the same genre of question was retained, although in tending towards the descriptive rather than the technical, these could sometimes test the limits of credibility:

‘Describe the vegetation you would find on a journey from the Ivory Coast to Timbuktu, noting also the natural and domestic fauna.’ (1927)

Figure 5. Examination Paper (extract), 1911

Still stiffer sorts of test were supplied in a series of Honours papers set between 1926–33, where passages of geographical text in French or German were provided for translation, and questions in both foreign languages required answers in the same tongue.

To finish, a few examples of subjects which are likely to surprise. Current cohorts of Geography students are expected to understand how their subject can inform, and be informed by, current worldly affairs and contemporary geopolitics. The same can be said for those studying at Glasgow in 1915:

‘Discuss the geographical attractions to the territorial expansion of Germany presented to the adjoining lands on the eastern and western frontiers.’

By 1918, the objective language of analytical detachment had been supplanted by a more value-laden identification of problem states:

‘Give an account of the geographical conditions of the Netherlands, and consider how far these must influence the attitude of the country towards the belligerent European powers.’

Even so, simple patriotism was displaced, and attentions focused instead on an allied European outlook. On the same paper, students were tested on their grasp of the effects that geography might have on the negotiation of a post-War peace agreement:

‘Indicate any geographical conditions of Europe (1) which have intimately affected the military operations of the War and (2) which are likely to have a bearing upon any subsequent settlement of the chief problems at issue.’

Indeed, questions of political geography were a regular feature in papers set during the interwar period. Under exam conditions, student geographers were figured as international ‘trouble-shooters’, tasked with re-ordering ethnic and trade relations, all the way from the Irish Free State to Upper Silesia and Anatolia. Questions required that they chart new, prospective versions of statehood, according to international borders, ‘ethnographic settlements’ and rights to resource exploitation. Evidently, different lessons in international diplomacy, statecraft, colonial administration, trade relations and competitive economic advantage were being learned along the way. Moreover, for those who tend towards a version of historical interpretation which considers ‘the past as the key to the present’, two questions from papers set in 1932 hang heaviest in the mind:

‘Write an essay on the economic geography of Iraq’

‘Discuss the bearing of the physical geography of Afghanistan on the question of the political unity of the country under existing economic conditions, and estimate the probable effects of developments along modern lines should these occur’.

Conclusions: Places to Start

‘I remember these two,’ he said. ‘That gives me some place to start,’ Old Betoine said, lighting up the little brown cigarette he rolled. ‘All these things have stories alive in them.’ He pointed at the telephone books. ‘I brought back the books with all the names in them. Keeping track of things.’ He stroked his moustache as if he were remembering things. – from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko [Silko, 1977].

Since reading this passage, I haven't been able to look at a phone book the same way. To Old Betoine, a phone book is an archive and one with a rich history that deserves to be kept safe. For me, a phone book was always just a phone book. […]

The great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin had also set about collecting and creating small archives that represented experiences and ideas drawn out of the scraps of modern life in order to provide a portrait of his own existence. (Mr Whiskets, 2009)

This delightful blog, a commentary on Walter Benjamin's Archive (Benjamin, 2007), nicely encapsulates our wish to assemble ‘small archives’ based upon a multiplicity of ‘scraps’ culled from diverse sources and sites, from which the many ‘stories’ of Geography at Glasgow (over its century) can be retrieved and retold. Some of these scraps have indeed been little more than scraps, morsels of ‘scrappy’ evidence displaying little obvious order in what they are, how they were first made and in how or why they have survived. The chance survival of the field excursion photograph albums is an obvious case in point. Other of the scraps have been rather larger in terms of size and span, albeit perhaps deceptive in the extent of their intrinsic order, something notably true of the Occasional Papers and field reports, while other scraps again have been equally deceptive, with the official records in the University Archives possessing a veneer of longevity and consistency – bound into the loosely ‘disciplinary’ quality of such records – but actually, once scratched, betraying a fragmentary and even capricious character (with only stray mentions of Geography, clear gaps in the record, even clear errors creeping in). Yet another scrap, the examination papers, is far from ‘scrappy’ and its utter completeness, its excessive orderliness, remains a total surprise to us, but here we then encounter a curious muteness, a ‘small archive’ that can, in and by itself, only yield a relatively narrow range of findings and possible conclusions.

The orderliness of the accounts that we can compose of departmental history in conjunction with these different materials is not quite what might be anticipated. It might be supposed that the most orderly accounts – those relaying a longer-term narrative with an apparent reliability of ‘factual’ evidence allied to a certain consistency in claims advanced – would be those based on the most (conventionally) ordered of sources, the University Archive entries or even examination papers being exemplary, and there is a ‘truth’ to that supposition. It might also be supposed that the most disorderly accounts – those where we have the least confidence, where inference apparently dominates, and where, it might be said, ‘the dots cannot be joined’– would be those based on the most (conventionally) disordered of sources, the photograph albums being exemplary, and there is a ‘truth’ to that supposition as well. As we have nonetheless been arguing throughout, such equations may be deceptive, partly because the different sources, these disparate parts of our archive, are not always quite what they first seem in that it is quite possible to discern order in apparent disorder and vice versa.39 Partly, however, it is that the most conventionally ordered accounts, those cleaving to the ‘institutional history’ genre, drawing as they do upon the most official, bureaucratically-collected and ‘governmental’ of sources,40 may also be the ones that miss what is most important: the stories from below or, indeed, from within, the feelings, the joys, the frustrations, the elations, the angers, the senses of accomplishment or loss, the passions of pleasure or despair, that arguably linger more palpably in certain sources than in others (also Lorimer, 2003a, 2003b; Lorimer & Spedding, 2002). And this is why we reckon that it may be in the photograph albums and the more unguarded statements slipping into copies of (The) Drumlin, the field reports, even the prefaces of the Occasional Papers, but maybe too in certain fugitive comments from the University Archives, that the knotty grain of Glasgow's Geography's many local ‘life-worlds’ become exposed to view. But this is potentially to miss the importance of ‘the telephone book’, as above, or the examination papers and other banal, administrative and unprepossessing sources, as in our discussion, since they too may be a valuable ‘place to start’ in recomposing a departmental history, secreting within them other stories depicting a quite other ‘portrait’ of Glasgow Geography's own, ongoing ‘existence’. It is perfectly feasible that we could write orderly accounts on the backs of all of these sources, all of these ‘small (and not-so-small) archives’, orderly, disorderly or however characterised, since the orderliness is ultimately to be gauged in whether what gets retold is deemed intelligible, credible, interesting, moving or even worth reading. And, with that, we stroked our moustaches, as if remembering things.

Acknowledgements

This paper would have been impossible without the indefatigable labours of Allan Lafferty. Personal communications from Alistair Cruikshank, Allan Findlay, David Forrest, Fraser MacDonald and Charlie Withers have been extremely valuable. Thanks to two referees for their supportive remarks and advice. Thanks to all those colleagues who have found things in their offices, shared memories and wondered about the things recounted here. Thanks to Les Hill for assistance with scanning the images.

Notes

¹This survey was sent out to all Geography departments in the UK, and led to a recent published review of departmental archives (Johnston & Withers, 2008).

²At this time the Department was called the Department of Geography and Geomatics (ex-Topographic Science).

³See Withers's (2002, pp. 306–308) claims about first stumbling upon ‘that old stuff’ and then more deliberately collecting together, hence ‘constructing’, the archive of the Department of Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

⁴We say ‘surfaces’ because some of the items gathered together are objects, like maps or surveying equipment, not merely signs of one type or another on paper.

⁵We copy this construction –‘Glasgow's Geographical Centenary’– from the title of Withers's paper on the occasion of ‘Edinburgh's Geographical Centenary’ (Withers, 2008).

⁶The first issue of Drumlin, the student-edited magazine – a favoured outlet for the dissemination of written material arising from ‘fieldtrips’– would not appear for a quarter of a century (1955).

⁷It is unknown whether the Glasgow students received any formal instruction on photographic technique. In the modern history of the discipline, photography, rather like field sketching, has tended to be treated as a staple form of geographical representation (and for the most gifted exponents an artistic extra) but seldom regarded as a method with core status, or demanding pedagogic input. Critical historiographies of geography might usefully compare the treatment of surveying (formally taught) and photography or field-drawing (sanctioned but less often taught). See also comments below about examination questions demanding that students do a landscape drawing.

⁸Jane Soons was one of the Department's Teaching Assistants present on the 1956 Scandinavian expedition, and one of the Department's earliest female PhD graduates. In recognition of her subsequent contributions to research in physical geography, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Glasgow in July 2009.

⁹One set was found in the fume cupboard in our Physical Geography laboratory.

¹⁰This literature, particularly the so-called occasional or working paper series, has briefly been discussed by Connell (1974), Hoggart (1974) and, most comprehensively, Larkham (1987). Connell (1974, p. 121) comments that mnay of the papers concerned ‘are unknown (and some of which deserve to be unknown) outside their original departments’.

¹¹Which raises a question as to whether the overall corpus of ‘proper’ publications by Departmental staff – books, chapters, journal papers, official/consultancy reports – might also be said to constitute part of our archive. In this paper, we have been scrupulous in not referencing such publications unless directly relevant to writing the histories of Geography departments, Glasgow's included.

¹²The title of the series changed for the last paper to Department of Geography and Topographic Science, University of Glasgow, Occasional Papers.

¹³As a result, Findlay established the Applied Population Research Group (APRU), which produced its own Discussion Paper series (over 20 papers from 1989 to 1994), including many non-Glasgow authors. The APRU would warrant its own detailed treatment, not least for its formative role in the subdisciplinary fields of population geography and population/migration studies. See APRU (1992).

¹⁴For much of the 1980s, even into the early-1990s, a major feature of annual meetings of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) was the ‘Occasional Publications’ room, separate from the commercial publishers’ stands, where racks and tables of such series from most British Geography departments could be readily browsed. This room is now but a distant memory.

¹⁵The perception, erroneous as it happens, has been peddled that ‘we’ should forget about wasting time on any pieces of writing lacking the credibility of ‘proper’ publications (in some cases, the latter apparently only being academic journals with ISSN status), since these would be beneath the RAE radar.

¹⁶For a brief time in the early-2000s, the Department in Glasgow did have an on-line Occasional Paper series, at one point boasting over twenty items, but for the moment at least this too has faded away.

¹⁷Organised on behalf of the IBG and the University Association for Contemporary European Studies.

¹⁸Sidaway is not entirely correct, since published versions did appear (eg. Jowett, 1989a, 1989b, 1990, 1991).

¹⁹We also encountered numerous fieldclass manuals: most amount to little more than rudimentary geographical descriptions of destination regions (from York to Swansea to Galway to Mallorca …) coupled to instructions about individual or group fieldwork to be undertaken. If arranged systematically from oldest to most recent, it might be possible to reconstruct something from these sources about changing departmental approaches to field inquiry, with possible wider resonances. They do not, however, comprise departmental ‘grey’ literature in quite the manner meant here.

²⁰In the sense of documents ‘divulged’ from within the Department during our current Centenary searches: it may be that such reports, together with original data card indexes, are now deposited in the University of Dundee archives (MacDonald, 2009) – Caird moved to a post in Dundee in the early-1960s.

²¹ Parts III & IV cannot be found: maybe they were never produced.

²²Which suggests a nod towards Fleure's (1919) famous typology of regions: ‘regions of difficulty’ of course being ones where hostile ‘natural’ environmental conditions shape, perhaps curtail or force greater ingenuity, in the dimensions of the ‘human response’.

²³We have recovered the following ‘Geography’ expedition reports: Seil/Easdale/Luing, 1977; Arolla, 1977; Kimberley, 1997. There must have been more. We have also recovered the following ‘Topographic Science’ expedition reports: Kanderfirn, 1973; Callanish, 1974; Norway, 1975; Scourie, 1976; Maam, 1978, 1980; Twelve Pins, 1981; Cwm Idwal, 1982; Newborough Warren, 1983. Again, there may be more. The Topographic Science Honours degree came on stream in the late-1960s, and for a while from the Level 3 (Junior Honours) students went away as a group every summer, together with some Level 2 (intending Honours) students, to undertake a group-based survey and mapping exercise that was not formally assessed (an exercise which eventually ceased in the 1990s when assessed individual student projects were demanded). Students have exerted a lot of control over the destinations of these expeditions, albeit with some staff input. Many expeditions have solicited sponsors, the reports being in part designed as a tangible output to return to these sponsors, and some of the maps produced by the topographic science fieldwork were formally published. Thanks to David Forrest for background information here.

²⁴eg. Aswan, 2002, 2004; Tanzania, 2008. These were explicitly formulated at ‘student exchanges’ in the sense of entailing collaborative work between undergraduate geographers from the University of Glasgow and their equivalents in the Universities of South Valley, Egypt, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

²⁵Which is also a caution against the ‘neatness’ of the story that Philo (1998) tells about (The) Drumlin and how revelatory it is of Glasgow geographers (staff and students) melding with broader shifts with the conceptual registers of human geography (through regional geography to spatial science and into various post-positivist positions).

²⁶For instance, in records of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (Cruickshank, 2009[pers.com.]).

²⁷Glasgow University Archives Services, 13 Thurso Street, Glasgow G11 6PE (for further details, see http://www.gla.ac.uk/archives/).

²⁸These papers include publications, a few unpublished mss., various photographs, handwritten (barely decipherable) notebooks from field excursions, with occasional notes about presentations heard at conferences, and – seemingly cross-referenced from the notebooks – sheets of slides for overhead projection. These materials could potentially be of value to researchers interested in Geography's ‘late-colonial’ period, given the extent of Miller's involvement in African and ‘colonial’ concerns.

²⁹It might be added that for many years this was not an Honours course, but rather a course – itself split into an ‘ordinary course/class’ and an ‘advanced course/class’, both to be delivered in the same academic session (year) – providing students who took both elements with ‘credits’ that could be put towards a final degree in either Arts or Science. The Honours Geography degree in anything like its present form did not arise until the 1920s. The relatively small size of the student cohort taking the course, twenty-six in 1909–10, and also its changing size and composition over the earliest years, is discussed further in Philo with Lafferty (2009).

³⁰The details here are explored in detail by Philo with Lafferty (2009).

³¹Maddrell notes only that Newbigin was an ‘external examiner’ at Glasgow (Maddrell, 2009, p. 63). The term ‘examiner’ was sometimes used to describe Glasgow's ‘Lecturer in Geography’, since the post carried with it ‘examining’ duties, and it is possible that Newbigin's ‘examining’ at Glasgow did extend, at least in 1916–17, beyond merely an ‘external’ role. Maddrell (2009, pp. 290–293 & pp. 300–303) does discuss two women geographers closely associated with Glasgow Geography, Joy Tivy, who was Head of Department, and Margaret Storrie; and the latter played a role in the above-mentioned crofting surveys.

³²Observations made draw chiefly on the first twenty-five years of exam papers. We intend a more systematic and fulsome examination of Geography exams which takes into consideration disciplinary moments and movements other than those of the ‘long regional episode’. Unfortunately, we do not have access to older examples of student answers: we would welcome being contacted by any of Glasgow's Geography student alumni who may happen to have retained their exam answer books!

³³Periods under investigation range from the early modern (Withers and Mayhew, 2002) to those within living memory (Matless, 1999).

³⁴Alternatively, it is conceivable that an archive gradually amassed as examination papers were inserted year-on-year in the volumes.

³⁵The Departmental archive of exam papers offers no obvious means to ascertain how exam scripts were judged and graded by markers. Unlike the operation of marking today – where staff are supplied with grade-related criteria describing key characteristics of student work – it seems likely that marks were assigned according to the personal opinion (and whims) of academic staff.

³⁶Paradoxically and frustratingly, in some instances, question directives stress that answers must at the same time be ‘exhaustive’ or ‘complete’. Faced with this challenge, the authors declare themselves flummoxed!

³⁷Nowadays criticality is treated as a key feature by which markers discriminate between students of ‘average’ or better ability. During sessions on exam preparation, students are taught to articulate critical thinking through the production of more discursive forms of essay. Unless having been specifically requested, brevity and concision in geographical writing are not normally rated as key criterion in the grading of student work. Although much less evident than it is today, the language of criticality is not wholly absent from early examination papers: ‘Write a critical account of our knowledge of the geography of Tibet or Outer Mongolia’ (1927).

³⁸The archive of exam papers tells us nothing of overall student reception or of differentiated response. This muteness is unavoidable since we know of no systematic university record that keeps a tally of answers to individual questions. Students can, of course, exert their will by choosing not to answer certain questions; judging them unclear, confusing, impenetrable, or just too plain difficult. Thus, some questions simply go unanswered, and it is the exam setter who can be said to have ‘failed’, rather than the exam sitter.

³⁹It might be added that we are deeply influenced by what Sibley (1981) long ago demonstrated to a geographical audience through his pioneering work on supposedly ‘disordered’ marginal groups (or ‘outsiders’): namely, that one person's or group's order may be another's disorder, and vice versa.

⁴⁰Deliberately to invoke a loosely Foucauldian perspective on the sorts of sources that we mean here, and Foucault's ideas about the archival relations and circuits of power-knowledge are never far from our thinking in this regard.