Process and Form in Geomorphology

David Stoddart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134682850
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Process and Form in Geomorphology marks a turning point in geomorphological research. Stoddart has brought together a team of the leading international experts to offer important new studies into the processes, theory and history of landforms, and to present a framework for taking research forward into the new millenium. Illustrated throughout, Process and Form in Geomorphology takes up the challenges of the research agenda set by Richard Chorley and offers fresh insights into his unique contribution.

1

RICHARD J. CHORLEY

A reformer with a cause

Robert P. Beckinsale

OXFORD

Richard John Chorley was born at 00.50 on 4 September 1927 and is always pleased to note that, discounting ‘summer time’, his birth date is 3.9.27. Three has always been his lucky number and it is understood that Plot 33 has been reserved for him at St Giles Cemetery, Cambridge. His birthplace was Minehead, a small town in Somerset only 20 miles west of the village of Pawlett, the home of Peter Haggett with whom later he was so happily linked. His father’s name was Joseph and his mother’s Mary, and he was their only child.

In 1937 he joined the local County (later Grammer (sic), as he persistently spelled it) School, where geography was to become his favourite, although not necessarily most successful, subject. His most influential teacher, Miss Lake, who was subsequently an Inspector of Schools, wrote on his reports: ‘Has ability, but is not working consistently hard enough…. Both spelling and writing need improving. He can do well but his work is erratic.’ One of his least successful subjects was French. As a ‘credit’ standard was then required for admission to university, he sat the School Certificate Examination in that subject on three occasions while at school, achieving the successive results of fail, pass, fail. As a result of this his knowledge of French grammar is very good even after almost half a century.

Between his volunteering for service in the army and his enlistment Germany surrendered, leading to his subsequent scepticism of simplistic correlations. There were to be two linked academic achievements during his almost three years of military service – the achievement of a credit in French and admission to Exeter College, Oxford. Without any further formal study of the language, Chorley presented himself again for examination and received the required credit standard. He has subsequently maintained that this success, the one of which he is most proud, was due to a combination of the language to which he was exposed in the army and to his release from formal education. However, this is not the whole story because, as has constantly happened in Chorley’s career, luck played a strong part. He wrote the French examination in Manchester equipped only with an early ballpoint pen which, true to its trade name (Rollball), fell apart during the examination. Luck enabled Chorley to retrieve the minute ball from the dusty floor – not the first time he has fallen to his knees in the course of his scholarly career. The success in French, combined with the exemption from Latin allowed to ex-servicemen, made him eligible to sit the entrance examination for Exeter College, the alma mater of Charles Lyell (1797–1875), who became Britain’s greatest geologist, internationally acclaimed as the master uniformitarian to whom, in the words of Charles Darwin, ‘the science of geology is enormously indebted … more so, as I believe, than to any other man who ever lived’ (Chorley, Dunn and Beckinsale 1964:190).

Chorley chose to read for an honours degree in geography, a subject which at Oxford had only recently blossomed into a separate entity. True, there had been temporary lecturers there on geographical topics during and since Tudor times but prolonged cementation into a unified educational subject did not materialise until after Halford J. Mackinder (1861–1947) was appointed Reader in Geography in 1887. However, it was not until twelve years later that Oxford University decided to establish a School of Geography which might grant a diploma to its successful students. Then, in the spring of 1899, Mackinder persuaded Andrew John Herbertson (1865–1913), who was lecturing at Herriot-Watt College, Edinburgh, to join him as his assistant at Oxford and the first examination there for a Diploma in Geography was held in 1901. Four years later, when Mackinder became Director of the London School of Economics, Herbertson succeeded him as Reader in Geography at Oxford and directed geographical affairs there until he died in 1915 at the early age of 50.

Thereafter, the ideas of Mackinder and Herbertson dominated thinking at the Oxford School of Geography and at most of the academies further afield to which its alumni radiated. The geographical approach was considered to be new because it had passed out of the encyclopaedic, data-listing bias common in early Victorian times to an approach which was more regional, more orientated towards topographical maps and strongly influenced by W.M. Davis’s explanatory-descriptive method and cyclic concepts. H.O. Beckit, who succeeded Herbertson as Director of the Oxford School of Geography, actually joined Davis’s European landform pilgrimage of 1911 and was a confirmed Davisian. Under his successor, Professor Kenneth Mason of Hertford College, a full honours course in geography was introduced at Oxford in 1930. However, the first half of the twentieth century was war-ridden and geographical progress here proved more material and organisational than intellectual, being dominated largely by pre-existing themes.

By chance, Chorley arrived at Oxford just at the wrong – or should we say the right? – moment for the anti-Davisian reformer. At first he was to find little co-operation in his recalcitrancy within British universities. In London, S.W. Wooldridge, a devout Davisian, ruled the roost; at Oxford landforms or geomorphology was considered a small part of a much wider geography, which was essentially a humane subject. In 1945 when the present writer chose to lecture on Rivers and Lakes the ruling powers altered the title to Rivers, Lakes and Man. In Chorley’s undergraduate time the full honours three-year course in geography consisted mainly of a study of, and separate papers in, a preliminary examination and a final examination of a separate paper on: general physical geography (a mixture mainly of landforms, climate, hydrology and botany); general human geography; map work; British Isles; France; and each of three other regions of which Chorley selected Central and Southern Europe, India, and the USA. In addition, there was a thesis on a small area and a special subject, which was examined by two separate papers and was selected from a few specific topics each enlightened by a recommended bibliography. A few years before Chorley’s arrival, enquiries on the selection of the Special Subjects had been circulated among the staff of the School of Geography and his future tutor, with an eye on the approaching International Hydrological Decade, suggested a study of European rivers. It was rejected and inexorably the Special Subject related to physical landscapes appeared as ‘The Cycle in the Study of Landscapes’ and was bolstered by a bibliography imbued with classic Davisiana. This topic was selected by both Chorley and his contemporary Yi-Fu Tuan, who went on to write a percipient paper on Penckian slopes (Tuan 1958) and later, under John E. Kesseli at the University of California at Berkeley, produced a fine doctoral thesis on ‘Pediments in southeastern Arizona’ (Tuan 1959).

By the age of 24 Chorley was beginning to feel his oats academically and was little inclined to conform to what he, perhaps misguidedly, considered to be the antiquated views of lecturers or examiners. Having realised the weaknesses of the uncompromisingly historical approach to geomorphology presented by the cyclic ideas of W.M. Davis and inflamed by its bombastic presentation by Professor Wooldridge during a guest lecture, Chorley asked a number of injudicious questions. These caused the then Professor at Oxford, famed more for the accuracy of his estimate of the height of Mount Everest than for his understanding of the depth of banality of much British geography of the period, to instruct him to refrain from the future questioning of distinguished visitors. The present writer was much more sympathetic and bears the responsibility of having been Chorley’s sole tutor during his whole three years at Oxford.

Whereas most students would be expected to achieve high marks in their special subject, he obtained two of his lowest marks in his landform papers, in spite of an oral or viva lasting over fifty minutes. In the vernacular, he was batting on a sticky wicket. Ironically, had Chorley performed better, British geomorphology might well have fared worse, in that he was debarred from pursuing more conventional postgraduate studies in this country and was fortunate enough to gain a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York City.

During the 1950s and 1960s many British geographers, human and physical alike, found a warm welcome in the USA, which, compared with war-depressed Europe, was a land flowing with milk and honey, abounding for earth scientists in real opportunities and progressive ideas. It was a further stroke of luck for Chorley that, having gone to Columbia to study under Armin K. Lobeck, he found that geomorphology there was the province of the youthful Arthur Strahler. At their first meeting Chorley was given an offprint of Strahler’s recently published American Journal of Science paper in which ideas of quantitative dynamic geomorphology and systems analysis were applied to the classic problem of slope development (Strahler 1950). This publication had an effect on Chorley similar to that of Chapman’s Homer on the poet Keats, and clarified for him his previous unique instinctive antipathy to the exclusively historical approach to geomorphology. These were vintage years for geomorphology in the Department of Geology at Columbia which have been described by Strahler (1992) in some detail, and it was a rare privilege and daunting challenge for the qualitatively/historically trained Chorley to be exposed to the cutting edge of the new quantitative/dynamic thinking exemplified by such scholars as Strahler, Schumm, Melton, Broscoe and Morisawa. Schumm in particular became a lifelong friend and, along with Haggett, Stoddart, Barry, the present writer and others, combined such friendship with scholarly collaboration. After three years at Columbia, Chorley was appointed as Instructor in Geology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and spent a further very happy three years in that relatively small Ivy League university. In 1957 family matters prompted him to return to England, his father having died prematurely while Chorley was in the United States. Joseph’s own father had been buried with two other paupers in an unmarked grave at the age of only 35, leaving a widow and seven children. Chorley’s interest in genealogy was marked recently when, almost 100 years after his paternal grandfather’s death, he inscribed a memorial to him in Locksbrook Cemetery, Bath.

Unemployed, Chorley returned to Oxford and re-established a contact with his former tutor which he never relinquished. During this rather difficult year he was fortunate to be befriended by George Dury, then one of the most radical and forward-looking of British geomorphologists. Under the mistaken apprehension that attendance at the annual meeting of the Institute of British Geographers would be both uplifting and career-enhancing, Chorley presented himself at Nottingham in January 1958. In a corridor Dury introduced him to Professor Wooldridge as someone who had been working with Strahler, which prompted the rejoinder: ‘Next time you see Strahler tell him I spit at him!’ This response was the product of what were becoming heady, emotional times for geomorphology and of course it was necessary that there should be some considerable figure of established authority, not quite so quick on the draw as of yore, towards whom young bucks took the long walk down Main Street. If Wooldridge had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Chorley, of course, recognised this and bore Wooldridge no lasting ill-will, writing more than thirty years later:

Between the late 1920s and the late 1950s Wooldridge occupied a position of increasing pre-eminence in British geomorphology. By those who acknowledged this and followed his lead, he was rightly regarded as a brilliant researcher, an unequalled field teacher and a jovial colleague, ever ready to appear in amateur productions of Gilbert and Sullivan. To those who followed different precepts, especially as ill health set in during his later years, Wooldridge presented a rather different image.

(Beckinsale and Chorley 1991: 285)

In a more proximate and less charitable frame of mind Chorley delivered at the meeting of the Institute of British Geographers held in Cambridge in 1959 (where he had in the interim been appointed to a University Demonstratorship), under the title ‘The new geomorphology’, a very explicit, ill-mannered but personally satisfying attack on the monolith of traditional British historical geomorphology – a house of cards which was to collapse with amazing rapidity. With this experience in mind, Chorley is perhaps the only British geographer not to be surprised by the rapidity of the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, which bore such a similarity to the organisation of British geomorphology during the quarter of a century prior to 1959.

Chorley’s employment at Cambridge was another occasion in which pure luck was to come to his assistance. In 1958 Professor Linton left Sheffield University and Chorley sent a curriculum vitae there enquiring whether there was a vacancy for a geomorphologist. Having a spare stamp, he also decided to send the one carbon copy of the c.v. to the Department of Geography at Cambridge in the faint hope that there might be the prospect of an opening there. The following day he was telephoned by Professor Alfred Steers and called for interview. Steers was looking primarily for a climatologist to join his strong team of geomorphologists, which included Bruce W. Sparks, A.T. (Dick) Grove and W. Vaughan Lewis. Steers, a wise and percipient director, was easily persuaded, if indeed he needed any persuasion, to appoint Chorley as a Demonstrator, in spite of the latter’s obvious preference for landforms and deficiency as a climatologist. So the Oxford scholar embarked on weather and repaid this climatological debt when he and R.G. Barry collaborated in Atmosphere, Weather and Climate (Barry and Chorley 1968), which in expanded editions still flourishes (6th edition, 1992).

CAMBRIDGE

The department which Chorley joined in October 1958 was remarkable for the composition of its youthful members – Peter Haggett had returned to a Cambridge Demonstratorship the previous year and the research student body included David Stoddart, David Harvey, Claudio Vita-Finzi, David Grigg, and others who were to change the course of world geography. From the outset the unison of the two geographers from West Somerset was fruitful, as was their friendship with David Stoddart. Together they used their influence in practical classes to substitute quantitative methods and locational analysis for the pre-existing arty cartography and laborious construction of map projections. In 1963 they began, in conjunction with the University Extra-Mural Board, the important Madingley Hall conferences for geography teachers which did so much to inject change into school geography and from which emerged Frontiers in Geographical Teaching (Chorley and Haggett 1965) and, especially, Models in Geography (Chorley and Haggett 1967). This innovation was described by the two in their preface to Remodelling Geography (Haggett and Chorley 1989), edited by Bill Macmillan.

In 1961 chance again took a hand in Chorley’s career, this time in a macabre manner. Vaughan Lewis, who with Gus Caesar had been particularly welcoming to him, was killed in a motor smash in the United States. Prior to this Chorley had been warned that his job would terminate after five years, and it will be recalled that W.M. Davis had received a similar warning at Harvard seventy-nine years previously. The effect of the sudden death of this endearing and stimulating sch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introdution
• Part I On Landforms
• Part II On Theory and History
• Epilogue
• Publications of Richard J. Chorley
• Index