Geographical Association

Rob Morris
Geography Department
Shrewsbury School
Ashton Road
Shrewsbury
SY3 7BA

Email: Rob Morris
Shropshire GA Ning

Subscription rates 2011/12

Educational: Existing GA Group Member - £20
Educational: Non-GA Group Member - £30
Individual: GA Member - Free
Individual: Non-GA Member - £15 (includes one year national GA membership)

Individual Lectures: £3 Adults, £1 Students

Members of the North Staffs, Chester and Black Country branches have reciprocal membership rights and can come to lectures for free.

Shropshire GA Branch 60th Anniversary Lecture: The Green Planet
Wednesday 28 September 2011
Prof. Ian Stewart, Plymouth University and BBC TV/Radio

Globalisation and Health
Wednesday 5 October 2011
Gill Miller, University of Chester and WJEC chief examiner

Emerging World Cities
Wednesday 2 November 2011
Allan Watson, Staffordshire University

Flooding
Wednesday 7 December 2011
Prof. Janet Hooke, Liverpool University

Worldwise Quiz
Wednesday 25 January 2012

Superpowers
Wednesday 1 February 2012
Al Pinkerton, Royal Holloway, University of London

Earthquake-landslide disasters
Wednesday 7 March 2012
Rob Parker, Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, University of Durham

Iain with Owen Chisholm and Ed Sankey (both Shrewsbury School upper 6th formers), the student representatives on the GA branch committee

The Shropshire Branch of GA in conjunction with the Shrewsbury School Geography Society were pleased to welcome Professor Iain Stewart to Shrewsbury on Wednesday 28 September 2011.

Professor Stewart is a professor of Geoscience Communication at Plymouth University (the only one in the world) and is a familiar face to BBC2 viewers. His previous BBC documentary series have included Earth: The Power of the Planet and How Earth Made Us and he has also presented numerous editions of Horizon. He is a very familiar face to geography students at Shrewsbury through his TV programmes

For his talk to an audience of over 400 teachers, members of the public and students from as far away as Solihull, he spoke about his next series due to be screened early in 2012 that has tentatively been titled 'The Green Planet' (or 'How Plants made the Earth').

His talk was a journey through 400 million years of the Earth's history to discover how plants have shaped the face of our planet, taking a barren alien rock and hostile atmosphere and transforming it into the world we know today.

Despite this being a departure from the programmes and lectures about hazards that most of the audience were familiar with, we were entertained by his talk that included pictures of the locations that he had visited for the new series. These included Hang Son Doong, the world's largest cave system in Vietnam and the Eden Project in Cornwall, where he was locked in an airtight container for 48 hours with nothing but plants for company.

Professor Stewart has promised to come back to Shrewsbury at a later date to talk once again to the Shropshire Branch and learn a little more about the geography and geology of Shropshire.

After the lecture a retiring collection for Shrewsbury House (a youth and community cente in inner city Liverpool supported by the Shrewsbury School community), amassed almost £500. This will be presented to the 'Shewsy' on a Lower Sixth social studies trip later in the year.

Geographical Association President John Hopkin presents the winners of the Shropshire round of the Worldwise Quiz, Rob Homden, Stephen Chandler and Oliver Beressi of Shrewsbury School, with their trophy.

The Worldwise Local Quiz is an annual competition organised by the Geographical Association and sponsored by the Field Studies Council. Students from all over the UK take part in local rounds typically held at GA Branches - the 2010 Shropshire round was held in Shrewsbury on 17 November.

Selected winners of the local rounds are invited to attend the Worldwise Challenge weekend at a Field Studies Centre.

Tom Harrison and James Gregson, both upper-sixth geographers at Shrewsbury School, present Mr Rob Lucas, CEO of the Field Studies Council, with a cheque for £1908 for their Darwin Scholarship. The money was half of the proceeds from the lecture given by Michael Palin at Shrewsbury in October 2009.

The Darwin Scholarship is a programme led by the Field Studies Council at Preston Montford Field Centre in Shrewsbury every August. The Scholarship programme is aimed at young scientists from around the world with an aim to develop 'better naturalists' in the spirit of Darwin's love of nature and observing the natural world. The Scholarship focuses on three areas: skills of observation and identification, skills of recording biodiversity and skills of communicating biodiversity to different target groups.

The money raised will allow a number of students from less economically developed countries where biodiversity is under threat to obtain travel grants to come to Shrewsbury. While in the UK, they visit Shrewsbury School as part of the course.

A group of 6th Form geography students from Shrewsbury School meet Michael Palin © John Snowdon, Shropshire Life Magazine

On Thursday 1 October 2009, Shrewsbury School welcomed former pupil Michael Palin back to his old school, at the joint invitation of the Old Boys Club and the Shropshire Branch of the Geographical Association.

In his talk 'From Shrewsbury to the World - a Debt to Darwin', Michael entertained a sellout audience of over 700 with magnificent and comical accounts of experiences and encounters on his extensive travels as well reminiscing about his days at Shrewsbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

He spoke about his trepidation of once again stepping on to the stage in the Alington Hall at Shrewsbury School, where possibly his finest moment at the school took place in winning an Elocution prize in 1961. He amused the audience by also describing his various walk-on parts in school plays that were invariably Shakespeare in those days.

He spoke about the seven BBC TV series he has made with largely the same production crew, describing how it was more of a team effort rather than down to him as an individual. From his first journey in 1988 that followed Phileas Fogg's fictional journey around the world, Michael told the audience he was, in fact, fourth choice for the programme after Alan Whicker, Miles Kington and Noel Edmonds had all turned the BBC's offer down.

He described his perilous journey by dhow from Dubai to Mumbai and how, in his last journey, he had recently tracked down the crew of that boat to Gujurat in North West India. Michael regaled the audience with anecdotes about landing on the ice at the North Pole, travelling through the USSR in the last throes of communism and visiting such diverse places as Mogadan in the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, Peshawar on the North West frontier of Pakistan and the South Pole. Along the way he spoke of the people he met; Inuits in Alaska who recognised him from 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail', Kalashnikov-toting Pathans from the tribal areas of Pakistan offering him recently taken videos of Osama bin Laden for $20, and former Burmese head-hunters singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers' in their own language.

One of the most amusing stories was how having been greeted by Maori chiefs with a Haka in the South Island of New Zealand, Michael replied with the first verse of the Shrewsbury School song sung in Latin! The song starts around four minutes into the video below:

Behind the humour lay a deep, personal feeling for, and appreciation of, the astonishing beauty and variety in places and people in the world which hold a fascination for him, as for that other great Old Salopian, Darwin, before him. The talk was well received by the audience who were charmed by Michael's style that was part eccentric, part raconteur with some Pythonesque overtones thrown in for good measure.

The proceeds for the evening went to the Field Studies Council Darwin Scholarship, an award for teachers of biology, ecology and geography from overseas to come to Preston Montford to learn how to teach aspects of Field Studies and take this knowledge back to their own countries. The other joint beneficiary was Shrewsbury House, a youth and community centre in Everton in Liverpool that the school has supported in many ways since its formation by a former member of staff at Shrewsbury in 1903.

An interview with Michael conducted by two of the pupils will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of GA Magazine.

The Shropshire Branch of the GA was featured in the October 2008 issue of Shropshire Life magazine. The full page article outlines the activities of the Branch and gives details of past and forthcoming events.

Download: Shropshire Life article (PDF, 541k)

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