Stanley Gregory

Stanley Gregory Reproduced with kind permission from The University of Sheffield Stanley Gregory, known to all as Stan, had a major impact on how geography – physical and human – was taught and practised in British universities, colleges and schools in the 1950s–1970s. He was a highly successful ‘revolutionary’ during the discipline's quantitative turn. Born and raised in north London, Stan enlisted in the Royal Navy after leaving the Regent St Polytechnic School in 1944, serving with its meteorological service in northern Scotland, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his later career. He enrolled in the Department of Geography at King's College London in 1947, one of that cohort's group of ex-servicemen who reached major positions of influence within the discipline over the next four decades, and gained a first-class honours degree three years later. He was immediately appointed to an assistant lectureship at the University of Liverpool, spending the next 18 years there, being promoted to a lectureship in 1953, senior lectureship nine years later, and a readership in 1966 before being appointed to a chair at the University of Sheffield in 1968, from which he took early retirement in 1988. Stan specialised in climatology as an undergraduate, being taught by Percy Crowe – then head of the department at Queen Mary College. Immediately on his arrival at Liverpool he registered for an MA, awarded in 1951, and seven years later he gained a PhD for a thesis by published works, entitled ‘Studies in pure and applied climatology’, comprising 10 of his earliest papers, several in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. The main focus was on variability in climatic parameters, notably rainfall, at a variety of spatial and temporal scales, and he produced a large number of pioneering maps, many based on novel – certainly for geographers – estimated probabilities. In the mid-1950s his attention switched to the study of water supply problems – linking climatic investigations to resource utilisation and addressing issues arising from the spatial mismatch between the areas of water supply and those of increasing demand, the latter managed by an outdated system of many small water companies. But in the 1970s his attention returned to climatology, with an increasing emphasis on fluctuations in a wide range of contexts, reflecting his collection of data while visiting universities and research institutes on all continents. In all of this work, he stressed accurate description and the rigorous use of statistical methods to identify spatio-temporal patterns and trends. Stan's major impact on the discipline was much wider than his pioneering climatological work, however; he believed that the methods deployed in his own research should be adopted widely throughout geography. Crowe and others had convinced him that climatic data should be analysed using standard statistical methods, so Stan learned these and from 1957 on – supported in particular by his colleague Andrew Learmonth – taught them to Liverpool students, whatever their particular interests. Most geographers at that time used data that could (to Stan should) be subjected to statistical analysis – even if they did not appreciate it. (His colleague Dick Lawton sat in on the course to demonstrate its importance to human as well as physical geographers.) He succeeded in convincing many that in order to co-exist alongside the sciences, geographers needed to adopt a rigorous approach to data analysis: the Liverpool department gained a reputation for its commitment to that position, crystallised in his 1963 book Statistical methods and the geographer, the first on statistics for geographers by a geographer – and which went through four editions, the last appearing in 1978. In it, he set out the basics of statistical analysis in what he termed a ‘simple, largely non-technical introduction, for non-numerate geographers’ and several generations of students benefited very substantially from the care he took in ‘leading them by the hand’ clearly and accessibly and so providing them with a sound foundation for understanding the expanding research literature and for undertaking their own first forays into quantitative analysis. Teaching was very important to Stan; as he put it in his IBG Presidential Address, ‘… teaching, at both undergraduate and graduate level … conditions the present health of our subject and its future growth’. Stan's activities promoting the proper use of statistics by geographers extended well beyond his Liverpool students and textbook readers. In 1964 with Barry Garner he co-founded the Quantitative Methods Study Group, which they initially operated outwith the Institute of British Geographers, believing that ‘incorporation would be the kiss of death’ (he was an elected member of the Institute's Council at the time, being the first candidate nominated ‘from the floor’ to defeat one of the slate proposed by the Institute's officers); the Group formally affiliated in 1969, at which time his chairmanship ended. By then he had convinced its secretary Alice Garnett, a year before he succeeded her in a chair at Sheffield, that the Geographical Association should establish a Committee on Models and Quantitative Techniques in Teaching, to ensure that a wide gulf did not develop between geography as practised in the country's schools and in the developments then under way in the universities. She agreed, and he chaired it for the first two years, establishing – despite some (often bluntly stated) opposition – that teachers felt the need for assistance in ‘re-tooling’ for this ‘new geography’. Further, to ensure that the revolution entered the schools, he joined the Joint Matriculation Board (a body established by five universities which set O- and A-level examinations until 1992); he chaired its geography committee for five years (1970–5) and oversaw the introduction of new syllabuses that significantly changed how the discipline was taught to several generations of school students – what he described as ‘a positive move to re-fashion geography into a subject fit for the twenty-first century’. From then on, he took a – relatively – back seat, continuing with his own research but leaving others to carry forward the revolution, though he was usually there in the audience providing support; words of encouragement and advice were freely given and much valued. Fluent in their language, he played a significant role in convincing French geographers of the need for formal quantitative analysis. At Sheffield, he attracted a number of colleagues who shared his goals and did much to support and promote them. He was an excellent administrator, calm and unflustered and decisive when needed: he served as head/chairman of the department for three terms, was a dean and then, in a period of considerable student unrest that called for his quiet tact and great patience in negotiations, an excellent pro-vice-chancellor. Whatever the involvement – within universities or beyond – Stan created and sustained a wide range of loyal friendships. His extensive, dedicated activity meant that Stan Gregory was one of a small number of people who could justifiably claim to have catalysed major changes to geography in the mid–late twentieth century – though he was too modest to do so and, because he operated outside what became known as the ‘Cambridge–Bristol axis’, attracted much less recognition than deserved. In 1978 he could write that statistical methodology was part of the training of geographers throughout British higher education – for which he deserved great credit. (Although he knew that the battle was not yet fully won. In his 1976 Presidential Address to the Institute of British Geographers – entitled ‘On geographical myths and statistical fables’ – he used data from the Domesday Book to counter a claim by Darby, who did not favour the ‘quantitative revolution’, that ‘the greater the number of plough-teams and men on an estate, the higher its value, but it is impossible to discern any constant relationship’: Stan showed that 72% of the variation in values could be accounted for by those two variables!) Later years showed that his optimism was somewhat dimmed, but the foundations he helped build now underpin a revival of the rigorous scientific approach that he did so much to advance. Stan's service to his discipline extended well beyond the promotion of quantitative methods. He co-founded and then co-chaired the group, within first the IBG and then moved to the Royal Meteorological Society, that became the Association of British Climatologists, and in 1981 founded and edited for its first six years the Journal of Climatology. Three years later, he was the founding chairman of the International Geographical Union's Study Group on Recent Climatic Change, which four years later became its Commission on Climatology. Few geographers have been elected as President of the Geographical Association and the Institute of British Geographers: Stan Gregory occupied both positions in the 1970s (having succeeded Alice Garnett as secretary of the GA during his first four years at Sheffield), and a decade later presided over Section E of the British Association. He was also a Vice President of the Royal Meteorological Society. The GA made him an Honorary Member in recognition of his ‘outstanding contributions to geographical education’ in 1991 and the Association of British Climatologists similarly recognised him in 1993. His climatological research was recognised by the Royal Geographical Society's Murchison Award in 1984, and the Royal Meteorological Society gave him its Hugh Robert Mill Medal and Prize in 1990; the University of Ottawa – where he was a visitor in 1970 – awarded him an honorary degree of DGeog in 1972. During his academic career Stan travelled widely, holding visiting appointments in a wide range of universities and research institutes in Africa (East, South and West), Australia, Canada and India, as well as making a considerable number of short-term visits: his first was to the University College of Sierra Leone in 1960; the last was in 2000, to IGU Commission on Climatology meetings in China and South Korea. On many of these, he collected data to continue his work on climatic variations, contributing to his long list of journal publications which ended in 1993, 40 years after the first. Sadly, his first wife Marjorie's health deteriorated soon after he retired and plans for combined travel and research had to be abandoned. After her death in 1997 he began to travel very widely, exploring many parts of the world, for the last decade of his life with his second wife, Helga: she survives him along with his two daughters and three grandsons – a family to which he was devoted.

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