Concordia 27_cover section.indd

Concordia Winter 2024

24

Ian with colleagues on the 1955 Brathay Exploration Group Expedition in Slovenia

From Sandy Lodge to Lahad Datu — Hertfordshire to Borneo

Ian Douglas (1948–1955) reflects on his travels as a geographer

I have been fortunate to work in many countries during my life as a university geographer. Much of what I have been able to do stemmed from things I did and learnt at Merchant Taylors’. I was already fired up about geography when I arrived in 1948, thanks to my grandfather’s atlas and my father’s Ordnance Survey maps. Jack Baiss, Joe Gerber and Charles Hull enthused me further; and the school scouts taught me the skills of living in the wild and gave me opportunities for challenging journeys, culminating in 1953 and 1954 in mountain craft on the national senior scout midwinter expeditions to Eryri/Snowdonia. The geography connection led to the Brathay Exploration Group, with which I helped survey tarns in the Lake District and on Mount Triglav in Slovenia in 1955.

Alongside Geography, I took French, English and History at A Level, all of which proved valuable in later years. Arnold Pilkington (ECAP) told me I just scraped a pass in French. However, that enabled me to get summer jobs as a travel representative in Ostend and Bruges in 1958 and 1959, helped me dealing with French texts in the Oxford Geography course and in getting Belgian and French government scholarships to study at Liège and Strasbourg in 1961–2, and later to lecture in French as a Professeur Invité at Université Paris1 (Panthéon Sorbonne) in 1991 and 1997. English taught me how to write a précis — an invaluable skill for the research and teaching components of an academic career. However, A.B. Jefferies, the History master, gave me an insight that helped shape part of my future work. He took the class to the City of London to visit the area near the Merchant Taylors’ Hall. As in so many British cities in the mid-1950s, there were still large areas of derelict