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Professor Eva G. R. Taylor 1879-1966

In 1959 a group of distinguished scholars established an annual lecture in honour of Professor Emeritus Eva G. R. Taylor, the first female professor of geography in the UK, on the occasion of her 80th birthday on 22 June 1959. The sponsoring organisations, amongst others, were the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the Hakluyt Society (HS), the Society for Nautical Research (SNR), and the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN). These four Societies have arranged over 40 lectures since then to be given by scholars of any nationality in the branches of knowledge to which she made great contributions. Her fields were historical geography, especially the history of nautical science, of navigation and of cartographical ideas and discoveries. She held the chair of geography at Birkbeck College London University for many years and wrote extensively for the Journal of the Institute of NavigationMariner’s MirrorThe Geographical JournalImago Mundi and other periodicals.

In 2010 the late Professor Bill Mead recalled his first encounter with her. Her unconventional use of a walking stick seems to have stuck in his mind, when he recalled vividly how she used to point it at students when asking a question, as well as using it to hail taxis or even to hook Professor Darby’s leg to join her taxi from a crowd of people waiting. 

She had three boys (one died) and was the partner of Herbert Dunhill, brother of the founder of the pipe and tobacco firm Alfred Dunhill. Sarah Tyacke recollects that with the papers deposited in the British Library by Eila Campbell in 1981 there was a pipe, no doubt fondly kept by her. She was a decidedly unconventional and great scholar.

Her publications were prolific. Among her books were Tudor Geography (1930) and numerous editions for the Hakluyt Society (1932-63) including The Original Writings… of the two Richard Hakluyts (1935) and The Haven-Finding Art (1956). As Dr Helen Wallis, Map Librarian at the British Library (1968–86), said in 1967 in a commemorative appreciation of her work:

Her writings were characterised by the extensive use of original sources and documentary evidence and they were always a delight to read.

For many later specialists it is her two monumental volumes on the mathematical practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (1954), and then those of Hanoverian England (1966) which stand out as seminal in terms of demonstrating the range and depth of scientific innovation and knowledge across England during those centuries; from the obscure artisans who made the instruments and taught mathematics, to luminaries like Hooke, Newton and Flamsteed.

The Eva G. R. Taylor lectures celebrate her own breadth of scholarship and showcase current research in all the historical scientific fields to which she devoted her life. These are listed below. 

Biographical publications about her and her personal papers

  • E.G.R Taylor’s correspondence and papers 1929-1966 are held in the British Library Add MS 69466-90 and at Add MS 71872-4. 

  • (1967) Eva G R Taylor, Journal of the Institute of Navigation, 20:1, pp. 94-101. A collection of commemorative articles.

  • Campbell, E. M. J. (1987) Geography at Birkbeck College, University of London, with particular reference to J. F. Unstead and E. G. R. Taylor (in) British geography 1918-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.45-57.

  • de Clercq, P. (2004) A chronicle of lesser men. E.G.R. Taylor and her mathematical practitioners of England, Bulletin of the Scientific Instruments Society 81, pp. 31-33.

  • de Clercq, P. (2007) ‘The life and work of E.G.R. Taylor (1879-1966) author of 'The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England' and 'The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England’. Updated and annotated version of the EGR Taylor lecture given at the RGS on 13 Oct 2005. The Journal of the Hakluyt Society

  • Maddrell, A (2009) Complex locations: women’s geographical work in the UK 1850-1970, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, p. 411.

Eva G.R. Taylor Lectures, 1960-2023: a record and bibliographic listing

No.

Date

Location and/or host

Author

Title

Published in/reference

 

1

Monday

17 October 1960

Royal Geographical Society

Eric Axelson

Prince Henry the Navigator and the  discovery of the sea route to India: The first Eva G.R. Taylor lecture

The Geographical Journal, June 1961, 127(2) pp.145-158

 

2

Wednesday 31 October 1962

National Maritime Museum [NMM]) [Society for Nautical Research SNR]

C.R. Boxer

The Dutch East-Indiamen: their sailors, their navigators, and life on board, 1602-1795

The Mariner’s Mirror: the quarterly journal of the Society for Nautical Research (London; New York: CUP), May 1963, 49(2).

 

3

Monday

26 October 1964

Royal Geographical Society

C. Koeman

Lucas Waghenaer, a 16th-century marine cartographer: The Eva G.R. Taylor Lecture 1964

The Geographical Journal, June 1965, 131(2), [202]-17, pp.211-17

 

4

Wednesday 26 October 1966

Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Institute of Navigation

G.S. Ritchie

Great Britain’s contribution to hydrography during the nineteenth century

The Journal of the Institute of Navigation (London: c/o RGS; J. Murray), January 1967, 20(1), 1-11 

 

5

Monday 29 April 1968

Royal Geographical Society

George Kish

Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901), polar explorer and historian of cartography : The Eva G.R. Taylor Lecture, 1968

The Geographical Journal, December 1968, 134(4), [487]-505

 

6

Wednesday 11 June 1969

National Maritime Museum [NMM]) [Society for Nautical Research SNR]

J.C. Beaglehole

Some problems of Cook’s biographer

The Mariner’s Mirror: the quarterly journal of the Society for Nautical Research.  (London; New York: CUP), November 1969, 55(4), 365-81.

 

7

Monday 15 February 1971

Royal Geographical Society

E.C. Willatts

Planning and geography in the last three decades: The Eva G.R. Taylor Lecture, 1971

The Geographical Journal, September 1971, 137(3), [311]-38. Discussion: pp.330-8

 

8

Monday 3 December 1973

Royal Geographical Society

Michael Chisholm

Regional policies for the 1970s:  The Eva G.R. Taylor Memorial Lecture, 1973

The Geographical Journal, June 1974, 140(2), [215]-44

 

9

Wednesday 21 May 1975

National Maritime Museum/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Eric G. Forbes

John Flamsteed and the origins of the Greenwich astronomical tradition

The Journal of Navigation (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS; J. Murray), July 1975, 28(3), 251-62.

 

10

Monday 16 May 1977

Royal Geographical Society

J.H. Bird and E.E. Pollock

The future of seaports in the European Communities

The Geographical Journal (ISSN 0016-7398), March 1978, 144(1), [23]-48

 

11

Thursday 12 October 1978

Science Museum/ Society for Nautical Research

Glyndwr Williams

Seamen and philosophers in the South Seas in the days of Captain Cook

The Mariner’s Mirror: the quarterly journal of the Society for Nautical Research. (London; ISSN 0025-3359), February 1979, 65(1), 3-22. 

 

12

Tuesday 10 June 1980

Royal Geographical Society

D.R. Stoddart

Geography, education and research

The Geographical Journal (ISSN 0016-7398), November 1981, 147(3), [287]-97 :

 

13

Wednesday 4 March 1981

Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Ursula Lamb

The London years of Felipe Bauzá, Spanish Hydrographer in exile, 1823-34

The Journal of Navigation (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press), September 1981, 34(3), 319-40.

 

14

Wednesday 13 October 1982

Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Whitehall / Society for Nautical Research

D.B. Quinn

Maps and illustrators in the discovery of North America

 

 

15

Monday 25 April 1983

Royal Geographical Society

Peter Whitehead and John Hemming

Painter-travellers in Brazil

 

 

16

Thursday 13 December 1984

Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Derek Howse

Nevil Maskelyne, the Nautical Almanac, and GMT

 

 

17

Monday 4 November 1985

Royal Geographical Society

Ieuan Griffiths

The scramble for Africa: inherited political boundaries

The Geographical Journal (ISSN 0016-7398), July 1986, 152(2), [204]-16

 

18

Wednesday 19 November 1986

Royal Geographical Society / Society for Nautical Research

Gerard L’Estrange Turner

Elizabethan computers and the secrets of the sea

 

 

19

Monday 23 November 1987

Royal Geographical Society

Edward Heath

Power shift to the Pacific

 

 

20

Wednesday 14 December 1988

Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Institute of Navigation

D.W. Waters

The English Pilot: English sailing directions and charts and the rise of English shipping, 16th to 18th centuries

The Journal of Navigation (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS; Oxford: OUP, September 1989, 42(3), 317-54: 13 ill.

 

21

Wednesday 29 November 1989

Royal Geographical Society

Christopher Board

Do we need a national atlas?

 

 

22

Wednesday 28 November 1990

Royal Geographical Society / Society for Nautical Research

Robin Knox-Johnston

In the wake of Columbus

 

 

23

Wednesday 27 November 1991

Royal Geographical Society

Andrew David

Artists’ views of Vancouver’s voyage’ ‘Exploration and discovery of the Pacific Northwest: the artists on Vancouver’s voyage to the northwest coast of America

Harbour & Shipping (Vancouver BC : Progress Publishers, March 1992, 75(3), 26-33

 

24

Wednesday 16 December 1992

Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Helen Wallis

Navigators and mathematical practitioners in Samuel Pepys’s day

The Journal of Navigation (London : Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS ; Cambridge : CUP, January 1994, 47(1), 1-19.

 

25

Thursday 2 December 1993

Royal Geographical Society

William Ravenhill

The Honourable Robert Edward Clifford, 1767-1817: a cartographer’s response to Napoleon

The Geographical Journal, July 1994, 160(2), [159]-72.

 

26

Monday 12 December 1994

Royal Geographical Society

Peter Marshall

Around Africa

 

 

27

Wednesday 29 November 1995

Royal Geographical Society / Society for Nautical Research

Roger O. Morris

Two hundred years of Admiralty Charts and Surveys

The Mariner’s Mirror: the journal of the Society for Nautical Research (London; November 1996, 82(4), 420-35.

 

28

Wednesday 20 November 1996


Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Robert K. Headland

Russian aspects of the Arctic Ocean

 

 

29

Wednesday 3 December 1997

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Nicholas Rigby and Andrew Fagg

Mapping for peace : the challenges of 250 years of crisis support

in British Cartographic Society 34th Annual Symposium and Map Curators’ Group Workshop Leicester 1997 : Proceedings / edited by David Fairbairn (London : BCS c/o RGS, 1997pp.27-37; This presentation was in Symposium Session 2 ‘Military and overseas mapping’, whose chairman was Chris Board.*** NB: The British Cartographic Society’s 34th Annual Symposium and Map Curators’ Group Workshop : Workshop and Symposium Programme 11 – 14 September 1997 (Leicester : Dept of Geogr., University of Leicester, 1997), pp.[9]-[10].

 

30

Wednesday 9 December 1998

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Society for Nautical Research

Andrew Cook

The public and private lives of a hydrographer: James Horsburgh (1762-1836)

 

 

31

Tuesday 30 November 1999

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Michael Richey

E.G.R. Taylor and the Vinland Map

The Journal of Navigation (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, May 2000, 53(2), 193-205.

 

32

Tuesday 31 October 2000

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Jim Smith

Sir George Everest,  the man behind the mountain’

 

 

33

Tuesday 13 November 2001

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Society for Nautical Research

Anita McConnell

Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1659-1730): from professional soldier to ‘Father of Oceanography’

The Mariner’s Mirror: the journal of the Society for Nautical Research (London; August 2002, 88(3), 323-31.

 

34

Thursday 10 October 2002

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

D.F.H. Grocott

Maps in mind: how animals get home

The Journal of Navigation (London: Royal Institute of Navigation, c/o RGS [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], January 2003, 56(1), [1]-14.

 

35

Tuesday 14 October 2003

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Corradino Astengo

Mediterranean portolan charts of the 14th to 17th century’

Covered in The history of cartography ed. †David Woodward (Chicago; London: Univ. Chicago Pr., 2007) vol.3.1, ch.7 ‘Cartography in the European Renaissance’, pp.174-262).

 

36

Tuesday 26 October 2004

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Society for Nautical Research

Francis Herbert

". . . to mesure and compace the hevyn and erth and all the worlde large" : the RGS-IBG Collections Taylored for study

 

 

37

Tuesday 13 October 2005

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Hakluyt Society

Peter de Clerq

The life and work of Prof. E.G.R. Taylor, with special emphasis on the ‘Old Mathematical Practitioners’

Journal of the Hakluyt Society (www.hakluyt.com/journal_index.htm), February 2007; (www.hakluyt.com/journal_articles/2007/DeClerqTaylor.pdf), June 2010:  ‘The life and work of E.G.R. Taylor (1879-1966), author of 'The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England' and 'The Mathematical Practitioners of Hanoverian England’, with ‘Foreword’: “This is an updated and annotated version of the E.G.R. Taylor Lecture, delivered at the Royal Geographical Society on 13 October 2005 at the invitation of the Hakluyt Society.” This was the first lecture given on behalf of the Hakluyt Society at the suggestion of Anne Savours.

 

38

Thursday 12 October 2006

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Alan Stimson

A symphony of nautical instruments: the Grinling Gibbons carvings in Admiralty House, Whitehall

Published as ‘The Old Admiralty Boardroom carvings’ in Koersvast: vijf eeuwen navigatie op zee: een bundel opstellen aangeboden aan Willem Mörzer Bruyns bij zijn afschied van het Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam in 2005 / redactie: Remmelt Daalder [et al.]; samenstelling en eindredactie: Leo Akveld (Zaltbommel : Aprilis, 2005), pp.115-29.

 

39

Thursday 18 October 2007

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Ann Savours [Shirley]

Sir Clements Markham (1830-1915) : shining light or éminence grise?

 

 

40

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Society for Nautical Research

Alison Morrison-Low

“For those in peril on the sea”: marking and mapping of the Scottish seas before 1787

Chapter 3 ‘Scottish lights before the Bell’ in Northern Lights: the age of Scottish lighthouses (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2010.)

 

41

Thursday 15 October 2009

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Hakluyt Society

Susanna Fisher

Captain Joseph Huddart, FRS (1741-1816), mariner and distinguished man of science

 

 

42

Thursday 14 October 2010

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

Hans D. Kok

Dutch maritime charts between 1550 and 1800

 

 

43

Thursday 13 October 2011

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Charles W.J. Withers

Instruments, geography and scientific enquiry: guides to travellers and methods in nineteenth-century Britain and France

Published as ‘Science, scientific instruments and questions of method in nineteenth-century British geography’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (ISSN 0020-2754 print; 1475-5661 online), 2013, 38(1), pp. [167]-179.

 

44

Thursday 11 October 2012

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Society for Nautical Research

Kirsten Seaver

Flourishing fantasies of the Arctic: from ‘Pygmies’ to the Vinland Map

 

 

45

Thursday 10 October 2013

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Hakluyt Society

Jim Bennett

Adventures with instruments: science and seafaring in the precarious career of Christopher Middleton

Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 73 (2019), pp. 303-27

 

46

Thursday 9 October 2014

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)/ Royal Institute of Navigation

David Rooney

The dawn of the time lords: time for navigation in the chronometer age

Navigation News : the magazine of the Royal Institute of Navigation (ISSN 0268-6317), Nov. – Dec. 2014; also available online (membership only)

 

47

Thursday 8 October 2015

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Felix Driver

Women, editing and publishing: Ivy Davison and the Geographical Magazine in its first 30 years

 

 

48

Thursday 13 October 2016

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Andrew Lambert

Finding Franklin: searching and science in the Canadian Arctic

 

 

49

Thursday 12 October 2017

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Captain M. K. Barritt RN

Compassing the vaste globe: hydrographic practioners of the late Georgian Royal Navy

 

 

50

Thursday 11 October 2018

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

David Barrie CBE

By the light of the heavens: how people and animals navigate by the sun and stars

 

 

50

Thursday 10 October 2019

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Professor Simon Schaffer

Isaac Newton and the haven finding art

   

51

Thursday 9 October 2020

Online/Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Dr Margaret Schotte

Estimates and instruments: the case for comparative maritime history

   

52

Thursday 14 October 2021

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Professor Michael G. Brennan

English travellers to Venice, 1450-1600 

   

53

Thursday 13 October 2022

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

David Mearns

Reconstructing the navigational clues to the sinking location of Shackleton’s Vessel Endurance

   

54

Thursday 12 October 2023

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Professor Charles W. J. Withers

Instruments of exploration? British steamships on the Niger, Euphrates, and Indus Rivers, 1832-1838