QUB Geology Department Alumni web pages*
GEOLOGY AT QUEEN'S, BELFAST, 1849-1954
by Peter R. Crowther (Keeper of Geology, Museums & Galleries of Northern Ireland)
[This is a slightly longer version of the lecture presented at the QUB Geology Alumni's 'Celebration of the Department 1849-2001', held in the Geology Building on Friday 22 June 2001]
A Professor of Mineralogy & Geology was one of the original 20 professors who greeted the 200 students with which Queen's College Belfast opened for business in 1849. The three Queen's Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway had been legally established by Royal Charters in December 1845. They were soon to become the constitutent colleges of the Queen's University in Ireland, with its own Royal Charter in 1850. All three colleges opened in 1849 with a Professor of Mineralogy & Geology on the staff. In Belfast the post came with the additional title 'Curator of the College Museum' &endash; which may have been a factor in the appointment of the first incumbent, Frederick M'Coy (1823-1899).
M'Coy had been working since 1846 in the Geological Museum of Cambridge University, arranging, cataloguing and describing for eventual publication the many thousands of Palaeozoic fossils amassed mostly during the previous three decades by Rev. Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873). Professor of Geology at Cambridge since 1818, Sedgwick had played a key role in building up geology as a science during the first half of the nineteenth century. He had defined and named the Cambrian System and jointly established the Devonian with Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), before falling out with Murchison over the extent in space and time of Murchison's Silurian System.
Frederick M'Coy was the son of a Dublin physician, Simon M'Coy (1795-1875) who himself became one of the founding professors at Queen's College Galway, as Professor Materia Medica. Although only 26 when he came to Belfast, Frederick M'Coy had already built up a considerable reputation in Ireland as a palaeontologist. While still in his teens, he had arranged several major Dublin collections, and worked on material collected by and for Richard Griffith (1784-1878), who was then compiling his great Geological Map of Ireland. In 1845 M'Coy had been appointed the first field staff member of the new Geological Survey of Ireland but his field skills proved less than adequate and he quit the Survey the following year. Then came the invitation from Sedgwick to go to Cambridge. So M'Coy arrived in Belfast in 1849 with an already impressive c.v. and a string of substantial publications under his belt &endash; all this despite his lack of formal qualifications.
But M'Coy also brought with him a commitment to continue his unfinished work in Cambridge. He was in constant communication with Sedgwick by letter (some of which are the Ulster Museum's collections), and he returned to Cambridge every summer vacation from 1850 to 1854. The permanent Belfast 'day-job' may have given him status and a regular salary (£200 a year plus student fees), but it held little attraction as a base for research. The major product of M'Coy's Belfast years was the great monograph British Palaeozoic Fossils in the Geological Museum, Cambridge. It appeared in three parts between 1851 and 1855, and was published in Cambridge. The multi-talented M'Coy also drew some of the illustrations.
M'Coy left his mark on the teaching collections in Belfast by initiating the College's purchase in 1850 of a collection of 2,000 minerals from the dealers Krantz of Berlin. At £80 this was the most expensive single purchase made by the College in its first academic year. Irish fossils were added to the teaching collections during M'Coy's time (and subsequently) by an arrangement with the Geological Survey of Ireland, whose field officers were under instruction to collect sufficient duplicates to deposit examples in the Museums of the three Queen's Colleges. Some Krantz and Survey specimens can still be recognised in QUB Geology's collections today.
Although M'Coy was a good teacher and well thought of by his fellow professors, the number of students attending his courses in any one year remained low &endash; never more than a dozen in the five years he taught at the College. M'Coy's inability to attract greater numbers can be attributed to a change of emphasis in the syllabus for the general BA degree. In 1845, geology was to have formed a compulsory component of a three year BA, but by the time the College opened in 1849 it had been dropped. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the only students required to study geology were those doing diploma courses in engineering and agriculture &endash; and there were not very many. Low student numbers had financial implications, since the professors relied on the £2 course fee from each student to supplement their relatively meagre salaries.
So when an opportunity arose for M'Coy to multiply his £200 annual salary by a factor five, to £1000, he took it. In 1854, M'Coy moved to Australia, where he had been appointed the first Professor of Natural History at the University of Melbourne. He had an illustrious career in Australia, which included the founding of the National Museum of Victoria; by the time of his death in 1899 he had become Sir Frederick M'Coy KCMG and the 'grand old man' of Australian science.
Just a year before M'Coy's departure to Melbourne, a 23-year old Scottish graduate of Edinburgh University, Wyville Thomson (1830-1882), had joined Queen's College Cork as Professor of Natural History (covering botany, zoology and physical geography). Clearly Belfast must have held greater attractions for Thomson, since in 1854 he succeeded M'Coy as Professor of Mineralogy & Geology.
The name Wyville Thomson will forever be associated with the 4-year voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s - a global scientific expedition which completely revolutionised our understanding of life in the deep oceans. It is less well-known that Wyville Thomson spent more than half his academic career at Queen's College Belfast, the first six years as Professor of Mineralogy & Geology, then another ten (from 1860) as Professor of Natural History & Geology (after the previously separate Chair of Natural History had been combined with Mineralogy & Geology). The combined post left Wyville Thomson responsible for teaching all Geology, Mineralogy, Botany, Zoology and Physical Geography, and their associated field classes. The breadth of knowledge required to cope with such duties was recognised by the informal title given to holders of this post &endash; Professor of Creation.
Wyville Thomson was enough of an all round naturalist to deal with the work load, and to carry out and publish much research across a wide range of subjects. He worked on several fossil groups, including trilobites, graptolites and echinoderms. In the 1860s he was rash enough to offer the London-based Palaeontographical Society two separate monographs, one on graptolites and another on Lower Jurassic crinoids. The fact that the Society never received either monograph is a likely consequence of his increasing fascination with life in the deep sea. It was towards the end of his years in Belfast, in the late 1860s, that Thomson laid the foundations for the Challenger voyage by convincing the Admiralty to release HMS Lightning and Porcupine to explore the depths of the Atlantic off north-west Europe.
Thomson became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1869 and left Belfast the following year to take up the Chair of Natural History at Edinburgh University. Within two years he was off on HMS Challenger for its four year voyage, returning in 1876 to a knighthood and much popular acclaim.
At Queen's, Thomson's successor as Professor of Natural History & Geology was another Scottish graduate of Edinburgh University, the 30-year-old Robert Cunningham (1841-1918). Although saddled with the same multi-disciplinary teaching responsibilities as Thomson, Cunningham was primarily a zoologist. In the late 1860s he had travelled on HMS Nassau as a member of a scientific expedition to the southern shores of South America. This led to the publication in 1871 of his chief work The Natural History of Magellan and Patagonia. Cunningham occupied the chair in Belfast for thirty-one years (1871-1902) and was well regarded by his students and college colleagues. Being less of an all-rounder than Wyville Thomson, he appears to have been somewhat overwhelmed by the breadth of his teaching commitments and he published little (and nothing at all geological). However, like Wyville Thomson before him, Cunningham still found time to contribute to the local community by involving himself with both the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society and the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club.
The Geology syllabus as recorded in the annual Queen's College Calendar changes little through the Cunningham decades, while the subject seems by then to be a requirement only for the engineers (although it finally became an optional component of the BA Hons course from the mid-1880s, and of a BSc degree introduced in the mid-1890s). Dramatic changes in the governance of Queen's occurred in the middle of Cunninghams's 30-year reign, with the College becoming part of the Royal University of Ireland in 1882, but this traumatic event had little impact on Geology.
The rather moribund situation for Geology as a subject continued at Queen's into the twentieth century. On Cunningham's retirement in 1902, yet another Scot and Edinburgh graduate, Gregg Wilson (1865-1951), became Professor of Natural History & Geology. Wilson was an eminent marine zoologist who had already held scientific posts in Edinburgh, Sydney (Australia) and London. Soon after his arrival in Belfast he helped to set up the Ulster Fisheries and Biology Association which, from about 1905, ran a short-lived marine laboratory at Larne. The earliest known photograph of a Geology teaching space was probably taken (by Robert J. Welch) during Wilson's time, in the early 1900s.
Wilson's research interests were better catered for after 1909, when the Royal University of Ireland was abolished and Queen's College Belfast was elevated to independent university status. Under the new, expanded and better funded regime, the Professor of Natural History & Geology was divided into three new posts &endash; Professor of Botany, Professor of Zoology, and a Lecturer in Geology. Gregg Wilson became the first Professor of Zoology and remained so until his retirement in 1931. He retained considerable influence in the University for another twenty years, first as Registrar and Honorary Treasurer, then (in his mid-eighties) as Pro-chancellor.
With the establishment of the Lectureship in Geology in 1909, there was at last a requirement by the new University to employ someone with proper geological credentials - for the first time since Wyville Thomson's arrival at the College over half a century before. Arthur Richard Dwerryhouse (1867-1931), from Leeds University, was appointed. Already in his mid-40s, Dwerryhouse was something of a late developer. Originally from Hale in Lancashire, he had been an insurance clerk and worked in the milling trade in Liverpool. An amateur interest in glacial geology and karst scenery led him to join the Liverpool Geol. Soc. in 1892 and eventually triggered a change in career. In 1896 he was taken on as a mature student by Professor Percy Kendal (1856-1936), an outstanding Quaternary geologist, at the Yorkshire College (later Leeds University). Kendal added him to the teaching staff at Leeds about 1900, as Lecturer on Petrography. Dwerryhouse published a significant paper on the Eskdale granite, Cumbria, in the year he moved to Belfast. The name of Dwerryhouse as an author is probably best remembered for a slim volume Geological and Topographical Maps, aimed at students, which first appeared in 1911. This ran to two editions and was still being reprinted in 1942 (eleven years after the author's death).
The most significant scientific product of Dwerryhouse's years at Queen's was his overview paper, 'The Glaciation of North-Eastern Ireland' (although this wasn't published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geolgical Society until 1923, after he had left Belfast). He also produced a popular introduction to Geology in the Romance of Reality series (undated, but it probably first appeared about 1910). Judging by the number of copies still available from second-hand book dealers, it must have been a good seller and was probably reprinted several times. Dwerryhouse had long experience as a Royal Artillery officer in the Territorial Army. During World War 1, in his late forties, he commanded a battery in France and reached the rank of Major.
A key moment in the development of Geology at Queen's came in 1914, when for the first time the Geology teaching staff doubled in size - from one to two. That year, Dwerryhouse was able to appoint a Demonstrator in Geology. He chose a 25-year-old from Leeds who had been rejected for War service by the Army on medical grounds. His name was John Kaye Charlesworth (1889-1972). Charlesworth was another of Percy Kendall's students at Leeds University where, like Dwerryhouse, his latent interest in the Quaternary was no doubt encouraged. After graduating from Leeds, Charlesworth gained research experience in London, Breslau and Munich. Charlesworth remained a Demonstrator at Queen's for four years before being promoted to Assistant in 1918. But the following year he temporarily leaves our story by resigning from Queen's to join Manchester University as a Senior Lecturer.
In 1920 Dwerryhouse gave a 21-year old petrologist, Doris Reynolds (1899-1986), her first university teaching job, as his Assistant in Geology. She had just graduated with first-class honours from Bedford College London. In a recently published biography of Arthur Holmes (The Dating Game by Cherry Lewis), Doris Reynolds is described as an "extremely boisterous and vocal woman, with strong opinions on absolutely everything". There were very few professional women geologists at the time. Reynolds was born in Manchester in 1899, but her parents had then only recently moved across from Belfast, where her father had been a textile merchant. Perhaps this Belfast link partly explains her move to Queen's in 1920.
It is recorded that within months of Reynolds' arrival, Dwerryhouse left to become a Lecturer in Petrology at Reading University, where he remained until his retirement in 1929. But 'tradition' in the Geology Department has it that Dwerryhouse left under something of a cloud, after making some unwelcome amorous advances towards Doris Reynolds. Whatever the truth in that story, 1921 marked another turning point for Geology in Queen's.
With Dwerryhouse gone, Charlesworth returned from Manchester to take up the newly revived Chair of Geology. Doris Reynolds remained in Belfast as Charlesworth's Assistant for four years before moving back to Bedford College London. Her subsequent high-profile career had at its core a series of substantial studies on the petrology of the Newry Complex and Slieve Gullion. Her controversial views on the origin of granite helped to fuel what became known as the Granite Controversy, which raged from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the 1930s she met and eventually married the geologist Arthur Holmes, a partnership which lasted until Holmes' death in 1965. She went on to produce a third edition of the book which continues to inspire generations of geology students, Holmes Principles of Physical Geology.
In 1927 Charlesworth appointed fellow Yorkshireman, John Jerome Hartley (1886-1959), as Assistant in Geology. Already in his early forties, Hartley came with a strong engineering background, having graduated Batchelor of Engineering from Liverpool in 1906 and worked as a railway engineer in Canada and SE England. After serving as a sapper in World War I, Hartley joined Finsbury Technical College, where he ran the Engineering Laboratory and took practical classes in surveying. During his spare time at Finsbury, Hartley took a BSc honours degree in Geology from the University of London, then a Masters in 1924 (for a thesis on Lake District geology).
Charlesworth and Hartley shared the Geology teaching between them for most of the 1930s and 1940s. Hartley published widely on Irish geology, but perhaps his most impressive geological achievements are represented by two substantial papers on the Sperrins region published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy &endash; 'The Geology of North-eastern Tyrone' (essentially the Tyrone Igneous Complex) in 1933, and 'The Dalradian Rocks of the Sperrin Mountains' in 1938. He began the field mapping and systematic collecting for these papers as early as 1928, soon after his arrival in Belfast. Fortunately, his collection of about 1,000 hand specimens has survived, and was transferred from the Geology Department at Queen's to the Ulster Museum in 2000. On arrival, it appeared that the collection held little scientific value, since although every specimen was numbered, there were neither labels nor any locality data. Happily, however, most of Hartley's original 6" field slips had been transferred to the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland several years previously. Hartley had neatly recorded specimen numbers on his maps as he went along, often with a brief description of rock type and field relationships. So it has proved possible to restore the specimen data, and this unique collection will soon be fully documented and available again for consultation at the Ulster Museum.
Hartley combined his engineering and geological interests in an important set of papers devoted to the water resources of Belfast and the wider province, which were published in the 1930s by the Institute of Civil Enginering. He was to chair the Northern Ireland branch of the Institute in 1953-1954, during his retirement.
The Charlesworth/Hartley teaching partnership was broken for two years in the late 1930s. After ten years as Demonstrator and Junior Lecturer in Geology, Hartley is not recorded at all on the teaching staff of Queen's for the session 1937-1938; he reappears the following year as a Demonstrator in Civil Engineering before returning to Geology as a Junior Lecturer in 1939. Three years later a permanent Lectureship in Geology was established for him, and he became Reader just three years before his retirement in 1951.
It is interesting to examine what happened when Charlesworth was deprived of Hartley's services for those two academic years in the late 1930s. In 1937 he took on for a year the Glaswegian John Graham Comrie Anderson (b.1910), then in his mid twenties. Anderson had just completed a BSc and PhD under Professor E.B. Bailey (1881-1965) at Glasgow University (Bailey was external examiner for Queen's that year). A petrologist and structural geologist, Anderson went on in 1949 to become Professor of Geology at Cardiff University, from where he retired in 1977. He is probably best known for his books The Structure of the British Isles (1968) and The Structure of Western Europe (1978). Anderson is now in his 91st year and still lives in Cardiff.
Charlesworth's next stop-gap appointment in 1938 was the young Austin Woodland. Woodland spent almost his entire career with the Geological Survey of Great Britain and its successor the Institute of Geological Sciences. Working his way up through the organisation, he became Director of the Institute of Geological Sciences in the late 1970s. Dr Harry Wilson gives a sympathetic account of his period in office in his excellent, if irreverent, history of the Survey Down to Earth.
In 1948, almost exactly a century after Geology was first taught in Queen's, the teaching staff rose from two to three. Charlesworth and Hartley were joined that year by Peter Padget as Assistant Lecturer. During his three years in Belfast, Padget concentrated on the stratigraphy of the Carboniferous Limestone, mapping and collecting around Cuilcagh, Belcoo and the Clogher-Slieve Beagh district, and publishing most of his results. Padget left in 1951 to begin a long career working for the Norwegian Geological Survey. He donated the bulk of his Irish collections at the time to the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University (which Professor Neville George had made the centre for Carboniferous research in Great Britain). However, some of Padget's material survived in the Department at Queen's; in 2000 four boxes labelled 'Padget Collection', containing a few hundred fossils, came to light and were transferred to the Ulster Museum. Like the Hartley material, initially it looked to be of little scientific value, since the accompanying labels carry only locality numbers, and no key to the numbers had survived with the collection. Happily, I was able to contact Padget at his home in Trondheim. He had retained his 6" mapping slips from Cuilcagh and the Clogher - Slieve Beagh area, and he very kindly donated them to the Ulster Museum recently. These record the precious locality numbers, and brought meaning to the specimen labels. So once again the scientific utility of his material can be fully restored.
The general post-war expansion in university provision across the United Kingdom affected Queen's as much as anywhere else. In Geology, Padget's appointment in 1948 was the first of several which led to the steady growth of the Department. In 1951, Hartley's retirement enabled Charlesworth to inject more new blood in the form of Jack Preston, as Lecturer in Geology. That same year Dr Walter Schwarzacher was appointed Assistant Lecturer. In 1952 the first Queen's graduate joined the staff &endash; Robert J.G. Savage (1927-1998), a Co. Down man and vertebrate palaeontologist, became Temporary Assistant Lecturer. Savage's move to Bristol in 1954 saw the appointment of another palaeontologist, Robin E.H. Reid.
It is appropriate here to include a few comments about the great man Charlesworth, as we reach 1954 in our story, the year of his retirement. Charlesworth's achievements, both as a scientist, and as a teacher determined to build up the Department, were immense. There is no better indication of his breadth of knowledge than the three great encyclopedic treatments which capped his long and productive career: The Geology of Ireland (1953), the monumental two-volume (1,700-page) Quaternary Era (1957), and The Historical Geology of Ireland (1963). The changes which he oversaw in the teaching of Geology at Queen's are forcefully illustrated by the contrast between Geology's accommodation when he arrived - a hut which had originally formed part of a First World War UVF hospital (built between the Lanyon Building and Botanic Gardens - and when he left (the present Geology building which opened in April 1954).
Charlesworth was a good teacher and a firm believer in the importance of fieldwork. He used to take students to the North Coast for several days each year around Easter time. But he didn't restrict his enthusiasm for Geology to his university students: like Hartley, Charlesworth was a consistent supporter of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club and latterly the Belfast Geologists' Society. He continued his close association with the Belfast Geologists' until just a few years before his death in 1972 (aged 82), regularly leading excursions on the north Antrim coast into the 1960s.
The year 1954 was another turning point in the
history of the Department. It saw the opening of the present
building, and the retirement of the man who had done so much to
create the circumstances in which the Department was now to grow.
Teaching and research were in the capable hands of a dynamic young
staff, but now led by a new Professor, Alwyn Williams.
Dr Peter R. Crowther
Keeper of Geology, Museums & Galleries of Northern Ireland
Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast BT9 5AB
Tel: +44 (0)28 9038 3132 Fax: +44 (0)28 9038 3103
Email: peter.crowther.um@nics.gov.uk
*Please note: this is not an official
page of the Queen's University. This page has been provided as a
private service to alumni of the Queen's University of Belfast
Geology Department, after the closure of the department by the
university in Summer
2001.
webmaster: Robert
McCaffrey (PhD 1992)
robmccaffrey@propubs.com