Obituaries in the Scottish Geographical Journal

This year my own home department, the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences (GES) at the University of Glasgow, has lost two much-valued colleagues: Emeritus Professor Paul Bishop (1949-2022), leading physical geographer, earth scientist and scholar of long-term human-environment relations, and Professor Roderick Brown (1962-2022), an earth scientist who worked occasionally with geographers. To lose two such mainstays of the one department in such a short space of time is extremely tough for colleagues, and added poignancy here arises because of how much the research and teaching of Paul and Rod had intersected over many years. Indeed, Rod was going to be a speaker at a GES event commemorating Paul that we held in September 2022: in practice, the resonances of Rod’s loss quietly sounded throughout this event, chiming into our reflections on and for Paul. The plan is to publish a selection of pieces in an issue next year (2023) commemorating Paul’s academic life and work, while an obituary for Rod is included in the current issue. Alongside that for Rod, this issue also contains an obituary for Professor Akin Mabogunje (1931-2022), an eminent Nigerian geographer regarded as one of the most prominent representatives of academic geography from and about Africa. Rod’s Scottish connection is obvious, Mabogunje’s less so, but in fact Mabogunje was a recipient in 1984 of the Centenary Medal (now the Coppock Medal) of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS), the only African ever to receive this honour. It is interesting to consider the status and history of obituaries as these have appeared over the nearly 140 years of the journal’s existence, initially as the Scottish Geographical Magazine (SGM) and subsequently as the Scottish Geographical Journal (SGJ) (Philo et al., 2022). A basic search (as of late-November 2022) on ‘Obituary’ using the journal website’s search function generates 396 results. One is a thought-provoking ‘obituary’ for the ‘death of a subject’, meaning the teaching programme (and recognisably distinct department) of Geography at the University of Strathclyde (Chan, 2011), while others are historiographic papers drawing upon obituaries as sources for reconstructing the past lives and contributions of geographers or explorers (e.g. Maddrell, 1997; Murray, 2013; Philip & Edwards, 2019). The majority of results do identify obituaries for named individuals, however, some being wellknown figures from Geography’s disciplinary history in Scotland: e.g. J. Scott Keltie (18501927: Chisholm, 1927); George G. Chisholm (1855-1930; R.N.R.B., 1928); J.W. Gregory (1864-1932: Anon, 1932); Marion Isabel Newbigin (1869-1934: Anon, 1934); James Wreford Watson (1915-1990: Crosbie, 1991); Joy Tivy (1924-1995: Caird, 1996); and John Terrence (Terry) Coppock (1921-2000: Rhind, 2000). Other names are of prominent geographers from outwith Scotland, although in such instances the obituary-writer often references Scottish connections, personal, professional or through such routes as contributing to summer schools, presenting to the RSGS or publishing in the SGM/SGJ: e.g. Elisée Reclus (1830-1905: Geddes, 1905a, 1905b); Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932: Anon, 1932); and John Harris Paterson (1923-1997: Werrity, 1997). Additional notable names include academics from other disciplines or famous explorers: e.g. Roald Amudsen (1872-1928: