by Briony McDonagh (with help from Helen Manning)
Today’s ‘WOW GEES woman’ is Lois Latham, a regional geographer who
spent more than 30 years in the Department of Geography here at Hull. She was the
first woman to be appointed to a permanent academic post in the department in
1946 and throughout much of her tenure, the only female academic working
in the department.
Lois Latham with colleagues at a retirement function in 1989
(l-r: Jay Appleton, Alan Harris, Harry Wilkinson, Lois Latham and George de Boer)
Latham was born more than a century ago, in Wakefield (West
Yorkshire) in 1910, later studying geography at the University of Sheffield and
graduating in or around 1932. She served as editor of the Scottish
Geographical Magazine between 1936 and 1940 – the third woman in succession
to hold the post – and during the Second World War, she contributed to the
Admiralty Intelligence Handbooks.
In 1946, she moved to Yorkshire, appointed as a lecturer in
Geography in what was then Hull University College. This was a time when the
city was still hard hit by its aerial bombardment during the War. As a then
colleague of Latham’s in the Department of Economics mentioned to me recently,
Hull in the late 1940s and early 1950s was badly ravaged by war with thousands
of bombed-out houses and many of the academics at the University working out of
army huts!
During her more than 30 years at Hull, Latham was active in the
teaching programme and in a range of other roles both within and beyond the
University. She was President of the Hull branch of the Geographical Association
from 1954 until around 1960 when she handed over the presidency to her colleague
in the department George de Boer. She travelled widely and in 1959 to 1960 she
spent a year at the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia and later organised a
return visit to Hull by Tomislav Šegota of the Yugoslav Encyclopaedia, an international
connection linked closely to her own research interests in the regional
geography of the USSR. She also headed the department’s contribution to the second
phase of the Land Utilisation Survey of Britain, the behemoth of a mapping
project first initiated by Dudley Stamp in the early 1930s. She was by all accounts
also an excellent teacher, and the department continued until very recently to
award a student prize in her name (funded thanks to a generous bequest in her
will).
The huts housing the Department of Geography post WWII. Photo: M. Holliday c. 1963
By the time she retired in 1977, Lois Latham had spent more than
three decades as an educator and researcher in the Department of Geography. She
had seen the University gain its Royal Charter (and the right to grant degrees in
its own name), been part of the move whereby the department relocated back into
the space in Cohen it now occupies and witnessed a huge explosion in staff and undergraduate
numbers. During all this time she was the only woman to hold a full-time
academic position in the department. In fact, it was not until the appointment
of Sarah Metcalfe and Judith Rees in the late 1980s that the department ever
had more than one woman in full-time permanent posts on the payroll! Today we’re
approaching double figures – an achievement indeed in the quarter of a century
since 1988.
The Cohen Building in the spring sunshine: GEES's home since the 1960s
But despite both her long-standing service and her role as Hull’s
first female geographer, Lois Latham remains a relatively obscure figure. She
was not, for example, someone I had heard of when I started my own job at the
University, though I knew of other Hull geographers of the period including
Herbert King (whose papers at the Hull History Centre I’ve previously consulted)
and George Kimble (whose Geography in the Middle Ages I’d recommend to
anyone). As Avril Maddrell comments in her recent book, Latham has been ‘expunged
from the textual account of the department’s history’ (Complex Locations,
p. 235). It’s hard to know whether this was directly as a result of her gender,
but as one-time colleague Derek Spooner notes in his contribution to the
department’s recent history, Latham was a ‘somewhat marginalised and possibly
undervalued figure in the Department’ (Eighty Years of Geography at Hull,
p. 14). She did not, for example, publish as much as many of her (male)
colleagues and as we all know in academia, it’s publish or perish when it comes
to one’s scholarly reputation. Personally I’m sorry she published so little – I’d
have liked to have read the work of the Hull’s first female geographer. I’d
also like to know which her office was in the Cohen Building. I’m definitely hoping
it was mine!
Acknowledgements: This blog post draws on dissertation work by
current GEES undergraduate, Helen Manning; Avril Maddrell’s excellent book, Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850-1970 (Wiley/Blackwell,
Oxford, 2009); and the recent history of the department, Eighty Years of Geography at Hull, edited by Stephen Ellis (2013). Readers wishing to know
more about Lois Latham and her contemporaries at this and other UK institutions are advised
to consult the latter two sources. Photos from Eighty Years of Geography except the last which was taken recently by Anna Bird.
International Women's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. International Women's Day celebrates women's success, and reminds of inequities still to be redressed. The origins of IWD can be traced to the struggle for women to gain the vote in European countries about a century ago. The first International Women's Day event was run in 1911.
International Women's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. International Women's Day celebrates women's success, and reminds of inequities still to be redressed. The origins of IWD can be traced to the struggle for women to gain the vote in European countries about a century ago. The first International Women's Day event was run in 1911.
