This well written and most interesting record of the formation, expansion and sad demise of the very well regarded Sheffield Geology Department, was written by a member of the 1971 Honours class. It details the staff and is excellently illustrated with photographs of members, premises, field excursions and laboratory classes.
Although geology was part of the metallurgy curriculum in Sheffield before the 1905 formation of the University, a Geology Department did not appear until 1913, being the result of a legacy left by Henry Clifton Sorby FRS (1826−1908), the brilliant Sheffield petrologist, and the ‘Father of Microscopical Petrography’.
The first Sorby Professor was William G. Fearnsides (1879−1968), but the day student total did not reach 10 until 1919 when an Honours School of Geology was established. Even so, the total day students each year, including metallurgists, engineers and science students, was ~20−35 after the post 1914−18 war bulge until 1939, with only 3−7 Honours students. Fearnsides retired in 1945 and Frederick W. Shotton was appointed to the Chair.
Shotton had to cope with enormously increased student numbers in very inadequate accommodation and he resigned in 1949 to be replaced by the dynamic and much loved, Leslie R. Moore (1912−2003). Moore expanded the Department to one of the largest in the country, appointed staff who became distinguished, initiated fossil palynology studies which led to the Department becoming the national centre for this work with ~250 postgraduates being trained who were snapped up by employers. Expeditions to Kilimanjaro, the Sahara, North Peary Land and Iceland added to the Department’s success.
But the 1949 promise to Moore of a new Department building was never fulfilled and his successor in the Sorby Chair from 1978, J. Barry Dawson faced a split site and a lack of top University support which in 1987 slashed income by 53% to preserve support for chemistry and physics. This triggered downgrading in the Oxburgh Review and the Department closed in 1990 to be partly replaced by a small Earth Science Unit (within Animal and Plant Sciences) which itself was closed in 2001. The palynological work continues as a Centre under Professor Charles Wellman in Animal and Plant Sciences and the proceeds of this book go towards supporting this work.
A superb Department closed by an inept hierarchy.
Reviewed by Bernard Elgey Leake
SORBY’S LEGACY: GEOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD.
R. Alison Hunter, author and publisher,2013, 201pp. Details at www.geologyatsheffield.co.uk