Sidney William Wooldridge


Professor Sidney William Wooldridge CBE, FRS, FGS, geologist, geomorphologist and geographer, was a pioneer in the study of the geomorphology of south-east England and the first professor of geography at King's College London. He collaborated with Dudley Stamp and with David Linton.

Early life and education

Sidney Wooldridge was born in Hornsey, North London in 1900, the younger son of a bank clerk. His early childhood was spent in Cheam, Surrey, and his later schooling in Wood Green, north London, where he also took evening classes in geology. He read geology at King's College London, graduating with a first-class degree. Research in petrology led to an MSc and DSc. His study of the Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits of the North Downs and Chiltern Hills of southern England led to an interest in geomorphology.

Academic career

In the 1920s and 30s Wooldridge lectured at King's on a combined geography and geology course with the London School of Economics. In the Joint School of Geography King's offered Geomorphology, Meteorology, Biogeography and the History of Geographical Discovery, while the LSE offered the Regional and Economic aspects, Historical Geography, and the Distribution of Man.
During World War II this arrangement was disrupted by the evacuation of King's to Bristol, requiring Wooldridge to teach human geography. His conversion to geography complete, he became professor of geography at Birkbeck College, London in 1944, returning to King's in 1947 as its first professor of geography and remaining until his death in 1963.
Wooldridge was a founder-member of the Institute of British Geographers for academics dissatisfied with the Royal Geographical Society's focus on amateur research and exploration; he was later IBG president. He did not break completely with the RGS, serving on its council. Wooldridge also served as president of the geography section of the British Association and chaired the Field Studies Council in 1952.

Research

Wooldridge's work concentrated mainly on the London Basin and the Weald, his first paper being on folding within the London Basin. Other publications looked at the Reading Beds, Eocene and Pliocene deposits and the structural and geomorphological evolution of the basin. Inspired by the theories of W.M.Davis on cycles of landscape evolution, Wooldridge employed detailed fieldwork to identify features such as river terraces and erosion surfaces, for example a presumed platform at 200 feet above modern sea level. In the later 1930s collaboration with colleague David Linton culminated in the 1939 classic Structure, Surface and Drainage of South-East England.
The 'Wooldridge and Linton Model' of landscape evolution was dependent on the identification of remnants of three widely developed erosion surfaces: a warped sub-Eocene surface; a high-level unwarped Neogene peneplain and an unwarped Plio-Pleistocene marine platform. It explained both the concordant drainage pattern of the central Weald, and the widespread discordant features.
Wooldridge also collaborated with fellow King's alumnus Dudley Stamp. Wooldridge had provided petrological input to a paper with Stamp on the Silurian of Wales as early as 1923 and, like Stamp, moved from geology towards human geography. Wooldridge's interest lay in relating early human settlement and land use to the physical landscape. In 1951 Stamp at LSE and Wooldridge at King's jointly edited London Essays in Geography.

Personal life

Like Dudley Stamp, Wooldridge married a King's geography student, Edith Stephens. Wooldridge was a keen golfer and cricketer, a Congregationalist lay preacher and an amateur operetta enthusiast. He continued to work after a stroke in 1954, dying in 1963.

Legacy

In 1980 the Institute of British Geographers marked the fortieth anniversary of Structure, Surface and Drainage in South-East England by the publication of The Shaping of Southern England (, a collection of papers which both emphasised the importance of the work, and showed how dated it had become. Fundamentally, the 'Wooldridge and Linton Model' was based on the view that the south-east region had been tectonically stable except for two brief periods, in the Upper Cretaceous and the mid-Tertiary. Subsequent work has shown that this view is far too simplistic, throwing much of the interpretation of cycles of landscape evolution into doubt.
More serious are criticisms of Wooldridge's overemphasis on form over process. However, his role as a pioneer geomorphologist, and emphasis on historical perspective and regional focus remained important.

Selected published works

Wooldridge received a number of awards to fund fieldwork, including the Royal Geographical Society's Murchison Award with David Linton in 1942. He was made CBE in 1954 in recognition of his work on the Sand and Gravel Council. In 1957 he received the Royal Geographical Society's Victoria Medal and in 1959 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a rare honour among geographers.