William Smith in York and Scarborough

Over the weekend of Sept 21st and 22nd 2024, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society and Yorkshire Geological Society celebrated the 200th anniversary of William Smith delivering the inaugural YPS lectures, on the subject of geology.

Saturday September 21st was the symposium day, in the Tempest Anderson Hall of the Yorkshire Museum, and it was a fascinating day of talks. A proper report will be written by the YPS in due course, but my particular highlights were as follows:

• Colin Speakman noting that William Smith’s fee of £50 for his course of eight lectures is the equivalent of £6000 today. I will henceforth be using Smith2024 rates to charge £750 for each public talk I give.
• Colin noting also that Smith’s invitation to give the YPS lectures came about via his meeting in Kirkby Lonsdale, in late 1823, Dr Matthew Allen, apothecary of York Asylum. The story of Allen’s life is a pretty eye-opening one, not to be explored further here. We will, however, come back to the asylum.
• Duncan Hawley explaining that the YPS’ copy of Smith’s geological map of England and Wales is rather special. Presented to the society in 1824, it is not simply a copy of the 1815 map, but a version with various additions and amendments. Smith and his nephew John Phillips had been based in the north of England since 1820, and their understanding of the geology had evolved.
• Duncan also explaining the problems Smith had figuring out the limestone geology of south Wales and the Welsh Borders. The Malverns were mentioned, and who would go on to unravel one of the mapping mysteries of that area, in 1842? Why, Smith’s niece, and John’s sister, Anne Phillips!

• Expanding on forgotten, or overlooked, knowledge, Ru Smith gave a fascinating account of the late 18th Century development of Carboniferous stratigraphy by Northumbrian quarry-workers. The Rev William Turner did a remarkable job in compiling their knowledge. Rather than perpetuating the meme of the heroic lone geologist, Ru showed that if we have seen further, it is not by standing on the shoulders of giants, but by crowd-surfing on the shoulders of miners.
• Ru added that many stratigraphic units still used in the modern Carboniferous stratigraphy of north-east England hark back to the names given to strata by the miners. I wonder if this applies also to the industrial Jurassic stratigraphy of Cleveland and the Yorkshire coast? Given that mining for alum began there in the 17th Century, there must be a history to be investigated.

After a lunch interval that was extended somewhat due to the York Food Festival being in full swing, we returned to the hall for an afternoon of talks and discussion about the future of geological mapping.

• Duncan McLean extolled the virtues of micropalaeontology, noting wryly that, whilst various men laid claim to being the father of the subject, there were mothers too, perhaps none more important than Esther Applin, Alva Ellisor, and Hedwig Kniker. Next year marks the centenary of their pioneering work on foraminiferal biostratigraphy.
• The British Geological Survey’s re-mapping of the Yorkshire Wolds Chalk did not involve microfossils, explained Laura Burrel Garcia and Laura Austin Sydes. Picking up flints and fossils, especially sea urchins and bivalves, in ploughed fields allowed them to work out the formations they were traversing. Combining this with borehole and geophysical data, the new map of bedrock and Quaternary geology will be of particular use in understanding aquifer behaviour.
• I was then enormously pleased to welcome back two winners of the John and Anne Phillips Prize, to tell us what they’ve been up to since. Our 2018 recipient, Becky Hopkins, is now Dr Becky Hopkins, having completed a magnetic-stratigraphic-Antarctic PhD at Southampton. 2023 winner Louis Chambers, meanwhile, is carrying out a volcanology Masters at Durham.
• Becky and Louis did their prize-winning mapping in Snowdonia, and both their maps were considerably better than William Smith’s (and Charles Darwin‘s) North Welsh efforts. This is as it should be, of course, with all the knowledge gained since Smith’s ground-breaking work (and the bonus of not having to get to their field area via horse-drawn carriage.)

Whilst I pondered whether Museum Gardens needed pebble mosaics of both Smith’s 1815 and 1824 geological maps, the symposium ended with a broad discussion. My favourite exhortation from the audience was for someone to produce a map of Yorkshire’s Ipswichian geomorphology. Who wouldn’t want a hyaena’s-eye view of this interglacial landscape?

On Sunday, events moved to Scarborough. William Smith and John Phillips had given a second set of geology and palaeontology lectures in the town in September 1824, so Prof Pete Rawson and I offered a couple of geological bicentenary strolls. Pete followed the William Smith Trail, whilst I took people round the Rotunda Museum, before going dinosaur-tracking in South Bay.

All-in-all, it was a really excellent weekend, but there are a couple of points of unfinished business. Whilst William Smith and John Phillips are unquestionably worth celebrating, we really need to find out more about Mary Ann, William’s wife, and Anne, John’s sister. Mrs Smith and Miss Phillips are relegated to the margins, but surely we can work to redress this oversight.

I mentioned York Asylum earlier, and I will return to it here. Dr Bob Adams of York Medical Society, formerly senior psychiatrist at Bootham Hospital, informs me that Mary Ann Smith died in York Asylum on June 27th 1844. She had been admitted just over two years earlier, on February 15th 1842, by her nephew. This must have been John, who still resided – officially at least – in St Mary’s Lodge.

Given that her husband died in Northampton in August 1839, what happened to Mary Ann in the intervening three years? Why was she then incarcerated? And what happened to her in the asylum?

Additionally, I received confirmation from one of the churchwardens that Mary Ann was buried at St Olave’s Church, but that she doesn’t have a headstone. Anne, meanwhile, certainly does have a headstone, but when I went to visit it in June, it was exceedingly overgrown.

Much still to do, therefore, to understand the lives of the Smiths and Phillips in Yorkshire. Hopefully it won’t take another two hundred years.

(Edmonds, J. M., 1975. The geological lecture-courses given in Yorkshire by William Smith and John Phillips, 1824-1825. Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, vol. 40, p. 373-412.)