Natural Divisions of England: Discussion Author(S): Thomas Holdich, Dr

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Natural Divisions of England: Discussion Author(s): Thomas Holdich, Dr. Unstead, Morley Davies, Dr. Mill, Mr. Hinks and C. B. Fawcett Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Feb., 1917), pp. 135-141 Published by: geographicalj Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1779342 Accessed: 27-06-2016 02:59 UTC

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Province Population in Area in Iooo Persons per Ca ital millions. sq. miles. sq. mile. cP rC-a North England ... 27 5'4 500 Newcastle. ' ? Yorkshire ... 3-8 5'I 750 Leeds. o Lancashire ... 6'I 17'6 4' 4 25'I I390 Manchester. P X Severn ..... 29 4'7 620 Birmingham. Trent .. 21 5'5 380 Nottingham. - . Bristol 3...... I3 2-8 460 Bristol. g Cornwall and Devon I'o 36 4'I 9'8 240 Plymouth. c) : Wessex ...... I3 2-9 450 Southampton.

. l'South-east England I7 30 570 ? o = Central England I'2 4'I 290 Oxford. o 'b East England ... 6 6'o 5 270 Cambridge. X XLondon ...... 7'7 22 ) 3500 London.

Wales ... . 2'3 8'1 280 Cardiff. Scotland ...... 4'8 300 I60 Edinburgh. Ireland ... .. 4'4 32'6 130 Dublin.

Sir THOMAS HOLDICH: We are here this afternoon to listen to an interesting paper by Mr. Fawcett on the Natural Divisions of England, and without any further preliminaries I will ask him to read his paper.

Mr. Fawcett then read the paier i5rinted above and a discussion followed. Sir THOMAS HOLDICH: I am sure you will agree with me that Mr. Fawcett has given us what may be considered to be an ideal scheme for the redistribu- tion of provinces in England for the purposes of local administration. It would have been of very considerable interest to us all, I think, if he had extended his researches-which are evidently very considerable-a little further, to the dis- tressful country of Ireland. I have studied a similar question as regards Ireland, and I confess it seems to me that there are problems there which are almost incapable of solution. In partitioning up England as he has done he has observed what I have always considered to be a strictly scientific system of placing his boundaries; they are selected first of all with a full consideration of the sentiments and the idiosyncrasies of the people who are thus partitioned off, and they are plain and easily distinguishable, following fairly recognizable geographical features. But there must be gentlemen here who are far better acquainted with the subject than I am, and I hope that some of them will add to the interest of the afternoon by stating their views. Dr. UNSTEAD : I have hesitation in advancing criticisms, bearing in mind the necessity for much more study of the paper than I have had an oppor- tunity of devoting to it; but I may say that after reading Mr. Fawcett's paper and listening to his exposition I find I am in very considerable agreement with him as regards the particular delimitations he has made. I question, however, several of the fundamental assumptions on which the delimitation is based. In the first place, it seems to me that the problem of the division of England into administrative areas is really not a geographical problem. The geographer may offer certain suggestions in regard to it, but it properly belongs to the sphere of public administration, in which much more than geographical considerations must be taken into account. The historian must be consulted, for a great many questions of the past are involved; the expert in administration who knows the advantages and disadvantages of working with certain types of boundaries and areas will have much to say ; others also should contribute, and then when all the contributions have been put together a solution may be

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:59:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 136 NATURAL DIVISIONS OF ENGLAND: DISCUSSION found. Finally, when some definite scheme is made after consideration of all the conditions, the geographer might criticize it from his particular point of view. However, assuming that a solution may be attempted in a Geographical Society, I hesitate to accept Mr. Fawcett's decision that England should not be treated as a unit, and that it should be divided up into a number of separate provinces. The reason given is that without such a division there would be a disparity in the importance of the different constituent parts of the British Isles, for Wales would have one unit of population as compared with two units in Ireland, two again in Scotland, and fourteen units in England; the suggestion of the paper is that English influence would dominate in a federal parliament. But would that domination be really affected by the division of England into some twelve provinces ? I take it that the federal parliament would deal with affairs in which the United Kingdom as a whole is concerned, and that the provincial parliaments would deal with local affairs; in that case, would that federal parliament be dominated less by England because for local affairs there are provinces and provincial parliaments ? Moreover, this consideration leads to the observation that although the areas and populations of the provinces have been considered, the powers and functions of their parliaments have not been taken into account; yet surely these are integral parts of the problem; only when the powers and functions are determined can appropriate units be decided upon. Are the provinces to deal with merely local affairs, or are they to deal with matters which affect the whole of England ? The latter would seem impracticable, but if the former is assumed the provincial parliaments would deal with almost the same matters with which the County Councils at present are concerned ; they become enlarged County Councils rather than subordinate parliaments. Then in that case would these provinces really be comparable with the other regions which Mr. Fawcett apparently has in mind-Scotland, Wales, and Ireland ? Are they of the same order of representation ? And in this connection another factor may be taken into account, namely, the possibility not only of decentralization in the government of the British Isles, but also that of the formation of an Imperial Parlia- ment. We may, and probably shall, see a reconstructed Empire with a common parliament for imperial affairs, with representation from Canada with its seven million people, for instance. How will these relatively small provinces of England compare with the immense Dominion of Canada ? Will there be two, or will there have to be three, ranks of Parliaments ? The existence of this problem, not referred to in the paper, might lead to a revision of the plan for the division of England. But assuming that such a division is to be made here in the Royal Geo- graphical Society, and that it is to be made on the scale of having some ten or twelve provinces in England, the actual delimitation is a very interesting study, and in that work of delimitation I find myself much more in agreement with the author. Mr. Fawcett has taken many geographical factors into account and shown great ability in their correlation. With many men, many opinions; one would wish to draw a boundary here, another would draw it there, and in regard to details discussion might be interminable. I would only suggest that it seems to me that the divisions should be approximately equal in importance: if one looks at them as marked upon the map the areas seem to be about equal, but when we consider them in regard to their population there is by no means the same equivalence. For instance, the south-western divisions of the Devonian peninsula and the Bristol region are each taken as one, but even

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:59:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NATURAL DIVISIONS OF ENGLAND: DISCUSSION 137 if they are put together they have not the importance of several of the other divisions. Apart from this, I highly appreciate many of the points made by Mr. Fawcett; for instance, his lucid explanation of how it has come about that in- creases of population have shifted the centre of gravity of settlements and altered the position of suitable boundary-lines, and the happy illustration in the case of Wiltshire. The suggestions for new boundaries have been very skilfully con- trived and should provide valuable hints in connection with other geographical problems. As a minor point I would ask Mr. Fawcett to reconsider the title of his paper; when I first saw it I thought at once of the division of England into natural regions somewhat on the lines of those associated with the name of Prof. Herbertson, and I was surprised, when I came to read the paper, to find that it really dealt with administrative regions. These differ, of course, from natural physical units in essential particulars, as for example when the natural units known as the Lake District and the Fenlands are each divided for the purpose of the paper. To avoid misconceptions, therefore, it might be well to call this paper a study in " natural administrative regions." Lest my criticisms give a wrong impression, I must end by recording my feeling that we are much indebted to Mr. Fawcett for a very interesting and stimulating paper. Dr. MORLEY DAVIES: I listened with the very keenest interest to Mr. Fawcett's paper, because some years ago I started on the same task, and although I did not give it one-tithe the amount of research that Mr. Fawcett has evidently done on the subject, I did enough in trying to delimit areas in England for this purpose to appreciate very well the amount of trouble and care which Mr. Fawcett has given to the work, and the very successful way in which he has overcome great difficulties. I do not agree with Dr. Unstead's criticism that there was too much uniformity of area instead of uniformity of importance in the provinces which Mr. Fawcett has delimited. I do not think myself that uniformity of importance would be possible to attain. The impression I have from my own attempts at dividing off England into administrative provinces is that if you set out to get uniformity you get artificial agglomerates of areas which have no real unity. My own criticism would be that there has been rather too much of an attempt to get uniformity of importance. I think, for example, that Mr. Fawcett was unnecessarily timid in his assignment of limits to the London province. He has been afraid to make it so important as to overshadow the others. He seemed to think that in a federation of the various local parliaments of England a big area like London would dominate the others. But would it do so any the less if divided into three or four than if it were one ? It seems to me that it is an unnecessary danger to guard against, and I certainly would be inclined to throw a larger area into the metropolitan province than Mr. Fawcett has done. For example, he had to admit that he could not find a natural capital for the south- east province. Well, that seems to be a reason for merging the south-east province in the London province. As regards the other three provinces, there is a great deal more to be said for their separateness, especially for East Anglia and Wessex. But as regards the south-eastern province it would be an improvement if it were merged in the London province. I only add again that I appreciate very much indeed the large amount of care and thought which Mr. Fawcett has put into this work. Dr. MILL: I have listened to this paper with extreme interest, and I should be inclined, in discussing it at a meeting of this sort, to assume that it is expedient that England should be divided up into such areas, because from the

This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:59:14 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 138 NATURAL DIVISIONS OF ENGLAND: DISCUSSION geographical point of view we have not to do with the expediency of such a division, but with the way in which such a division should be carried out if required. The one point in which I think Mr. Fawcett departed from his own principles is in the attempt to neutralize the importance of London. It seems to me quite impossible to put London into a second place or in equality with any other centre of population. The principle which I thought excellent when Mr. Fawcett was reading his paper was that a centre should not be separated from its suburbs. This would certainly require that London should be thrown into the same area with the south-east of England at least, because the whole interests of the south-east of England are centred in London. Even now many of the public bodies dealing with the local government of districts in the south-east of England are obliged to have their offices in London in order to be equally accessible from all parts of the districts, some of which could not communicate easily with a local centre. Until the railway system of England has been altered we cannot create new local centres, unless perhaps the railway system is superseded by the universal use of motors. As things are at present it will be quite impossible to make some of these provincial capitals accessible to all parts of the area of which they are intended to be the centres. I much admired the way in which Mr. Fawcett overcame many of the difficulties that naturally suggest themselves. I know these difficulties, having met many of them when I was trying to group together the counties of England and to subdivide them into river-basins, so as to arrive at a compromise between the natural and the administrative boundaries. I feel that the most trouble- some thing, if the scheme were to be carried 'out, would be, not the want of local patriotism, but the excess of it. Could one ever get Liverpool and Manchester to agree as to either being a capital ? Again, the United States gives an object lesson that I think should not be lost sight of. In the States it has been made a rule-I think a general if not a universal rule-that the metropolis of the State, that is the greatest commercial centre and the largest town, should not be the capital. Under this rule Albany and not New York is the capital of New York State; and of course carrying this rule further they make the federal capital a city without any political status at all. That is a principle which if adopted might have simplified the choice of a capital by reviving some small town of ancient importance. For instance, the south-east if it had to be separate from London might have its capital at Canterbury. This subject is so interesting, both as a geographical exercise and as a forecast for the possible reform of the terribly complicated and confused local government system of this country, that if one stopped to discuss all the difficulties we might talk all night; but I think we owe a debt of thanks to Mr. Fawcett for his courage in tackling such a question and his skill in presenting this problem. Mr. HINKS: There is one remark that I should like to make for Mr. Fawcett's consideration. I doubt if. his thesis that a University town makes a good local capital-though it may be true of Southampton-is true of East Anglia. A long residence in Cambridge makes me feel that it would not be a good capital for a province of East Anglia. In the first place it is far too near London. Also through long centuries the University has been predominant in the town, with no particular local interest in the surrounding country, and this does not produce a high type of local enterprise and intelligence. Norwich, which is first of all a very much larger place, a richer place, and a place very much farther away from London, is a sounder capital than Cambridge could possibly be for the province of East Anglia.

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I think that Dr. Unstead was a little unkind to the author in assuming that because he did not deal with Ireland and Scotland he proposed to leave them undivided. He would not be so rash a man as to discuss how Ireland should be divided. Nor do I think that he in the least implied that Scotland should not be divided. But this brings us back to his fear of the domination of Parlia- ment by the English. Is it not a proposition that might find some support, that if any one race has dominated Parliament for the last fifty years, it certainly has not been the English race ? Sir THOMAS HOLDICH: In the,first place I would like to ask Mr. Fawcett to reply to any criticisms that have been made, before asking for a vote of thanks to him. Mr. FAWCETT: The suggestions made are extremely interesting all through. The reason for omitting a good many of the matters Dr. Unstead regrets was that there was neither time nor space to deal with them. The problem is much more than a purely geographical one; but the aim of this paper is to try to put forward the geographical aspect of this problem of obtaining the best divisions. It is obviously possible to start from that side as well as from the point of view of the administrator. As to the use of the term " Natural Divisions," I should like to suggest that the human geography of any given area is as " natural " as the physical. And for divisions which are, or should be, primarily concerned with human needs the actual distribution of the people is the chief factor. In respect of the parliaments, you may have noticed that I avoided using the term " Imperial Parliament " for that which now sits at Westminster. No British Parliament can rightly be called Imperial unless it includes representatives from all the self-governing States of the Empire. Canada and Australia are already federations. Hence the problem of Imperial federation would certainly not be further complicated by the adoption of a federal system for the internal government of these islands. The paper was limited to a consideration of divisions of England because that is quite a sufficient subject for the time available. Also while such a sub- division of Ireland would certainly offer interesting problems, it would raise matters of discussion somewhat outside the scope of a Geographical Society. The considerations put forward as the basis of these divisions of England would not suggest any division of Scotland, for that country has only one large focus of population-the Edinburgh-Glasgow conurbation-and it is less popu- lous than London or Lancashire. As to the powers of the provincial parliaments: they can have only such powers and duties as the British Parliament delegates to them. Dr. Unstead's phrase of " Glorified County Councils " may not be inappropriate. Such a federation from above downwards would differ in its essential principle from that of Australia, or of the United States, which began as an alliance of thirteen independent sovereign states jealous of their mutual independence. The provincial parliaments wonld necessarily be subordinate to the central parliament. Then it was suggested that the larger population of England would still dominate the federation in spite of any such divisions. That seems to anticipate that the separate provinces would be as likely to think together on political matters as would a unified England. But I hope that each province is a natural unit, and hence that they would act as distinct units. There is, I think, no reason to anticipate any political division of English and non-English. The industrial regions are not so much inclined to follow London's lead as is often assumed in London. And a more probable line of cleavage on political matters would be that which separates the industrial provinces from the rest.

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In this paper there has been no attempt to mark out divisions equal to each other in area or importance. It is quite by accident that the five provinces of industrial England have similar areas. In the part of the country which I have called MAetropolitan England the divisions are much less natural than elsewhere. In the first draft this area was marked off into only two provinces-(I) East Anglia and the valleys draining to the Wash, and (2) a London Province. The focus of the whole is in London; any division of it is a compromise, and cannot be quite satisfactory. In the United States of America, as Dr. Mill has said, there is a series of artificial capitals. There is also a series of artificial interstate boundaries; and it seems that the artificial character of these divisions is in many ways a hindrance to the good government of that country. To fix the administrative and legislative centre in a minor townlet, because it happens to be near the areal centre of the state, to the exclusion of the chief city, is to narrow the range of choice of representatives and reduce the contact between the parliament and the people. A real capital is a necessity for any well-organized democratic government area; and unless the provinces of England have each a capital which is a focus for their interests their prospects of active provincial life will be less than they should be. Mr. Hinks' comments on the suitability of a university town as a capital were, I think, based mainly on experience of Cambridge. But Oxford and Cambridge are universities of a different order from the younger universities of England. The latter are, to an increasing extent, regional universities ; though few of them are fully developed as yet. The two ancient universities are remarkably non-localized in contrast; they are national and imperial rather than regional in their chief activities. Dr. Mill has emphasized the intricacy and complexity of the present divisions of England. I do not believe that any one who has not given a good deal of time and attention to this matter realizes the waste of energy caused by all this needless complexity. Even to describe it would take far more time than is available. But a glance at the preface to the Census reports and references to the wholly distinct divisions adopted by the Government Departments for various purposes will show that the number of primary divisions reaches some hundreds of unrelated overlapping areas. A criticism of these divisions from the point of view of geography might be of value in many ways, especially in regard to national economy. In conclusion, I wish to thank you for the attention given to this paper and for the interesting discussion, which is evidence that its chief aim has been realized. Sir THOMAS HOLDICH: I am sure you will agree with me that the paper which has been read and the discussion afterwards have been full of suggestions and given us much to think about, and I will ask you to express your thanks to the lecturer in the usual way.

ANote on l7/i-. Fawcet/'s pafier by Mr. L. E. W. Boizacina. Mr. Fawcett briefly referred to the interesting question of a connection between local patriotism and regional environment. From such experience as I have gained during somewhat lengthy stays in several parts of England at various times I am inclined to think that local patriotism is most strongly developed in those shires, remote from London, where the county tongue is most conspicuous. The two phenomena appear to be connected collaterally, probably not causally. Thus county pride so strongly felt both in Devonshire and Yorkshire-shires with highly characteristic peculiarities of speech, intonation,

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and formerly of dialect-hardly exists at all in Middlesex, and not in any marked degree in Surrey, where the overruling influence of London with its most unbeautiful city-bred cockney speech has quite killed the original county speech-always pleasant to hear wherever spoken because born of the soil- and with it apparently that remarkable regional consciousness which is so marked in the north and west of England alike. Mr. Fawcett also referred to the local use of the term "West Country " throughout England from north to south. As a north-countryman he best knows to what extent the term is used to denote the country lying west of the Pennine chain; but no one, I fancy, will venture to deny that " West Country " has a very special signification as applied to the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, not only locally in those counties but in London as well. Geographically, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall are the true western counties of England. The English counties bordering upon Wales are best referred to as west-midland counties.

NOTES ON THE TRANSLITERATION OF ARABIC NAMES FOR THE x/M. MAP THE transliteration into Roman character of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish names presents well-known difficulties. The spelling of classical Arabic is fixed; and consequently the spelling of place-names derived from personal names or from common nouns can generally be determined by an Arabic scholar. The Arabic spelling of others is often uncertain. Moreover the pronunciation of a place-name is often uncertain in the place itself; while there is not unnaturally a great diversity of pronunciation in different parts of the wide extent of the world where Arabic is spoken. The fact that Persian and Turkish employ nearly the same alphabet, but in some respects differ in pronunciation, adds to the difficulty of dealing with names for which an authoritative native spelling is unobtain- able. Finally, the richness of the Eastern alphabets in consonants for which the Roman alphabet has no distinct equivalents, and the general absence of vowels in the written language, make it often impossible to con- jecture the native form from a European rendering, in any attempt to reduce the results of different systems of transliteration to some degree of consistency. Transliteration is, in fact, not a reversible process with the data and characters usually available, and one cannot hope to do more than remove some of the grosser inconsistencies in current spellings. In the preparation of the i/M. map we should naturally wish to adopt an official system. Unfortunately, there are in use three official systems and one comparative want of system. The Indian General Staff has within the last few years adopted a system for its reports and maps which we will call India.*

* 'A System for the Transliteration of Persian, Afghan, and Arabian Words.' Second Edition. General Staff, India, 1912, This was drawn up by a committee

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