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The 2014 Festival of the British Science Association starts in Birmingham this weekend. 100 years ago, members of the Association were experiencing something very different. The 1914 meeting was held in several locations across Australia: thousands of miles from home, members arrived to find that war had broken out. The meeting, however, carried on.
But why Australia, and what was the impact of war?
The BSA, then known as the British Association for the Advancement of Science (known as the BAAS to historians of science and, affectionately, as the British Ass to its Victorian friends), was founded in 1831. After a somewhat rocky start, its annual meetings had become a successful part of the nation’s calendar, held in different towns and cities across Britain and Ireland.
Its heyday was probably in the 1850s-60s, when towns competed against each other to act as hosts and hundreds of men (and occasionally women) of science, their families, locals, journalists and the curious attended each year. They were attracted by the opportunity to hear papers read in the meetings of the various “Sections” (A=mathematical and physical science, B=chemistry, C=geology etc), to attend presidential addresses and public lectures, and to enjoy a host of trips, visits, sermons, entertainments and dinners.
It was both “the parliament of science” and a “scientific picnic”, with the status and seriousness of members always under scrutiny. As the century went on, and as science became more specialised, attendance decreased: meetings were less obviously a general cultural phenomena that involved all leisured residents of the host town.
A new purpose, or at least an anxiously pressing new constituency, was found in empire. The BAAS went overseas seven times: to Canada (Montreal in 1884, Toronto in 1897, Winnipeg in 1909 and Toronto in 1924) to South Africa in 1905 and 1929, and to Australia in 1914. The visits to the southern hemisphere in particular were long trips of two to three months – “an intellectual pleasure cruise” involving lengthy sea voyages and stops at ports, before beginning the tour of the host nation.
The visitors were treated as honoured guests, being greeted by local dignitaries offering endless forms of hospitality. The state or dominion governments guaranteed tens of thousands of dollars or pounds for the privilege. For the Australian meeting, there were 300 overseas visitors, all of whom got at least their local rail fares paid. A lucky 155 made up the “official party”, which received a large grant to cover all travel and local costs.
While there was some fear that they would attract “the ordinary globe-trotter or tourist” or “dilettante members”, the Australian organisers felt the hangers on were a price worth paying for such “sterling and well-known men of science” as had gone to the South African meeting in 1905.
Despite the expense and huge organisational effort, however, ideas about how Australia would benefit were vague. The Governor of New South Wales insisted that the “impressions” of the visitors “as regards Australian problems cannot fail to be most valuable”, but the Mayor of Sydney was probably closer to the mark when he spoke of how the meeting should “stimulate Imperial interest” and “send back every visiting delegate as a zealous missioner, well informed, and anxious to help in peopling and effectively occupying the vast continent of Australia”.
One newspaper claimed that the chief advantage of the meeting would be “the strong appeal made to the popular imagination in this country concerning the potency of science in modern life”. Just what this might mean in practice was never expanded on. Little needed to be said because science was unquestioningly linked, just as empire was, to ideas of modernity, (Western) civilisation and economic progress.
Given that the European empires were about to clash with such horrific results, it is interesting to note how keen the Australian organisers were to include “a few really distinguished foreigners”. Yet, as war was declared, it was clear that nation and empire beat notions of universalism in science. This was particularly obvious for the men who suddenly found that they were enemy aliens.
One such was the German geographer and geologist Albrecht Penck, suspected of spying, because he was – most suspiciously for a geographer! – carrying maps of Australia. Penck would be best known, as Nature put it in 1938, for “his epoch-making studies of the Ice Age” but he also worked on the concept of lebensraum. Allowed to leave Australia, in 1915 he explored spatial arrangements of Europe, including its tripartition, with German influence expanded into Mitteleuropa.
The Austrian anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was less fortunate, although his story is ultimately more heartening. Unlike Penck he was not allowed to travel back to Europe but he was able to continue work, and was even given funds to carry out research in the Trobriand Islands. The postwar publication of his Argonauts of the Western Pacific made his career.
The BAAS soldiered on, as it were, with prearranged meetings in Manchester (1915) and Newcastle (1916) but then, for the first time, abandoned its meetings until after the war. The renewal of hostilities ended discussions about a second Australian visit. No meetings were held 1940-45 and, after that, the British Empire was changed forever: the BAAS never again met beyond Great Britain and Ireland.
The quotes in this post were gathered on my own history of science picnic, back in 2007, when I followed in the footsteps of the BAAS to South Africa and Australia. Some of this research was published in C.W.J. Withers, Geography and Science in Britain, 1831-1939. You can hear me in a discussion on ABC Radio from last month on the Big Science Picnic of 1914, and find me @beckyfh.
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