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SIDNEY WILLIAM WOOLDRIDGE
1900-1963
Sidney W illiam W ooldridge, who died on 25 April 1963, was the doyen of
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British geomorphologists and a great champion of field studies of all kinds.

His publications on the physical geology and human geography of south
eastern England are not only outstanding contributions to science but also
documents of considerable significance for problems of town and country
planning in that overcrowded region.
Wooldridge was born on 16 November 1900 at Hornsey. His early years
were spent at Sheen in Surrey where his father, Lewis William Wooldridge,
was a bank manager. Subsequently his parents moved to Winchmore Hill
and, with a brother and sister, he grew up in north London where he was to
live for the greater part of his life. He was educated at Glendale County
School, Wood Green, where he displayed a strong partiality for cricket and for
exploring the local countryside of Hertfordshire. His tremendous enthusiasm
for field studies developed at this early stage in his career as he became
interested in the problems of the origin of the local gravel deposits and his
capacity for accurate observation and logical interpretation were already
apparent. While a schoolboy he attended evening classes at Birkbeck College
where the lectures of J. W. Evans, F.R.S., still further fanned his geological
interests.
In 1918 Wooldridge came up to King’s College, London, to read geology
as a full-time student. Here his teachers included W. T. Gordon, at that time
head of a joint Department of Geology and Geography, A. K. Wells and
L. Dudley Stamp. Under the London University system he had to specialize
in either petrology or palaeontology and chose the former but it was geology
in the field which principally fascinated him and he devoted much time to
the study of Tertiary and Pleistocene deposits, in particular those of his
home area.
Wooldridge graduated in 1921 with 1st class honours in geology and was
appointed initially to a demonstratorship and later to an assistant lecturership
in the joint Department of Geology and Geography at King’s. His first publi
cation appeared in 1921 and two years later he was awarded his M.Sc.
Some of his early work lay in the field of igneous and metamorphic petrology
but for the most part it was concerned with the Tertiary stratigraphy and
structure of the London Basin. The award of his D.Sc. in 1927, only six years
after graduation, is an indication of his productivity during the early years
when his interests were still wholly geological.
371
372 Biographical Memoirs
In 1927 Wooldridge was promoted to a lecturership at King’s. He was
now becoming an acknowledged authority on the geology of the London
Basin and of adjoining parts of south-eastern England. He had taken in 1923
an active part in the formation of the Weald Research Committee of the
Geologists’ Association and acquired a love of the countryside of Surrey,
Sussex and Kent which was to persist throughout his life. In 1928 he was
awarded a grant from the Daniel Pidgeon Fund of the Geological Society to
further his work on the glaciation of the London Basin. By the early 1930’s
his interests were beginning to turn more and more towards geomorphology
and to the influence of geology on the human geography of south-eastern
England. In 1934 he married Edith Mary Stephens a former student of

geography at King’s who shared many of his interests and who for a number
of years was geography mistress at Enfield County School. Many colleagues,
students and friends have pleasant memories of visiting their home at
Finchley.
The years from 1930-1939 probably represent Wooldridge’s most
fruitful period as a geomorphologist. In his work on river development and
denudation chronology he was associated with a number of former students
and colleagues, particularly D. L. Linton and J. F. Kirkaldy. In 1937 he
published the first edition of his widely-read text-book The physical basis of
geography written in collaboration with R. S. Morgan. By now his scientific
work was receiving widespread recognition. In 1932 he shared the Foulerton
Award of the Geologists’ Association with his friend and collaborator F.
Gossling, in 1936 he was the recipient of the Lyell Fund of the Geological
Society and in 1942 he and Linton were jointly awarded the Murchison
Grant by the Royal Geographical Society. This period was cut short by the
outbreak of war, and between 1939 and 1945 Wooldridge published little.
During these years such free time as he had was devoted to service in the
Royal Observer Corps, first at Bristol, during the evacuation of King’s
College, and later in the London area.
In 1942 the title of Reader in Geography at King’s College was conferred
on Wooldridge and in 1944 he accepted the Chair of Geography at Birkbeck
College on the retirement of Professor E. G. R. Taylor. This final stage in the
transition from geologist to geographer had little influence on Wooldridge’s
research interests. In his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘The geographer as
scientist’ he expressed his confidence that geography could play a vital role
in scientific education. Its breadth rendered it, in his view, a discipline which
might do something to alleviate the situation summed up in the cynical
definition of a modern university as a place ‘where a multitude of studies are
conducted with no relationship between them except simultaneity and
juxtaposition’. He found the routine at Birkbeck with evening teaching and
relative freedom from academic duties during the day ideal for the prosecu
tion of his field studies. As in the years before the war he maintained unofficial
headquarters for field work at Timberscombe, an attractive half-timbered
Elizabethan guest-house near the village of Fernhurst, beneath Blackdown,
Sidney William Wooldridge 373
on the borders of Surrey and Hampshire. Here generations of students were
introduced to the pleasures and perplexities of field studies in geomorphology.
Wooldridge was associated from its earliest days in 1943 with the Council
for the Promotion of Field Studies, later to become the Field Studies Council.
He was among those instrumental in starting the first of the field centres,
Juniper Hall, and for many years he conducted courses there. From 1947 he
was a member of the Executive Committee of the Council and its Chairman
from 1952. He devoted much time to its affairs, seeking to extend the number
of field centres, to find suitable wardens and other staff and to obtain increased
financial support.
In 1947 Wooldridge returned to his old College, as Professor of Geography,

a title last held in 1876 by Harry Govier Seeley, F.R.S. The revival of the
Chair of Geography at King’s College marked the final stage of the separation
of the schools of Geology and Geography. Wooldridge was, however, con
vinced of the need for unity among the earth sciences and did everything he
could to maintain close collaboration with the Geology Department. In his
inaugural lecture—‘The role and relations of geomorphology’—he expressed
his pride in his geological upbringing and quoted with approval the words of
the great American physiographer W. M. Davis: ‘To look upon a landscape
. . . without any recognition of the labour expended in producing it or of the
extraordinary adjustments of streams to structures and of waste to weather,
is like visiting Rome in the ignorant belief that the Romans of today had no
ancestors.’ The existence of a joint School of Geography comprising the
departments at King’s College and the London School of Economics per
mitted a division of interests between the two colleges, leaving Wooldridge
free to develop the more scientific side of the subject at King’s while the
School of Economics concentrated on its human and economic aspects.
Wooldridge would not countenance the production of geographers without a
sound knowledge of the physical basis of their subject and all his students
were compelled to attend the first year course in physical geology. Almost
all took geology as a full-scale ancillary subject.
Wooldridge’s unique knowledge of the superficial deposits of the London
area led to his appointment as a member of the Advisory Committee on Sand
and Gravel set up in 1946 under the Chairmanship of Major A. H. S. (later
Sir Arnold) Waters, V.C., by the Minister of Town and Country Planning.
He devoted much time to the work of the Committee, acting as Deputy
Chairman, and his services were recognized in 1954 by his appointment as a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1950 Wooldridge was President of Section E (Geography) of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. His presidential address
provided a masterly synthesis of knowledge relating to the high-level erosion
surfaces of Britain and their origin. In 1951 as President of the Institute of
British Geographers he put forward a defence of regional studies as funda
mental to the content of geography. Again he was moved to quote W. M.
Davis’s view that ‘no-one should consider himself a geographer until he has
become expert in the regional geography of at least one large area’. In 1954.
as President of the Geographical Association, his subject was ‘The status of
geography and the role of field work’. In his address he stressed the need for
developing at an early stage ‘an eye for country’—i.e. the capacity to read
and interpret a piece of country, an accomplishment distinct from map
reading in that the ground and not the map is the primary document. Only
those who have seen him in action with a field class can fully appreciate his
mastery of the power to impart this accomplishment.
It is convenient to consider Wooldridge’s scientific work under a series of
headings but it must not be assumed that subjects (other than perhaps
igneous petrology with which he had only a brief flirtation) were dealt with
in separate compartments or at wholly different stages of his career. He
abhorred over-specialization and the fragmentation of knowledge and
inveighed against it almost too continuously. Many of his publications dealt
with stratigraphy, structure, sedimentary petrology, geomorphology, human
geography and land use as equally essential parts of a regional study.
Igneous petrology
At the time when Wooldridge was appointed to a demonstratorship at
King’s College, L. D. Stamp, then a lecturer in the joint Department of
Geology and Geography was mapping the inlier of Upper Ordovician
volcanics and sediments north of Llanwrtyd Wells in Breconshire. Wooldridge
collaborated with him and undertook the petrographical description of the
igneous rocks, predominantly pyroclastic and related to the spilite-kerato-
phyre suite. He was able to compare many of them with the Ordovician
volcanics of the Dolgellau-Cader Idris district, at that time being studied by
his old teacher, A. K. Wells.
Visits to the Channel Islands interested Wooldridge in their igneous and
metamorphic geology. With H. W. Cornes he recorded a series of basic
intrusions from northern Sark and commented upon the mechanics of their
emplacement. In a more general paper, to which G. M. Stockley contributed
chemical analyses, he described the petrology of the schists and plutonics of
Sark, interpreting certain dioritic rocks as hybrids resulting from the partial
assimilation of hornblendic gneisses and schists by granite magma. Similar
problems occupied him subsequently when he worked in Jersey with A. K.
Wells. Together they described the main rock groups of the island, re
interpreting many of the field relations and discussing with much petrographi
cal detail the relations of acid to basic rock as well as the age of the various
intrusives. Examination of the magnificent exposures on the north coast of
Jersey convinced Wooldridge and his co-author of the importance of assimi
lation of basic rock by acid magma in the production of the Jersey diorites.
They clearly described and figured the fine-grained margins (apparently
chilled) of basic rock against later acid material which are still a fertile
subject for controversy.
Stratigraphy and structure of the London basin
Wooldridge’s earliest publication was a short paper describing folding in
the Tertiary and Cretaceous rocks near South Mimms in Hertfordshire,
an area which he had demonstrated to a field meeting of the Geologists’
Association in 1920 while still an undergraduate. The structural evolution
of the London Basin and its influence on sedimentation fascinated him.
Reviewing the minor structures of the region he resolved them into a
northwest-southeast and a northeast-southwest set, a few east-west folds and
certain north-south structural lines which he held to be monoclinal. The
northwest-southeast and northeast-southwest folds were regarded as
the result of accommodation to movements in the Palaeozoic floor during the

mid-Tertiary earth movements. The north-south structural lines were,
however, so closely connected with facies changes in the Tertiary sediments
that an earlier date seemed indicated. For example the change from Reading
to Woolwich facies coincided closely with a north-south line along the Lea
Valley and what appeared to be its southward continuation through Croydon.
The same Croydon line marked the westward limit of the Blackheath Beds
while farther to the east these beds were absent over part of a second inferred
north-south disturbance running through Billericay in Essex. The Lea Valley
line further marked the boundary between continental and marine Bagshot
Beds. By consideration of thickness variations in the different Tertiary strata
Wooldridge built up a picture of the stages in the growth of the London
syncline. The two main periods of deepening of the basin were shown to be
broadly related in time to the Lower Landenian and Ypresian transgressions.
Although Wooldridge’s conception of Eocene history was similar to that
outlined earlier by L. D. Stamp there was the important difference that
deepening of the syncline rather than uplift of the complementary Wealden
anticline was regarded as the cause of the transgressions.
By detailed studies of the stratigraphy and sedimentation Wooldridge
extended our knowledge of Eocene palaeogeography in the London Basin.
With D. M. C. Gill and later with C. J. C. Ewing he described the marginal
facies of the Reading Beds from Lane End in Buckinghamshire. With H. C.
Berdinner he recorded the nature of the passage beds from London Clay to
Bagshot Sand in Essex. In the Rayleigh Hills in Essex he described the
occurrence of ‘curled bedding’ in the Bagshot Beds and interpreted it as a
result of submarine sliding at a time (1923) when the importance of this
process was still little recognized. He traced in detail the transition from
marine to continental Bagshot Sands, showing by mechanical analysis
(elutriation) the sharp change in character of the sediment which marked this
facies boundary.
From the Eocene deposits of the London Basin Wooldridge turned his
attention to the Pliocene. Alone or in collaboration with others (F. Gossling,
C. J. C. Ewing) he traced on the North Downs and the Chilterns the patches
of high-level sand and shingle which, like the Lenham Beds of Kent, mark the
transgression of the Pliocene sea into the London Basin. These deposits,
which rest on various formations from the Claygate Beds to the Chalk, occupy
a wave cut platform (usually about 550 to 600 ft above present sea level)
inclined towards the axial line of the basin. The invading sea—referred to by
Wooldridge as the Diestian sea though he later appreciated that the more
westerly high-level shingles were of post-Diestian (perhaps even of post-
Pliocene) age—must have formed a gulf or channel roughly coextensive with
the London Basin as defined by the present Chalk escarpment.
The uniformity of level of the various Pliocene outliers in a general east-
west direction led Wooldridge to discount the possibility of subsequent
transverse warping on any extensive scale. The slope of the surface on which
they rest towards the centre of the basin, however, suggested slight deepening
of the London syncline which he related to ‘post-Diestian’ uplift of the
Wealden axis.
Although Wooldridge’s principal method of attack on geological as well
as geomorphological problems was by observation in the field he did not
neglect laboratory studies and the use of the microscope. In 1917 G. M. Davies
had recorded the distinctive mineralogical characteristics of some of the
Pliocene outliers of Kent and Surrey. Wooldridge examined the heavy
mineral suites from about 25 widely spaced localities and found that a general
abundance of andalusite, sillimanite, monazite and green spinel helped to
distinguish the deposits from the older Tertiaries.
Stratigraphy and structure of the Weald

Although Wooldridge was devoted to the Weald of Kent, Surrey and
Sussex and used it constantly as a training ground for students, his original
work there was primarily geomorphological rather than stratigraphical or
structural. However to him the structural background was fundamental to
physiographic studies. He never failed to point out how consistently the
structure of the Weald was misrepresented by over-simplification in small-
scale sections and suggested that its detailed structure was as imperfectly
understood as that of any comparable tract in the English lowlands. Accord
ingly he devoted considerable attention to tracing the principal fold and fault
lines of south-eastern England and to interpreting the structure of the central
Weald by means of contours representing the form of the surface at the base
of the Weald Clay. The results of these investigations are incorporated in the
stimulating synthesis ‘Structure, surface and drainage in south-east England’
published jointly with D. L. Linton, originally in 1939.
Apart from this, however, he did some independent mapping on the scale
of six inches to the mile of a portion of the western Weald. Using a sandstone
(the Fernhurst Sandstone) and an underlying red clay some 400 ft. below the
base of the Hythe Beds he was able to interpret the structure over a con
siderable area of otherwise featureless Weald Clay country. Large-scale
dislocations involving masses of Hythe Beds over a mile long and bounded
by curvilinear fractures were regarded as ancient landslips related to peri-
glacial freeze and thaw effects.
Sidney W illiam Wooldridge 377
Pleistocene geology
Wooldridge’s interest in the history of the London Basin led him by easy
stages from study of the Tertiary to Quaternary geology. Indeed at the time
of his early work there was little certainty regarding the boundary between
the two systems and many of the deposits described in his paper entitled ‘The
Pliocene history of the London Basin’ (1927) are now included in the
Pleistocene. The Pebble Gravel occurring widely at a general height of about
400 ft o.d . in south Hertfordshire was interpreted by Wooldridge as a
deposit, part fluviatile, part marine, laid down on the emerging floor of the
‘Diestian’ sea. Well to the north of the River Thames two sharply defined
belts of gravel contained abundant chert pebbles indicating a provenance

from the Hythe Beds of the northern Weald. These concentrations of chert
lay significantly opposite the points where the rivers Mole and Darent enter
the London Basin. This evidence led Wooldridge to interpret the Pebble
Gravel as marking the drainage system of a post-Pliocene proto-Thames,
flowing far to the north of its present position, and of its tributaries. The
coastline of the time he held to be indicated in East Anglia by the marine
Westleton Beds, described by Prestwich and petrographically similar to the
Pebble Gravel.
Successive stages in the Pleistocene stratigraphy were described by Wool
dridge in his important paper ‘The glaciation of the London Basin and the
evolution of the Lower Thames drainage system’ (1938). He traced the
series of hill and plateau gravels of the Middle Thames associated, north of
London, with undoubted glacial deposits. The gravels comprise the great
‘drift-trains’ which appeared to enter the Thames Basin at Goring Gap and
extended east-north-eastwards as a belt 3 to 8 miles wide past Henley, Bourne
End, Beaconsfield, Watford and St Albans to Hertford and Ware to merge in
the great sheet of glacial drift covering East Anglia. Wooldridge’s synthesis
was based essentially on physiographic evidence, i.e. questions of level, and he
agreed with R. L. Sherlock in recognizing a proto-Thames flowing east-north
east as far as Ware. Its course was marked by the Higher Gravel Train which
fell in level to a point west of Watford where it was met by a second drift-train,
the Leavesden Gravel Train, falling in altitude southwestwards. In Wool
dridge’s reconstruction blocking of the Vale of St Albans by local or Chiltern
ice in Higher Gravel Train times caused reversal in the western part of the
Vale (as marked by the Leavesden Gravel Train) and drainage southwards
via the prominent wind gaps near Watford.
At a level about 50 ft below that of the Higher Gravel Train Wooldridge
traced the Lower Gravel Train marking a subsequent course of the Thames
from Goring Gap eastwards to the Colne Valley beyond which he suggested
it looped southwards across Middlesex by way of the Finchley depression. The
later composite Winter Hill Terrace of the Thames at a level of 250 to 200 ft
o.d . merges in the Colne Valley with the outwash of the eastern (Chalky
Boulder Clay) ice sheet. Wooldridge made in 1926 the first attempt to put the
margin of this ice sheet, the southernmost advance of glaciation in Britain,
on a map of Hertfordshire and central Essex. Lobes extended along the
valleys of the Colne, the Lea (with a projection to Finchley) and the Roding
while others occupied the ground between Havering and Brentwood, between
Brentwood and Billericay and between Billericay and Danbury. From
well-records Wooldridge was able to show that much of the glacial drift had
its base between about 180 and 230 ft above sea level. In later years in
collaboration with D. J. Smetham he traced in greater detail the southern
margin of this glacial drift in Essex and Hertfordshire which he described
as forming the most clearly marked natural regional boundary in the northern
part of the London Basin.
Wooldridge fully recognized the important effects of the Pleistocene

period in the periglacial regions south of the limits of the ice sheets. As early
as 1923 he had recorded the presence of numerous faults of small throw in the
Bagshot Sands of the Rayleigh Hills and suggested that clean-cut faulting in
so soft a deposit was most likely to have occurred when the sands were frozen
during the tundra-like conditions of Pleistocene time. His interpretation of
dislocations in the Hythe Beds of the western Weald as the result of mass-
movements under periglacial conditions has already been mentioned.
For many years Wooldridge had been interested in the diversion of the
River Mimram by a drift plug in its former valley at Codicote as demonstrated
by R. L. Sherlock during the Geological Survey’s mapping of the Hertford
area. Further investigation showed that this episode was but part of a more
complicated series of temporary glacial diversions, associated with pro-glacial
lakes in the Lea and Harpenden valleys. The evidence suggested separate
periods of ice-advance, probably associated with the two distinct sheets of
Chalky Boulder Clay known in the Vale of St Albans. Unlike most of the
classic examples of pro-glacial drainage in Britain these phenomena were
associated with the ‘Older Drift’.
In a Centenary Lecture delivered to the Geologists’ Association in 1958
Wooldridge summarized current knowledge of the Pleistocene succession in
the London Basin and paid tribute to the writings of Prestwich, Whitaker and
Barrow by which his own work had been greatly influenced. He stressed
again the essentially physiographic basis on which the succession had been
established and showed how with declining height and decreasing age the
deposits showed increasing complexity of composition. He closed his lecture
with the words of G. K. Gilbert—‘When the work of the geologist is finished
and his final comprehensive report is written, the longest and most important
chapter will be upon the latest and shortest of the geological periods.’
Denudation chronology and drainage evolution

Perhaps the most stimulating and imaginative of all Wooldridge’s re
searches was his reconstruction of the history of the extra-glacial areas of
southeastern England from mid-Tertiary times onwards. Here the develop
ment of the landscape has to be deciphered by the methods of geomorphology,
the study of ancient erosion surfaces, of river profiles and river terraces, of
drainage patterns and stages of coastline evolution. Whereas chronology is
normally established by the geologist in terms of sedimentation it has here to
be determined almost wholly in terms of denudation. Nevertheless the two
chronologies must be linked and to Wooldridge southeastern England
provided magnificent opportunities for attempting this. In many respects it
could provide the type area for British geomorphology.
In 1895 W. M. Davis had argued that the character of the Wealden
drainage implied successive cycles of sub-aerial denudation, the first culmin
ating in a peneplain represented by levels on the higher hill-tops, the second
still current and with a large part of its course to run. Subsequent workers
and particularly H. Bury in 1910 appreciated that the manner in which many
of the rivers cut across the fold axes was not compatible with a second cycle
landscape. Wooldridge in the Weald and D. L. Linton in Wessex gave
detailed study to the degree of adjustment of the streams to structure and
concluded that their predominantly north-south courses in an area of
east-west folding could only be accounted for by superposition from a thin
covering of marine sediments, the products of the ‘Pliocene’ transgression.
The hill-top surface of W. M. Davis certainly existed, marked by summits
over 750 ft on Salisbury Plain, the North and South Downs and the Central
Weald but it had been extensively trimmed by the waters of the Lenham
Beds sea.
On the chalk terrains of the North Downs and the Chilterns Wooldridge
was able to recognize three distinct morphological zones. Near the crests
of the escarpments were the relics of the maturely dissected mid-Tertiary pene
plain. At a slightly lower level came the Pliocene marine bench, submaturely
dissected by new and extended valleys. Still farther down the dip slope was
the exhumed sub-Eocene surface, the least dissected of the three. Different
residual deposits and different durations of exposure and leaching gave
rise to soil differences in these three zones. Some are reflected on land
utilization maps which show, for example in east Kent, that the sub-Eocene
facet is a region of dominantly arable farming, while the sub-Pliocene surface
gives rise to pasture and woodland; in the French terminology the contrast is
between ‘champagne’ and ‘bocage’.
These three facets which could be mapped over wide areas gave Wool
dridge and Linton one line of attack in attempting to reconstruct the shores
of the Pliocene sea as far westward as Dorset. In addition they relied on the
pattern of the drainage system and its relation to the longitudinal mid-
Tertiary folds as a means of discriminating between areas in which drainage
evolution had been continuous through two cycles of erosion and those in
which it was interrupted at the close of the first cycle by the brief Pliocene
marine trespass. Those areas where strong longtitudinal elements were
preserved, as in the central Weald, were the land masses of Pliocene times.
Studies of the Wealden rivers and particularly of the Mole, which Wool
dridge investigated in collaboration with A. J. Bull, F. Gossling and J. F. N.
Green among others, convinced him of the widespread extent of an erosion
surface at about 200 ft., traceable also throughout the London Basin and
overlain by the Chalky Boulder Clay of Essex. A less well developed facet at
400 ft corresponded in height to the platform (overlain by the Pebble Gravel)
which dominated the form of the country north of London. These features
together with the terraces and raised beaches of Sussex offered the outline of
a Pleistocene chronology. The apparent occurrence of morphological features
at approximately the same height over considerable areas of southeastern
England led Wooldridge to attach increasing importance to simple eustatic
movement as the controlling factor since mid-Tertiary times. In this he was
strengthened by the results of work with J. F. Kirkaldy on the longitudinal
profiles of certain rivers in the Weald, Wessex and the London Basin. Notable
agreement was found in the heights of rejuvenation heads (or knickpoints)
throughout the Weald and the Hampshire Basin as well as in the rivers
Colne and Lea. The significance of these resemblances was heightened by the
contrast to the long profiles of rivers in Essex and East Anglia within the zone
of known downwarping towards the North Sea depression.
Work on the River Mole had interested Wooldridge in problems of hydro
geology and with Kirkaldy he returned to the site of his earliest publication
to study the exceptionally fine development of swallow holes along the
Mimmshall Brook in Hertfordshire. Though the valley drains to the River
Colne through a glacial overflow channel, the section below W ater End is
dry save during heavy or persistent precipitation and the drainage goes
underground to the Lea. Wooldridge and Kirkaldy mapped and described
the swallow holes and the features resulting from their collapse, one of which
at least reproduced in miniature all the features of the ‘uvalas’ of the true
Karstic regions.
The final synthesis for southeastern England led to the establishment of a
chronology based on a series of erosion surface, some with, some without
overlying deposits, at successively lower levels from the summit peneplain
at 750 to 800 ft down to the flood plains of the present-day streams. This
encouraged Wooldridge to consider the possibilities of correlation with
upland surfaces elsewhere in the British Isles particularly in the southwestern
peninsula where G. Barrow and J. F. N. Green had recorded platform relics
having the aspect of marine strand-flats at a variety of altitudes.
In his Presidential Address to Section E of the British Association in 1950
Wooldridge reviewed the ‘upland plains’ of Britain. Both in the southwest and
in the Bristol region he was impressed by the evidence of widespread planation
at about 400 and 600 ft and speculated whether these platforms could be
contemporary with the surfaces of the same height in southeastern England.
However he hastened to warn his audience of the ‘seductive quagmire of
long-distance correlation’ which would assume a lack of differential move
ment since mid-Tertiary times unacceptable to many geologists. Moreover,
the number of erosion surfaces recognized round the British Isles and the range
of altitude within any one assumed surface rendered correlation hazardous.
In his published work Wooldridge adopted a cautious and judicial attitude
though in debate he could be more partisan. On the marine or continental
origin of the higher platforms he also withheld judgement. He was greatly
influenced by the work of H. Baulig and inclined towards a eustatic hypothesis
involving stability of the land masses over extensive areas. In his youth he had
tentatively correlated the 200 ft platform of southeastern England with the
Milazzian marine stage of the Mediterranean Pleistocene but in later years
admitted that he was rather aghast at his ‘carefree rashness’ in so doing.
However he devoted much thought to the geophysical implications of a
hypothesis involving changes of sea-level over a range of more than 1000 ft
and their possible bearing on the problem of continental drift. Controversial
as the subject may be, none can deny its fundamental importance to geologist
and geographer alike.
Human geography
Wooldridge’s studies in the origin and development of landforms were
accompanied by a growth of interest in human geography. The modern
cultural landscape was to him a development from the physical landscape.
Not only was it primarily controlled by the geology but also by its physio
graphic history. Pedogenic processes, both geochemical and biochemical,
are, within limits, cumulative in effect and functions of time. It was therefore
an inescapable conclusion that where two erosion surfaces, developed on the
same parent material, had been exposed for vastly different periods of time,
they would show significantly differing soil profiles. Wooldridge believed
that soil variations were the most important factor in geographic develop
ment, hydrographic and morphological factors filling an important though
secondary role.
With D. J. Smetham, Wooldridge studied the progress of Saxon settlement
in Essex and Hertfordshire using the place-names as a guide. It is widely held
that settlements whose name has the termination -ham, -ton, or -ing are
earlier than those of a descriptive or topographical character with such
endings as -don, -field, -stead or -ley. The first group were found to have their
greatest concentration on the drift areas of the counties, notably in the west
where the boulder clay shows its widest expanse; the London Clay areas were
almost without evidence of settlement at this early date. The later settlements
were almost equally divided between the two regions. Distribution both of
early Saxon burial grounds and of the Norman manors showed a similar
preference for drift lands over London Clay lands. In collaboration with
D. L. Linton, Wooldridge applied similar methods over a wider area of
southeastern England. Previous work, especially by Sir Cyril Fox, had tended
to distinguish ‘areas of primary settlement’ with pervious soils derived from
chalk, sand and gravel and ‘areas of secondary settlement’ on the heavy
clay soils. Wooldridge and Linton put forward the view that it was actually
a third group, the loam regions, intermediate in character between the highly
permeable and highly impermeable areas, which figured most prominently
as nuclei of settlement. These loam terrains were developed on a variety of
geological formations—on high- and low-level brick earths and certain
terrace gravels, mainly along the valley of the Thames and its tributaries; on
the Thanet marls of east Kent; on the Lower Chalk and Upper Greensand
at the foot of the Chalk escarpment; on portions of the Lower Greensand
of the Weald; and on much of the boulder-clay surface of East Anglia,
Hertfordshire and Essex. These regions stood out as the real ‘areas of primary
settlement’, first entered upon in the Bronze Age, more extensively taken up in
the Belgic phase of late Iron Age times, inherited with but little extension
or areal modification by the Romans and finally consolidated and extended
as regional nuclei by the Nordic invaders. The loam terrains constitute an
essential key to the study of the later stages in the historical geography of the
area and even in the present phase of ‘metropolitan’ geography they remain
agriculturally distinct.
Land use and conservation

The first half of the twentieth century has witnessed the loss in Britain
of 2 million acres of agricultural land to urban expansion, surface mineral
working and the needs of the defence services. Wooldridge felt strongly that
the geographer had a duty not only to offer facts but to exert an influence in
the formation of policy concerned with land use. He criticized the Greater
London Regional Plan of 1944 on a number of counts. For one thing the
area of the Plan was too small in that much of the displaced central population
would have to be accommodated beyond the planning boundary. It paid
no attention to hydrology despite the opinion expressed by leading consulting
geologists that the absolute population ceiling in any region is set by the
availability of water. It paid inadequate attention to physique and offered an
over-simplified land classification. Wooldridge put forward a physical basis
for the Plan based on sub-regions reflecting the facts of geomorphology and
surface geology and showed how these should lead to a more practical division
into planning zones.
In 1946 Wooldridge was appointed a member of the Waters Committee set
up to consider sand and gravel working and the inroads it was making upon
the land surface of Britain. With a fellow member of the Committee, S. H.
Beaver, he reviewed the problem in a paper read to the Royal Geographical
Society in 1950. By this time the building industries in their requirements
of sand and gravel, brick clay and chalk and clay for cement were consuming
about 2250 acres of land annually, of which 80 per cent was accountable to
sand and gravel. Reckoned by bulk, sand and gravel was second only to
coal among minerals worked in this country. Unlike coal or iron ore, limited
in occurrence to certain ‘fields’, sand and gravel were almost ubiquitous.
Since the cost of gravel was nearly doubled at a distance of 13 miles from the
pit, accessibility to markets was the overriding factor in the localization of the
workings.
The problem of restoration of land worked for sand and gravel differed
significantly from the restoration of opencast coal or ironstone pits. In the
latter case considerable amounts of overburden (which could subsequently
be replaced) had to be removed to work a relatively thin seam. In the case
of sand and gravel workings there was usually little or no overburden. The
geological parent material were various—Triassic sandstones, high-level
glacial and fluviatile gravels and low-level flood plain gravels. The resulting
soils included some of the best and some of the worst in the country.
The high-level workings presented little problem. It was normally possible
to regain a considerable measure of productivity by simple levelling: in some
cases indeed the land was improved by removal of the gravel cover. With the
flood plain gravels, most of which were worked by dredging or suction as wet
pits, the situation was very different. In urban areas they often served a
useful purpose as tips for builders’ debris and other inactive rubbish and the
restoration of a surface suitable for light industry and normal residential
buildings could be ensured. Where, however, wet pits lay beyond the
economic range of urban filling material no solution other than preservation
as landscaped lagoons could be offered. Wooldridge declined to see the prob
lem of the sand and gravel industry as a simple contest between agricultural
and mineral reservations but he pleaded that the industry should be given
a measure of priority in certain areas of wide extent. Above all, urban
expansion should not be allowed to sterilize the mineral resources necessary
for its own building materials. A modern town is often no less the direct
product of the land on which it stands than its brick-built nineteenth-century
predecessor or the stone-built Cotswold village.
Wooldridge had remarkable qualities as a teacher. He had the capacity

to transmit his enthusiasm for his subject and the gift of clear exposition.
He had a pungency of phrase which delighted his audiences and at times he
took pleasure in being as provocative as he could. He enjoyed lecturing and
gave freely of his time to universities, to training colleges, to field centres and
to the Working Men’s College, Camden Town, with which he was for many
years closely associated. In the words of a colleague writing in The , ‘it
was his passion to bring to young and old the joy that comes from discovering
for one’s self some new fact of landscape history and from fitting it into a
developing pattern of new scientific knowledge’.
Beyond doubt Wooldridge’s happiest hours were those spent on field work,
preferably in the countryside of southeastern England which he loved so well,
On such occasions he was a delightful companion, full of an almost Chester-
tonian zest for life, brimming over with ideas and ready to trounce anyone
bold enough to query them. In argument he gave hard knocks with relish and
took them with good humour. Most outdoor activities appealed to him.
In his youth he had played club cricket and had been a forcing batsman and
a useful fast-medium bowler. Later in life, as a member of Surrey County
Cricket Club he frequently slipped away to the Oval, often to return wrath-
fully denouncing the decline in English batsmanship. Golf he said was
essentially a geomorphological game and he applied himself to it with
enthusiasm. He was a member of Hampstead Golf Club and in his prime hit
a very long ball. In his younger days he also played soccer, hockey and, with
some reluctance for he regarded it as a rather effete game, tennis.
Wooldridge was a member of the Congregational Church and did a
certain amount of lay-preaching. He often attended the Interdenominational
Church at Hampstead Garden Suburb. He read widely on theological
subjects and enjoyed arguing about them. He was greatly influenced by the
writings of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth though his philosophy remained
a simpler one than Barth’s in that he saw behind all natural phenomena
evidence of a divine purpose. In his latter years he became a communicant
member of the Church of England. He had an immense knowledge of the

scriptures and a capacity for producing an appropriate text for almost every
eventuality. Perhaps the most familiar to those of his colleagues whose
scientific interests lay further afield than the London Basin or the Weald was
‘The eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth’. He also found ‘All things
are lawful . . .—but all things are not expedient’ useful when he had to put his
foot down with students.
Politics too attracted Wooldridge. For many years he was a staunch,
though not uncritical, supporter of the Labour party and spoke on their
platforms at elections. He was bitterly disappointed at what he regarded
as the party’s ingratitude in passing over Herbert Morrison for the leadership
in succession to Attlee in 1955 and transferred his allegiance to the Liberals.
He continued, however, to describe himself as a socialist at heart though his
political philosophy was probably of too independent a character to be
confined by the doctrines of any single party.
Light opera and particularly Gilbert and Sullivan operas gave Wooldridge
tremendous pleasure. In 1930 he had been largely responsible for the
formation of an amateur operatic society known as the Geoids and composed
originally of members of the Geology and Geography Departments at King’s
College and the London School of Economics. With this society, which still
flourishes, Wooldridge played in most of the Savoy operas. With his good
baritone voice and commanding presence he made an awe-inspiring Mikado,
an autocratic Captain Corkoran and a dastardly Sir Despard Murgatroyd.
In 1954 Wooldridge had a cerebral thrombosis. Although he made a
remarkable recovery the illness diminished his range. With great courage he
endeavoured to live as full a life as ever; however, he got tired more readily
and he developed a tendency to be dogmatic and at times irritable. Perhaps
only those who had known him at the height of his powers realized how great
was the change. However, he was cheered by the fresh honours which came to
him: in 1956 he was elected a Fellow of King’s College; in 1957 he was
awarded the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society; in 1959
came his election to the Royal Society; and in 1960 he was made a member of
the New York Academy of Sciences.
In his latter years Wooldridge gave much service to his University and
College. He was a Governor of Sir John Cass College and Wye College and
Chairman of the Committee of Management of the Institute of Archeology.
He was at one time a member of no less than six different Boards of Studies,
a testimony to his great range of interests. As chairman of the Management
Committee of King’s College Hall, one of the College halls of residence,
he did much to assist and stimulate student communal life. He took a keen
interest in old-student affairs and was at the time of his death President
of the King’s College London Association. He acted as umpire for College
cricket matches. In addition to watching cricket he found relaxation by
attending rehearsals of the Geoids Amateur Operatic Society even when he
could no longer take part in the performances. In 1962 and 1963 he produced
the Pirates and the Yeoman for King’s College Operatic Society.
His final seizure came, as he would perhaps have wished, at King’s College
Hall. At the time of his death he was actively engaged with Mr M. J. Kenn,
a former member of the Civil Engineering Department, in an experimental
study of mountain building. His great services to his College were com
memorated in the chapel on 22 May 1963. The congregation representing
science, religion, arts, politics and sport bore witness to the full life he had led.
Assistance in the preparation of this memoir from Mrs E. M. Wooldridge,

Dr K. Board, Professor J. F. Kirkaldy, Professor J. C. Pugh and Dr U. E. Simon
is gratefully acknowledged.
J. H. T aylor
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P apers
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Stratigraphy and structure of the Weald

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Denudation chronology and drainage evolution

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Land use and conservation

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British geomorphologists and a great champion of field studies of all kinds.

England. In 1934 he married Edith Mary Stephens a former student of

In 1947 Wooldridge returned to his old College, as Professor of Geography,

the result of accommodation to movements in the Palaeozoic floor during the

Stratigraphy and structure of the Weald

belts of gravel contained abundant chert pebbles indicating a provenance

Wooldridge fully recognized the important effects of the Pleistocene

Denudation chronology and drainage evolution

Land use and conservation

Wooldridge had remarkable qualities as a teacher. He had the capacity

member of the Church of England. He had an immense knowledge of the

Assistance in the preparation of this memoir from Mrs E. M. Wooldridge,

district. Proc. Geol. Assoc. 36, 257-284.

Stratigraphy and structure of the Weald

Denudation chronology and drainage evolution

Land use and conservation

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