Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Who (What?) is JANET?
In my new role at the AGI, I am enjoying attending a number of meetings of groups concerned with GIS in their sector. On Thursday I went to Glasgow to attend a meeting of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) . JISC's mission is to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support education and research.
The meeting I was at was one of the regular meetings held by their Geospatial Working Group. This is a group which does a lot of work relating to accessibility of Geographic Data for the academic community. The meeting was really interesting. But as usual the acronyms were impenetrable. In particular was the constant mention of JANET? Who is she? Or what is she? Dr Finlay's Housekeeper? Or something more?
Well it turns out that JANET is the network dedicated to the needs of education and research in the UK. It connects the UK’s education and research organisations to each other, as well as to the rest of the world through links to the global Internet. In addition, JANET includes a separate network that is available to the community for experimental activities in network development.
The JANET network connects UK universities, FE Colleges, Research Councils, Specialist Colleges and Adult and Community Learning providers. It also provides connections between the Regional Broadband Consortia to facilitate the DfES initiative for a national schools’ network. Over 18 million end-users are currently served by the JANET network.The range of activities facilitated by JANET allows individuals and organisations to push back the traditional boundaries of teaching, learning and research methods.
For example, JANET’s videoconferencing and video streaming capabilities are being used to deliver lectures to remote groups of students. For researchers, the high capacity of the JANET backbone allows the linking of large data storage and high performance computing facilities at a national and international level.
This all sound worthy of more investigation. In the meantime, further information plus a video relating to JANET can be found here.
The meeting I was at was one of the regular meetings held by their Geospatial Working Group. This is a group which does a lot of work relating to accessibility of Geographic Data for the academic community. The meeting was really interesting. But as usual the acronyms were impenetrable. In particular was the constant mention of JANET? Who is she? Or what is she? Dr Finlay's Housekeeper? Or something more?
Well it turns out that JANET is the network dedicated to the needs of education and research in the UK. It connects the UK’s education and research organisations to each other, as well as to the rest of the world through links to the global Internet. In addition, JANET includes a separate network that is available to the community for experimental activities in network development.
The JANET network connects UK universities, FE Colleges, Research Councils, Specialist Colleges and Adult and Community Learning providers. It also provides connections between the Regional Broadband Consortia to facilitate the DfES initiative for a national schools’ network. Over 18 million end-users are currently served by the JANET network.The range of activities facilitated by JANET allows individuals and organisations to push back the traditional boundaries of teaching, learning and research methods.
For example, JANET’s videoconferencing and video streaming capabilities are being used to deliver lectures to remote groups of students. For researchers, the high capacity of the JANET backbone allows the linking of large data storage and high performance computing facilities at a national and international level.
This all sound worthy of more investigation. In the meantime, further information plus a video relating to JANET can be found here.
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Cairngorm
On the way back from Orkney, I stopped off to see my parents and took them up to the Cairngorm car park. We hadn't been here for some time. I love the view from Cairngorm both upwards to the summit of the mountain and downwards to Lock Morlich and Aviemore beyond. As the ski-ing season in Scotland diminishes, areas like Cairngorm have to provide other facilities for tourists, including the controversial funicular railway. In my view they have done this is a sensitive and positive way so that the mountains retain their grandeur and beauty. These are three of the photos I took.
Sunday, 1 July 2007
Orkney
Orkney was magnificent. Much more beautiful, much more fertile than I had imagined. And on the surface it seems to be thriving. But since this is a geog blog and not a travelogue, I will not give a full account of where we were and what we did. Instead I will quote from Orkney 2020.
Orkney—key facts
Resident Population 19,245 (2001 Census)
Main towns Kirkwall (pop. 7,500 approx)
Stromness (pop.2,200 approx), both situated on mainland Orkney
Area 100,000 hectares over 67 islands
Industry Tourism, agriculture, fishing, oil processing, craft manufacture and retail
Orkney has 18 inhabited islands, two of which (South Ronaldsay and Burray) are linked to the
Orkney mainland by causeways. Island populations vary in size from a single family to several
hundred, and the geography of Orkney offers a significant challenge to public agencies seeking to
deliver services effectively and efficiently. Orkney 2020 states:
Some of Orkney’s barriers to inclusion are shared with other communities. Poverty may be
less visible in rural areas than in inner cities, but exists nonetheless, and is exacerbated by the
high cost of travel: whether to work, to access shops or services, or to visit friends and
relatives. Those who are disadvantaged by disability, ill health or unemployment will need
their interests represented, and their needs prioritised when targeting resources.
The geography of Orkney gives rise to other barriers to inclusion. It is impossible to achieve
truly equal access to services such as the Pickaquoy Centre when some communities are
several hours away by sea. Many hospital services can only be accessed in mainland Scotland.
Consequently, some compromises are inevitable. We can try to deliver local services which
meet as many needs as possible, and ensure that they are available to all. Where services
cannot be delivered locally, we can do our best to help people to travel to them.
Orkney 2020, OCPP, April 2003
Orkney mainland by causeways. Island populations vary in size from a single family to several
hundred, and the geography of Orkney offers a significant challenge to public agencies seeking to
deliver services effectively and efficiently. Orkney 2020 states:
Some of Orkney’s barriers to inclusion are shared with other communities. Poverty may be
less visible in rural areas than in inner cities, but exists nonetheless, and is exacerbated by the
high cost of travel: whether to work, to access shops or services, or to visit friends and
relatives. Those who are disadvantaged by disability, ill health or unemployment will need
their interests represented, and their needs prioritised when targeting resources.
The geography of Orkney gives rise to other barriers to inclusion. It is impossible to achieve
truly equal access to services such as the Pickaquoy Centre when some communities are
several hours away by sea. Many hospital services can only be accessed in mainland Scotland.
Consequently, some compromises are inevitable. We can try to deliver local services which
meet as many needs as possible, and ensure that they are available to all. Where services
cannot be delivered locally, we can do our best to help people to travel to them.
Orkney 2020, OCPP, April 2003
Orkney’s population has fallen dramatically over the past century, to the point where the survival of the smaller isles communities is uncertain. To quote again from Orkney 2020:
A century ago, Orkney’s population stood at around 29,000. In 2000 it was 19,500 and, if
current trends cannot be reversed, it is forecast to fall to 17,500 by 2016. Over the last 50
years, with the mechanisation of agriculture, there has been a steady drift away from the isles
towards the towns on mainland Orkney, as people move to find work, or to retire closer to
their families. Most of the predicted population decline can be expected to affect the isles and
more remote mainland areas, where it will threaten the survival of communities whose
existence is already marginal. Below a certain critical mass, communities die. There are too
few children to keep a school open, and essential services cannot be provided at a reasonable
cost. Young people move away and there is nobody to replace the older generation.
In 1901, Orkney had 26 inhabited islands; today, only 16 islands have permanently resident
communities. If these fragile communities are to survive and flourish, we need to take action
to halt and reverse the population decline. Lifeline transport services and supply lines must be
kept open, and communities helped to establish new economic activities to replace those in
decline. Young people will always want to move away, to study or travel, and we should
encourage them to do so. Our challenge for Community Planning is to ensure that they can
return to live and work in a thriving community.
Orkney 2020, OCPP, April 2003
A century ago, Orkney’s population stood at around 29,000. In 2000 it was 19,500 and, if
current trends cannot be reversed, it is forecast to fall to 17,500 by 2016. Over the last 50
years, with the mechanisation of agriculture, there has been a steady drift away from the isles
towards the towns on mainland Orkney, as people move to find work, or to retire closer to
their families. Most of the predicted population decline can be expected to affect the isles and
more remote mainland areas, where it will threaten the survival of communities whose
existence is already marginal. Below a certain critical mass, communities die. There are too
few children to keep a school open, and essential services cannot be provided at a reasonable
cost. Young people move away and there is nobody to replace the older generation.
In 1901, Orkney had 26 inhabited islands; today, only 16 islands have permanently resident
communities. If these fragile communities are to survive and flourish, we need to take action
to halt and reverse the population decline. Lifeline transport services and supply lines must be
kept open, and communities helped to establish new economic activities to replace those in
decline. Young people will always want to move away, to study or travel, and we should
encourage them to do so. Our challenge for Community Planning is to ensure that they can
return to live and work in a thriving community.
Orkney 2020, OCPP, April 2003
It is the cry of all small communities. But I will return to visit.
Friday, 22 June 2007
Off to Orkney
This weekend, after a couple of days in Unstone near Sheffield, we head off to Orkney. Despite being born in Inverness, I have never been to Orkney and am huegley looking forward to the visit. The weather forecast is not good - windy and wet, but that might actually give us the variety of light and atmosphere for which Orkney is famous.
And of course it will be light until way past midnight and then again only a couple of hours later.
Above all it will be good to get out of the city, get north of the border, and experience nature, climate and geography close up and in an unrefined state.
And of course it will be light until way past midnight and then again only a couple of hours later.
Above all it will be good to get out of the city, get north of the border, and experience nature, climate and geography close up and in an unrefined state.
Thursday, 21 June 2007
Chorley Not!
I attended the AGI Chorley Day on Tuesday. This was a review of the receommendations of the Chorley Report of 1987, 20 years on. Some have been enacted but sadly some have made little progress. Of more interest to me perhaps was the looking through a geographic window into the future. So much is changing and so quickly all driven by the inexorable march of technology.
And we at the AGI need to ensure that we are not a barrier to change but that we continue to reinvent ourselves to ensure that we are here and are relevant 20 years from now.
And we at the AGI need to ensure that we are not a barrier to change but that we continue to reinvent ourselves to ensure that we are here and are relevant 20 years from now.
Friday, 15 June 2007
Sir Wally Herbert
No sooner have I written about various explorers than one of the greatest contemporary British explorers sadly dies.
At the AGI conference last year I was fascinated and riveted by a talk given by Sir Wally Herbert's daughter, Kari, about her time living among the Inuit of Greenland both as a young child and subsequently. It was a life she had not chosen, she was too young, but one which she embraced with enthusaism.
Now her father has died, but rather than sadness the emotion must be of one of admiration for someone who lived life to the full, tested himself to the limits of human endurance and hightlighted the triviality of most of the difficulties which the rest of us face. I repeat here the obituary from today's Times newspaper.
The leader of the first expedition to make a surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, through the North Pole, Wally Herbert was “the explorer’s explorer”. Sir Ranulph Fiennes called him the “greatest polar explorer of our time”. He proved his courage and determination time and again in both the Arctic and Antarctic, travelling more than 25,000 miles by dog sledge and open boats, and mapping 46,000 square miles of previously uncharted territory.
He loved the romance of exploration, and wrote a book about Antarctic men in blank verse. He relished the harshness and simplicity of the icy wastes. Though he rarely lost his temper, he was not to be thwarted, and long before he was finally knighted, his men would refer to him as “Sir Walter”.
Born into an English military family in 1934, Walter William Herbert served in the Royal Engineers, 1953-55, training at the School of Military Survey before learning the rudiments of navigation in the Suez Canal zone. He next worked as a surveyor in Shoreham-by-Sea until an entrée into the world of polar exploration literally dropped into his lap. A newspaper, fortuitously opened at an advertisement for men to join Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, fell from the luggage rack of a bus as he was commuting to work, with the result that he spent the years 1955-58 in the Antarctic, travelling with dog teams to map hitherto unvisited areas.
Being the first recorded human being to stand in a particular spot and the first to map a whole new area was always, for him, an exhilarating feeling. “We were a world of men in harmony with our environment,” he wrote of that first Antarctic experience. “We saw a paradise in snowscapes and heard music in the wind, for we were young, and on our long exploratory journeys we felt with the pride of youth that we were making history.”
Antarctica’s supply of virgin territory was dwindling fast under the onslaught of motorised expeditions, but 80 per cent of the Arctic was still uncharted. Therefore, his next big project was at the other end of the globe, where he planned to make the first surface crossing of the frozen Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, taking in the North Pole en route. Herbert considered this to be the last remaining element of a daunting trinity of challenges, the others being the ascent of Everest and the first surface crossing of the Antarctic ice cap.
His plan to walk “across the top of the world” involved traversing the more or less frozen Arctic Ocean, from Alaska via the North Pole to Spitsbergen, with the use of modern and traditional aids: radios, homing beacons and satellite information as well as dogs and sledges. In the four years, 1964-68, that it took him to plan the trip he would either spend 15 hours a day at his typewriter, drumming up what support he could from polar experts all over the world to help him to win the vital backing of the Royal Geographical Society, or would motor 260 miles a day between his parents’ house in Lichfield and the expedition’s headquarters in London. He often arrived in such a state of stress, despite tranquillisers, that he would have to shut himself away to unwind before getting down to business.
A spell of field training forestalled total collapse: he made a useful 1,200-mile dog-sledging journey across Smith Sound and through the Canadian North West Territories to test equipment and men – and finally, the British Trans-Arctic Expedition was ready.
Herbert, with his team – Allan Gill, Fritz Koerner and Kenneth Hedges, plus four heavily laden sledges and 34 huskies – set out from Point Barrow on February 21, 1968. On the map it was a 2,000-mile journey, but they all knew that the constant shifting of the ice could greatly inflate that mileage. Herbert and his colleagues, who would be spending a year and a half on the ice, would have to be ready every night for the sound of the sudden splitting or pressuring that would mean they had to move dogs, tons of equipment and themselves on to a new floe in double quick time.
Modern radio communications proved a mixed blessing. When Gill badly injured his back and the expedition committee in London radioed an order for his immediate evacuation, Herbert was incensed. The committee retaliated by suggesting that his opposition was due to “winteritis” warping his judgment. But in the words of a reporter for The Sunday Times, which shared exclusive newspaper rights to the expedition story with The Times: “Herbert has his faults – a Napoleonic sense of drama, impetuosity and a tendency to think too much in a loud clear voice – but he is a long way from going barmy. He wanted Gill to stay for the winter because the Arctic is Gill’s life and any alternative, death included, would be preferable to the stigma of failure during an expedition.”
Gill stayed, and gradually regained his strength. But the incident made Herbert enemies when some of his indignant remarks were relayed to a large readership. After this and other delays, it was only by dint of forced marches that the team reached the North Pole on April 6, 1969.
Arguably the worst of their journey lay ahead, with the ice splitting all around them as temperatures rose. But in mid-May they at last sighted land, and on May 29 an exhausted Hedges and Gill, his injury forgotten, summoned up the strength and the willpower to scramble on to Small Blackboard Island off the northeast coast of Spitsbergen, 3,620 miles after leaving Point Barrow.
Only half the team having landed, in Herbert’s eyes it was not the triumph he had hoped for, and he was further disappointed when the expedition’s achievement was, as he saw it, overshadowed in the eyes of the world by the almost simultaneous exploits of a new generation of explorers: the Apollo 10 astronauts, who were taking their first pictures of Earth from the Moon just as Herbert and his team were sighting land.
Yet the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, rightly called his achievement “a feat of endurance which ranks with any in polar history”, and the expedition’s patron, the Duke of Edinburgh, numbered it “among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance”.
On his return from the Arctic, Herbert married Marie McGaughey, who not only understood his obsession with polar travel but was even prepared to share it with him. Two years later, with Marie and their ten-month-old daughter Kari, he journeyed to Qeqertarsuaq in northwest Greenland to spend two years living with the Inuit, recording their way of life before it was changed for ever by the incursions of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hitherto a rather solitary man, he was greatly helped in his information-gathering by his wife’s gregariousness and the spontaneity of their tiny daughter, whose stay in the Arctic had been sponsored by Heinz but who was soon, with her mother, enjoying the sort of food that revolted Herbert, including the skulls and brains of little auks, cooked whole. When his daughter returned to Britain and a shop assistant overheard her talking Inuit, he relished the woman’s inevitable comment, “Oh well, it’s always nice to have a second language.”
After a sortie to Lapland in 1975 Herbert led an expedition in 1978-82 which attempted the first circumnavigation of the Greenland coast by dog sledge and skin boat, an enterprise that had to be abandoned after severe weather, problems with unseaworthy boats and expensive air rescues. This project never captured the imagination of public or press, but Herbert’s efforts won him renewed respect from his peers.
The death of his second daughter, Pascale, in an electrical accident in 1993, when she was 15, left Herbert devastated. Only a few years before, he had had a quadruple heart bypass, and after these two crises, painting and drawing pictures based on his many expeditions began to take up his time at home at Laggan in Inverness-shire. There were one-man exhibitions on several continents, and two of his works ended up in royal collections.
Among his books were A World of Men (1968), Across the Top of the World (1969), The Last Great Journey on Earth (1971), Eskimos (1976), Hunters of the Polar North (1982), The Noose of Laurels (1989), a controversial study which disputed Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole, and The Third Pole (2003).
Knighted in 2000, Herbert was also a joint honorary president of the World Expeditionary Association and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His awards included a Polar Medal in 1962 and its clasp in 1969; the Livingstone Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, 1969; and the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1970.
He is survived by his wife and their elder daughter.
Sir Wally Herbert, polar explorer, was born on October 24, 1934. He died of heart trouble on June 12, 2007, aged 72
At the AGI conference last year I was fascinated and riveted by a talk given by Sir Wally Herbert's daughter, Kari, about her time living among the Inuit of Greenland both as a young child and subsequently. It was a life she had not chosen, she was too young, but one which she embraced with enthusaism.
Now her father has died, but rather than sadness the emotion must be of one of admiration for someone who lived life to the full, tested himself to the limits of human endurance and hightlighted the triviality of most of the difficulties which the rest of us face. I repeat here the obituary from today's Times newspaper.
The leader of the first expedition to make a surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, through the North Pole, Wally Herbert was “the explorer’s explorer”. Sir Ranulph Fiennes called him the “greatest polar explorer of our time”. He proved his courage and determination time and again in both the Arctic and Antarctic, travelling more than 25,000 miles by dog sledge and open boats, and mapping 46,000 square miles of previously uncharted territory.
He loved the romance of exploration, and wrote a book about Antarctic men in blank verse. He relished the harshness and simplicity of the icy wastes. Though he rarely lost his temper, he was not to be thwarted, and long before he was finally knighted, his men would refer to him as “Sir Walter”.
Born into an English military family in 1934, Walter William Herbert served in the Royal Engineers, 1953-55, training at the School of Military Survey before learning the rudiments of navigation in the Suez Canal zone. He next worked as a surveyor in Shoreham-by-Sea until an entrée into the world of polar exploration literally dropped into his lap. A newspaper, fortuitously opened at an advertisement for men to join Britain’s Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, fell from the luggage rack of a bus as he was commuting to work, with the result that he spent the years 1955-58 in the Antarctic, travelling with dog teams to map hitherto unvisited areas.
Being the first recorded human being to stand in a particular spot and the first to map a whole new area was always, for him, an exhilarating feeling. “We were a world of men in harmony with our environment,” he wrote of that first Antarctic experience. “We saw a paradise in snowscapes and heard music in the wind, for we were young, and on our long exploratory journeys we felt with the pride of youth that we were making history.”
Antarctica’s supply of virgin territory was dwindling fast under the onslaught of motorised expeditions, but 80 per cent of the Arctic was still uncharted. Therefore, his next big project was at the other end of the globe, where he planned to make the first surface crossing of the frozen Arctic Ocean by its longest axis, taking in the North Pole en route. Herbert considered this to be the last remaining element of a daunting trinity of challenges, the others being the ascent of Everest and the first surface crossing of the Antarctic ice cap.
His plan to walk “across the top of the world” involved traversing the more or less frozen Arctic Ocean, from Alaska via the North Pole to Spitsbergen, with the use of modern and traditional aids: radios, homing beacons and satellite information as well as dogs and sledges. In the four years, 1964-68, that it took him to plan the trip he would either spend 15 hours a day at his typewriter, drumming up what support he could from polar experts all over the world to help him to win the vital backing of the Royal Geographical Society, or would motor 260 miles a day between his parents’ house in Lichfield and the expedition’s headquarters in London. He often arrived in such a state of stress, despite tranquillisers, that he would have to shut himself away to unwind before getting down to business.
A spell of field training forestalled total collapse: he made a useful 1,200-mile dog-sledging journey across Smith Sound and through the Canadian North West Territories to test equipment and men – and finally, the British Trans-Arctic Expedition was ready.
Herbert, with his team – Allan Gill, Fritz Koerner and Kenneth Hedges, plus four heavily laden sledges and 34 huskies – set out from Point Barrow on February 21, 1968. On the map it was a 2,000-mile journey, but they all knew that the constant shifting of the ice could greatly inflate that mileage. Herbert and his colleagues, who would be spending a year and a half on the ice, would have to be ready every night for the sound of the sudden splitting or pressuring that would mean they had to move dogs, tons of equipment and themselves on to a new floe in double quick time.
Modern radio communications proved a mixed blessing. When Gill badly injured his back and the expedition committee in London radioed an order for his immediate evacuation, Herbert was incensed. The committee retaliated by suggesting that his opposition was due to “winteritis” warping his judgment. But in the words of a reporter for The Sunday Times, which shared exclusive newspaper rights to the expedition story with The Times: “Herbert has his faults – a Napoleonic sense of drama, impetuosity and a tendency to think too much in a loud clear voice – but he is a long way from going barmy. He wanted Gill to stay for the winter because the Arctic is Gill’s life and any alternative, death included, would be preferable to the stigma of failure during an expedition.”
Gill stayed, and gradually regained his strength. But the incident made Herbert enemies when some of his indignant remarks were relayed to a large readership. After this and other delays, it was only by dint of forced marches that the team reached the North Pole on April 6, 1969.
Arguably the worst of their journey lay ahead, with the ice splitting all around them as temperatures rose. But in mid-May they at last sighted land, and on May 29 an exhausted Hedges and Gill, his injury forgotten, summoned up the strength and the willpower to scramble on to Small Blackboard Island off the northeast coast of Spitsbergen, 3,620 miles after leaving Point Barrow.
Only half the team having landed, in Herbert’s eyes it was not the triumph he had hoped for, and he was further disappointed when the expedition’s achievement was, as he saw it, overshadowed in the eyes of the world by the almost simultaneous exploits of a new generation of explorers: the Apollo 10 astronauts, who were taking their first pictures of Earth from the Moon just as Herbert and his team were sighting land.
Yet the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, rightly called his achievement “a feat of endurance which ranks with any in polar history”, and the expedition’s patron, the Duke of Edinburgh, numbered it “among the greatest triumphs of human skill and endurance”.
On his return from the Arctic, Herbert married Marie McGaughey, who not only understood his obsession with polar travel but was even prepared to share it with him. Two years later, with Marie and their ten-month-old daughter Kari, he journeyed to Qeqertarsuaq in northwest Greenland to spend two years living with the Inuit, recording their way of life before it was changed for ever by the incursions of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hitherto a rather solitary man, he was greatly helped in his information-gathering by his wife’s gregariousness and the spontaneity of their tiny daughter, whose stay in the Arctic had been sponsored by Heinz but who was soon, with her mother, enjoying the sort of food that revolted Herbert, including the skulls and brains of little auks, cooked whole. When his daughter returned to Britain and a shop assistant overheard her talking Inuit, he relished the woman’s inevitable comment, “Oh well, it’s always nice to have a second language.”
After a sortie to Lapland in 1975 Herbert led an expedition in 1978-82 which attempted the first circumnavigation of the Greenland coast by dog sledge and skin boat, an enterprise that had to be abandoned after severe weather, problems with unseaworthy boats and expensive air rescues. This project never captured the imagination of public or press, but Herbert’s efforts won him renewed respect from his peers.
The death of his second daughter, Pascale, in an electrical accident in 1993, when she was 15, left Herbert devastated. Only a few years before, he had had a quadruple heart bypass, and after these two crises, painting and drawing pictures based on his many expeditions began to take up his time at home at Laggan in Inverness-shire. There were one-man exhibitions on several continents, and two of his works ended up in royal collections.
Among his books were A World of Men (1968), Across the Top of the World (1969), The Last Great Journey on Earth (1971), Eskimos (1976), Hunters of the Polar North (1982), The Noose of Laurels (1989), a controversial study which disputed Peary’s claim to have reached the North Pole, and The Third Pole (2003).
Knighted in 2000, Herbert was also a joint honorary president of the World Expeditionary Association and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His awards included a Polar Medal in 1962 and its clasp in 1969; the Livingstone Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, 1969; and the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, 1970.
He is survived by his wife and their elder daughter.
Sir Wally Herbert, polar explorer, was born on October 24, 1934. He died of heart trouble on June 12, 2007, aged 72
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