John Walter Gregory
John Walter Gregory was that most Victorian of men. An East End boy, he left school at 15, but took his education into his own hands and was to become a scientiest, explorer, teacher and man of letters. His travels would take him to Australia and the Antarctic, to the Rift Valleys of East Africa and to the mountains of Tibet. Yet his birth had him marked out for a quiet career in trade.
Gregory was born on 27 January 1864 in Bow, the son of a wool merchant. His solidly lower middle class upbringing saw him attending Stepney Grammar School* and leaving at 15 to take an office job. But a fascination with geology took him to evening classes at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution* in Chancery Lane. With its motto of ‘In nocte consilium’ (study by night), Birkbeck allowed working men and women to study for degrees in their spare hours.
He matriculated in 1886, won a BSc with first class honours in 1891, and gained his doctorate in 1893. In 1887 he had taken a job as an assistant in the geological department of the Natural History Museum, newly opened on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. It must have been a fascinating time to be a geologist - the ideas of the recently deceased Charles Darwin were still permeating through science and society and rattling many people’s faith in Creationism. But though Gregory stayed in his post at the museum until 1900, he was itching to see the world for himself.
If he wasn’t quite Indiana Jones wielding a whip, Gregory certainly took the world in his stride. Geology in those far off days was as much adventure and exploration as science, with Gregory and his teams journeying deep into parts of the world that had barely been discovered by Europeans.
He had already obtained leave to travel in Europe, to North America, East Africa and the West Indies. In 1896 he published ‘The Great Rift Valley’ detailing his journey to Mount Kenya and Lake Baringo. He accompanied Sir Marten Conway’s expedition across Spitsbergen in 1896, as naturalist on the trip, and produced seminal work on glacial geology.
And in February 1900, Gregory travelled to the other side of the world, to take a the post of professor of geology at the University of Melbourne. Gregory was an astonishingly prolific writer, combining his teaching with a string of books in the early 1900s - learned papers, titles for university study and school books. Titles include The Dead Heart of Australia, The Foundation of British East Africa, The Austral Geography, The Geography of Victoria and The Climate of Australasia. From 1901 he was director of the Geological Survey of Victoria and became a fellow of the Royal Society, back in London.
Gregory returned to Britain in 1904, taking up the chair of geology at Glasgow University, where he was to remain until retirement, 25 years later. He widened his interests to cover archeology, and a flood of further books followed, among them ‘To the Alps of Chinese Tibet’ with his son, which recounted the trip they had made together. By the 1920s, Gregory was taking a sociological perspective, and penned Human Migration and the Future.
In 1932, Gregory was 68, but still travelling and exploring, and in January of that year set off on a trip to South America to research earthquakes and volcanoes in the Andes. Sailing on the Urubamba River in southern Peru, on 2 June, his boat turned over and he was lost.
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John Gregory’s Old Schools
Stepney Grammar School was later amalgamated into the Coopers and ultimately Coopers Company and Coborn School, which occupied various sites in Bow Road, Tredegar Square and Fairfield Road throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Like many of the old East End grammar schools, Coopers moved out of London, decamping to Upminster in Essex in 1971, where it remains to this day.
Birkbeck, University of London, was founded at a meeting at the Crown and Anchor pub on the Strand in 1823. Despite complaints that George Birkbeck was ’scattering the seeds of evil’ by encouraging working men to study in their spare time, the idea caught in, and the London Mechanics Institute was born. It became the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, and by Royal Charter became part of the University of London in 1920. Birkbeck is coming to the East End in the next few years. Its partnership with the University of East London will be known as Birkbeck Stratford.