Austin William Woodland

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Obituaries: Austin William Woodland (1914–1990) Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society, 48, 345-346, 1 May 1991, https://doi.org/10.1144/pygs.48.3.345a

Evans, W. (2004, September 23). Woodland, Austin William (1914–1990), geologist and geological administrator. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 2 Sep. 2020, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-75161.

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Ref No Title Description
GSM/GX/Z/483 Woodland, A W
IGS/DR/Wd Austin William Woodland Woodland was born on 4 April 1914 in the mining village of Mountain Ash, Mid-Glamorgan. He won a scholarship to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth where he was awarded first-class honours in geology in 1934 and a PhD in 1937 following which he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at Manchester University and then a lectureship at Queen's University, Belfast. He joined the Geological Survey of Great Britain in 1939. He was promoted to District Geologist for Yorkshire and the East Midlands in 1957, moved to North West England in 1960 and became Assistant director, Northern England in 1962. In 1966-67 he was the geological assessor for the Aberfan Disaster Tribunal. Woodland was appointed deputy director in 1971 and Director in 1976. He retired in 1979 and died on 9 November 1990. He was awarded a CBE in 1975.

Austin William Woodland as Director of the Survey

Extract from: From: Wilson, H.E. Down to earth - one hundred and fifty years of the British Geological Survey. Edinburgh:Scottish Academic Press, 1985. [In all directions: developments under Sir Henry's fourteen successors In all directions: developments under Sir Henry's fourteen successors]

Dunham was succeeded in 1976 by Austin Woodland who had been Deputy Director since 1971. Woodland was a traditional field geologist who had spent many of his early years mapping the South Wales Coalfield and whose evidence was important in the enquiry into the Aberfan disaster in the sixties. He was not wholly sympathetic with some of the directions in which the Institute had expanded over the previous decade and left NERC headquarters in no doubt about his views.

Woodland felt strongly that those parts of I.G.S. output which were of most value to the national geological archive were the traditional publications of the Field Survey — the maps and memoirs which will always be of value to the engineers, miners and planners of Britain. His main effort during his directorship was to maintain this base against the attacks on traditional mapping by a NERC increasingly obsessed by repayment work. The 'Consortium' of Departments funding the Geological Survey of Great Britain was maintained during his term in office and he was able to keep the field programme at a steady level. The relentless pressure for more contract work continued, however, and this process reached its nadir in the late 1970s when over 80% of the work carried out by the Institute was commissioned.

Perhaps Woodland's major organizational bequest was the Deep Geology Unit, established in 1977. It was funded from the scanty 'Science Vote' and made up of geologists and geophysicists transferred from existing units and recruited because of theirexperience in fundamental research. The intention was to have a multi-disciplinary group which would exploit the increasing flow of data on hydrocarbon exploration held by I.G.S. on behalf of the Department of Energy, and employ the expertise of such units as Global Seismology, Geomagnetism and Metalliferous Minerals and Applied Geochemistry in the study of the deep structure of the United Kingdom, with particular regard to hydrocarbon, geothermal and metallic mineral potential.

The new unit has been notably successful under its successive heads, W A Read and Alf Whittaker — with perhaps too large a proportion of its work commissioned by the Department of Energy. Though this work was of high quality it was based on confidential information and could not be published immediately, with the result that the excellent research efforts of the staff were not publicised. In 1983 the restructuring of the organisation divided the unit into two groups, responsible to two different Programme Directors, and its full potential has yet to be seen.

One of the most traumatic events of Woodland's Directorate was the sudden death in office of Bill Bullerwell late in 1977. Bullerwell had been the first geophysicist in the organisation, the first Chief Geophysicist and the successor as Deputy Director in 1976 to Steve Buchan. He was a man with a profound knowledge of the organisation and his departure was a significant loss at a crucial period. He was succeeded as Deputy Director by Peter Sabine, formerly Petrographer and latterly Head of the Geochemistry Division.

The formation in 1977 of the Deep Geology Unit occasioned yet another regrouping, for it was joined in a new Special Surveys Division by the Metalliferous Minerals and Applied Geochemistry Unit, Industrial Minerals Assessment Unit and Engineering Geology Unit.

In 1979 Woodland was succeeded as Director by Professor George Malcolm Brown, a distinguished geochemist who had been head of the Geology Department at Durham University — the third post-war Directoral appointment from outside the organisation.

There was a period of organisational stability until 1982, when the post of Chief Geophysicist, in abeyance since the death of Bullerwell in 1977, was revived and a new Geophysics Division appeared, with the disappearance of the Special Surveys Division, the component units of which were dispersed into other divisions, including a new 'Environmental and Deep Geology' Division.

In 1983 a second Deputy Director, George Innes Lumsden, hitherto Assistant Director in Scotland, was appointed and at the end of the year the whole concept of Divisional organisation disappeared with the introduction of a system of 'matrix management', planned to be flexible 'in response to changes in emphasis of the science and in the character of the Institute's programmes'.

Under the Director and his two Deputies (the only titles remaining from the past), four Programme Directors, three Chief Scientists, and a Head of Information and Central Services are responsible for the activities of the British Geological Survey, as the organisation was renamed on 1 January 1984.

The Chief Geologist, Chief Geochemist and Chief Geophysicist are responsible for overall standards in their subjects, for career management of the staff and for special research groups, while the Programme Directors control Regional Geological Surveys and similar field-orientated programmes on land in the UK, work on the Continental Shelf and overseas. Individual programmes are led by Programme Managers or Group Managers who may be SPSOs or PSOs.

The evolution of this system was a protracted process with, one must assume, a good deal of infighting among the Assistant Directors. It also produced a degree of interference from NERC headquarters which exceeded even their usual norm and this they compounded by their financial stringency. The result is a period of disillusionment and low morale among all levels of staff which must have no equal save, perhaps, in the last years of the Geikie regime. No Director in the whole history of the Survey can have had such a thankless and frustrating period in office as Malcolm Brown, most of whose hopes and expectations have, up to the time of writing in late 1984, been inhibited by the constraints of outside control.