| Summary: | After the summer field season of 1989 in the Pakistani Karakoram, I drove to Oxford, the ‘city of dreaming spires’ and arrived in the Department of Earth Sciences. In those days Oxford was probably the best field-geology ‘hard-rock’ department in the country and one of the best in the world. It was a wonderful place for me, buzzing with excitement and full of talented geologists working on projects all over the world. John Platt had post-graduate students working on several projects in the European Alps and the Spanish Betics, Simon Lamb was starting a major new field project in the Andes of Bolivia, and the department had some of the world’s leading igneous petrologists working on volcanic and granitic rocks all over the world. The department was overflowing and I was given an office on the top floor of the ‘annexe’ a wonderful old Victorian building at 62, Banbury Road. My office was up in the attic and I called this grandly the ‘Oxford Centre of Himalayan Research’. Right across the Banbury Road was an excellent public house, the Rose and Crown on North Parade, and we used to congregate there regularly for discussions on geology, and the world in general over a pint or two of traditional real ale. It was an excellent life. In the 1830s the first Professor of Geology in Oxford was the Reverend William Buckland who naturally came with a lot of religious baggage. Buckland was a bit of an eccentric in many ways including living with and eating a whole variety of wild animals and doing his geological fieldwork dressed in full academic gown. Following Buckland the department settled down to a more conventional geological approach, studying the stratigraphy and palaeontology of Oxfordshire. By the 1950s Oxford had become one of the leading departments of geology and mineralogy in the world. The head of department was Lawrence Wager, who had made his name studying the classic Skaergaard igneous intrusion of Greenland. Wager had earlier joined the 1933 Everest expedition climbing to 27,500 feet on the north ridge and ...
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