The Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Women from the Beginning

This is the claim most exposed to patriotic exaggeration, and it is the one that holds up best. RSGS admitted women from its inception in 1884: its constitution used the gender-neutral category Ordinary Members, with no sex bar, and its own history notes a membership of prominent men and, unusually for the time, women.

RSGS also emphasised research and education over gentlemanly exploration and drew in members of the general public alongside academics — a broader base than the London clubland of the RGS. That is worth saying precisely rather than as a vague boast, and it should not be inflated: RSGS still recruited heavily from Edinburgh’s most prominent men and women, and the RGS remained far larger and more powerful.

The Bartholomew Claims

John Bartholomew and Son, styled the Edinburgh Geographical Institute from 1889, was among the foremost map publishers in the world, and J.G. Bartholomew held a royal warrant as Cartographer to the King — hence “the Prince of Cartography”. Two claims recur, and both need trimming.

Layer-colour relief. Colouring the bands between contour lines to show elevation predates Bartholomew by a long way: Leonardo used coloured chalk for elevation around 1503, Jean-Louis Dupain-Triel produced an elevation-tinted contour map in 1791, and Franz von Hauslab pioneered lithographic colour-layer maps in the late 1820s. What the firm genuinely did was popularise and commercialise the now-standard green-lowland-to-brown-highland scheme, on the half-inch series of Scotland from 1895 and of England and Wales from 1903, building on his father John Bartholomew Jr’s commercial colour contouring shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1878. Cartographic scholarship groups Bartholomew with Eduard Imhof and Karl Peucker as the people who made such tints the de facto standard. “Popularised” is right; “invented” is not.

Antarctica. Per the National Library of Scotland’s Bartholomew Archive, in 1886 he prepared a South Polar chart to illustrate John Murray’s RSGS address, and it became the basis of the chart in the 1887 Handy Reference Atlas, on which the continent is clearly labelled Antarctica. G.A. Mawer credited him in Polar Record (2008) with having coined and popularised the name, generally received by geographers by 1928. But Rip Bulkeley’s rebuttal in Polar Record (2016) showed the modern one-word name appearing as early as 1840 at a congress of Italian scientists, its English use traceable from 1849, and the first map using it published in 1843. The word is a Latinisation of the Greek antarktikos, “opposite the Arctic”. First to popularise the label on modern published maps: yes. Named Antarctica: no.

Explorers, Expeditions, Medals

David Livingstone is honoured by the society, not a participant in it: he died in 1873, eleven years before it existed. The link runs through his daughter Agnes Livingstone-Bruce, a co-founder, and the Livingstone Medal she endowed in his memory, first awarded in 1901 and designed by James Pittendrigh MacGillivray.

William Speirs Bruce and the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition of 1902–04 are the society’s strongest expedition connection. Scotia established Omond House on Laurie Island in 1903 — later handed to Argentina as Orcadas Base, still operating, holding the longest continuous Antarctic meteorological record — and discovered Coats Land, named for the family who paid for the venture. The total cost was about £36,405, of which the Coats brothers gave roughly £30,400. RSGS awarded Bruce its Gold Medal in 1904 and amplified the expedition; it did not fund it. Bruce was controversially denied the Polar Medal, widely blamed on RGS President Sir Clements Markham, who resented the independent Scottish venture; the RGS ignored Scotia in its own awards.

Ernest Shackleton served as RSGS Secretary in 1904–05 before returning to exploration, and received the Livingstone Medal in 1909 — a direct institutional connection. Isobel Wylie Hutchison, the Arctic botanist, explorer and filmmaker, took an RSGS Fellowship Diploma in 1932 and on 24 October 1934 became the first woman and third person overall to receive the Mungo Park Medal, later serving on Council, as honorary editor of the magazine from 1944 to 1953, and as Vice-President from 1958 to 1970.

The Gold Medal, now the Scottish Geographical Medal, dates from Stanley’s award in 1890; the Mungo Park Medal honours exploration in hazardous environments; Honorary Fellowships have been awarded since 1888. RSGS reports more than 750 Honorary Fellowships and nearly 400 medals over its history, to a list including Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen (1925), Edmund Hillary and John Hunt (1953), Neil Armstrong (1971), Ranulph Fiennes, Freya Stark, David Attenborough, Michael Palin and Annie Lennox.

Putting Geography in the Universities

The society’s most durable institutional achievement is not an expedition. Through a committee Bartholomew served on, RSGS efforts helped fund a lectureship in geography at the University of Edinburgh from 1908. The National Library of Scotland’s Bartholomew Archive states plainly that this was the first formal geography teaching programme in Scotland. The first lecturer was George Goudie Chisholm, an RSGS Secretary and author of the first English-language economic-geography textbook; a Chair of Geography followed at Edinburgh in 1931.

Since 1909 RSGS has awarded a silver University Medal to the outstanding graduating honours geography student at each Scottish university, and it established one of the earliest dedicated geographical collections — a geographical museum proposed within the society by the pioneering urbanist Patrick Geddes in 1896.

Perth, and the Collections

RSGS moved from Edinburgh — 80A Princes Street, later 10 Randolph Crescent — to the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow from 1994 to 2008, and since 2009 its registered office has been Lord John Murray House, 15–19 North Port, Perth, with a volunteer-run visitor and education centre next door in the Fair Maid’s House, the oldest secular building in Perth, associated with Scott’s 1828 novel The Fair Maid of Perth.

The collections run to tens of thousands of maps and atlases, over 15,000 volumes and some 120 serial titles largely deposited with Strathclyde’s Andersonian Library, journals, photographs, film — including unique 1904 SNAE footage held at the Scottish Screen Archive in Glasgow — scientific instruments and personal papers. The earliest map of Scotland in the collection dates from 1573.

A Small Charity with a Climate Mission

RSGS today is deliberately small: its own pages describe more than 2,500 members, around 120 volunteers and six staff, while its LinkedIn and Wikipedia figures cite about 2,700 members as of October 2019. It runs roughly 90 to 100 “Inspiring People” illustrated talks a year across about thirteen local groups, publishes The Geographer and the peer-reviewed Scottish Geographical Journal, awards medals and fellowships, works on policy and champions school geography.

Under Chief Executive Mike Robinson, in post since 2008, it has taken a prominent climate role, launching the Climate Solutions course with the Universities of Edinburgh, Stirling and Strathclyde, IoD Scotland and the Scottish Government, with contributions from figures including Christiana Figueres, Mary Robinson, Mark Carney and Greta Thunberg. It is a sister organisation to, and entirely independent of, the far larger RGS with IBG in London, which reports about 16,500 members.

Timeline

1. 16 July 1830

   The Geographical Society of London founded

   The RGS; royal charter 1859 — RSGS's older sibling

2. Mid-1884

   Bartholomew proposes a Scottish society

   Traditionally on a walk at North Berwick with Agnes Livingstone-Bruce

3. October 1884

   Inaugural public meeting in Edinburgh

   Recorded by Honorary Secretary Donald G. Moir in 1959

4. 4 Dec 1884

   Headquarters opened at 80A Princes Street

   Henry Morton Stanley signs the visitor book first

5. Within a month

   Branches at Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow

   Not simultaneous foundings — branches of an Edinburgh society

6. 1887

   Queen Victoria grants royal status

   The society becomes the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

7. 1887

   Bartholomew publishes “Antarctica” on a map

   In the Handy Reference Atlas, from an 1886 South Polar chart

8. 1888

   Honorary Fellowships begin

   More than 750 awarded since

9. 1890

   First Gold Medal, to H.M. Stanley

   Now the Scottish Geographical Medal

10. 1892

    A London branch is founded

    A rival to the RGS — and a lever in its women's-admission crisis

11. 1901

    First Livingstone Medal awarded

    Endowed by Agnes Livingstone-Bruce in her father's memory

12. 1902–1904

    The Scottish National Antarctic Expedition

    Bruce's Scotia: Omond House and the discovery of Coats Land

13. 1904

    RSGS Gold Medal to William Speirs Bruce

    Honoured by RSGS — but privately funded by the Coats family

14. 1904–1905

    Ernest Shackleton serves as Secretary

    Livingstone Medal in 1909

15. 1908

    Edinburgh geography lectureship funded

    Scotland's first formal geography teaching; Chisholm the first lecturer

16. 1909

    University Medals instituted

    For the top honours geography graduate at each Scottish university

17. 1931

    Chair of Geography at Edinburgh

    The lectureship matures into a professorship

18. 24 Oct 1934

    Isobel Wylie Hutchison takes the Mungo Park Medal

    First woman, third person overall, to receive it

19. 1994–2008

    Based at the University of Strathclyde

    After Edinburgh; the library largely deposited in the Andersonian

20. 2009

    Perth headquarters

    Lord John Murray House, with a visitor centre in the Fair Maid's House

Did You Know?

• The society was proposed by a man of twenty-four who was already running one of the world's leading map firms.
• Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr Livingstone, I presume”, opened the headquarters and signed the visitor book first.
• RSGS's London branch of 1892 was set up as a rival to the RGS — and helped force the question of women Fellows.
• Isabella Bird was an RSGS Honorary Fellow two years before the RGS admitted her, and twenty-one years before it admitted women for good.
• Ernest Shackleton was the society's Secretary for a year before going back to the ice.
• Omond House, built by the Scotia expedition in 1903, still runs as Argentina's Orcadas Base — the longest continuous weather record in Antarctica.
• Coats Land is named after the thread manufacturers who paid for about £30,400 of a £36,405 expedition.
• The society's oldest map of Scotland dates from 1573.

Honest Caveats

The beach-walk date is lore. June or 21 July 1884, depending which RSGS page you read.

Bartholomew’s title varies. First Secretary in some accounts; joint honorary secretary alongside the salaried Arthur Silva White in the Dictionary of National Biography.

No simultaneous Edinburgh–Glasgow founding. Glasgow was an early branch.

“Democratic” needs limits. Open to women and the public, yes; a mass or egalitarian body, no.

Both Bartholomew claims are partial. Popularised, not invented, on hypsometric tinting; first published, not coined, on Antarctica.

Honour is not funding. RSGS medalled Bruce; the Coats family financed him.

Figures drift. Membership is cited as 2,500 or 2,700, and the annual talk count as 90 or 100, both from RSGS’s own materials.

Some founding specifics rest on the society’s own history and Moir’s 1959 recollection. Elspeth Lochhead’s academic articles in the Scottish Geographical Magazine (1981, 1984) and the primary Council minutes would take precedence where they differ.