Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain
Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘needto-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it. The distinction between geographical maps and topographical ones was made by Ptolemy, and road-journey maps go back to at least the 3rd century AD in the Roman Empire (and possibly even earlier in China). We do not possess any of these fragile parchment itineraries, but in Vienna there is a 13th-century copy, known as the Tabula Peutingeriana, of a document giving the principal routes through the Empire. Its purpose and limitations are revealed by its unusual shape, 6.7 metres long by 340 millimetres wide. If Mary Spence wants to know what these things look like, she need go no further than Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which has the original of the Chronica maiora of the great chronicler Matthew Paris. He was a beautiful artist as well as historian, and provides itineraries for Britain as well as one to the Holy Land.
There are millions of places and things in the world, and the art of cartography consists in deciding what to put in, and what to leave out, depending on the purpose of the map. I yield to no one in my admiration, and indeed love, of the Ordnance Survey one-inch-a-mile maps, and indeed own hundreds of them, some from 19th-century editions. But they tend, if anything, to put too much in, and the more there is, the more difficult reading them becomes, especially in a hurry, and still more if eyes are elderly, as mine are.
What we should be worrying about is not the new systems but the inability of most people to read a map at all. I was fortunate in that I was taught map-reading thoroughly, on my first visit to the Lake District at the age of 12, by my big sister Clare, who had studied geography under the great Professor Fleure at Manchester University, and who was the best map-reader I have ever known. I also did military map-reading in the school OTC, and in the army at Eaton Hall. Some of this knowledge stuck, and on an exercise during misty weather on that fearsome place Bodmin Moor, I was the only one to get my platoon back safely. Today, outside the Services, few people know how to use a map in conjunction with a compass, or how to take a back-bearing.
Ignorance of map-reading is just part of a wider ignorance of geography. I suspect the subject is badly taught, especially in the state schools. The old system, learning capes and capitals and countries by heart, and poring over atlases, was mechanical but it meant children learned facts and had a good idea of where places were, and their shapes. A generation ago the subject was taken over by the Left, and instead of facts and places children learned about protecting the environment, saving the planet, emissions and how nature is being ruined by industry in the USA. The result is they simply parrot current fads and fantasies, and know nothing. They cannot draw maps, the ability to do which is the essence of geographical knowledge. If I hear somebody ranting away about the Middle East, Iraq, etc., I say ‘Let us see what, if anything, you know about the subject. Here are pens and sheets of paper. I want you to draw a map of the Middle East, including Egypt, the Gulf and Iran, the northern shore of the Black Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Put in all the political boundaries, including those of the Gulf states, and all the capital cities. Mark all the principal oil fields. You need not put in the rivers except the Tigris and Euphrates, but I expect key points such as Mecca to be accurately indicated. While you are doing it, I will draw a similar map and we can compare the two.’ This tactic works very well in deflating the ranters. It confirms something I have long suspected: few people know exactly what is in the Middle East (a term invented by Winston Churchill in 1920-22 or thereabouts) and may mix it up with East Africa. I have never come across anyone who can draw an accurate map of Iraq.
I first went to that region in 1950 and have been to nearly all the countries which compose it, so its geographical saliences are fixed firmly in my mind. It is a different matter with the Caucasus region. It is not entirely unknown to me. I once interviewed the late Shah of Persia for TV on his houseboat on the Caspian, and later had a swim in its sturgeon-filled waters. When I dried off afterwards, I found a scorpion occupying one of my shoes. But the frontiers have changed radically since those days. So I have been practising drawing a map which shows Georgia and both Ossetias, Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan across the Caspian, Armenia of course, and Turkey and Iran to the south. Not easy, is it? Especially if you have to put in the capitals and the pipelines, and the principal mountain ranges, very important in the Caucasus. Not forgetting Mount Ararat, either. The Cabinet have been deliberating on these points recently, and Mr Miliband has been laying down the law, and actually went out to Tbilisi. But could they, or he for that matter, draw an accurate map of the region? No chance, I fear.
The great thing about coming to terms with geography is, first, to admit your ignorance, often total. A shining example of this was provided by Lord Sankey, Lord Chancellor 1929-35. He was a lawyer who was converted to radicalism by presiding over the Coal Commission and getting the chance to meet the ghastly mineowners. Hence he got the woolsack for which he was in many ways quite unfit. But at least he was humble. He used to bring to Cabinet meetings a small atlas, and consult it when foreign countries were mentioned (he had never been further than the Tyrol). The others laughed at him, but Sankey said: ‘Since I was at Lancing they have invented new countries like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and Poland is quite a different size and shape.’ One of those who laughed the loudest was Neville Chamberlain, later to be convicted of culpable ignorance by referring to the Czechs, during Munich, as living in ‘a faraway country, of which we know nothing’.
Personally I love drawing maps, and illustrating them with dragons and mermaids. Dumped on a desert island, I would choose an atlas as my extra book. I have a wide selection here in my library, including the Barraclough historical atlas, the massive Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary Architecture, and the recent The Art Atlas (Laurence King Publishing), the last of which I consult constantly. But my big Times atlas is the 1993 edition. I must get a new one: so much has changed in 15 years. The magic of a good atlas is that you can scan its pages and conjure up in your mind images of distant landscapes. Mere travel will not do this: a knowledge of history is more vital. It is one of the most dangerous myths that travel broadens the mind. If the mind is not broad in the first place, mere tripping and junketing will make no difference. No group travels more today than the 15to 25-year-olds, and none are more ignorant of geography. I heard recently of a couple who went to the Seychelles believing them to be in the West Indies. Moreover, they returned, after a fortnight in a beach hotel, none the wiser.
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