Percy Crowe: a forgotten pioneer quantitative geographer and climatologist

Abstract

Climatology was for long a Cinderella specialism within physical geography. Many of its pioneers’ research was in descriptive climatology, set in the regionalism paradigm that dominated geography until the 1960s. As such, much of their work is now only rarely cited. One of those pioneers was Percy Crowe, who sought to change the nature of that descriptive work through a more robust and systematic application of statistical methods. Indeed, he was one of the very first geographers to apply standard statistical techniques and his applications – in three main projects – were the stimulus for one of his students who played a major role in promoting the use of statistical methods more widely in geography from the late 1950s on: Crowe’s influence was much wider and more influential than the citations to his climatological studies suggests. He was also prescient regarding the need for methodological/philosophical changes in human geography.

Quantitative methods II: How we moved on – Decades of change in philosophy, focus and methods

“…Two geographers long aware of those limitations had been disregarded. Crowe (1939: 11), the pioneer quantitative geographer (Johnston, 2019a), claimed geographers should seek ‘scientific synthesis…[in] statements of tendencies similar to those of the social sciences’. Jones (1956: 370) contested Martin’s (1951) claim that ‘laws must be formulated which could be applied in human geography with the same exclusiveness and rigor as scientific laws are applied in the physical world’, concluding thathowever broad the generalization, it might fail in strict application to any single phenomenon.…”

“…Two geographers long aware of those limitations had been disregarded. Crowe (1939: 11), the pioneer quantitative geographer (Johnston, 2019a), claimed geographers should seek 'scientific synthesis . .…”

A tribute to Ron Johnston (30 March 1941–29 May 2020)

“…It was inspired by the early work of the American 'space cadets' who were fomenting the so-called Quantitative Revolution across the Atlantic and North Sea (Freeman lent Ron papers presented at the 1960 IGU Lund meeting on urban geography, whose proceedings were edited by Knut Norborg and published in 1962 by CWK Gleerup). Encouraged by another notable Manchester geographer -the climatologist Percy Crowe, an early user of statistical methods (see Johnston, 2019) -Ron looked for spatial order in the often messy social landscape. It presaged a great deal more to come.…”