FRIEND OF THE EARTH
Ross Clark hopes that Prince William's
enthusiasm for geography does not mean that he'll start lobbing bricks at McDonald's
IT is one final indignity, many will feel, which the monarchy can ill afford. First, the `Squidgy' tapes, then the heir to the throne announcing to the world that he would like to be reincarnated as a tampon. Divorces; speeding tickets; the Queen manhandled by the Australian prime minister; Diana, Princess of Wales's appearance on Panorama; Maori bottoms; It's a Royal Knockout; Prince Edward. And now this. But maybe we shouldn't over-react to the — so far unconfirmed — news that Prince William has found staring at Old Masters too much of a yawn, and is giving up history of art to study geography in his second year at St Andrews. After ail, changing to geography is something that I did at university, and look at me now: a freelance idler never sure where his next crust is coming from; ideal modern royalty, in other words. The signs were there, in any case, that Prince William was no art historian in the making. Can you imagine John Ruskin taking a year out from his studies to clean lavatories in Peru? I don't think so. From his travel bug to the zip-up fleece he wore for a photocall last year, it was quite clear that William was a closet geographer long before last week's leaked news.
There are some, at least, who will he relieved: William's security staff. An extra guard had to be drafted in after it was realised that many history-of-art lectures at St Andrews are given, with the aid of a slide projector, in a darkened room. Less happy will be all those Home Counties nymphets who signed up to read history of art in the hope that they might catch the royal eye. Perhaps they, too, will be boning up on their knowledge of glaciers in the next few months and rehearsing an explanation to their director of studies as to why their interests have suddenly switched from Raphael to river gravels.
Perhaps it will not worry Prince William, but he will inevitably be the subject of much sneering in senior combination rooms. 'I'm surprised that geography is a university subject,' was a typical response from fellow students when I decided to take it up. Many of a scholarly disposition harbour a lifelong grudge against the subject after being sent out in the rain by their secondary-school teachers to count the number of buses for a traffic survey. Geography lectures at Cambridge, where I read the subject, were widely assumed by outsiders to consist of a schoolrnasterly figure reciting the capital cities and the major industries of West Africa.
Disregarding the nymphets for a moment, William may find that he is going somewhat against the grain. When I first inquired about changing subject, I could tell by the way the geography tutor's eyebrows shot upwards that the subject was one that scholars more frequently changed out of than into. Every year, a horde of intellectually challenged public schoolboys in 13arbours would sit, yawning, through a year of glaciology before switching en masse to the land economy tripos and Sc) on into estate agency. They left behind a rump of slightly leftleaning, Greenpeace-supporting students in T-shirts and Outward Bound gear, more sporty than studious.
If the students leant to the Left, however, it was nothing like as far as some of the lecturers. Geographers have somewhat changed political colour since the days when they would gather at the Royal Geographical Society and discuss the conquest of the next flank of Africa. 'Locate the following colonies on the map, and describe their uses to the British Empire,' read one school exam question aimed at 11-year-olds in 1893. These days the question would more likely read, 'Juan is a six-year-old boy who works 18 hours a day stitching training shoes in Malaysia for twopence a month. Sam lives in a big house in Woking and has just been given a pair of £149.95 trainers for his sixth birthday. Imagine they write to each other as pen-friends.'
Geography is a schizophrenic subject split into its 'physical' and 'human' wings. Protocol may well demand that William stick to the former — land formations and harmless things like that — rather than the latter, which these days is largely about the evils of capitalism in the Third World. To judge by the school geography syllabus, which now includes a unit on globalisation and some very one-sided exercises related to the global footwear industry, it wouldn't come as too much of a shock if next May Day the second in line to the throne were to be caught in a Balaclava, lobbing a brick at McDonald's in Trafalgar Square. In fairness, however, one might just acknowledge that history of art has a pedigree of producing worse, in the shape of Anthony Blunt. In contrast to human geography, physical geography is relatively uncontroversial, although I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few geography dons out there who have come up with a Marxist line on sandstone deposits in the East African rift valleys.
The prince will have to face the scepticism of those who, familiar with university life, may accuse him of taking up geography only for the field trips. There is some basis for their suspicions: one does wonder at geographers and their field trips. I remember a week-long subsidised beano in the Loire Valley, drenched in red wine; the cost to us: £42.50 each. It was very noticeable how the field trips went only to nice places: the Algarve, Prague, the Alps. As far as I remember, the socio-economic geography of Scunthorpe went entirely unstudied. No doubt influenced by his wayward uncle, Prince William has at least chosen a subject for whose graduates the employment prospects are good; provided, that is, he doesn't mind a job such as chief policy officer (picnic sites) for the North East of England Regional Development Agency.
But maybe, in an age when the function of royalty has been reduced to opening the odd leisure centre and making the odd non-committal speech about how we all jolly well ought to be a tiny bit kinder to the planet, geography is the ideal training for a monarch. The subject's raison d'être effectively ended when the world's last frontiers were opened. Since then, its juicier bits have been nicked by scientists and economists, and those geographers who remain have been searching for a role. Nowadays, a remarkable number of its academics spend their days producing papers with titles such as 'Whither geography?' If Wills can master the art of self-justification which comes with being a modern geographer, the monarchy should be safe for decades to come.
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