New biography pays tribute to ‘Yorkshire’s forgotten genius’

WE COULD all compile a list of great Yorkshire people. This would, of course, feature such diverse characters as explorer and navigator Captain James Cook, slavery abolitionist William Wilberforce, pioneer pilot Amy Johnson and novelist Emily Bronte. But somewhere on the list there would surely be room for the name of John Phillips.

“John who?” I hear you ask, which would not be surprising, as sadly one of the greatest contributors to scientific knowledge in Britain has disappeared into obscurity. Now, however, a biography has been published which seeks to right that considerable wrong.

In it the author, Colin Spearman, describes Phillips as “Yorkshire’s forgotten genius”. A big claim, but one which this affectionate portrait proves to be well justified.

As a brilliant cartographer and early geologist, Phillips became secretary of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society and first keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, at York. A trailblazer in studying the geology of the Yorkshire coast and the limestone landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, on the national stage, at 31 he was appointed the first secretary of the British Association for the

Advancement of Science when it was set up in York. He went on to make major contributions to astronomy and meteorology, becoming Professor of Geology at Oxford University, aged 53.

Born in 1800, by his early 20s Phillips was already giving well-attended lectures in York, Hull, Scarborough, Leeds and Manchester, following work he had carried out with his uncle, William “Strata” Smith. In 1817 they had surveyed the coast between Whitby and Scarborough, and over the following two years conducted a survey for a new canal linking the River Don and River Aire, revealing the extent of the great magnesium limestone belt which runs through central Yorkshire. The canal would not be built because of opposition from the rival Aire-Calder scheme. In 1829, his work as a pioneer palaeontologist led him to Bielsbeck Quarry, a marl pit outside Market Weighton on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds where some fossilised bones had been found. They were identified as elephant, rhinoceros, lion, reindeer, horse, wolf and bison and provided an extraordinary insight into the wildlife of so-called “pre-diluvial” (before the flood) Yorkshire. The lion’s jawbones are still in the Yorkshire Museum collection.

“There was another side to Phillips the pioneer walkerwriter and artist,” writes Speakman. “Having tramped thousands of miles in geological wanderings, he produced two of the best early guidebooks to Yorkshire, including one of the world’s first-ever railway guidebooks.”

The author believes Phillips’s lasting legacy was as the inspirational force behind Britain’s National Parks and outdoor movement in the 20th century, and as an interpreter of the Yorkshire landscape.

■ John Phillips - Yorkshire’s Traveller Through Time, by Colin Spearman, is priced at £15 and available from gritstonecoop. co.uk