Geology and industrial consultancy: Sir William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929) and the Kent Coalfield

Abstract

In Britain's development as the first industrial nation, the crucial importance of surveyors, mining engineers and geologists in prospecting and exploiting minerals and raw materials seems self-evident. Yet historians of geology have yet to take proper account of this aspect of geological science. Why is this ? One reason may simply be that the historiography of the subject itself is only relatively recent and many areas, besides industrial geology, await coverage. Or perhaps the nature of the source material is to blame. While scientific geologists filled museums with their fossils and notebooks, engaged in well-publicized controversies of the day, and wrote numerous books and articles, industrial geologists often left relatively few papers and sometimes never published their results. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the neglect of economic geology may be due to a rapidly developing bias in the subject itself. A recent study has highlighted the fact that the history of British geology, as seen through the eyes of historians at least, appears to comprise two different but closely interconnected strands. The first relates to natural history and looks toward the scientific or ‘pure’ front; the second connects with mining and the search for raw materials and is slanted towards the industrial or ‘applied’ horizon. In the same way that the scientific branch of geology brought fame and fortune in Victorian times, so the protagonists of ‘pure’ geology have so far been the chief interest of historians – so much so that the literature so far lacks detailed case studies of the careers and work of applied geologists.