John Terence Coppock

John Terry Coppock CBE FBA FRSE (2 June 1921 – 28 June 2000) was a British geographer who was the Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography at University of Edinburgh from 1966 to 1986 and Secretary and Treasurer of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland from 1986 to 2000. He was a pioneer in three areas of scholarship – agricultural geography, land-use management and computer applications.

Early life and war years Coppock was born in Crieff in Perthshire the son of Arthur Coppock and Valerie Margaret Phillips.

The family moved to Wales and he was educated at Penarth County School. He left school at 17 in 1938 and became a civil servant in the Lord Chancellor's Department. Shortly afterwards he joined a territorial battalion of the Welsh Regiment, went to camp in August 1939, and did not return to civil life for over seven years. He spent the first two and a half years of military service in various parts of the UK including Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the next four and a half in various parts of the Middle East which he reached via Cape Town and Aden. He returned to the Civil Service in 1946 and rapidly became in turn an executive officer in the Ministry of Works and an officer of Customs and Excise (his pre-War ambition). A year later, in 1949, he left to accept a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where within two years he was awarded first class in both Parts I and II of the Geographical Tripos.

Career and later life After a year as a research student in Cambridge, reading widely and continuing his practice of sampling senior undergraduate courses in other disciplines, he was appointed to the staff of the Geography Department of University College London, where he remained for fifteen years, as Assistant Lecturer (1950–52), Lecturer (1952–64) and Reader (1964–65). In 1963-64 he also spent a year as visiting senior lecturer in the Department of Geography in the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.

He died in Edinburgh on 28 June 2000.

Family

Coppock married Sheila Mary Burnett in 1953. She died in 1990. Elected FRSE in 1976 and served on Council from 1979 to 1982. Awarded the 1985 Victoria Medal from the Royal Geographical Society. President of the Institute of British Geographers Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society CBE in 1987 for services to geography. Honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1999.

Principal publications Source: Recreation in the countryside: a spatial analysis, 1975 An agricultural geography of Great Britain, 1971 An agricultural atlas of England and Wales, 1964 Greater London, 1964 (as editor, with Hugh C Prince) Information technology and scholarship: applications in the humanities and social sciences, 1999