Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Tavener, Laurence Ellis

30.12.1903 - 1990

According to the 1911 Census return, Laurence’s father, Alfred Edward, was a ‘match, starch and grocery buyer’. At the time the family were living in Forest Gate, Essex, where Laurence had been born seven years earlier.

He was clearly a gifted academic securing an MA from Cambridge University and a PhD from the University of London. In 1926 he was appointed to the post of assistant lecturer in the Geography Department, University College of Southampton, later the University of Southampton, apparently only a year after graduating from Cambridge. In 1936 he married Wynifred Joan Sandwith at Bracknell Congregational Church. Laurence continued at the university for the whole of his working life, eventually retiring as a Reader in Geography, in 1969.

Sources

• Malcolm Wagstaff, Geography: The First Seventy - Five Years at the University of Southampton, 1996.

• The National Archives

• Hampshire County Council

• L. Dudley Stamp, Review of, The Common Lands of Hampshire, Nature, 1958, 181, 730.

• The Parkes Institute, Southampton University

Portrait

None found.

Contribution to county’s history

During the 1950s Laurence was commissioned by Hampshire County Council (HCC) to survey the common lands of Hampshire. This was in anticipation of the 1955 Royal Commission on Common Lands which led in 1965 to the Commons Registration Act, resulting in the ongoing register of such lands still maintained by Hampshire County Council. The previous national survey dated from 1873 and Cambridgeshire was the only county to have made a more recent survey.

Taverner’s Common Lands of Hampshire provides a wealth of information, historical as well as contemporary, which had not previously been collated, providing historians with insights not available from other sources. Before its publication HCC thought it only had 90 areas of common land, whereas Taverner located at least 133, plus many village greens of less than 5 acres, which were not listed. A review by the distinguished geographer. L. Dudley Stamp, noted that the commons were predominantly on the ‘coarse, hungry soils of the London and Hampshire Tertiary basins, and the western end of the Weald’. As might be expected for an academic, Tavener’s work contains many tables and maps to justify his conclusions.  It excludes the New Forest, the commons of which were already well known.  

Relevant published works

• The Port of Southampton, Economic Geography, Vol. 26 (4), October,1950


• The Common Lands of Hampshire (Hampshire County Council: Winchester, 1957)

Critical Comments

A positive criticism is that history can clearly benefit from other disciplines, of which geography offers some obvious overlaps.

Other Comments

In his history of the Geography Department, Wagstaff (see above) comments that ‘Tav ... had a long and lasting influence on its development’. Somewhat unflatteringly, however, he goes on to describe him as being ‘of average height, with a plump body and a head sitting on it apparently without a neck’. Moreover, he goes on to observe that, with all staff and students wearing gowns in the 1930s, Mr Tavener’s ‘gown hanging vertically from his arms ... [he] presented a much more imposing appearance than his lectures justified.’ This was, perhaps, overly critical given that he goes on to credit ‘Tav’ with obtaining ‘the library assembled by the Rev. James Parkes on Jewish-Gentile relationships for the University’, now part of The Parkes Institute, and (b) ‘the supervision of some of the first true research students in the Department’.

He was an evangelical Christian, which led him to take an interest in the Jewish world and to publish The Revival of Israel (1961, Hodder & Stoughton, London), a work recently reprinted (online entries at Amazon etc seem to have got the year of publication wrong, giving 1903).

Contributor

Roger Ottewill, and Barry Shurlock, 08 07 24

Key Words

Common lands, soil types, geography, Southampton, Jewish history

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