My PhD supervisor, Dick Grove, who has died aged 99, was a physical geographer whose research on long-term environmental change in Africa helped shape understanding of past climate change. At the time of his death Dick was the most senior of the Royal Geographical Society’s 16,000 fellows.
His research between the 1950s and 70s on field expeditions in the Sahel, Tibesti, the Kalahari and the Ethiopian Rift established the scale of climate change on African desert margins. He and his students made cutting-edge use of air photographs to map ancient sand seas around the Sahara and the Kalahari, showing massive desert expansion at the height of the last glaciation (20,000 to 12,500 years ago). Surveys of the fossil shorelines of ancient lakes showed the “greening” of the Sahara in the early Holocene (10,000 to 5,000 years ago).
In the early 70s, when international attention was focused on the African Sahel by the tragedy of drought and famine, Dick’s research found a new and important policy audience, challenging glib Malthusian arguments about population growth and “desertification”. From the late 80s, Dick’s interests expanded to the environmental history of the Mediterranean, documenting the complex interplay between environment and peoples from the earliest times to the present.
Dick was born in Evesham, Worcestershire, to Christine (nee Hughes), a milliner, and Edwin Grove, a fruit and vegetable grower. In 1941, after attending Prince Henry’s grammar school in the market town, Dick went to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, to study geography. From 1942 to 1945 he was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving primarily in Air Training Command in Canada. He returned to Cambridge, finally graduating with a first-class degree in 1947.
He worked briefly for the Colonial Office in Nigeria on the problem of soil erosion, before returning to Cambridge as a demonstrator in the department of geography in 1949. He was appointed to a lectureship in 1954, and remained in Cambridge for the rest of his career, retiring as lecturer in 1982, although he continued as director of the Centre of African Studies in 1986. He was elected a fellow of Downing College in 1963, eventually serving as senior tutor and vice master.
Dick was a true geographer of very wide interests. He was a somewhat diffident lecturer, but a highly stimulating supervisor and a generous colleague. An acute and wry observer of landscapes and people, he had a profound influence on science and on those he worked with and taught.
He married Jean Clark, a Cambridge glaciologist, in 1954, and they had six children. Jean died in 2001 and their son Richard, a pioneering environmental historian, died in 2020. In 2009, Dick married Ann Round.
She survives him, as do his children Jane, Lucy, Bill, Alison and Jonathan, 15 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
