John Terence Coppock


John Terry Coppock CBE FBA FRSE 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. 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, Lecturer and Reader. In 1963-64 he also spent a year as visiting senior lecturer in the Department of Geography in the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.
Coppock was appointed as the first Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh in 1965. This professorship is named after Alan G. Ogilvie, a figure who was key to setting up the department. Coppock taught a range of courses in economic geography, rural planning, agricultural geography and the regional geography of Scotland. He also initiated the MSc Course in Geographical Information Systems, the first of its kind in the world. During which time he worked closely with the government advising them on issues of agriculture, tourism, census data and Scottish affairs - introducing a variety of cartography and geographic information systems. Through the International Geographical Union, he also advised the Canadian government.
Retirement from the Ogilvie Chair in 1986 was followed immediately by his appointment as Secretary and Treasurer of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, serving until his death in 2000. He also became Chairman of the Scottish Field Studies Council and played a major role in raising half a million pounds for a major development at the field centre at Kindrogan House in Perthshire which was appropriately named the Coppock Building in May 1995 when opened by The Princess Royal.
He died in Edinburgh on 28 June 2000.

Family

Coppock married Sheila Mary Burnett in 1953. She died in 1990.

Awards and honorary positions