Kenneth Mason

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Kenneth Mason MC (10 September 1887 - 1976) was a soldier and geographer notable as the first statutory professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His work surveying the Himalayas was rewarded in 1927 with a Royal Geographic Society Founder's Medal, the citation reading for his connection between the of surveys of India and Russian Turkestan, and his leadership of the Shakshagam Expedition.

Kenneth Mason was born at Sutton, Surrey, the son of a timber broker. As a schoolboy, it was a book, Heart of a Continent by Francis Younghusband, that was to inspire Mason to take up geography and to survey India and the Himalayas when he grew older.

Educated first at Cheltenham College and then the Royal Military Academy, Mason was commissioned in the Royal Engineers, helping to pioneer stereoscopic photographic techniques that were to revolutionise cartography using aerial and land-based photography.

In 1909, Mason sailed for Karachi and was posted to the Survey of India. 1910-1912 saw him engaged on triangulation in Kashmir, where he leared climbing techniques, taught himself to ski and went on to make a stereographic land survey.

In 1914, Mason's First World War service took him to France (the Neuve Chapelle sector and Loos) before, in January 1916, he landed at Basra, Persia. In action connected to the relief of Kut, he led a night march to the flank of the Dujailah redoubt, and was subsequently awarded the Military Cross. He entered Baghdad as Intelligence Officer with the Black Watch he was promoted to Brevet-Major and three times mentioned in dispatches. Following the Armistice he was the first to take cars across the Syrian desert.

He married Dorothy Helen Robinson in 1917 and had two sons and one daughter.

Mason returned to India after the first world war and began preparing for his most important scientific project, the exploration of the Shaksgam Valley, in 1926. At that time the only westerner to see the valley had been Younghusband. Now Mason began its survey using a photo-theodolite and stereographic techniques, laboriously collecting great quantities of data. His results were plotted in Switzerland using what, at the time, was the world's most advanced stereo plotting machine and were acclaimed as brilliantly successful, winning him the award of the 1927 Royal Geographic Society Founder's Medal.

He was elected as the first statutory professor of Geography at the University of Oxford in 1932, becoming a Fellow of Hertford College. His academic work linked to the Himalayan Journal which he had founded in 1929 addressed the challenge of naming ranges in the Karakoram region. He retired from his Chair in 1953 after a career that included directing the Oxford team of a group of academics involved in producing the British Naval Intelligence Division Geographical Handbook Series between 1941 and 1946. Together with a team in Cambridge, over fifty volumes were produced. These were devoted to the geography of countries engaged in military operations during the Second World War.

Outside professional interests, Mason was devoted to the Drapers' Company and became its Master in 1949.