AS readers know, I like to hear suggestions about people and topics, episodes and characters from Scottish history that I should cover here in this column. So I was delighted to receive the following email from Kenny Munro, chair of the Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Trust. He wrote: “Like many, as an artist, I have been fascinated by Geddes, his philosophy and his humane approach to ecology, environmental studies, improving society and social reform.

“I installed a memorial to Geddes in Perth in 1998 and Kenny Hunter made a bronze portrait of him in 2012 which is at the back of the Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh. However, I hope you’ll agree

that the legacy that Geddes has left us is now being applied in many areas of life: His mottos – ‘By Leaves We Live’, ‘By Creating We Think’ and ‘Think Global Act Local’ still ring true as mantras for the 21st century.

“Can I list just a few topics which are noteworthy: Two books will be launched around March, In Search of Patrick Geddes by Walter Stephen published by Luath Press, and a scholarly publication by Murdo MacDonald and Edinburgh University Press. Professor Bashabi Fraser has also published several works connecting Geddes to the Indian sage Rabindranath Tagore.

“Greta Thunberg was presented with the Geddes Environmental Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographic Society in 2019.

“An international Geddes Conference was held at the Indian city of Indore in September commemorating the remarkable story of Geddes’s civic survey there in 1919. A national lecture tour followed. A colourful essay is written about that Indore event and entitled ‘Maharaja for Day’.

“A Geddes Centre opened just a few year ago at Riddles Court, Edinburgh. His granddaughter Marion Geddes has re invigorated The Scots College and Gardens which was Geddes’ last project – an international centre in response to the carnage of the First World War.

“Strathclyde University has a very significant archive of Geddes papers as does Edinburgh University.

“Back in 2004 there was a big 150th anniversary celebrating Geddes, partly in his birth town of Ballater, with cultural exchanges with India; during which I brought a Bengal boat and two rickshaws back from Kolkata.

“In fairness,I must conclude by mentioning a drama documentary film about Geddes made by distinguished BBC filmmaker James Allan Wilson entitled: ‘An Eye for the Future’ and broadcast on BBC2 in 1970 –2020 is the 50th anniversary of that documentary. I wrote an essay about Jim which is on the Saltire Society website. Sadly Jim Wilson died in 2018 but his tremendous legacy includes at least twenty documentary films held

at the BBC. A longer-term objective is to see these films digitally restored and made available for public viewing via the National Library of Scotland’s moving image archive department.

“We at the Geddes Trust have been lobbying BBC to consider a timely new documentary on Geddes and the value of restoring the original 1970 film which they still have.

“Well Hamish, I apologise for wandering off the specific subject of Sir Patrick Geddes but hope you will find my suggestion of some interest.”

INDEED I do, and thank you for your most welcome note, Kenny. I have been planning to write about Geddes for some time, and you have inspired me to do so now, and I totally endorse your call for the BBC to act.

I consider Geddes to be such a towering figure that I going to devote my column this week and next to the amazing life, extraordinary career and quite astonishing achievements of one of Scotland’s greatest sons who, in my far from humble opinion, still does not receive the credit he should get here in his native land.

Like everyone who studies Geddes, I am indebted to such writers as Walter Stephen, Kenneth MacLean, Professor Sir Robert Grieve and his greatest early champion, the American Lewis Mumford, for their biographical works – any errors in what follows are all mine and not theirs.

Geddes was, quite simply, one of the most influential Scotsmen of his or any other era, a designer who literally made his mark on Edinburgh and Scotland, a pioneering planner who was responsible for the design of not one but two other capital cities, and a teacher who was a leader of, and championed, a range of sciences from botany to sociology and town planning. And all of this without ever taking a university degree – he was known for his distaste for examinations as he believed they stifled education. Oh, and he was a dramatist and a historian as well – a true lad o’ pairts, and as we shall see, this is a Scotsman of yore who speaks to the world now, and how.

For instance, in this week of Brexit, how about this observation he once wrote: “To avoid the Scylla of paleotechnic peace and the Charybdis of War, the leaders of the coming polity will steer a bold course for Eutopia [sic].

“They will aim at the development of every region, its folk, work and place, in terms of the genius loci, of every nation, according to the best of its tradition and spirit; but in such wise that each region, each nation, makes its unique contribution to the rich pattern of our ever-evolving Western civilisation.”

How we wish for a Patrick Geddes now as we see “Eutopia” become dystopia …

Geddes did go to university – Edinburgh, for a whole week. Yet apart from his practical studies at a London college his lifelong main education came at his own hands – he was a true autodidact.

Patrick Geddes was born in Ballater in Aberdeenshire on October 2, 1854, the fifth child and youngest son of a Gaelic-speaking soldier, Alexander Geddes, and his wife Janet, nee Stevenson. He was christened Peter but was always known as Patrick. Two of his siblings did not survive childhood, tragedies which would influence Geddes’s views in later life.

The family were not well off as Alexander was no regular officer but had risen from the ranks to become a sergeant major and quartermaster. From the age of three, Patrick was raised in the Kinnoull Hill area of Perthshire and was educated at Perth Academy from the age of nine.

This period of his life greatly formed the character of Geddes and gave him his lifelong appreciation of green and open spaces. He would go for long walks with his father, learning about the landscape, the flora and fauna, and even getting the basics of arithmetic and mathematics when his father systematically planted a potato crop.

Geddes would later write something that shows how much he was influenced by his early roamings in the Scottish countryside: “How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves.”

No wonder many people think of him as a founding father of the science of ecology and “green” theories.

UNUSUALLY for that Victorian time, both his parents encouraged his creativity and scientific studies and his father even built the teenaged Patrick a shed for his experiments.

On leaving school, Geddes started an apprenticeship in the National Bank of Scotland’s branch in Perth, but he never completed it and probably never intended to do so. Instead he would spend his time in cabinet-making and studying under a tutor, James Geikie, who would go on to become one of Scotland’s greatest geologists.

In 1874, Geddes matriculated at Edinburgh University but within a week he had concluded that the teaching methods were not for him and left to study at the Royal School of Mines, later part of Imperial College London.

The attraction there for Geddes was the chance to study under Thomas Huxley, the radical thinker, anatomist and champion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution who in 1869 had coined the term “agnosticism” – not in a religious context, but as a description of scientific method based on reason.

While working as a demonstrator in the physiology department of the University of London, Geddes met Darwin who was then in his 70s. It is recorded that both men were impressed by each other.

Huxley became Geddes’s mentor, and although they did not always agree, the largely self-taught Englishman recognised the qualities of the young Scot and urged him to travel to France where the latest theories on science were encouraged by the Sorbonne University in particular. His time in France gave Geddes a lifelong love of the country and also greatly influenced his personal philosophy as he came under the tutelage of social thinkers such as Frederic Le Play and Prince Kropotkin.

In 1878, while researching flatworms at Sorbonne’s marine station at Roscoff in Brittany, Geddes made the first of his breakthrough observations, studying the plant substance chlorophyll found in tiny invertebrates. His findings were reported in the 1879 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and suddenly the name of Geddes was being spoken in high places.

Disaster struck shortly afterwards when Geddes went to Mexico to study and collect biological specimens. Exposure to strong sunlight permanently damaged his eyesight and he was never again able to spend long periods of time using a microscope. It may also be why he was never too fond of writing down every thought and speech.

Typically, he turned his convalescence to his advantage, devising the first of his “thinking machines” which were visual aids to collecting and presenting facts and ideas in line with the philosopher Auguste Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences.

In 1880, Geddes returned to Edinburgh. The university forgave its erstwhile short-term student and employed him as a lecturer in zoology and as an assistant in practical botany based at the Royal Botanic Garden.

Geddes once wrote: “A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.”

Arguably, nowhere in the world is that more true than in Edinburgh. Almost from the start of his time in the capital, Geddes began to question what he could see around him – the squalor, frankly, of the Old Town sitting cheek by jowl with the rich and expansive New Town.

He made his home in the latter, meeting and marrying Anna Morton, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and setting up home in Princes Street. Even before they met, Geddes was formulating his theories about how a person’s environment can shape their thinking and how the “city” and “community” interact.

He would later express it thus: “Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power.”

By the 1880s, most of Edinburgh’s better-off citizens had moved to the New Town or the suburbs leaving the historic Old Town full of poor housing and shockingly bad sanitation.

Geddes then did something revolutionary – he moved his family to the Old Town. Read what he did to change the face of Edinburgh in Part Two next week.