Kenneth Mason (geographer)

Kenneth Mason MC (10 September 1887 – 2 June 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 surveys of India and Russian Turkestan, and his leadership of the Shaksgam Expedition.

Kenneth Mason was born at Sutton, Surrey, the son of timber broker Stanley Engledue Mason and his wife Ellen Martin Turner. 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, Woolwich, Mason was commissioned in the Royal Engineers. There, he helped 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 learned climbing techniques, taught himself to ski and went on to make a stereographic land survey.

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

Mason was devoted to the Drapers' Company and became its Master in 1949.

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