A FIFTY-YEARS RETROSPECT

Abstract

About this time an excellent Instructor in Surveying was appointed to the School of Military Engineering in the person of Major A. C. MacDonnell. He had served in India,—though not on the Survey of India,—and, being well acquainted with the excellent Indian frontier survey methods, resolved to introduce them into the course at Chatham. So he started using the system of computing latitudes and longitudes from trigonometrical data by Puissant's formulæ, in the form used by the Survey of India. But he had reckoned without his host, the higher authorities. His dreadful deed became known, and the matter was referred to three eminent officers for their opinion. The three officers were Sir Charles Wilson, Director of Military Education, Sir John Ardagh, Director of Military Intelligence, and Sir John Farquharson, Director-General of the Ordnance Survey; none of the three had had any personal acquaintance with the method in question, although two of them had directed the Ordnance Survey, and Sir Charles Wilson in the sixties had carried out some very interesting surveys in Palestine and Sinai. Well, these three distinguished officers solemnly condemned the Indian method as being unsuitable for use at Chatham, and MacDonnell had to revert to more primitive ways, which later on would have made impossible the conduct of a properly managed boundary commission or such surveys as that of the Orange Free State, Uganda, or Northern Sinai, or much of the technical work on the Western Front during the War. And that was that.