The man set on charting a course

Martyn Baguley remembers William Mudge (1762-1820), one of the founding figures of the Ordnance Survey, on the 200th anniversary of his death

Two hundred years ago, on 16th April 1820, William Mudge died. Not a name that resonates like those of some of his contemporaries Byron, Wordsworth, Darwin – but one that should be better known.

Since 1518 map-making in Britain had been a minor responsibility of the ‘Board of Ordnance’ (from the French word ordonnance which relates to the organization of military affairs). Distinct from the army, it was an independent military body that operated from the Tower of London where a talented small band of military and civilian draughtsmen, some as young as eleven, busied themselves with the intricacies of military surveying, trigonometry and geometry, all fundamental for map-making.

Following the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, so that military maps could be made to ‘facilitate the subjugation of the clans’, a survey of Scotland using simple techniques had been done by William Roy, a young land surveyor. With a French invasion threatening, in 1756 Roy was part of a small team commissioned to prepare rough maps of England’s south coast. He consistently argued the case for a national survey of Britain, but his appeals fell on deaf ears.