Blood of the Isles (9 page)

Even the name, Spanish for ‘little mule’, recalls the sterile hybrid of horse and donkey. Knox continues:

Races, in this exposition, do not hybridize and any unnatural mixing produces only enfeebled offspring whose progeny are doomed to extinction. Though the nineteenth century was dominated by the extreme views of people like Robert Knox, who believed in the sanctity and purity of racial groups – with Saxons at the top of the rankings, of course – there were a few lone voices raised against the predominant dogma. One of these was Luke Owen Pike, a Lincoln’s Inn barrister. His well-argued, and witty, riposte to the Teutomaniacs like Knox was to point out that it was extremely unlikely, even if the entire population of Jutes, Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain, that they could have exterminated
all
the Britons, with their centuries of experience of Roman military tactics. Even if they had managed to kill all the men, they would not have killed all the women.

Pike not only rejected the concept of the immiscibility of races, he argued for the creation of a hybrid racial mixture in which the indigenous component would usually predominate.

Although the ranting racist diatribes of Robert Knox, the moderation of Luke Owen Pike, even the commentaries of Matthew Arnold, were the expression of strongly held opinions, none of them had a solid basis of factual evidence. While the fierce argument was raging about whether races were fixed and immiscible or could happily and successfully interbreed and blend, a few people did begin to gather systematic scientific observations to inform the debate.

The first to do so on a significant scale was John Beddoe, a doctor who spent the best part of his life travelling to every part of Britain recording the physical appearance of the natives, both alive and dead. He was a classic case of the Victorian amateur scholar, amassing a huge amount of data which, in sheer bulk alone, has never been surpassed. John Beddoe was born in 1826 in rural Worcestershire, the second of eight children. Though his family was comfortably well off, John was a sickly child and missed most of his formal education. Nevertheless he managed, through
family connections, to get a place at University College London to study medicine. He eventually graduated, not in London but in Edinburgh, and after a spell in the Crimea set himself up in Bristol. Building up his medical practice in the fashionable quarter of Clifton was difficult, especially as he had to compete for patients with a resident pool of extremely competent and well-established doctors. With time on his hands, he began to indulge his passion for observing and recording people’s appearance.

First, he had to devise a reliable classification for the features he decided to concentrate on – the colour of the hair and the colour of the eyes – exactly those features we use ourselves in the first description of a stranger. He also wanted to be quite sure that he was looking at permanent features, not something that would change from year to year. For this reason he rejected skin colour, perhaps an obvious one to include, because he was worried that it might be influenced by exposure to sunlight, which of course it is. He also decided against recording skin colour because there was a theory doing the rounds that daily exposure to smoke and grime made city-dwellers darker and darker as they got older, while their rural contemporaries remained fresh-faced and pale in comparison.

John Beddoe was determined to break free from the generalizations that were so commonplace, and still are, about regional differences in appearance. He disregarded the clichés of short, dark Welshmen or muscular, redheaded Highlanders and set out to replace these prejudiced impressions with real observations. He frequently discovered that what had been written about a place and its
people was completely at odds with reality, even when the source of the misleading reports would normally have given no cause for doubt. For example, the Church of Scotland minister in Wick, a town at the north-east tip of Scotland not far from John O’Groats, was obliged to compile a statistical account of his parishioners, including their overall appearance. The minister described his flock as ‘having for the most part dark brown or black hair, and dark complexions, remarkably few having red or yellow hair’. But when Beddoe arrived, he found the complete opposite. Among more than 300 individuals whose appearance he recorded, blonds and redheads were in the majority.

How did Beddoe make his observations? You can imagine how this might get very complicated – are those eyes green or hazel? Is that hair light brunette or dark blond? But Beddoe needed something much simpler, and easy to record – we will see why in a moment – and he spent several months refining his system. He decided to create just three categories of eye colour and five for hair. For eyes they were Class 1 light, Class 2 intermediate or neutral and Class 3 dark. In the light category, Class 1, were included all the blue eyes plus bluish grey, light grey and very light green. In Class 3 he put black and deep brown eyes. Class 2 included most shades of green and hazel, very light brown and very dark grey. It is not a particularly refined system, but it succeeds in its simplicity. I’ve tried it and I can almost always put someone’s eye colour into one of the three categories at a glance without any difficulty.

When it comes to hair, though, it is harder. Most of my women friends over the age of forty probably colour their hair. Actually several have forgotten what their original hair colour was, even growing their hair out for a few weeks to be reminded, before going straight back to the hairdresser when they find out. This is nothing new and Beddoe was well aware of artificial hair colouring and its changing fashion, even in the nineteenth century. ‘When I began work in England,’ he wrote, ‘dark hair was in fashion among the women, and light and reddish lines were dulled by greasy unguents. In later years, fair hair has been more in fashion, and golden shades, sometimes unknown to nature, are produced by art.’

In Beddoe’s time, these artificial hair colours were far more confined to the wealthy than they are now. Beddoe was much more interested in the ‘ordinary folk’ than the ‘upper classes’, as he called them, as they were, in his opinion, ‘more migratory and more often mixed in blood’. He eventually settled on five classes of hair colour: R for red and shades of auburn which were nearer red than brown; F for fair, including blond and very light brown hair, along with pale auburn; B included all the other shades of mid-brown; D was reserved for very dark brown; and N for the few cases of jet-black hair which he encountered.

Beddoe developed a routine. He arrived at a location and walked casually around looking at everyone who passed within 3 yards. In the palm of his left hand he held a small card divided by lines into columns and rows. In his right hand he concealed a pencil and, as people passed by, he put
a tick in the appropriate square on the card. As one card filled up he replaced it, then at the end of each day worked out a simple numerical score for that locality. He called this score the ‘Index of Nigrescence’, which he calculated by adding the number of dark-brown (class D) scores to twice the number of jet-black (N) then subtracting the fair (F) and red (R). The ubiquitous mid-browns (B) were omitted from the calculation. He explains why he doubled the influence of the jet-blacks in the formula. It was to ‘give the proper value to the greater tendency to melanosity shown thereby’. That sounds rather arbitrary to me, but the jet-blacks were so rare it didn’t make a lot of difference. The simple equation for each place was:

Beddoe was not under any illusion that colour of hair and eyes were excessively important features, but they did have two persuasive advantages from a practical point of view. Firstly there was no shortage of material – everyone had eyes and most had hair. The other crucial point was that there was no need to ask the subject’s permission. As we shall see, Beddoe was also fascinated by the shape of people’s heads, but these observations were not so straightforward. Although everyone had a head, so again there was no shortage of material, to get any sort of shape measurement he did need the subject’s acquiescence, something that was unnecessary for recording hair and eye colour.

Beddoe’s medical practice in Bristol slowly improved, and he did at last succeed in getting a hospital position, the equivalent of a modern-day consultant, at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. Even though this increased his workload considerably, he still found time for his travels, card and pencil in hand, to every part of the Isles. He did not restrict himself to mainland Britain, but went often to Ireland, recording four expeditions between 1860 and 1870. By now he was a well-connected physician and his excursions were rarely solitary. On his first visit to Ireland, for example, he was accompanied at various times by a Scottish archaeologist, an expert on Irish criminology, an Irish antiquarian and a Catholic priest who acted as interpreter when they needed one in the Gaelic-speaking west. The intrepid wanderers were entertained wherever they went. In Dublin they met the leading Irish physician Sir William Wilde, ‘father of the unhappy Oscar’, as Beddoe describes him, and an enthusiastic amateur anthropologist, who, like Beddoe, was much taken with the contemporary craze for phrenology. By this time, Beddoe was making measurements of skull shapes when he could. As we saw, this needed the acquiescence of the subject, something he obtained by the following trick.

This was only a mild subterfuge compared to what happened next. Such was their enthusiasm for comparative anatomy that Beddoe and his companions turned into grave-robbers. ‘The acquisition of skulls also had its difficulties,’ he wrote. ‘These relics lay about in old and deserted burial grounds, apparently quite uncared for, but their open abstraction would have aroused bitter feeling, and perhaps active opposition.’

To conceal what he was doing on these occasions, Beddoe wore a shooting jacket and, while his companions diverted the attention of any onlookers, he stuffed the skulls into large pockets sewn into the lining. These skulls eventually found their way to the museum of the College of Surgeons in London, where they remain to this day.

A professor from Galway developed an even more extravagant method for anatomical larceny. He always went hunting for skulls accompanied by his wife, who, in the fashion of the times, wore a wide crinoline skirt. When they spotted a skull, she stood nearby while the professor knelt down and quickly transferred the contraband to specially constructed pockets beneath the folds of his wife’s voluminous skirt.

However, Beddoe’s tours were not mere leisurely excursions between one literary salon and another, punctuated by a bit of grave-robbing. He wanted to get everywhere,
driven by his passion not to miss a single opportunity to observe, to measure or even to steal. For example, to reach the Aran Islands in Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland they were rowed over ten miles of rough sea in a small skiff. Frightened and seasick, the party arrived at Inishmore, the largest of the islands, to find they had to sleep on beds of straw. They spent two days sketching the buildings and tabulating the remote population, and were even able to ‘annex’ a couple of skulls ‘of great but unknown antiquity’ from an old cemetery.

Though Beddoe’s passion for collecting skulls drove him to subterfuge and theft, he did at least confine his enthusiasm to the long dead. Not so his companion, Barnard Davis, who often visited Beddoe in his Bristol practice on the look-out for interesting specimens among his friend’s still-living patients. On one visit to the Infirmary, Davis was introduced to a Bosnian sailor who was desperately ill after nearly drowning when his ship sank in the Bristol Channel. He had developed gangrene in his lungs and, in the days before antibiotics, was not expected to survive. Davis, convinced the man was not much longer for this world, was unsympathetically matter of fact.

‘Now,’ he said to Beddoe, ‘you know that man can’t recover. Do take care to secure his head for me when he dies, for I have no cranium from that neighbourhood.’

Yet Davis was to be disappointed for, as Beddoe recalls, the man ‘made a wonderful recovery, and carried his head back to the Adriatic on his own shoulders’.

Beddoe’s reputation began to spread after he entered, and won, the Welsh National Eisteddfod competition in
1867 for the best essay on the origins of the British nation. As a young doctor struggling to get his practice established, he needed money and the annual prize of 100 guineas was a definite attraction. The prize had not been awarded for the previous four years because the entries had failed sufficiently to impress the judges. To encourage a better field, the money was raised to 150 guineas. As soon as Beddoe heard this he rapidly wrote and submitted his essay. When, to his delight, he heard that he had won, he rushed up to the Eisteddfod at Ruthin in North Wales to collect the money. He got the 100 guineas but the extra 50 never materialized. Even forty years later, when he wrote his autobiography, this episode evidently still rankled.