Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  The Races of Britain was, and still is, a masterpiece of observation. The samples were not statistically controlled, his coverage of Britain and Ireland was not uniform, and he came in for criticism on these grounds – rather predictably from people who never themselves got into the field. But his work is best judged as a masterly piece of natural history and not a modern work embroidered with statistical treatments.

  So what of the results themselves, and what did they tell Beddoe, and us, about the origins of the people of the Isles? Taking his measurements of hair colour and applying the formula of the Index of Nigrescence across the whole of Britain and Ireland, the values range from 0 to 80. There is a very clear difference between the far east of Britain, by which I mean East Anglia and Lincolnshire, where the Index is lowest, and Ireland and Cornwall in the west, where it reaches its highest value, as it also does in the west of Scotland. The low values for East Anglia are also continued across Yorkshire and Cumbria and again in the far north of Scotland and the Hebrides. In all these regions the Index is about zero, which means, in practice, that there are as many blondes and redheads as there are brunettes. In other parts of England, and in Wales, the values for the Index are intermediate between the fairer east and the darker west.

  The Index is a measure of hair colour alone. When it comes to eye colour, the east–west gradient is reversed. Brown eyes are commonest in the east and south, where they exceed 40 per cent in East Anglia, but also in Cornwall. In Ireland, but also in Yorkshire and Cumbria, the same counties where red/fair hair were at their highest proportion, the number of people with blue or grey eyes rises to 75 per cent. In the far north of Scotland and the Hebrides, where fair hair was common, blue or grey eyes are even commoner than they are in Ireland. When hair and eye colour are combined to produce two basic types – what Beddoe calls ‘Mixed Blond’ and ‘Mixed Dark’ – with fair/red hair and blue/grey eyes or dark eyes and dark hair respectively – the patterns reflect the individual components to some extent. ‘Mixed Blonds’ outnumber their opposites in the north of Scotland, east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, while ‘Mixed Darks’ predominate in Wales, Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands, along with Wiltshire and Dorset. In Ireland, especially in the west, the Mixed Blond outnumber the Mixed Dark, leading to the conclusion, when coupled with the high Index of Nigrescence, that there must be a high proportion of dark-haired people with blue or grey eyes.

  Beddoe begins his conclusions in the far north. ‘The Shetlanders’, he says, ‘are unquestionably in the main of Norwegian descent, but include other race elements also.’ He draws the same conclusion for the inhabitants of Orkney and of Caithness in the far north of the Scottish mainland. He assumes the Norwegian element came with the Vikings. He also makes the strange observation that ‘The excessive use of tea, the one luxury of Shetland, probably only aggravates a constitutional tendency to nervous disorders which is more prevalent among the few dark than the many fair Shetlanders.’ This is the point to tell you that Beddoe describes himself as a young man ‘of fair complexion, with rather bright brown wavy hair, a yellow beard and blue eyes’. Clearly it was perfectly safe for him to drink the tea.

  As he works his way down Britain and across to Ireland, his observations combine preconception with perception in an extraordinarily personal record of his encounters. On Lewis, in the Western Isles, he observes the ‘large, fair and comely Norse race, said to exist pure in the district of Ness at the north end of the island’ and the ‘short, thick-set, snub-nosed, dark-haired, often dark-eyed race, probably aboriginal and possibly Finnish whose centre seems to be in Barvas’. Barvas is 12 miles north-west of the principal town, Stornoway.

  Beddoe is acutely aware of influences on the objectivity of his observations. In recording the Highlanders he says at once that ‘Most travellers, on entering the habitat of a race strange to them quickly form for themselves from the first person observed some notion of the prevailing physical type.’ Also he is aware that the longer he spends in a particular place, the more he can distinguish the differences between people: ‘I confess that the longer I have known the Scottish Highlanders the more diversity I have seen among them.’

  He also notices the presence of what he calls ‘a decidedly Iberian physiognomy, which makes one think . . . that the Picts were in part at least of that stock’. We will return to that particular element of the British mix later in the book. As he crosses the border into England he finds pockets of ‘a very blond race in Upper Teesdale’ and, further south, ‘the small, round-faced dark-haired men with almond-shaped eyes . . . in the vale of the Derwent and the level lands south of York’, which he ascribes to either an Iberian or Romano-British origin. There is a growing feeling, as Beddoe moves around the country, that he is forming the view that dark-eyed and dark-haired people are the remnants of the indigenous Britons that were later supplemented, or displaced, by the Saxons and the Vikings. Even as he travels to the West Country, the connection is there: ‘In the district about Dartmouth, where the Celtic language lingered for centuries, the Index of Nigrescence is at its maximum.’ Onward to Cornwall, where ‘The Cornish are generally dark in hair and often in eye: they are decidedly the darkest people in England.’

  When Beddoe moves into Wales, he finds in the central region ‘a prevalence of dark eyes beyond which I have met with in any other part of Britain’. The Snowdonians too are ‘a very dark race’, while around the coast eyes and hair are lighter. Across the Irish Sea, he records that ‘the frequency of light eyes and of dark hair, the two often combined, is the leading characteristic’.

  So much for the observations. What about the conclusions? There can be a tendency among collectors to leave interpretation of their results to others, mainly, I think, for fear of being proved wrong and thus undermining their whole legacy. This is an increasing trend, but even Beddoe was shy of absolute conclusions. None the less he ventured an explanation for the fair-haired people of England, suggesting that ‘the greater part of the blond population of modern Britain . . . derive their ancestry from the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians . . . and that in the greater part of England it amounts to something like half’. So there we have it. Beddoe explains the different colouring by a very substantial settlement from Saxon, Dane and Viking. The particularly light colouring in parts of Yorkshire, which we noted previously, he attributes to the impact of the Norman Conquest. However, Normans, as we will later discover, are really no more than recycled Vikings. On Ireland and the Gaelic west generally, Beddoe thought the people to be a blend of Iberians with ‘a harsh-featured, red-haired race’. The Celtic ‘type’, with dark hair and light eyes, he ventures to suggest, may only be an adaptation to the ‘moist climate and cloudy skies’ which they endure.

  Beddoe concludes the account of his lifetime’s work with this paragraph:

  But a truce with speculation! It has been the writer’s aim rather to lay a sure foundation whereon genius may ultimately build. If these remaining questions are worthy and capable of solution, they will be solved only by much patient labour and by the co-operation of anthropologists with antiquarians and philologists; so that so much of the blurred and defaced prehistoric inscription as is left in shadow by one light may be brought into prominence and illumination by another.

  It is as if John Beddoe, criss-crossing the country with card and pencil in hand, calipers and tape in his knapsack, had already anticipated the arrival of genetics. How he would have loved to be alive now.

  Beddoe and his contemporaries were the first to substitute observation for deduction and prejudice in exploring the origins of the people of the Isles. But, as he himself freely admits, there was still a strong subjective element in his observations of appearance. After all, our obsession with looks is ample proof of its emotional influence. It must have been almost impossible for Beddoe not to have nurtured some preconceived ideas, which, with the best will in the world, will have influenced his conclusions.

  The next stage in the scientific dissection of our origins r
emoved this subjective element completely. It began a long way from England, just as John Beddoe was enjoying a comfortable old age and the flood of honours which acknowledged the fruits of his lifetime’s passion. While he posed for the frontispiece of The Races of Britain on the doorstep of his comfortable mansion in the early years of the last century, a scientist in Vienna was mixing the blood of dogs.

  5

  THE BLOOD BANKERS

  If you have ever been a blood donor, or ever needed a transfusion, then you will know your blood group. You will know whether you belong to Group A, B, O or even AB. The reason for testing is to avoid a possibly fatal reaction if you were to be transfused with unmatched blood. You cannot tell, just by looking, what blood group a person belongs to. Unlike hair and eye colour or the shape of heads, blood groups are an invisible signal of genetic difference which can be discovered only by carrying out a specific test.

  Though the first blood transfusions were performed in Italy in 1628, so many people died that the procedure was banned. As a desperate measure to save women who were haemorrhaging after childbirth, there was a revival of transfusion in the mid-nineteenth century. Though some patients had no problems accepting a transfusion, a great many patients died from their reaction to the transfused blood. What caused the reaction was a mystery.

  The puzzle was eventually solved in 1900 by the Austrian physiologist Karl Landsteiner. After experimenting with mixing the blood of his laboratory dogs and observing their cross-reactions, he began his work on humans. He mixed the blood of several different individuals together and noticed that sometimes when he did this the red blood cells stuck together in a clump. This did not happen every time, but only with certain combinations of individuals. If this red-cell clumping was occurring in transfused patients, the blood would virtually solidify, which would explain the fatal reaction. It also explained why some patients tolerated a transfusion and showed no signs at all of a reaction.

  Landsteiner interpreted the results of his mixing experiments by suggesting that people belonged to one of the three blood groups, A, B or O. Two years later a fourth group, AB, was discovered. This also explained the erratic pattern of transfusion complications. Giving a group A patient a transfusion of blood from a group A donor was fine; tranfuse a group A patient with blood from a group B donor and there would be trouble. But so long as the donor and patient blood groups were the same there was no problem.

  It took a few years to discover the chemical basis for the different types of blood. The blood groups are the result of a simple genetic difference that occurs on the surface of red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen and give blood its colour. On the outside of each red blood cell sits a molecule that can occur in two very slightly different forms, A or B. People in group A have, unsurprisingly, version A on the surface of their red cells while in group B, this is replaced by version B. In the rare AB group the cells have both A and B versions on their outer surface. People in group O have neither A nor B versions of the molecule. Their red cells are, in a sense, bald.

  But these slight differences, which don’t affect the efficiency or the working of the cells at all, are not on their own sufficient to cause trouble on transfusion. The problem arises because, after a few months outside the womb, the blood serum begins to build up antibodies to the opposite version of the molecule on their own cells. People in group A build up anti-B antibodies in their serum. Again, this does not interfere with normal everyday life. People never make antibodies to their own blood cells, so people in group A don’t make anti-A antibodies, only anti-B. Since people with blood group AB have both versions on their red cells, they make neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies while, for the same reason, people in group O, whose cells have neither A nor B, are free to make both anti-A and anti-B antibodies and they do.

  The potentially fatal coagulation reaction occurs when the molecule meets its antibody. They stick to each other like glue and, what is worse, bind all the red cells into a sticky clump, the cause of all the trouble in mismatched transfusions. That’s why no one makes antibodies against their own cells. They would coagulate their own red blood cells and die.

  Under normal circumstances blood cells never encounter their own antibodies, but transfusion opens up that possibility. Transfuse a group A patient with blood from a group B donor and the antibodies will play havoc. Two things happen. The group B cells from the donor are coagulated by the anti-B in the patient’s serum and the anti-A in the donor’s serum clumps the patient’s own cells. Group O blood is really bad news because its serum contains both anti-A and anti-B which will attach the cells of any other blood group. However, as good methods were developed to separate the donor’s cells from the liquid serum, things got a bit easier. Group O cells, separated then rinsed free of antibody-containing serum, can be transfused into any patient, and if red cells are all you need that’s fine. Group O is the universal red-cell donor, as long as you wash them thoroughly first to remove the serum antibodies. If you need serum, not cells, then a transfusion of AB serum, which is free of antibodies, will suit any patient whatever their blood group.

  Once all this was understood, it was easy to see why so many transfusions failed. Without knowing in advance the blood group of donor and patient, blood transfusion was a really hit-and-miss affair. At least that was the case in Europe. Stories that the Incas of Peru had been successfully performing a form of blood transfusion without any adverse reactions were initially dismissed as nonsense. However, when it was discovered that practically all native South Americans were in blood group O, it no longer sounded so incredible. If Inca donor and Inca recipient were both in group O, as most were, then trouble-free transfusions are exactly what would be expected.

  Before the First World War, blood transfusions were a personal business. Willing friends and relatives of the patient would be tested to find someone in a compatible blood group. The donor would then come to a hospital, usually the operating theatre if surgery was the reason for the transfusion, and be bled right next to the patient, who then immediately received the fresh blood. The huge increase of blood transfusions needed to treat the battlefield casualties of the First World War led directly to the setting up of blood banks and the recruitment of donors along modern lines. Under the right conditions it was found that blood could be stored for several days without losing condition and there was no need to transfuse casualties immediately with absolutely fresh blood.

  Volunteer donors were bled at remote sites and the blood was despatched to the field hospitals at the Front to be matched and used as required. This soon became a large-scale activity and with it came the necessity for accurate records. Each army had its blood bank and they soon began to accumulate blood-group records from very large numbers of soldiers, each of whom was routinely tested in anticipation of being called either to give blood as a donor or to receive it as a casualty.

  Hanka Herschfeld, from the Royal Serbian Army, was the medical officer in charge of the Allied blood bank on the Balkan Front. Her husband, Ludwig, had been one of the scientists who, before the war, had helped to work out the way the different blood groups were inherited. With this background it is no surprise that they became curious about the accumulating results from the blood bank. The Allies drew their troops from all over the world and the Herschfelds noticed that the frequencies of the blood groups in the soldiers of different nationalities were often quite different from one another. Certainly they were still all either A, B, AB or O, but the proportions of each were different depending on where they were from. For example, far more Indian Army soldiers belonged to blood group B than did Europeans, who were, symmetrically, higher in the proportion of group A.

  The Herschfelds interpreted these differences in blood-group frequencies as having something to do with the distant origins of these different nationalities – and they were right. But in their now famous paper published in the leading medical journal the Lancet, just after the war, they went too far and divided the world into two separate r
aces. Race A came from northern Europe, while Race B began in India. The varying blood-group proportions seen in the soldiers of different nationalities were explained by the mixing as people flowed outwards from these ‘cradles of humanity’, as the Herschfelds called them, to populate the world.

  Their Lancet paper is a classic, and rightly so. It was the first of its kind and it opened up an entirely new field of research in anthropology. It follows on from the implicit assumption in John Beddoe’s research on physical appearance that inherited features can be used to explore the origins of people. Compared to the work on hair and eye colour, skull shape and so on, blood groups come one step closer to the fundamental controller of genetic inheritance, DNA. However, no one knew about the way DNA conducted the business of inheritance at the time the Herschfelds were at their peak, nor for several decades afterwards. Blood groups, though still an indirect manifestation of the underlying DNA, were a definite improvement on the earlier, subjective parameters which were all that were available to John Beddoe and his Victorian contemporaries.

  For one thing, it completely removed prejudice and human error from the equation. Blood groups are tightly defined and there is no overlap between them. No matter who does the tests, someone in group B will always be in group B. It doesn’t alter with age. There is no room for doubt, at least not about the accuracy of the observation. But there is also a noticeable shift in the tone of the reports. There are no longer any barely concealed inferences of racial character, like the free-spirited, fair-haired Saxon who will not be tied to the drudgery of an urban existence but would rather make his fortune overseas, or the morose, dark-haired Shetlander driven to despair by drinking too many cups of tea. All that nonsense vanishes, as it is very hard to get worked up about the comparative personal characteristics of one blood group over another. The American physician William Boyd, who extended the Herschfelds’ work around the globe, expressed this new sense when he wrote, ‘In certain parts of the world an individual will be considered inferior if he has, for instance, a dark skin but in no part of the world does possession of a blood group A gene exclude him from the best society.’ As a group A myself, that comes as something of a relief.