Chapter One
"A Curious Episode"
Every year King''s College, Cambridge,sends out its annual report to graduates of the college. Inan average year, the information it provides is usually of little interestto anyone on the outside, and hardly more riveting to thepeople it is produced for: how well the college did academically(usually very well) and sportingly (usually derisory); whichgraduates gave copies of their new books to the college library(Jan Pienkowski has donated another Meg and Mog book, for example);who landed a prestigious job (Her Majesty''s Ambassadorto Venezuela, Artistic Administrator of the DetroitSymphony Orchestra); news of college servants (Mrs. Hoye, bedmaker,retired after twenty-eight years'' service); and so on. Mostof the report is taken up with obituaries of fellows and graduates,which were written for many years by Patrick Wilkinson, aFellow of the college, who clearly treated the task as the opportunityto create a minor art form.
Although I am a voracious reader, I do not make a practiceof reading obituaries. But there was a unique quality about theobituaries of Kingsmen that meant I usually tried to find time tosit down and read them within a day or two of the arrival of theannual report. Not to put too fine a point on it, they containedsome good examples of donnish wit. For example:
In College, he organized nocturnal races, naked except for gowns, on the older Fellows'' tricycles.
His most vivid recollection of the College was to be of the Provost''s wife.
Baron Corvo ... braved travelling in his sidecar despite his insistence (before the days of traffic lights) that the faster you drove over the crossroads the smaller was the mathematical probability that you could have a collision.
After passing second MB he served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in destroyers, based on Malta, and remembered his ship shelling the British lines in Gallipoli, a mistake he attributed to his commanding officer''s breakfasting on port and pineapple chunks.
Meanwhile, he made heroic efforts of cycling to spend as much of his leave as possible with the choirboys of Canterbury Cathedral.
He developed blackwater fever and qualified for the Guinness Book of Records by achieving the highest known nonfatal temperature.
He radiated fun and he never lost the sense of mischief which had prompted him as a small boy to write `bugger'' with a pin on a burgeoning vegetable marrow in a vicarage garden.
Due to an inspired misprint in The Times obituary he was described as being `survived by many nephews and pieces''.
You probably get the idea.
In 1980, the usual brown envelope dropped on my doormat,and a few days later I sat down to browse among the obituaries.One of the dons who had died that year was a classics tutornamed John Raven. He had been senior tutor when I was an undergraduate.Truly the only thing I remembered about Ravenwas that, at a welcome sherry party for new students, he demonstratedan ability to move from a standing to a cross-legged positionin one smooth movement while keeping his torso entirelyvertical.
Raven''s obituary had its share of wit, but one particular paragraphintrigued me:
In 1954 he was at the centre of a curious episode. A reputable biologist had recorded finding, mainly on the Isle of Rhum, several plants not previously found in Britain. The botanical world was surprised, not to say suspicious. John went to investigate. His report was deposited in Trinity College Library and has never been published. John was indignant with editorial scientists who thought that `not having unpleasantness with botanical circles'' was more important than truth; but enough was made public to secure that the plants were quietly dropped from later editions of British flora. Kingsmen recalled the exposure of T. J. Wise by J. W. Carter of the year 1924.
For seventeen years this elliptical story stuck in my mind asworth exploring further, but I did nothing about it. Then, in1997, when I had a prominent botanist to lunch—the first suchoccasion in my life—I mentioned the story, and the botanist toldme, in a rather unforthcoming way, that the allegations of fraudinvestigated by Raven concerned a Professor John Heslop Harrisonof Newcastle University. Immediately, my interest intensified.Giving the alleged culprit a name put flesh on his bones andmade me want to know more about him.
I should say straightaway that it was not easy to discover whatthat name actually was. The professor had started as a simpleHarrison, with Heslop as a middle name, and at some point decidedto adopt the Heslop as part of his surname. But there weretimes when some people called him one name and others calledhim the other simultaneously.
My botanical friend''s slight reluctance to expand on the storyalso increased my interest. He was concerned that Heslop Harrisonhad a son who was still alive and had himself become a distinguishedbotanist. He gave the impression that the wholeprofession knew about the accusations but that, on the whole,this was never openly acknowledged.
We are none of us responsible for the sins of our fathers, andyet apparently, after this father''s death an entire generation ofbotanists had tiptoed around the accusation to avoid offendinghis son, who, I presumed, had played no part in the misdeeds, ifmisdeeds there had been.
So, where to start? Patrick Wilkinson was dead by now, but,as the obituary said, the "report was deposited in Trinity CollegeLibrary ..."
Oh no, it wasn''t. A librarian at Trinity acted on my phonecall, spent a couple of days investigating, then called back to saythat there was no trace of the report. "Have you tried King''s? Itmay be there," she said. I hadn''t, I did, and it was.
There was a certain amount of caginess on the part of theKing''s librarian. "You''ll have to get Mrs. Raven''s permission," hesaid. Mrs. Raven—Faith Raven, John Raven''s widow—turnedout to be a woman who eschewed small talk and spoke her mind.Having established that I was a Kingsman, and therefore presumably"a safe pair of hands," she agreed that I could read herhusband''s report.
In a light, airy room on the second floor of the library, severalpeople sat almost motionless at tables, turning the pages of rarebooks or carefully perusing sheets of manuscript. The quietscratch of a pencil—no pens allowed—would occasionally enliventhe silence. Researchers came here from all over the worldto consult the papers of E. M. Forster or John Maynard Keynes,or any of the hundreds of King''s fellows or graduates who haveleft material to the library. Already waiting on "my" table was afaded beige manila folder with "not to be looked at in the life ofJ. Heslop-Harrison (Jnr)" written on the outside. This interdictintroduced a cloak-and-dagger element into the business since,after all, I was looking at it "in the life of J. Heslop-Harrison(Jnr)," the son whom the nation''s botanists, it seemed, wanted toavoid offending.
The first things I came across in the folder were photocopiesof handwritten letters, along with carbons of typewritten letters.The carbons were from Raven, and the handwritten copies werereplies from Heslop Harrison. There were also miscellaneous lettersfrom Raven to others, including one dated 1960 to a friend.It had accompanied a copy of the report and said, "I''d really likeit kept under lock and key until both its hero and I are safely inour graves." (Calling Heslop Harrison the hero of the story, whenhe was anything but, turned out to be a typical example ofRavens gentle irony.)
The bulk of the folder was taken up by a foolscap envelope.In the envelope was John Raven''s report, in his small, neat handwriting.It began: "This report will inevitably be of considerablelength, and much of it will, I''m afraid, be rather dull ..."
When I finished reading, twelve thousand words later, I couldnot agree with Raven''s initial warning. It was not dull at all. Itwas a cool, reasoned, humorous, and explosive indictment ofchicanery of a high order against a man who, throughout mostof his career, was believed by nonbotanists to be a model ofacademic rectitude, rigorous research methodology, and distinguisheddiscoveries.
At the heart of the report was an accusation, made quite explicitly,that Professor John Heslop Harrison of Newcastle Universityhad, at some time in the 1940s, transported alien plantsto the Isle of Rum in the Inner Hebrides and planted them himselfin the soil. He had then, Raven alleged, "discovered" theplants and claimed that they were indigenous to the area andthat he was the first to come across them. The report dealt withone specific group of plants that had come under suspicion, butthe implication was that a whole series of other plants, describedby Heslop Harrison and his students in the Inner and the OuterHebrides over the previous decade or so, were also "planted" andtherefore could not be considered "discoveries," as had been reportedin academic papers by the professor and his students.
The Raven report presented a long list of Latin names of theplants in question—Epilobium lactiflorum, Erigeron uniflorus,Carex capitata, Carex bicolor, Lychnis alpina—and as I read it,images flashed before my eyes of tiny, brightly colored edelweiss,ornate, exotic orchids, primroses, pansies, and buttercups. It wassome time before I realized that the plants at issue, which formedthe focus of so much passion, were grasses, sedges, or rushes,mainly—to a nonbotanist unremarkable. One in particular, thesedge Carex bicolor, was both the most unusual of Heslop Harrison''sdiscoveries and one of the least flamboyant.
Over the next few weeks, I started to talk and correspondwith a number of people who might have been expected to knowof the events in the Raven report and the broader issue of fraudby Heslop Harrison. The botanists I began to consult were dividedinto three groups: those who said they knew little or nothingof what I was talking about; those who believed that HeslopHarrison had done what Raven said he did and was lucky to havegotten away with it for so long; and those who believed that hedid something a little underhanded or incompetent but that becausehe was such a good researcher most of the time, kind to hisstudents, and an autodidact who deserved admiration for whathe had achieved, his reputation should be left intact. None ofthose I spoke to, apart from close friends of Raven''s, had seen theRaven report or knew much about what was in it.
It was also difficult to find anything in print about the controversy.In the file was a reprint of a letter from John Raven toNature, the most authoritative British science journal, publishedin the issue of January 15, 1949, eighteen months after a tripRaven had made to Rum. How and why Raven had written thiswasn''t clear to me at the time. But to anyone not in the know, itwas far from providing evidence of a smoking gun, let alone ofthe hand that had fired it. The only reference to Heslop Harrisonwas where Raven said "... thanks to the kindness of ProfessorJ. W. Heslop Harrison ... I was enabled to see some at least of[Rum''s] most interesting plants." To someone who had readRaven''s report, this would seem on a par with thanking the embezzlerfor allowing you to see the forged check.
John William Heslop Harrison was professor of botany atNewcastle University at the time Raven wrote his report. He wasthen aged sixty-seven, and plants and insects had been a lifelongpassion. His mother had "the green fingers of a born gardener"and apparently was the only person to whom the young HeslopHarrison would entrust his moths when he was away fromhome. His first job was as a secondary-school teacher, and fortwelve years all his natural history work, leading to scientific papersin the specialist journals, was done outside his workinghours. It was that research, and the commitment that underlay it,that led to his first university post, as a researcher at the Universityof Durham.
A phrase that was often used later, much later, by people whospoke to me about Heslop Harrison was that he was "a miner''sson." Not quite accurate, but it has resonances that go far deeperthan a bald description of his father''s education. Such an expressionimplies the progression that underlies the American phrase"from log cabin to the White House," and I have the impressionthat it might be something Heslop Harrison said, or at leastthought, of himself: "from miner''s son to university professor."
There seemed to be three interwoven worlds that formed thebackground for the events of the story. There was, of course, thescientific world. This is a world in which hypotheses are formed,data gathered, and theories revised or consolidated, all in an environmentfrom which human emotions, motives, and frailtiesare meant to be excluded. Whatever had gone on, whatever HeslopHarrison had done, was confined to one part of this scientificworld: what is now called biogeography, which deals with howand why particular plants are found in particular places. HeslopHarrison and Raven played subtly different roles on this stagebecause, for all his botanical expertise, Raven, unlike HeslopHarrison, was not a professional scientist. His "day job" was as aclassics scholar and teacher, an authority on the Greek philosophers.All of his botanical activities were pursued as an amateur,but they were of a high order.
Then there was the academic world, split into the two spheresthat Heslop Harrison and Raven inhabited: "Oxbridge"—Oxfordand Cambridge—and what were known as the "redbrick" universities,in towns and cities throughout the rest of Britain. Oxfordand Cambridge have always attracted accusations of elitism.And John Earle Raven''s family background—son of the Masterof a Cambridge college, with academics, schoolmasters, and clericsin his background—meant that he would naturally go to aCambridge college. His undergraduate work at Trinity led effortlesslyto a first-class degree, followed by a fellowship in classics atthe same college, awarded in 1947. Heslop Harrison, on theother hand, was the son of an ironmaker in a small village in thenorth of England, and his education involved financial sacrificesby a family that wasn''t particularly well off. For him to contemplatea university education at all was quite a step. Emerging redbrickcolleges, such as King''s College, Newcastle, initially part ofthe University of Durham and later the nucleus of the Universityof Newcastle, lacked the history, tradition, and even attractivenessof the older universities yet felt themselves just as capable ofcompeting with the best in the land.
They were very different men socially, Raven and HeslopHarrison, but they were linked by the third world, the world ofnatural history, and specifically of plants. Although there was anoverlap with the scientific world, it soon became clear that manybotanists, like Raven, were not necessarily scientists, or not particularlyinterested in science, but were passionate about plants. Ifelt it was a passion I would have to get to understand, whetheror not I could share it, if I was to get much deeper into the storyof the Rum affair.
Continues...
Excerpted from A Rum Affairby Karl Sabbagh Copyright © 2001 by Karl Sabbagh. Excerpted by permission.
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