The Rum Sedges

The other day I was mulling over an internet paper by Willis Eschenbach on the temperature record at Darwin. The paper presented data that diverged significantly from the “official” view that Darwin’s temperature has skyrocketed in recent years as a result of global warming. On the contrary, the actual temperature data from the records of the Bureau of Meteorology show no upward or downward trend over the last century. The difference between the actual data and the alarming trend published by the government is perplexing to say the least, and I could not help but sniff the wind and wonder where the smoke was coming from. 

I am no climatologist so I will have to wait for an independent analysis of the Darwin situation before reaching a firm conclusion. Nevertheless, the issue triggered an intriguing memory. I went to my bookcase and ran my eye along the titles. There it was: a slim paperback I had bought in Elizabeth’s Secondhand Bookshop in Fremantle several years ago: A Rum Affair: A True Story of Botanical Fraud by Karl Sabbagh. I sat down and re-read it, finding to my pleasure that I could easily recapture the fascination of the first reading. Almost an entire Sunday slipped past.

The story centres on John Heslop Harrison, an eminent British botanist and academic in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Heslop Harrison was Professor of Botany at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an expert on the natural history of the Hebrides, including the island of Rum (the spelling of the name was changed to Rhum in Victorian times, for the sake of propriety, but is today more usually spelled Rum, which I prefer).

Heslop Harrison had a theory about the Hebrides, that windswept archipelago lying off the west coast of Scotland. He believed that they had escaped the last Ice Age. This was despite the understanding in wider scientific circles that glaciation had covered the entire British Isles, Europe and North America. Heslop Harrison’s theory could be proven, he maintained, by the discovery of species representative of the pre-Ice Age flora growing on Hebridean islands that were to be found nowhere else in Britain. Heslop Harrison found several such species on Rum, including the sensational discovery of a rare sedge, Carex bicolor, which he duly announced in a paper in the Journal of Botany, and a reed, Juncus capitatus, previously known only from the Channel Islands.

Many contemporary scientists were sceptical of Heslop Harrison’s theory, and suspicions grew about the validity of his ever-lengthening list of rare plant discoveries. Suspicion deepened when attempts by other botanists to find the plants were unsuccessful, and when it was pointed out that the rare species found by Heslop Harrison on Rum were growing on very different soils and in topographical situations quite different from those where they normally occurred.

Heslop Harrison also “discovered” species of water beetle (including Noterus slavicornis) in a Hebridean loch which had never been found in the British Isles before, and never were again. He discovered a rare butterfly, also never again collected in the area, to the puzzlement of British entomologists. This led to further rumours and whispers in scientific circles.

Eventually, just after the end of the Second World War, a searching investigation was undertaken, focusing on about a dozen of Heslop Harrison’s “suspect” reeds and sedges. The investigator was John Raven, a Cambridge classics don, skilful amateur botanist and son of a noted British botanist. Raven’s methods were not entirely honourable. For example, he tricked Heslop Harrison into letting him join one of his field excursions on Rum.

Honourable or not, Raven’s investigations were meticulous and his analytical skills impeccable. He concluded that the rare species found by Heslop Harrison did not occur on Rum. On the contrary, he believed that Heslop Harrison had raised them in his garden shed at Birtley, and then planted them on Rum, where they were dramatically discovered by Heslop Harrison (working alone) shortly afterwards. To this day no other botanist has been able to duplicate Heslop Harrison’s important finds.

It is also significant that none of Heslop Harrison’s original collections were properly labelled, curated and archived, so they cannot be studied in herbaria today. Professional botanists find this inexplicable. Heslop Harrison was a professional botanist, yet he failed to observe one of the fundamental aspects of botany: accurate data-basing of the information surrounding every specimen and its collection. It is part of the tradition of the science that every plant specimen included in a herbarium has a label that gives, as a minimum, the name of the collector, the date of collection and precise information on the location where the collection was made.

Notwithstanding, Heslop Harrison had supporters in the botanical and scientific establishment. The allegations of fraud against him were well known and often discussed in academic and botanical communities. Curiously, they never became public. The issue was not a cause celebre in the media, as perhaps it might have been today. Nor was Raven’s report ever published. It was simply “tabled” at Trinity College at Cambridge, where it languished in the archives for nearly half a century, before rediscovery by Karl Sabbagh (also a Fellow of Trinity College). The whole saga came to light after the publication of Sabbagh’s book and a number of newspaper articles derived from it. The book drew unfavourable comment from Heslop Harrison’s supporters, still influential in botanical circles as late as the 1990s, but subsequent disclosures from the British Natural History Museum have strongly supported both Raven’s and Sabbagh’s conclusions. Heslop Harrison died in 1967, a lonely and angry man, maintaining his innocence to the end.

I found Raven’s investigations and conclusions, and Sabbagh’s book, entirely convincing; I am in no doubt that fraud occurred. The most recent edition of the authoritative Sedges of the British Isles (quoted by Sabbagh) would seem to sum it up. After listing Carex glacialis, C. bicolor and C. capitata, all discovered by Heslop Harrison, under the heading of “Dubious Records”, the book goes on to say: 

The first two were recorded for Rhum … and the last mentioned species for S Uist in the outer Hebrides … as a single tuft. All have since disappeared from these localities and we consider them to have been planted. 

Sabbagh’s story has a number of intriguing themes, some of which find echoes in modern scientific controversies. First there is the botanical detective work by John Raven that led to the discovery of the fraud. Then there are the suggestions of collusion in the British academic-scientific establishment to ensure the issue was not publicised and would quietly die away, something that would never be possible today. Underlying all this is the interplay between passionate men and women of science, Heslop Harrison’s supporters and his critics, and the behind-the-scenes influence of the great university colleges at Cambridge and Oxford.

Not the least of many interesting aspects of the book is the island of Rum itself. It is one of the largest islands of the Inner Hebrides. Today it is a nature reserve and basically uninhabited, but in the eighteenth century it had a population of several hundred crofters and fishermen, each with their small leasehold lands or cottages, all owned by the laird. In the early 1800s, the island was purchased by a Lancashire industrialist who foreclosed on the crofters and fishermen and ejected them from the island. When his son inherited the island he built a castle on it, and then largely kept the place to himself and his family. Heslop Harrison was one of a tiny number of people made welcome. More than that, he came to treat Rum as his own private natural history museum. 

Heslop Harrison was a larger-than-life character, described by colleagues as forceful and opinionated. He attracted both friends and enemies. He was utterly intolerant of criticism, and fell out badly with colleagues who he thought should have been backing him rather than siding with the opposition.

He was not just a prominent botanist and field naturalist. He was also an outspoken supporter and promoter of Lamarckism (the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited, as opposed to the Darwinian theory that evolution is a matter of chance mutation and survival of the fittest). He even carried out and published a research project which demonstrated, to the great satisfaction of the Lamarckists, that white moths which became covered with soot and ingested aerial pollution in England’s industrial north, produced dark-winged offspring as a result. This research has since been roundly rejected on the grounds of poor methodology and lack of statistical control, but it needs to be remembered that Lamarckism was popular among scientists of the day (and still has its modern promoters), this being before the genetic mechanisms underpinning Darwin’s theory were known. However, given what we now know about his botanical research, it is hard to escape the suspicion that Heslop Harrison manipulated his moth research to get the results he wanted.

The aspect of the story I find most puzzling is the lack of any satisfactory motivation for Heslop Harrison to attempt such a blatant fraud. Apart from anything else, botany is a discipline in which such an attempt would be almost impossible to sustain, given the long traditions of specimen collection, archiving, data-basing, repeat survey and ecological and taxonomic research. As Sabbagh points out, and statements from many of Heslop Harrison’s contemporaries confirm, Heslop Harrison was powerfully wedded to theories and concepts, including Lamarckism and the survival of pre-Ice Age flora on the Hebrides. Perhaps he painted himself into a corner over this last controversy, and the more scientifically isolated he became on it, the greater was his need to ensure something concrete was discovered for confirmation. Perhaps also, there is no need to look further than to the flaws and human frailties to which all flesh is heir.

The implication that the scientific and academic establishment were happy to sweep Heslop Harrison under the carpet, as it were, and let the accusations of fraud fade quietly away, is also disturbing. There is an old saying, “The truth will out”. Every scientist and academic must know and respect this.

Towards the end of his book, Karl Sabbagh digresses to discuss other notable examples of scientific fraud during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All of them filled me with unease. Eventually my thoughts turned back to the puzzle of the divergent temperature records for Darwin, and to questions of scientific integrity and to the trust we put in our scientists and the scientific process. It will be intriguing indeed to see where the saga of the Darwin temperature record ends. Not, one hopes (for the sake of the Bureau of Meteorology), in a book by Karl Sabbagh. 

Roger Underwood is the author of A Botanical Journey: The Story of the Western Australian Herbarium, published by the WA Department of Environment and Conservation in 2011. He wrote on Ion Idriess in the September issue.