Agricultural History. King’s College 1950s Ag botany students.

 

Botanical memories of the Heslop Harrisons

By Clive Dalton (Kings 1952-56)

When we 1950s Agric students were doing our degrees at Kings College, Newcastle Upon Tyne, which was then a campus of the University of Durham, we didn’t know anything about John William Heslop Harrison, D.Sc. (1917), FRS. (1921), (1881-1967).

J.W. Heslop Harrison

In 1920, he left his post as Senior Science Master at Middlesbrough High School to take up a lectureship in Zoology at Armstrong College, Newcastle upon Tyne which later became King’s College of the University of Durham.

He rose to be Head of the Department of Botany in 1927 - a post which he held until his retirement in 1946.  After this he continued as Senior Research Fellow until 1949.  He died in 1967.

We saw nothing of him in our time, but he must have still been actively botanising and gardening from his home he built and named ‘Gavarnie’ in Ruskin Road, Birtley in County Durham.  Another old King’s graduate friend (Dr Pat Shannon) who left in 1947 remembers old Heslop-Harrison still giving them lectures.  Pat described him as ‘not being the most stimulating of lecturers’!   He seems to have been very active in botanising groups in Durham in his retirement where he was much revered for his knowledge and willingness to share it.

Mystery old lady

I remember in my second year (1953) regularly seeing a little old grey haired lady, always dressed in black, creeping around the Ag. Botany lab.   We never knew much about her – except that she was referred to in whispers as being famous for something to do with plant chromosomes.  She could have been a Heslop Harrison, but J.W. Heslop Harrison’s wife is recorded as having died in 1952.  Our old lady could have been her ghost!

The pure Botany Department 

Before we got into the Ag. Department, those of us who did the intermediate pure science year, did botany in the pure botany department where we met Dr W.A. (Willie) Clark.  He was a very precise Scot, and we had no problems with his botany lectures.

 He was memorable for his habit - common to many intellectual Scots, of inserting an 'aaay' between every 2-3 words in a sentence, while his brain was searching to achieve ultimate precision - which we used to mimic! For example:

'Today aaay, I would like to aaay, describe aaay, the role of the aaay, barrrl shaped parenchymatous cells.'  How could we ever forget that these cells were barrl (barrel) shaped even if we'd forgotten where they were?

His obituary in ‘The Vasculum’, Vol 69, No 1., page 1., April 1984, says that ‘he died at his home in Ryton on 19th November, 1983, aged 72. He took time to think things through and his conclusions, honestly made, were usually correct. He was generally a quiet, mild mannered man who had learned to shrug off trifling irritations, but at the same time he was not afraid to protest strongly against injustice. This he always did bluntly and never remotely underhand; with Bill Clark you knew exactly where you stood’. 

My italics for some words which make you wonder how he viewed his father-in-law’s professional antics.  Dolly died after a long illness just two months after William.

(A vasculum is a container used by botanists to keep field samples viable by maintaining a cool, humid environment. It is a typically flattened tin cylinder, carried horizontally on a strap to keep specimens flat, and lined with moistened cloth to keep them fresh.)

The Ag. Botany Department

Then when we got free of pure botany and started doing Ag. Botany, we met Mrs ‘Dolly’ Clark – who we then learned was the wife of Dr Willie Clark. 

We all loved Dolly and her lectures, because for one thing they had relevance to farming – even if her special interest was archaeology and ancient cereal grains (of which she was a noted authority).  We felt it was a bit over the top at times and not very important to our farming needs.

Ag. Entomology

We did Ag. Entomology, where we had Dr George Heslop Harrison, and he really was a problem.  He was tall with thinning hair, with the stance of a preying mantis.  He always wore a light blue, Harris Tweed sports jacket with all the four buttons done up. He had yellowing watery eyes and a chesty wheeze, which made him cough at regular intervals while talking.

It was tempting to feel sorry for him, but from his first lecture, he gave us the clear impression that he didn’t like any of us.  He probably soon picked up our vibes that the feelings were mutual!

He lectured almost with a vengeance, that learning things like the names of all the veins in a fly’s wings and other such trivia (in our view), was critical to our very survival in his class, and certainly was to pass his exams. 

To our general amazement, two in our class went on to do Honours in entomology with him, which we could never understand as they were good decent blokes!  They appeared to enjoy working in his Ag Zoology department, where he probably interacted with them with a bit more sympathy that with our whole mob. 

George’s widow (another Dollie) was librarian in the Ag. Department about 1967.  She was after our time so we have no memory of her.

The Rum affair book

A Rum Affair - a true Story of Botanical Fraud

By Karl Sabbagh 1999: Publ: Da Capo Press 2001

ISBN: 0-306-81060-3

Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux

When only recently, one of our group of old ex King’s friends (Malcolm Tait) alerted us to ‘The Rum Affair’ book by Karl Sabbagh, things started not only to astound us, but to explain a few things about the Heslop-Harrisons that we knew – and tickle our fancies about things that we didn’t know!  And even if we had known at the time, it would have been life threatening to even whisper them in the Department.

For example we didn’t know that Dolly and George were old Heslop Harrison’s offspring, and that Willie Clark was Heslop Harrison’s son-in-law, and that there was another son John (Jack) (see note below).

Looking back now it all seemed a bit incestuous, but then in those days this was not uncommon in universities, where students stayed on to be lecturers, and then worked their way up to occupy chairs and be heads of departments.  It was not often though that you found so many members of the same family in one Department.

My musings after reading the book

To see the significance of my points left hanging below, you’ll need to read the book, and then the critique by Chris Goldthorpe, to see how you judge J.W. Heslop Harrison and his botanical antics on the island of Rum, to which he and his students has special access for many years.

• Why did Heslop Harrison feel the need to use a double-barrelled surname – sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not? From the 1920s to 1937 he was simply J.W.H. Harrison. In1938 he started using J.W. Heslop Harrison, in 1942 he was still J.W. Heslop Harrison, but in 1950 he was J.W. Heslop-Harrison. 

•  Who was he trying to impress with his name changes?  Was he embarrassed about his father being an iron foundry worker, and JW was trying to improve his social class? 

• Why did he feel the need to alter his postal address in Birtley – with the postie’s collusion presumably? Again was it because he felt guilty about his social status?  

• When suspicion was building about his plant fiddling on Rum, why did he write papers naming Dolly and then Willie as authors when they clearly didn’t do the work?  Did he think they would not be suspected of his funny business and perhaps to deflect suspicion from him? 

• Why did old HH try to pull strings with the Director of the British Museum to take son George on to do a PhD, saying that he only had a pass B.Sc. at the time, but had been working on Hemiptera and had entered for a Ph.D.  George didn’t get the job and continued at Kings until 1939 when war broke out.

•  I now feel very guilty about what we students thought of George.  According to bits from Jack’s autobiography below, George had health problems as a child.  Then after leaving Kings in 1939, he went as Director of Plant Pathology and Entomology for the Iraq government.  Iraq was not occupied by German forces but an Iraqi government which was sympathetic to the Germans came into power at that time. So for some reason in 1941, poor George instead of clearing out like everyone else, he stayed on and was not only imprisoned, but he was tortured! 

Comments (April 2013) from Sandy Main - Agriculture Lecturer during the Heslop Harrison years.
Sandy was our much loved Ag Lecturer in crop husbandry, and at time of writing is 95 years old living in South Shields.  He saw many generations of students through the old Department in his time, as well as knowing all the Heslop Harrisons.  His great love was the Kings College Agricultural Society of which he was secretary for many years. It held meetings of farmers who had been former students mixing with current students - always with a special high profile speaker.  A special event was the annual tours to different countries on the Continent.

Sandy had only recently read the Run Affair book and provided the information below in a letter to Dr Deric Charlton.
  

• George Heslop Harrison (our entomology tutor) had in fact been electrically emasculated by the Nazi sympathizers in Iraq. 
• He married a Canadian lady on his return who dedicated her life to his care, and after George's early death she returned to Canada.
• Once when Sandy called in at their home in Low Fell to take George to Harper Adams Agricultural College where they were both external examiners, George's wife asked Sandy to take care of him.  George and Sandy shared a bedroom and Sandy remembers a very disturbed night as George had nightmares, clearly triggering memories of his prison experiences. 
• George's wife offered to be the librarian in the Ag Department, but it was only on a part time and voluntary basis - mainly to keep an eye on George's welfare. 
• There was no 'incestuous business' in the appointment of George and Dolly (Helena) as referred to in Sabbagh's book. George and Dolly were appointed by Prof. J.A. Hartley in 1935 and  Professor Wheldon  re appointed George after the war to lead the Ag Zoology (entomology) Department. 
• Sandy accompanied the old J.A. Heslop Harrison and son George up to Kielder and Deadwater in the early days when the Forestry Commission were planning their first plantings. The Heslop Harrisons had the job of listing the flora and fauna of the area.  Sandy remembers the two of them in the North Tyne river shouting enthusiastically to each other at what they were finding.
• As far as the Rum affair is concerned, Sandy is willing to give Prof Heslop Harrison the benefit of the doubt over his unproven plant fiddling, as he was such as he was such a great naturalist.

John 'Jack' Heslop-Harrison

We 1950s Ag students knew nothing of Jack Heslop-Harrison, but his autobiography tells a lot about his father.   Here’s some interesting comment from his autobiography, which Malcolm Tait found on the internet. You can see from what George writes below, that didn’t have an easy life with the old man!

John (Jack) Heslop-Harrison Autobiography: Site "Origins and Ancestry"

homepage.ntlworld.com/genomes/jhhpdfs/1origins.pdf

1930-1941: Home Life

‘Although there were many enjoyable interludes, the decade 1931-1941 was not, overall, a very happy one for me. After our move to Gavarnie in 1927, my father increasingly dominated my life in one way or another.

His own boyhood had been very hard and rough, and although he had parental encouragement, especially from his mother, the financial situation of the family was such that any advance he made through the educational system of the time had to depend primarily on his own efforts in gaining bursaries and scholarships.

He had in consequence developed a rigid mental discipline so far as work was concerned, and this he sought to impose on his children, for whom both he and my mother had high academic ambitions. My sister (Dolly) accepted the challenge, and realised some of his hopes, taking a MSc and becoming Head of the Agricultural Botany Department in King's (formerly Armstrong) College.

In my father's eyes the trouble was that she was a woman, and liable to get married; which of course she did. My brother (George), who had recurrent health problems and in addition possessed something of a rebellious nature, was less than responsive as a teenager - although he, too, eventually achieved high academic distinction with his work in applied entomology, receiving a D.Sc. for his researches on Psyllideae.

As the last of the sequence, I felt pretty continuous pressure to achieve, and anything less than first position in my class in any subject (especially in science) was regarded as tantamount to failure.

To set against this less than comfortable situation was the fact that my father made determined efforts to expand my horizons, especially by taking me on his various excursions and expeditions during the summer vacations’.

Jack’s career

His father, meeting famous botanists and entomologists, took Jack all over Europe with him when travel would have been difficult and slow before the war. 

Jack went to Kings in 1938 to do Honours in botany, zoology and chemistry, and after WW11 he joined the King’s Botany Department before accepting positions at Queen’s college, Belfast, then moved to London, Wisconsin and eventually Kew after his father’s death in 1970.  Clearly he’d kept well out of the old man’s way in his career.

In his autobiography, Jack doesn’t mention any of his fathers suspected dodgy dealings on Rum, which he must have known about.

The Heslop Harrison dynasty

The Moulder's Arms in Birtley was the home of the dynasty for 50 years.  The patriarch of the family was Cuthbert Heslop who was landlord from 1840-1868, then John Harrison (son in law) from 1868-1876, then Jane Harrison (nee Heslop who was John's widow) 1876-1890.
The pub is still in good heart today.

Acknnowledgements

Thanks to Malcolm Tait for digging out much of this information.

A Rum Affair - a true story of botanical fraud. By Karl Sabbagh. Critique by Chris Goldthorpe.

A critique by Chris Goldthorpe, B.Sc., M.Phil. Ph.D.

King's College, University of Durham,  (1959-1962)

A Rum Affair - a True Story of Botanical Fraud

By Karl Sabbagh (1999)

Publisher: Da Capo Press 2001

ISBN: 0-306-81060-3

Reprinted by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Karl Sabbagh writes well and recounts a story so gripping (like any crime writer), that I rationed myself to reading one or two chapters at a time in order to take it all in.

The wider picture

John William Heslop Harrison, D.Sc. (1917), FRS. (1921), (1881-1967) held two heterodox theories about natural history that put him at odds against the majority of biologists of the day:

1. During the last Ice Age parts of northern England and Scotland were not covered by ice. In these locations plant and insect species had survived where they are still found today.

2. He supported the Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics as a mechanism for evolution.

The book describes no organised campaign to discredit Heslop Harrison (HH) for holding these minority views, but suggests that he crossed swords with many scientists at the time, because they questioned his regular discoveries of new plant and insect species in the Western Isles. There is no doubt that HH was a forceful individual, who was prone to making opponents of people who held equally strong opinions. Indeed, some of the botanists and entomologists described in the book are also distinctly eccentric, measured by today’s standards.

Background comments from Dr Malcolm Tait:

Dr John Raven was a classics scholar and Fellow of King’s College Cambridge at the time of Rum affair.  He was also a respected amateur botanist and entomologist.  He was asked to investigate the events on Rum by Dr A.J. Wilmott who was in the Dept of Botany of the British Museum and was a close friend of Raven's father.  Wilmott had long suspected Harrison and there had been correspondence between them on various issues. It seems that it was Wilmott who hatched the plot, and encouraged Raven to apply for a grant from Trinity College to do his investigation on Heslop Harrison’s work on Rum).

Research question

Raven’s investigation was limited in scope to botany, and concerned itself with only one basic question. Did HH plant exotic species on Rum then record new plants in the literature to support his Ice Age theory?

Preliminary findings

There is no doubt that Raven, in a very limited period of time for field work, amassed an impressive bank of circumstantial evidence to support his investigation that HH introduced new plants on the island of Rum. However, he never produces ‘a smoking gun’, so to speak, to prove his point one-way or the other. For his part, HH vigorously refuted any suggestion of wrongdoing, and defended himself and his findings when specific questions were raised by Raven.

Sabbagh extends the question about the validity of HH’s scientific work to cover his discoveries of insects, as well as papers that he had published on melanism in moths and related studies on saw flies, to support Lamarck’s theory of inheritance.

Here again there is some circumstantial theorising, but nothing concrete about wilful deception. For example, the fact that other scientists have not been able to reproduce the experiments on melanism could be explained by HH’s faulty methodology and sloppy laboratory techniques. However, it should be noted that these studies were, unusually for an academic scientist, carried out in his garden shed and not under controlled conditions in a university laboratory.

An agriculturalist’s perspective

Surprisingly, I now turn to HH’s daughter, Helena otherwise known as Dolly Clark who taught us the agricultural botany of pasture grasses many years ago. I managed to remember from Dolly’s lectures that the annual meadow grass, Poa annua is a common species of grass that grows in permanent pastureland across the British Isles.

From my experience of both temperate and tropical agriculture, I know that grass species in the wild do not typically grow as isolated, single plants, but are usually found as part of a mixed grass sward that includes herbaceous plants as well. Thus, when I read Raven’s account on pp117-19 about other species being found growing among the sedge, Carex bicolor, alarm bells began to ring.

Raven records that he came across ‘a vigorous plant of Poa annua’ growing in a plant of Carex. He then found another two specimens of Poa in tufts of mature sedge. However, on carrying out a search of the surrounding gravel banks he found no plants of  Poa grass in the flora although he did not expect Poa to grow in such an unfavourable habitat as gravel.

HH (p139) explains the presence of Poa at the Carex site on the grounds that the grass abounds at high levels on the opposite side of the glen and suggests that ‘plants of Poa annua and other species are to be found on pony and deer droppings at all levels’. In other words, the grass may be found almost anywhere on the island where it is spread in the dung of livestock.

Although my suspicions were alerted I waited till I had finished the book before investigating this anomaly of single plants of a common grass species being found intermingled with the sedge, Carex bicolor. From an Internet search (Botanical Society of the British Isles, Kew Gardens, Wikipedia), I discovered, or should I say rediscovered, the following facts about Poa annua.

‘The grass has a worldwide distribution in temperate latitudes. In the UK it is a common species and frequent garden weed where it grows between 0 and 1,210m elevation. In favourable habitats, seeds ripen and are deposited 8 months of the year.  Plants grow rapidly from seed, they flower within 6 weeks then die’.

If annual meadow grass, a short lived annual species and prolific seeder, was spread on Rum in animal droppings, then one would expect that it would be found in groups together with other associated species in dung patches where animals had been grazing. However, Raven found only single plants within clumps of Carex, which leads to the suspicion that both plants had grown together. Nevertheless, even if as alleged, HH had planted the sedge plants for other botanists to find, there is no direct evidence to show a connection between his garden in Birtley and the site on Rum.

This evidence, I suggest, is there when we look at the gnat, Pseudohormomyia granifex whose galls were found infecting Carex bicolor plants on Rum and HH’s claim that this was the gnat’s first appearance in Scotland. So here we have the first record of an insect that has laid its eggs on other new species of sedge with both discoveries claimed by HH (pp142, 147).

Surprisingly, HH himself had reported the gnat species in his garden in Birtley. On p148, Sabbagh writes: ‘ A piece of evidence supplied by the professor himself showed that the Carex bicolor, which Raven believed had been cultivated in the professor’s garden in Birtley, was infected by a gnat that had been reported previously by Heslop Harrison himself from his garden in Birtley’.

Verdict

Having considered the evidence unearthed by Raven and Sabbagh, I have come to the conclusion that John William Heslop Harrison did indeed grow plants in his garden at Birtley and transport them to Rum where he then recorded them as species new to Scotland.

Northumberland's Cockle Park Experimental Station

BOOK TITLE
Cockle Park Farm. An account of the work of the Cockle Park Experimental Station from 1896-1956 by H Cecil Pawson. Published 1960. Oxford University Press.

Professor H Cecil Pawson, MBE, DSc, FRSE

 Cockle Park tower built for defence against the raiding Scotts in 1300 and for student accommodation in the 1950s

Armstrong College in Newcastle upon Tyne opened a School of Agriculture in 1896 and five years later experiments started at Cockle Park north of Morpeth in Northumberland by Professor William Somerville, the first Professor of Agriculture. His main challenge was to improve the large areas of poor grassland in the northern counties of Britain and his research showed spectacular results were achieved with the phosphate-rich industrial waste product "basic slag" from iron smelting.

Somerville was followed at Armstrong College in 1899 by Thomas Middleton who revolutionised agricultural education at the college, and set up the famous King's College Agricultural Society built on old students as they progressed into the industry.

Prof Gilchrist

Research continued under Professor Douglas Gilchrist (Science Director) by advocating ploughing up old pastures and sowing new grass and clover mixtures. The Cockle Park seeds mixture became famous world wide, as well as showing the importance of wild white clover in pastures.

 Cockle Park Seed's mixture
Generations of students have had to learn the "Cockle Park Seed's mixture" off by heart. There were many modifications added to suit different conditions, but this was the core one.

• 12 lb Perennial ryegrass
• 10 lb Cocksfoot
• 4lb Timothy
• 4lb English red clover
• 4lb Wild white clover

Later in history, Armstrong College became part of the University of Durham and the Department became the School of Agriculture. The School eventually became part of Newcastle University.

Appendix II of Prof Pawson's book is about the history of the Cockle Park Tower showing a print of it in 1774. It is a classic example of the peel towers or Border fortresses which covered the marches on both sides of the Border during the period of conflict.


Prof Mac Cooper
Another great source of information about Cockle Park is the biography of Professor M.M Cooper who came to Kings College from the Chair of Agriculture at Wye College in 1953 to be Dean of Agriculture so was in charge of the teaching and research programme, the commercial farm at Nafferton and the Experimental Station at Cockle Park.

Mac Cooper - A biography by John Craven.
Published 2000. The Pentland Press Ltd.
ISBN 1-85821-807-1



Always Your Friend. A personal appreciation of H Cecil Pawson by Reverend Edwin Thompson. Publishing Date unknown.










 The Cockle Park song
 It's not known who composed the original Cockle Park song, but singing it was a right of passage of all Agric students, along with many other classics. Here is the original from the Agric's Song Book.

 When Prof Cooper came up from Wye College to be Dean at Kings, he started making major changes to Cockle Park, some of which were welcomed and some not.

This took place in my third and fourth year (1954-55), and our class was instrumental in adding new verses to the song. - verses 3, 4 and 5.  The leader of the song changes was Henry Pickering, but we all added suggestions to the final version below.

It was always sung with great gusto to the tune of Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Thanks to Dr Deric Charlton for supplying this copy, obviously typed in the days before word processors!

We were all in awe of Prof Mac to the point of worshiping his every word.  Like a good Kiwi he was a great user of the word 'good'  - things he described as being good.  So that's why it's in the poem. And of course he was always quoting research from a place called Ruakura in New Zealand by his mate CP McMeekan.
So Ruakura again was a regular target for our mimicry.  Little did I realise that it would one day become my workplace, at the other side of the world far from that lecture room in the Ag School at King's College, University of Durham in Newcastle upon Tyne!