‘A Rum Affair: a true story of botanical fraud’, Karl Sabbagh (Birlinn)
The Fellows, or Dons, of King’s College Cambridge in the 1950s were in the habit of sitting at the refectory tables among the undergraduates at lunch. Among them was the senior tutor, a slim athletic-looking man called John Raven, who was an authority on classical philosophy. It was rumoured that he was also an amateur botanist of distinction.
This was the sum of my knowledge of him until after his death when I read his 1980 obituary in the annual report that King’s sends to all its graduates. By then he with Max Walters had published Mountain Flowers (Collins, 1956); later, after their deaths a book of flower paintings by him and his father, Canon Charles Raven, previously Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University and Professor of Theology, was published. His life-long interests were combined in publications on plants in ancient Greece.
Karl Sabbagh was an undergraduate at King’s when Raven was senior tutor. He also read that 1980 obituary and noted a paragraph referring to Raven having uncovered a botanical fraud. A reputable scientist had claimed to have found plants never before described in the island of Rum but Raven’s report on this ‘curious episode’ had never been published, and was said to have been deposited in Trinity College library.
Seventeen years later, now a writer and television producer, Sabbagh recalled this in conversation with a botanist friend and set out to investigate. This book, published first in 1999 and now in a new edition, is thus a tale of two pieces of detective work, one by Raven and one by Sabbagh. From a literary point of view, it is also the tale of a conflict between two strongly contrasting characters: Raven the dogged and patrician amateur and Prof John Heslop Harrison FRS, the established scientist whose reputation rested on a series of important botanical and entomological discoveries but who came from a more humble background. Raven came from a long line of Oxbridge scholars, Harrison (or Heslop-Harrison as he later styled himself) from working-class Newcastle.
The field on which the battle was largely fought was Rum in the Outer Hebrides, at that time (the 1940s and 1950s) the personal property of Lady Bullough, widow of the son of Sir John, a Lancashire industrialist whose fortune had purchased the island. Sabbagh tells the tale of Raven’s initial suspicion that Harrison’s discoveries were implausible and of how he was eventually able to confirm these suspicions by visiting the island and obtaining plant specimens. But Sabbagh’s detective work is almost equally enthralling, from his first discovery that Raven’s report was not in Trinity College but in King’s, through his difficulties in finding first-hand evidence from people who knew or had worked with Harrison, to his eventual conclusion that Raven was right and Harrison had indeed committed fraud.
The essence of the case was that Harrison’s reputation was as a teacher and discoverer of new species or known species in unlikely places. He apparently had an outstanding intellect and had been elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in his 40s, an extraordinary honour especially for someone from a northern university. It seemed likely, even to Raven, that some of his early discoveries were genuine. However Raven, in spite of his amateur status, had an equally powerful intellect and a life-long detailed knowledge of the minutiae of plant structure and classification together with an understanding of where, in ecological terms, to find rare plants.
This, coupled with a strong suspicion of Harrison’s expressed belief that Rum had escaped the last Ice Age and that certain plants had survived there, led to Raven’s investigation. Sabbagh’s investigation went further, asking why Raven’s report was never published and why someone with Harrison’s reputation should risk it all by fraud.
The detail concerned the reporting of plants that to most of us would be unnoticed weeds (sedges) in unlikely places. However, the interest is not in the detail but the wide implications. To a scientist dishonesty in a written report is as wrong as fraud in financial dealings. All scientific results require verification by repetition and by the accumulation of corroborative evidence, and a dishonest report can mislead generations of future scientists and the public. In some cases, such as the trial of a new medicine, they may have serious implications for the public. Why should such fraud occur? The reason is usually not hard to perceive; ambition in a competitive world coupled with a belief that one is cunning enough to get away with it. I have once uncovered it myself in a PhD student’s thesis, written under pressure from a dominant professor to ‘get results’.
It must still happen and requires vigilance by supervisors and editors of journals to detect. The consequence of being unmasked is nowadays very serious and would usually lead to public unmasking and loss of career. It must rarely occur in well-established scientists but I have seen two senior colleagues succumb and be removed from the medical register. As Sabbagh shows, at the time of the Rum Affair there were many suspicions among colleagues that something fishy was going on but few were in a position to challenge Harrison, who had a very dominant and prickly personality, until Raven came along. Even then, there was a clear reluctance to have a public showing of dirty washing, in part perhaps because Harrison’s son was already a distinguished biologist in his own right.
Many people might find a book about quarrels over sedges and where they grow or don’t grow of little interest. That would be a mistake in this case; Sabbagh writes very well and my interest never faltered. I read it over two days and found much to fascinate me. And I’m not even a fan of detective stories.
By Anthony Seaton | 25 August 2016