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themselves are delightfully annotated with asides such as ‘Cornwall, St Austell. Flower show.
Country folk’ or ‘Bristol. Whit-Monday. Young people numerous. Dancing.’ He also got hold of a
further set of 13,800 observations from the unlikely source of the lists of army deserters whose
pursuers published their physical description in the chillingly titled periodical Hue and Cry.
Finally, he recorded his own patients as they came through his Bristol surgery – a total of 4,390
altogether. These were particularly precious because there was time to make accurate observations
and to check on the birthplace of each patient.
Beddoe was very well aware of the dangers of unrepresentative sampling, and of more subtle
influences on the accuracy of his record. For example, were his Bristol patients representative of
the general healthy population? Possibly not. They must have had a reason to be in his surgery in
the first place. Indeed, he notes that the incidence of disease among American army recruits was
reported to be much higher among the ‘dark complexioned’. And his patients did, when averaged
out, have a slightly higher Index of Nigrescence than the West Country folk that he observed in
streets and marketplaces. This discrepancy he puts down to differences of moral character, allying
cheerfulness and an optimistic outlook to a light complexion, while ‘persons of melancholic
temperament (and dark complexion) I am disposed to think, resort to hospitals more frequently than
the sanguine’. Even then, blondes had more fun.
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.