There’s Skulduggery Afoot in True-Crime Tale of Rival Botanists

Can a distinguished scientist and an accomplished fraud inhabit the same body? This is among the riddles British author Karl Sabbagh encounters in “A Rum Affair,” a strange but true tale of botanical shenanigans set in the Inner Hebrides. When John Heslop Harrison, a Newcastle professor of botany, stakes his formidable reputation upon the discovery of certain sedges on the Isle of Rum off the west coast of Scotland, John Raven, a young Cambridge don and amateur botanist, suggests that in fact the professor may have transported alien plants to the island, then “discovered” them. It is a charge that sends a frisson of scandal through the botany world in the late 1940s. Then, mysteriously, the whole affair seems to die out.

Sabbagh, who had known Raven as an elderly don in his own King’s College days, is intrigued enough by a reference to an unpublished paper by Raven in a Cambridge alumni magazine to take up his own investigative trowel. Armed with a layman’s curiosity and a sly sense of fun, Sabbagh digs among musty library stacks, tracks down survivors of the time--Raven’s reticent wife, Heslop Harrison’s botanist grandson, surviving scholars and scientists--and pieces together a story full of odd twists, troubling issues of class and glaring lapses in scientific procedure. The two men, stalker and stalked, couldn’t have been much different: Raven a witty, charming young Oxbridge don and amateur botanist with a strong moral sense and a self-described “mystical feeling for vegetation”; John Heslop Harrison a brusque, peremptory man of humble origins, a professor at a modest red-brick university who, while cutting a wide swath across his field, was “admired by many, loved by few.”

In the course of the tale they are joined by the likes of Miss Maybud Campbell, secretary of the Botanical Society of the British Isles, who sings Czech lieder; the rustically named John Ramsbottom; and a botanical specialist described by the author as “a man with an astonishingly high boredom threshold.”

Returning from an investigatory trip of his own to Rum in 1948, Raven wrote the professor: “I am sorry to say that I was gravely perturbed by a certain amount that I saw. . . ,” then proceeded to express doubts about the professor’s claims. Heslop Harrison replied curtly: “In my opinion your exaltation of trifles [is] capable of explanation by any ordinary person. . . ,” then testily broke off the correspondence shortly thereafter. Raven next posted a letter to the magazine Nature intimating a hoax, setting off what one contemporary scientist calls “the greatest scandal of 20th century botany.”

Then the matter seemingly dropped from sight. Raven, disillusioned with scientific editors who seemed to feel that “not having unpleasantness within botanical circles was more important than the truth,” asked that his expose be “kept under lock and key until both its hero and I are safely in our graves.” Heslop Harrison, unbowed and unrepentant, finished his career with high honors.

But why would a man of Heslop Harrison’s formidable standing forge evidence in the first place? The best answer, among many put forth, seems to be that it bolstered the professor’s pet theory: that during the last ice age, the Hebrides had been practically ice-free. And why was the matter suppressed? British decency at play? Or a conspiracy of silence? Author Sabbagh offers some fresh evidence, and not a few new speculations.

A diverting tale of foul play among the ferns, “A Rum Affair” also raises some thorny, pertinent questions about the price of exposing the truth and what gives way when overweening personal ambition and the scientific method collide.