Beddoe, John

(b. Bewdley, Worcestershire, England, 21 September 1826; d. Bradford-on-Avon, England, 19 July 1911)

physical anthropology.

Beddoe suffered from ill health in his youth. Although he was intended for a career in the law, he studied medicine at University College, London, and the University of Edinburgh; in 1853 he received the M.D. from the latter institution, with a thesis entitled “On the Geography of Phthisis.” Beddoe next served as a house physician in the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. During the Crimean War he was on the medical staff of a civilian hospital at Renkioi in the Dardanelles. After the war he went to Vienna to complete his medical training, then made an extensive tour of Austria, Hungary, Italy, and France, studying medicine and physical anthropology. Upon his return to England in 1857 he set up a medical practice in Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, where he remained until his retirement in 1891.

Beddoe was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1873. He was a founding member, in 1857, of the Ethnological Society; was president of the Anthropological Society in 1869–1870; and was president of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1889–1891. In 1905 he gave the Huxley lecture, “Colour and Race,” and received the Huxley Medal. Beddoe received an honorary LL.D at Edinburgh in 1891 and there delivered the Rhind lectures. The University of Bristol elected him honorary professor of anthropology in 1908.

From the age of twenty Beddoe was a keen observer of the physical variations in man, beginning with observations on hair and eye color in the west of England, then extending his work to the Orkneys, which resulted in his Contributions to Scottish Ethnology (1853). In 1864 A. Johnes, of Garthmyl, Wales, contributed a prize of 100 guineas, to be awarded at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, for the best essay on the origin of the English nation. For four years, although there were contenders, the prize was not awarded. In 1868 it was won by Beddoe, and the essay was published as The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (1885). In the preface Beddoe says: “The successful work, however, though composed expressly for the occasion, was really the outcome of a great part of the leisure of fifteen years devoted to the application of the numerical and inductive method to the ethnology of Britain and of Western Europe.”

Beddoe’s Rhind lectures extended the theme of his Eisteddfod essay to cover all Europe. The year after his death, they appeared in a revised form: The Anthropological History of Europe, Being the Rhind Lectures for 1912 (1912).

Beddoe loved traveling, and set down some of the incidents of his widespread journeys in Memories of Eighty Years (1910). This book also describes his friendship and correspondence with all the major figures of the time who were interested in the physical and cultural history of early man in Europe: Broca, Davis, Topinard, Virchow, Darwin, Retzius, Rhys, Boyd-Dawkins, Cartailhac, Deniker, John Evans, Pitt-Rivers, and Ridgeway. His Races of Britain is dedicated “to Rudolf Virchow and Paul Topinard, and to the memory of Paul Broca and Joseph Barnard Davis.”

Beddoe was first of all a descriptive physical anthropologist, noting and measuring the varieties of man’s hair color, skin color, height, cephalic index, and so forth, throughout the British Isles and Europe. But he was not content with description; he wanted to explain the observed physical variations in terms of the spread of language and culture, and against the picture produced by prehistorians in the nineteenth century and the known movements of people in historical times. He continually sought to produce a coherent story in which the movements of, for example, speakers of the Celtic languages, or the people of the great migration period of post-Roman times, or the Jews and the Gypsies were integrated into the anthropological history of Europe.

The following passage, taken from the end of chapter 3 of The Races of Britain, shows the quality of Beddoe’s thinking:

The natives of South Britain, at the time of the Roman conquest, probably consisted mainly of several strata, unequally distributed, of Celtic-speaking people, who in race and physical type, however, partook more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed, dark stock which Broca has called Celtic, and which those who object to this attribution of that much-contested name may, if they like, denominate Arvernian. Some of these layers were Gaelic in speech, some Cymric; they were both superposed on a foundation principally composed of the long-headed dark races of the Mediterranean stock, possibly mingled with the fragments of still more ancient races, Mongoliform or Allophylian. This foundation-layer was still very strong and coherent in Ireland and the north of Scotland, where the subsequent deposits were thinner, and in some parts wholly or partially absent. The most recent layers were Belgic, and may have contained some portion or colouring of Germanic blood: but no Germans, recognisable as such by speech as well as person, had as yet entered Britain.

Beddoe was a pioneer in this sort of synthetic writing about the physical, linguistic, and cultural history of Europe. His works were widely read, and greatly influenced the thinking of a wide range of people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from pure physical anthropologists to historians like Rice Holmes, archaeologists like Ridgeway, and linguistic scholars like Sir John Rhys.

Even though today, over half a century after Beddoe’s death, it is no longer considered possible to lump together in any meaningful way the facts and hypotheses about the physical, linguistic, and cultural history of Britain and Europe, we should not forget that Beddoe’s work was instrumental in the development of anthropology. Prior thereto much speculation about the origins of the physical varieties of man in Europe had been largely guesswork. Beddoe put this matter on a firm basis of observed fact, of which his interpretations were in keeping with the evidence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Among Beddoe’s writings are Contributions to Scottish Ethnology (Edinburgh, 1853); The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (Bristol–London, 1885); “Colour and Race,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 35 (1905), 98–140; Memories of Eighty Years (Bristol–London, 1910); and The Anthropological History of Europe, Being the Rhind Lectures for 1912 (Paisley, 1912).

Glyn Daniel