John William Heslop-Harrison
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John William Heslop Harrison, FRS, (1881-1967), was Professor of Botany at King's College, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, now perhaps best remembered for an alleged academic fraud.
Heslop Harrison, an established academic and Fellow of the Royal Society, was in 1948 accused by John Raven, a Cambridge University classics tutor, of making false claims to have discovered certain plant species on the Isle of Rum on the west coast of Scotland. Whether or not such grasses were on Rum is pivotal to a theory that the islands escaped the last ice age. The fraud claim is described - and its veracity supported - in Karl Sabbagh's book, A Rum Affair.
Though frequently hyphenated, Heslop Harrison is the correct spelling. Refer to the book by Sabbagh listed below for a discussion of this point.
Heslop Harrison's fourth son was Jack Heslop-Harrison who became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1970.
[edit] Biographies
- Unknown (1968) Biographical Memoirs of Fellow of the Royal Society of London 14, p 243
- Karl Sabbagh, A Rum Affair, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999. ISBN 0-7139-9277-8
