English, Irish, Scots: They’re All One, Genes Suggest
But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles , Saxons, Vikings and Normans.
The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist’s point of view, seems likely to please no one.
The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins.
That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.
The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people moved back north.
The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the Atlantic coastline, since there were still land bridges then across what are now English Channel and the Irish Sea.
This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near East.
Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German, but these invaders’ numbers were also small compared with the local population.
In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels finally divided Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from one another, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story” (Carroll & Graf, 2006).
As for subsequent invaders, Ireland received the fewest; the invaders’ DNA makes up about 12 percent of the Irish gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer estimates, but it accounts for 20 percent of the gene pool in Wales, 30 percent in Scotland, and about one-third in eastern and southern England.
Still, no single group of invaders is responsible for more than 5 percent of the current gene pool, Dr. Oppenheimer says on the basis of genetic data.
He cites figures from the archaeologist Heinrich Haerke that the Anglo-Saxon invasions that began in the fourth century A.D. added about 250,000 people to a British population of one to two million, an estimate Dr. Oppenheimer notes is larger than his but considerably less than the substantial replacement of the English population assumed by others. The Norman invasion of 1066 A.D. brought not many more than 10,000 people, according to Dr. Haerke.
Other geneticists say Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction is plausible, though some disagree with details. Several said that genetic methods did not give precise enough dates to be confident of certain aspects, like when the first settlers arrived.
“Once you have an established population, it is quite difficult to change it very radically,” said Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College, Dublin. But he said he was “quite agnostic” as to whether the original population became established in Britain and Ireland immediately after the glaciers retreated 16,000 years ago, as Dr. Oppenheimer argues, or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which began 10,000 years ago.
Bryan Sykes, another Oxford geneticist, said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer that the ancestors of “by far the majority of people” were present in the British Isles before the Roman conquest of A.D. 43. “The Saxons, Vikings and Normans had a minor effect, and much less than some of the medieval historical texts would indicate,” he said.
His conclusions, based on his own genetic survey and information in his genealogical testing service, Oxford Ancestors, are reported in his new book, “Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.”
A different view of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has been developed by Mark Thomas of University College, London. Dr. Thomas and colleagues say the invaders wiped out substantial numbers of the indigenous population, replacing 50 percent to 100 percent of those in central England.
Their argument is that the Y chromosomes of English men seem identical to those of people in Norway and the Friesland area of the Netherlands, two regions from which the invaders may have originated.
Dr. Oppenheimer disputes this, saying the similarity between the English and northern European Y chromosomes arises because both regions were repopulated by people from the Iberian refuges after the glaciers retreated.
Dr. Sykes said he agreed with Dr. Oppenheimer on this point, but another geneticist, Christopher Tyler-Smith of the Sanger Centre near Cambridge, said the jury was still out. “There is not yet a consensus view among geneticists, so the genetic story may well change,” he said. As to the identity of the first postglacial settlers, Dr. Tyler-Smith said he “would favor a Neolithic origin for the Y chromosomes, although the evidence is still quite sketchy.”
Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists. These are not generally accepted by historical linguists, who long ago developed but largely rejected a dating method known as glottochronology.
Geneticists have recently plunged into the field, arguing that linguists have been too pessimistic and that advanced statistical methods developed for dating genes can also be applied to languages.
Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Julius Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel.
The Belgae may have introduced some socially transforming technique, such as iron-working, which would lead to their language supplanting that of the indigenous inhabitants, but Dr. Forster said he had not yet identified any specific innovation from the archaeological record.
Germanic is usually assumed to have split into three branches: West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch; East Germanic, the language of the Goths and Vandals; and North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages. Dr. Forster’s analysis shows English is not an off-shoot of West Germanic, as usually assumed, but is a branch independent of the other three, which also implies a greater antiquity. Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, Dr. Forster estimates.
Historians have usually assumed that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain when the Romans arrived. But Dr. Oppenheimer argues that the absence of Celtic place names in England — words for places are particularly durable — makes this unlikely.
If the people of the British Isles hold most of their genetic heritage in common, with their differences consisting only of a regional flavoring of Celtic in the west and of northern European in the east, might that perception draw them together? Geneticists see little prospect that their findings will reduce cultural and political differences.
The Celtic cultural myth “is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity; their main identifying feature is that they are not English,” said Dr. Sykes, an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286.
Dr. Oppenheimer said genes “have no bearing on cultural history.” There is no significant genetic difference between the people of Northern Ireland, yet they have been fighting with each other for 400 years, he said.
As for his thesis that the British and Irish are genetically much alike, “It would be wonderful if it improved relations, but I somehow think it won’t.”
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The common wisdom, one Rathbone himself subscribed to, was that over-identification with Sherlock Holmes had ruined him. "I was . . . deeply concerned with the problem of being 'typed,' more completely 'typed' than any other classic actor has ever been or ever will be again," he wrote in his autobiography. He goes on to note that Doyle had felt equally trapped by his creation: "He had created a sort of Frankenstein that he could not escape from. And so he decided to kill Mr. Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls and be done with him. I frankly admit that in 1946 I was placed in a somewhat similar predicament — but I could not kill Mr. Holmes. So I decided to run away from him." Rathbone ran away as far as New York, back to the stage, and promptly won a Tony award for Best Actor. A Pyrrhic victory, for after that there was nothing left but to keep up an increasingly fraying sense of dignity in unsuitable TV shows (including a mercifully brief stint as a game-show host), out-of-town summer stock and vaudeville, flop plays (a Holmes play was the worst flop of all), and low-budget horror and sci-fi movies.
Which was considerable, at first. Fresh out of school at the age of 18, he had distinguished himself more in athletics than academically, and had no other ambition than to become an actor. His father insisted on his spending a couple of years in business, but by age 20 Rathbone had successfully auditioned for his cousin Sir Frank Benson, who ran a successful Shakespearean company that toured the provinces of Great Britain. The company was professional and distinguished, and the provinces were a great place to learn the basics far away from London critics and audiences. It was there Rathbone learned to act — not just mastering Shakespeare but receiving daily instruction in related skills like diction, deportment, dancing, and fencing.
Short, red-haired, and somewhere on the scale between vivacious and batshit crazy, Ouida Bergère was a failed actress and silent-movie screenwriter of questionable talent but enormous energy, much of it devoted to serial self-reinvention. She claimed to have been born on a railroad train en route to Spain, of expatriate parents named Stephen and Marion Manners DuGaze, and to have been raised in Madrid and Paris. She spoke, it was said, nothing but Spanish until the age of four. In fact, she was born Eunie Branch in Little Rock, Arkansas — her father, Stephen Branch, was a railroad timekeeper. She had had several names and been married once officially and once not, by the time she attended The Czarina and announced to her startled escort that Rathbone was the man she intended to marry. Through the actor Clifton Webb, she arranged a meeting, and Rathbone fell hard. Being so well brought up and all, Ouida was too proper for sex before marriage, but of course marriage could take care of that. And it did, in 1926. Around this time, Ouida declared bankruptcy, but there is no evidence that Rathbone knew about this very bad omen. By his own account and those of others, he was personally still lost at the time — drinking heavily, having numerous affairs, and disinterested in his own professional success. Ouida Bergère, on the other hand, had a plan.
He was now in a great position: a freelancer, not tied to any studio, and in demand. Had he been patient and only taken the best of what was offered, he might have built a career as a leading man. Instead, he cashed in. During the next year, 1930, he madeseven movies. Most of his parts are variations on Dilling, though in the first, The Bishop Murder Case, he actually plays a detective. Those hoping for a preview of his Sherlock Holmes are in for a disappointment, however, as is anybody else who happens on this ponderous little movie. He got to have A Notorious Affair with Kay Francis in her slinky vamp period, but he plays a temperamental violinist of seemingly endless self-pity, and worse, plays him with an Italian accent that wobbles into French and back, sometimes within the same scene. The pre-Code naughtiness of titles like The Lady of Scandal, A Lady Surrenders, and Sin Takes a Holiday promise a lot more than they deliver, which is usually groups of overdressed actors standing very still near early-sound microphones, lobbing "sophisticated" remarks at each other. Rathbone, immaculate in his double-breasted suits but with his heels and elbows held rigidly in, illustrates why Mrs. Patrick Campbell once called him "a folded umbrella taking elocution lessons." The nail in the coffin was A Woman Commands, RKO's attempt to make silent star Pola Negri into a rival attraction to Garbo and Dietrich. Speaking with an impenetrable Polish accent and looking like a Newark truck driver in drag, Negri bombed. Rathbone, as the captain of the guard who adores her, went down with the ship.
After a year touring with the first lady of the theater, Katharine Cornell, including playing Romeo to her Juliet, Rathbone tried again in Hollywood. Whether it was his failure as a leading man or the freeing up of his talent inLoyalties, he came back to films as a character actor. He was luckier this time. With the enforcement of the Code, sex and naughtiness were out. Adaptations of classic novels and period pieces were in. The best of them might have been David Copperfield (1935), David O. Selznick's version of his own favorite novel. Beautifully directed by George Cukor, it featured a huge, and uniformly outstanding, cast of eccentrics: W. C. Fields, Lionel Barrymore, Roland Young, Edna May Oliver, Madge Evans, Maureen O'Sullivan, Una O'Connor, Elsa Lanchester, etc. Rathbone, in fact, was billed eleventh, and his name wasn't even featured on the poster. But as David's sadistic stepfather Mr. Murdstone, he stole the movie. He comes on a little like Romeo at first as he romances poor Mrs. Copperfield, but even his early solicitousness has an overbearing edge to it. Once ensconced in the house with his awful sister, he takes over. His face a mask of arrogant cruelty, his voice like the crack of a whip, he systematically bullies Freddie Bartholomew's David until the boy is whimpering like a dog and chomps Murdstone's hand in terror. "Ah, he bites, does he!" Rathbone cries exultantly, before proceeding to administer a caning that has clear, and horrifying, sexual overtones. This is the blackest villain Rathbone ever played, and he practically leaps off the screen in a way he never had before. It's a performance so intense that it demands some relief, which comes later in the movie when the Murdstones attempt to take David back for more mistreatment. Rathbone gets a glorious extended tongue lashing from Edna May Oliver that provokes applause even if you're just watching at home.
He and Ouida had cashed in on success before in 1930, and now in 1935 he repeated the pattern: he again made seven movies in one year. The difference this time was that either the parts or the films, and sometimes both, were excellent. The Last Days of Pompeii was a dreary historical charade that hoped to be spectacular but looked like something put on at the end of summer Bible camp. However, as Pontius Pilate, Rathbone got to wash his hands desperately and play deep moral pain and guilt — his post-Crucifixion cry "what have I done?" is hair-raising. He unsuccessfully attempted to play a gentle alcoholic in A Feather in Her Hat, but came back in style in another Selznick Dickens piece, A Tale of Two Cities, in which his arrogant French aristocrat single-handedly precipitates the Revolution. And in Kind Lady, he played the first of a type he was to make his own: a handsome, poetic fellow who preys on vulnerable women. Kind Lady is no more than a genteel semi-thriller designed to make blue-haired matinee ladies squirm, but thanks to Rathbone and co-star Aline MacMahon, it's deeply unsettling and creepy.
These were his peak years — one great part followed another, though Rathbone was unhappy being typecast as a heavy. He campaigned to play Romeo in Irving Thalberg's big-budget Shakespeare film, but of course that was never going to happen. He played Tybalt, and was the only actor in the cast able to suggest the youthful passion the play is supposed to be about, or to make the poetry sound like simple dialogue. He was nominated for an Oscar, but then so (unbelievably) was Norma Shearer. He also won an onscreen swordfight for the first and only time, against John Barrymore's gasbag Mercutio. In acting terms, he made mincemeat of Barrymore just as he had of Garbo, but his reward was only The Garden of Allah, in which he played an Arab sheik. He looks great in his turban in gorgeous Technicolor, but the movie marked a turning point. He had hoped to play the lead, a monk with a guilty secret, but Selznick placated him with a sympathetic supporting part. On the set, he ostentatiously held up filming in the desert heat, partying with the stars Dietrich and Charles Boyer and ignoring work calls. Selznick retaliated by rewriting his part as a villain, and the two fought. "You'll never work for me again!" he quoted the producer as yelling, and he added: "And I haven't!"
In the meantime, Rathbone and Errol Flynn made two more films together, both outstanding. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is hands-down the best movie either actor ever made, a storybook come to life and a landmark adventure film. Rathbone's Sir Guy of Gisbourne isn't a complex villain — he's not that bright, and he's out-thought and out-fought by Flynn's Robin over and over. Claude Rains as Prince John supplies the brains. It's Sir Guy's relentlessness and his sheer bigness that make him formidable. In his boots and his scarlet capes, rings and beard and long hair, with all of his costumes ever so slightly too much, he's the picture of arrogant entitlement. Rains has a line suggesting that Sir Guy is in love with de Havilland's Maid Marian, but we see little of that in Rathbone's performance. He's fixated on Flynn. This time, their duel is placed at the end of the movie where it belongs, and it's one of the great sequences of movie history. The clang of the broadswords, the stirring music, the beautiful use of light, shadow, and color all serve to raise the excitement level as Flynn and Rathbone go at it, their faces increasingly pained and sweaty. It's a great release of tension the movie has been building to all along, and when it's over there's only the briefest of happily-ever-after wrap-ups.
Later the same year, they appeared together in The Dawn Patrol, a remake of Howard Hawks' early talkie. As directed by the sensitive Edmund Goulding, it's less astringent and more emotional under its stiff-upper-lip boys' adventure surface. Flynn is very fine as Courtney, the young daredevil pilot in the 59th Squadron somewhere in France during World War I. Rathbone is his commanding officer, Major Brand. They're at odds, of course. Courtney thinks Brand is heartless for sending inexperienced young pilots up to die, and Brand is driven crazy by Courtney's insubordination and recklessness. Brand is one of Rathbone's best parts — he's a good man pushed to extremes by the indifference of headquarters, the ongoing carnage, and his own role in it all. "Do you know what this is?" he snaps at his aide. "It's a slaughterhouse — and I'm the butcher!" Donald Crisp, as the aide, has a nice rapport with him during a scene late at night, as the former is composing an umpteenth letter of condolence and wondering how to spell a word. "However you spell it, it will break her heart just the same," Rathbone says quietly as the firelight flickers on his face. Eventually, Flynn's heroics get Rathbone promoted, and in revenge he promotes Flynn to commander, whereupon he comes to understand what the older man was going through. They become friends, finally, which is a nice ending to all that onscreen antagonism.
Fox also produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, most likely as a one-off vehicle for Richard Greene, a bland pretty-boy kept around as a rival and threat to Power. Greene got top billing in Hound, but he was soon forgotten. In fact, it's possible to forget him while you're watching him. Playing Sherlock Holmes for the first time, Rathbone owns the movie. There's a misconception that he played Holmes the same way in all of his films; he even contributed to this idea when he wrote in his autobiography that "my first [Holmes] picture was, as it were, a negative from which I merely continued to produce endless positives of the same photograph." In reality, the performance underwent several changes and adjustments over time, changes that had less to do with exploring the character than with the actor's own reaction to it. In The Hound, Rathbone is heartier and more cheerful than he would ever be again, presumably at having finally found a leading role as an unabashed hero. His voice rising exultantly, he seems to spend much of the movie slapping the other characters on the back. He's the most jovial Holmes imaginable, and the most energetic — scampering over the studio's artfully tumbled Dartmoor set in pursuit of clues, he's like an overeager hound himself.
It didn't look that way at first. In the fall of 1939, Rathbone began playing Holmes on the radio, a weekly program that paid $1,500 an episode. It was so popular that it ran for nine years and ultimately 220 episodes. With war clouds gathering and the world situation growing more uncertain, this must have seemed like great good fortune to a British actor approaching his fifties: steady and lucrative employment as one of the most famous heroes of English fiction. "Lucrative" being the operative word, as he was now playing host to his wife's frequent and outlandishly extravagant parties. Often these lavish affairs cost as much as Rathbone's salary for an entire film, with the walls of their Los Feliz, California, home covered in live gardenias or a blanket of snow trucked in to cover the lawn at Christmastime. And while all Hollywood attended them, some of Hollywood snickered afterwards. With her endless pretensions and control issues (Vincent Price recalled that she "carried on like a mad duchess"), Ouida was inadvertently becoming something of a laughingstock. With money becoming more important than appearing in quality movies, her spending issues would soon lead to her husband becoming one as well.
MGM didn't really want him for its own movies anyway — it wanted to lend him to Universal and pocket a huge loan-out fee. Universal had recently come to terms with the Doyle brothers, who after pissing off Fox had been shopping the Holmes stories around Hollywood. By the time Universal expressed interest, the boys were getting a little desperate and were more than ready to bargain. Faithfulness to the original books? No longer a requirement. Make a B-movies series rather than Fox's A-level productions? No problem. Updating the stories from the Victorian era to the 1940s in order to further reduce costs? Bloody good idea! Rathbone and Bruce? That was the only thing everyone agreed was a must.
He considered himself saved by The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James that was shaped into theatrical success by its director, Jed Harris. Ouida thought it would be a hit, but nonetheless didn't want Basil to do it. Perhaps with the intent of derailing negotiations, she handed the startled Harris a sheaf of unsolicited rewrites. The play concerns Dr. Austin Sloper, a distinguished physician who lives with his shy spinster daughter, Catherine. Still in mourning for his late wife, he has idealized her out of all proportion and quietly tyrannizes Catharine, who he feels falls short in looks, poise, and accomplishment. His ostentatious politeness toward her are a paper-thin cover, not just for lack of love, but for profound and bitter disappointment. A theatergoer who saw Rathbone's performance commented that he played it very subtly as a man in tremendous but unexpressed personal pain. No wonder, perhaps, that Ouida found the idea of living with this character for an extended period unappealing.
His final film was Autopsia de un Fantasma, a comedy-fantasy made in Mexico by Ismael Rodriguez (who, it's said, Rathbone considered a genius). Filmed in Spanish with the English-speaking actors dubbed, it was never shown in the U.S. and hardly even in its country of origin. If you've ever seen Mexican comedy on cable, you can pretty much get the idea. It's a wild farce — when an old woman cries "it's raining buckets!" at the start, actual buckets begin falling from the sky around her. For the first time since playing Holmes, Rathbone is the film's top-billed lead. At 75, he scampers about gamely, donning doublets and hose as he had so often, and running around waving a sword. He plays a ghost who has been haunting a castle for 400 years, and cannot go to his rest until he wins the love of a woman. When a female robot sacrifices herself for him, he escapes from purgatory at last.