Native Sons

My reference in my previous post to ‘Vikings and Natives’ raises some interesting issues.

While there are only 6 YDNA test results in the Shorrock Surname Study, we have three distinct lines – and three distinct paternal ancestries. Two of these – 'North Country Ruy' and 'Rob' descend from the aboriginal British group - and the third 'Ian' is Viking. (i.e. R1b-13, R1b-8 and I1a).

This illustrates the revolution that has overtaken the understanding that the English have of their origins. Paraphrasing Oppenheimer from his 2006 book ‘The Origins of the British’:

‘The latest scientific evidence challenges the notion that the Romans found a uniformly Celtic population throughout the British Isles and that the indigenous folk of the English heartland fell victim to genocide and replacement by the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries and by an admixture of Vikings somewhat later.

Research shows that these late invasions contributed a tiny fraction of the English gene pool. Two thirds of the English people show an unbroken line of genetic descent from south-western Europeans arriving long before the introduction of farming and the adoption of Celtic languages in Britain’.

All this has been something of a shock to the English who have been wont to regard themselves as best exemplified as a tall, blond, blue-eyed Germanic Race that seized and colonized England, wresting the land from shorter and darker aboriginals, who they drove into the mountains of Wales and Scotland before they set about subduing all of the native tribes of the British Isles

Myths are of course at the core of nationhood (neither of which I might add are taken too seriously by Buddhists – Joko Beck gave an interesting talk on this issue with the title ‘New Jersey does not exist’).

However, we are at liberty to inquire and interpret.

The problems arise when we start playing moralizing and playing politics. Oppenheimer cannot resist this:

‘England has, however, benefited from considerably more recent immigration. As transport improved, passenger ships began to cross the oceans between continents, with vessels, from the Empire Windrush’ onwards, bringing immigrants from Jamaica. With the advent of regular intercontinental air travel, immigrants now fly to the British Isles from all over the world. These islands have, as on numerous occasions before, changed from a multicultural to an even more multicultural society.

Not altogether surprisingly, Oppenheimer’s facts and deductions about the ‘mongrel nation’ can be turned on their heads, as illustrated by the following extract from the newspaper British Pride:


‘WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE’: about Nick Griffin (Leader of the British National Party)
British Pride , 4th October 4, 2008

‘Nick Griffin shows that the argument put forward by the multiculturalists that ‘we are a mongrel nation of immigrants’ is a lie. Importantly he also reveals that the revolution in DNA studies indicates that the ancestors of some two-thirds of our indigenous population came to these islands at the end of the last Ice Age, and that those of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ancestry are far fewer than originally thought.

All the evidence of the scientific revolution of DNA studies over the last few years points to the fact that two-thirds of the indigenous people of the British Isles are the direct descendents of the first pioneers who followed the retreating ice sheets at the end of the last glaciation, and the vast majority of the remainder of our ancestors arrived during Neolithic times.

The invasions of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans which form the backbone of the ‘nation of immigrants’ story between them contributed little more than a ripple on our genetic pond. Far from being immigrants and ‘mongrels’, we the native folk of these islands, are the First People. We are the aborigines here and to deny that is both implicitly and explicitly racist’.


Well, we can all play numbers games and have a go at having the last word.

I had a wry smile though at Nick Griffin when I recently flipped through one of my father’s old books on British History (my father was a professional historian before he joined the RAF in 1942).

Charles Osman in his 1907 ‘History of England’, helping to create the original myth, has the following, none-too complimentary-things to say about the country’s aboriginal inhabitants:

‘First had come a short dark people, who knew not the use of metals, and wielded weapons of flint and bone. They were in the lowest grade of savagery, had not even learnt to till the soil and lived by fishing and hunting. They dwelt in rude huts, or even in the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the wolf... There are to this day regions where the survival of the ancient inhabitants can be traced by the preponderance of short stature and dark hair. Many such are to be found in both South Wales, and in the Highlands of Scotland’.

And Lancashire, it seems from my own YDNA – Ouch!


I end on an altogether more positive note about a Return of a Native Son:

‘MUHAMMED ALI VISITS IRELAND – MEETS DISTANT RELATIVES’
Huffington Post, 16th December 2009

‘DUBLIN — Muhammad Ali made a sentimental journey Tuesday to discover his Irish roots, and met distant relatives during celebrations at the local town hall and a nearby castle.

Thousands lined the streets of Ennis, western Ireland, to cheer his motorcade as the three-time heavyweight champion visited the home of his great-grandfather Abe Grady.

Fans adorned streets with red, white and blue bunting and flags, while shop windows competed to display the most impressive posters honoring Ali – including one tongue-in-cheek portrait of him appearing ready to knock out an unpopular Irish politician.

Ali, who is 67 and battling Parkinson's disease, fought only once in Ireland, knocking out Alvin Lewis at Dublin's Croke Park on July 19, 1972.

Ali offered a few playful jabs to cameras but made no public comments and steered clear of throngs of autograph-seekers Tuesday, among them hundreds of kids whose schools closed early for the event. Police blocked off roads and kept crowds in line with railings.

Grady settled in Kentucky in the 1860s and married a freed slave. One of their grandchildren, Odessa Lee Grady Clay, gave birth to Ali – then Cassius Clay – in 1942.

Genealogists pinpointed Ali's Irish links in 2002, but Ali had never visited Ennis’.