How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (5 page)

Around 1900, my grandfather left the family stronghold in Moray in the northeast of Scotland and headed east... to India, where he ended up in the small dusty town of Kanpur (then spelled Cawnpore), more or less in the middle of nowhere on the great Ganges Plain. In the end, he spent the rest of his life in and around the great northern plains at the foot of the Himalayas, and never went back to Scotland – though he retained throughout his life the links with home, including the little family cottage that his grandfather had built in Kingston at the mouth
[Page 35]
of that great salmon and whisky river, the Spey.

I have often wondered what made him get up and go, the only member of our extended northeastern family to leave Scotland (aside from when, a century earlier, his own grandfather had spent a year or so in Spain and, later, at Waterloo earning the king’s shilling defending us against Napoleon). By chance, just a couple of years ago, I discovered the answer. It was very simple. His maternal cousin had gone there a few years before him, and had evidently fixed him up with a job with a local firm of stonemasons.

Well, that only pushes the question back one step further. So why did his cousin go to this obscure corner of the Raj? The answer lies in whom he worked for... the Elgin Cotton Mill. And who owned and ran the Elgin Cotton Mill? And, as it happens, the Muir Mill, the Cawnpore Cotton Mill, the Stewart Harness and Saddlery Factory and several other local industrial companies in Kanpur? Mostly, as the names might suggest, Scots from the northeast, who for various reasons had ended up in Kanpur in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny and spot-ted an opening in the industrial market.

And here is the issue. When they needed to recruit staff, they invariably sent back home for them, back to their own communities, where they could get people they could trust and rely on. And they could rely on them precisely because of that sense of community, of belonging to the same small interdependent social network back home. It helped, of course, that old Granny’s beady eye would be upon them even in far-off lands, that tongues back home would be set a-wagging by the mere breath of rumour should they step out of line. But these niceties aside, the
[Page 36]
ties of kinship and community pulled enough weight on their own to keep most people toeing the line.

It is a pattern that one sees over and over again in the history of Scots migration. When the founding Scots fathers of Princeton University in the fledgling United States sought a principal for their new educational establishment, they did not advertise as we would now, but sent for one of their own from Edinburgh to head up the new institution.

In short, nepotism played an important role in the history of Scots migration, and its benefits were enormous. It probably made the Scots the single most successful migrant group from the British Isles during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The empire that was run from London was, in reality, a Scots empire, disproportionately administered, policed, missionised, taught, geologised, doctored, nursed, traded and transported by Scots. The issue was not so much that the Scots were any more desperate for a decently paid, upwardly mobile life than the English or the Welsh or the Irish, but that a strong sense of home community bound them to each other, and made working together that much more effective. That, and an education system second to none.

Despite the patent disapproval of his subsequent employers (the decidedly anti-British American Presbyterian Mission in North India), my grandfather continued to be a regular visitor to the British Club solely in order to spend time with the Scots officers of the regiments stationed in the locality. I hasten to add that he was a lifelong teetotaller, so it wasn’t the drink that drew him there – just the social gathering and the opportunity to immerse himself for an evening in things Scottish.
[Page 37]

The Scots have had a long tradition of such clubbishness. There had been mass migrations from Scotland to London in the second half of the seventeenth century that were associated with the founding of many Scots clubs and associations in the capital. The Highland Society was founded in London in the 1750s to provide support for immigrant Scots and, importantly, to ensure the preservation of Scottish culture, dress, music and language –and when they said language, they meant, of course, Gaelic. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than thirty Scottish societies, associations and clubs in the capital, many of them local county associations –the Argyllshire Association, the London Murray-shire Club, and so on – intended to maintain local community relationships as well as acting as mutual help societies.

Community, in a word, is the beating heart of life, and we neglect it at our peril. And one reason why, in traditional societies, communities were as effective as they were is that they consisted almost entirely of kin. As the Inuit whalers who take on whales in small open boats,
Moby
Dick
fashion, don’t hesitate to point out: when the chips are down and you’ve been thrown out of the boat into freezing Arctic waters, no one except a close relative is likely to be willing to put their life on the line to rescue you.

In the modern world, we have lost that all-encompassing sense of kinship that pervades traditional small-scale societies. In these societies, everyone in the community is kin. This is not just because they invent kinship relationships,
[Page 38]
even for incomer strangers like the anthropologists who come to study them. It is because everyone really is kin, related to each other in a complex biological web.

Those who come into the community (with the possible exception of the lonely anthropologist) soon become embedded into that web of relatedness because they marry and have children with members of the community. What makes us kin is not so much that we are descended from some remote common ancestor, but rather that we share a common interest in the future generations. We refer to in-laws as relatives for the very good reason that we and they share a common genetic interest in the offspring who will, in due course, become the parents of the next generation.

The importance of kinship is well illustrated by one of the iconic events in American folklore. In May 1846 at the height of the ‘taming of the Wild West’ and gold fever, the intrepid colonists of the Donner Party set out from Little Sandy River in Wyoming on the last stage of a long trek to California and a new life, a journey that had begun in Springfield, Illinois, more than a month before. Several untoward events – disorganisation at the start, some ill-advised routing, and attacks by Indians along the way –conspired to delay the party, which at its height numbered eighty-seven men, women and children. As a result, they reached the Sierra Nevada mountains, the jagged line of snow-covered peaks that barred their way west, much later than they had intended, just as winter began to close in.

Though they struggled on, they ended up trapped in the mountains by snowstorms at an entirely anonymous spot now known as Donner Pass. Here, they tried to sit
[Page 39]
out the winter. But since they had expected to be through the mountains well before winter set in, they had come unprepared. Their food gave out, and some even gave in to cannibalism. By the time a series of rescue parties arrived from California in February and March the following year, forty-one of the eighty-seven pioneers had died. What makes these bald statistics interesting is who died and who survived. Disproportionately more people who travelled alone died, while the chances of surviving were much higher among those who had travelled as families. Frail grannies travelling with their families made it, but not the strapping young men travelling alone. It paid to be travelling with kith and kin.

A second example is provided by another of the iconic events in American folklore. When the
Mayflower
colonists set foot on the American mainland in 1620, they were ill prepared to face the harsh New England winter. They suffered from severe malnutrition, disease and lack of resources, and no fewer than fifty-three of the 103 colonists died in that first winter. But for the intervention and generosity of the local Indians, the colony would have died out completely. Again, mortality was highest among those who came alone, and lowest among those who came as families.

The issue is not so much that families rush around and help each other, though that is certainly true, but rather that there seems to be something enhancing about being with kin. Being surrounded by family somehow makes you more resilient than when you are simply with friends – however much you argue with them. This much is clear from two studies of childhood sickness and mortality, one in the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne during the 1950s and
[Page 40]
the other on the Caribbean island of Dominica during the 1980s. In both cases, the amount of childhood illness and mortality experienced by a family was directly correlated with the size of its kinship network. Very young children in big families got sick less often, and were less likely to die. Again, this is not just because there are more people to rush around and do things in large families. Rather, it has something to do with just being in the centre of a web of interconnected relationships. Somehow, it makes you feel more secure and content, and better able to face the vagaries the world conspires to throw at you.

Just how potent the sense of kinship can be is nicely shown by how influential personal names can be. Until about a century ago, the old Gaelic naming tradition still applied widely in Scotland. By these rules, the first son was named after his paternal grandfather, the second after his father, the third after a father’s brother, with the equivalent rules on the maternal side applying to daughters. I actually owe my first name to a revolt on the part of my mother who flatly refused to have yet another George in the family –otherwise, if my father had had his way, I would have been the fifth George Dunbar in a row, starting with my great-great-grandfather who had been born in 1790.

But why should naming have followed these kinds of rules?

One obvious answer is that bearing the same name identifies family membership. This much is self-evident from the way we use surnames, although some surnames are clearly considerably better for this than others. While
[Page 41]
Bakers and Smiths must sadly conclude that they are unlikely to be related to strangers bearing the same name, Gaelic family names do provide clear indications of common ancestry, partly because of their many variants. Many name lineages are of quite modest size, and many had quite localised origins. The seaport up the road from Edinburgh notwithstanding (whose castle was in fact once the seat of the family’s medieval powerbase), Dunbar has been an almost exclusively Moray name for several centuries and rare elsewhere.

But it seems that first names can imply something about relatedness too. The traditional habit of naming a child for someone else seems to create a bond that invites interest and the possibility of lifelong investment by the person after whom the child is named. Traditionally, German children had one Christian name for every godparent that its parents had made the effort to ask – and godparents were expected to help further the child’s interests in society once it reached adulthood, not just to worry about its attending Sunday school. Analysis of parish registers from the Krummhörn area in northwest Germany by Eckart Voland, a historical demographer at the University of Giessen, showed that children who survived the first year of life typically had more Christian names than those who did not: since names were conferred when the child was baptised on its eighth day of life, this suggests that parents already knew who would survive and who would not, and hence for which children it was worth making the effort of soliciting godparents.

This sense of implied kinship even seems to persist today. This was put to direct test in a recent study carried out by evolutionary psychologists from Canada’s
[Page 42]
McMaster University. They used the US census to select a set of common and rare English surnames and first names, and then emailed nearly three thousand Hotmail accounts with different combinations of these names asking for help with a project on local sports team mascots, ostensibly from someone with the same or different combination of names. The test was whether the recipient took the trouble of replying. Just two per cent of recipients replied when they shared neither first name nor surname, but twelve per cent did so when they shared both. Shared surnames (which resulted in six per cent of recipients replying) did better than shared first names (four per cent). But when the names were rare in the population at large, the reply rates soared to twenty-seven per cent when sender and recipient shared both names, and thirteen per cent when they shared just their surname. As many as a third of those replying when rare names were shared commented at length on the coincidence, often asking about family origins.

I recognise exactly these response patterns in my own behaviour. Finding someone with the surname Dunbar invariably arouses my immediate interest. But I am only mildly excited when I come across a McDonald – among the commonest of all Scottish surnames – even though it has been a middle name in my particular lineage for several generations, thanks to a McDonald great-grand-mother.

Evolutionary biologists have long understood the significance of kinship (shared descent from a common ancestor) in animal and human biology. The essence of this is summed up in what has become known as ‘Hamilton’s Rule’, one of the cornerstones of modern evolutionary
[Page 43]
biology, named after the late W. D. Hamilton who discovered it while still a humble PhD student in the 1960s.

Hamilton pointed out that two individuals have a genetic interest in each other that is proportional to the likelihood of their sharing a given gene by descent from a common ancestor, and hence that, when all else is equal, they should be more likely to behave altruistically towards each other than individuals who are less closely related. Blood, as the old saying goes, is thicker than water. It is a finding that has been widely demonstrated by observation and experiment in organisms ranging from tadpoles to humans.