A while ago, I found myself chatting to a teacher from an inner-city school. “Is racism a problem?” I wondered. She shook her head. “The kids are all so aware of it, that if anyone said anything they would come down on them like a ton of bricks. No, the ones that I worry about are the redheads,” she added. “It’s the kids who are ginger who get it in the neck!”
And so, as someone for whom the launch of an ad campaign for Duracell (“the battery with the copper top”) was a landmark childhood moment, who understands the terror that the broaching of a packet of Ginger Nut biscuits on the school bus can bring, I was delighted to be presented with a book which promises to look with understanding at that peculiar subspecies of humanity to which I belong.
In Red: A Natural History of the Redhead, Jacky Colliss Harvey, a proud redhead as well as a Courtauld-trained commentator on arts and popular culture, sets out to give a scientific, historical, cultural and artistic overview of this relatively rare genetic quirk. Although as much as 6 per cent of the population in northern and western Europe might possess it, worldwide this number drops to less than 2 per cent.
“Red hair is the Marmite of genetics,” writes Harvey. “It is either loved or hated, and always has been.” For nearly all of its 50,000-year existence, she tells us, red hair has presented an unaccountable mystery to every society in which it has appeared. Harvey is not one for understatement.
Red has exceptional resonance for our species, she writes. There is an argument that it may have been the first colour early primates learned to distinguish in order to better select ripe fruits. And it still today speaks to something primal in our brains, she suggests, as she reels off any number of the old wives’ tales that have been propagated across history. Redheads have been hailed as a sign of divinity, burnt as sacrificial victims, dismissed as barbarians, damned as the product of taboo menstrual intercourse. They have been associated with vampires, stereotyped as clowns, vilified as traitors and celebrated as libidinous seductresses.
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Harvey attempts to cut her way through a dense tangle of rumour and disinformation. She looks at red hair as it has cropped up on the heads of anyone from palaeontological specimens, through historical characters to fictional creations and painters’ models. She moves from the mysterious redheaded Tarim mummies found in the wastes of the Taklamakandesert in western China (some of which date back to 1800BC) through to famous redheads such as Boudicca, Elizabeth I, Guy Fawkes and Uriah Heep. Her history spans anything from the slaves of Greek drama to medieval depictions of the auburn-headed Jewish tormentors of Christ through the flame-tressed temptresses of the Pre-Raphaelites to South Park’s “Kick a Ginger” episode to a Clairol hair products ad.
But it’s hard to find solid ground. Harvey makes a determined start by mapping out the anthropological and scientific backdrop. We are told of the Thracians, for instance, whose tomb mounds yield remains which suggest that their occupants might once have been auburn-locked, or of the ancient Scythians whom Herodotus described as having “bright red” hair. We are offered a map which shows populations of ancient redheads existing in ancient China or Iran.
We are given also a laboured genetic explanation. It would seem that red hair can probably be in large part put down to a recessive variant of the MC1R gene: a melanocortin 1 receptor which, sitting on chromosome 16, flips in and out “like a bad internet provider” to be replaced by an extraordinarily complex set of variants. The reader easily loses track among the parentheses.
From time to time some intriguing facts emerge. There is a biological benefit to this recessive trait, apparently. The redhead’s paler skin is more effective at synthesising Vitamin D which means that they are less likely to develop rickets. This became particularly important when the first hunter gatherers (who, getting most of their protein in the form of meat, rarely suffered Vitamin D deficiency) started to settle and become farmers; a redhead’s pelvis bones were less likely to be distorted and hence their children were less likely to die during birth.
For the most part, however, the reader feels rather lost. Arguments constantly get lost amid a mire of hypothesis and digression. (What purpose for instance, other than titillation, does a digression on Courbet’s eye-raisingly explicit painting, The Origin of the World, serve?) Harvey repeatedly raises questions to which one assumes that an answer will eventually come. Were Neanderthals redheads, for instance; could Achilles or Cleopatra have been flame-haired? The answer frequently turns out to be, “perhaps but probably not”.
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As a worldwide redhead movement gathers gradual impetus, with the queen of a redhead convention being crowned in Ireland and Red Hair Day in the Netherlands now an annual event, this book will no doubt find its minority audience. But it remains, for the most part, a dense and rather confusing mish-mash of anecdotes. Many will be fascinating to the redhead who, quite apart from anything else, will grab hold of anything in his or her search for ammunition to fire back at their persecutors.
But, in the long run, Harvey achieves little more than to reassure the greater part of the world’s population that redheads have always been and always will be treated like peculiar freaks. This book is unlikely to stop our gingers (pronounced to rhyme with singers) from getting it in the neck.
Red: A Natural History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey, Allen & Unwin, 240pp, £16.99. To buy this book for £14.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134