http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...at-created-Richard-Dawkins-family-estate.html
Dawkin's response from his web site:
He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.
Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against "intolerance and suffering", must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.
One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.
The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.
Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins's father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business.
One Dawkins family member was a member of the clergy. Many were MPs including two who became prominent opponents of the abolition of slavery, eventually achieved thanks to William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian.
Professor Dawkins, the atheist evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, claimed associating him with his slave-owning ancestors was "a smear tactic".
"One of the most disagreeable verses of the Bible – amid strong competition – says the sins of the father shall be visited on the children until the third or fourth generation," he said.
The family's association with Jamaica began when William Dawkins, a direct ancestor of the former Oxford University professor, arrived on the island. He began relatively humbly, as an overseer, probably supervising slaves, before receiving 1,775 acres of land between 1669 and 1682.
His son Richard became a leading member of Jamaican society, serving as a colonel in the local militia.
One history records that when Richard died in 1701 he left "personal property valued at £6,659 in Jamaica currency, [including] 143 negroes 'young and old' valued at £2,784."
Richard's son Henry Dawkins (1698-1744) – another direct ancestor of the campaigner - married Elizabeth Pennant, thus forming an alliance with another one of Jamaica's most powerful planter families.
An inventory of his estate shortly after his death showed that he, his wife and children owned a total of 1,013 slaves valued at £40,736. By 1754 his three surviving sons owned 25,000 acres in Jamaica between them.
Henry's brother James bought Over Norton in 1726. After his death in 1766, the estate passed to his nephew Henry Dawkins (1728-1814), another direct ancestor, who also owned thousands of acres in Jamaica.
Three of that Henry's sons became MPs. The youngest, also called Henry, (1765-1852), was the campaigner's great-great-great grandfather.
In 1796 the oldest son James Dawkins (1760-1843) voted against Wilberforce's proposal to abolish the slave trade, helping to defeat it by just four votes.
In 1807 he was one of a small rump of die-hards opposing the provisions of Slave Trade Act, which abolished selling slaves in the British Empire.
He is believed to have been among just 18 MPs who supported an amendment to postpone the act's implementation by five years. They were defeated by the votes of 174 MPs.
On religious matters James Dawkins was throughout 1813 an opponent of 'Catholic relief', one of the acts which lifted restrictions on freedom of worship, property and electoral rights for Catholics.
James and Henry's brother George Hay Dawkins Pennant (1764-1840) was another defiant slavery supporter. In 1831, two years before the act abolishing slave ownership in the Empire, he signed a circular which insisted: "the speedy annihilation of slavery would be attended with the devastation of the West India Colonies … with inevitable distress and misery to the black population.'"
The Anti-Slavery Reporter of June 1831 was so outraged that it listed 41 signatories including Dawkins, "By way of securing a lasting record of them. They are names which ought not to be forgotten."
In an unwitting anticipation of a later Dawkins's opposition to religion, the Anti-Slavery Reporter also castigated Jamaica's rulers for making slaves work on Sunday: they couldn't worship and were condemned to "toil and secularity".
Prof Dawkins established the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science offering a "clear-thinking oasis" supporting secularism. The foundation's 'mission statement' says it is on a "quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering."
In 2010 Richard Dawkins wrote an obituary for his father, describing how John Dawkins had inherited Over Norton Park from a distant cousin and how the estate, in the Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty, had been in the family since the 1720s. He omitted, however, to mention how previous generations made their money.
He quoted Scripture – disparagingly - to insist: "I condemn slavery with the utmost vehemence, but the fact that my remote ancestors may have been involved in it is nothing to do with me.
"One of the most disagreeable verses of the Bible – amid strong competition – says the sins of the father shall be visited on the children until the third or fourth generation."
Audibly irritated, he added: "You need a genetics lecture. Do you realise that probably only about 1 in 512 of my genes come from Henry Dawkins?
"For goodness sake, William Wilberforce may have been a devout Christian, but slavery is sanctioned throughout the Bible."
Richard Dawkins' sister Sarah Kettlewell, 67, is thought still to live on the estate, which has a farm shop and pedigree cattle. According to Companies House records which list Professor Dawkins as a director, Over Norton Park Limited made a £12,000 profit last year.
He insisted: "The estate is now a very small farm, struggling to make its way, and worth peanuts. The family fortune was frittered away in the 19th Century. Such money as I have is scarcely inherited at all."
He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family's past.
Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: "There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.
"The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships."
The revelations come after a difficult few days for the campaigner.
On Tuesday 14 February, some critics branded him "an embarrassment to atheism" after what many listeners considered a humiliation in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, in which the professor boasted he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species", then when challenged, dithered and said: "Oh God."
Dawkin's response from his web site:
It will be interesting to see how this all will play out, I would assume this will start some kind of media frenzy at least in Fox news room.Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went.
“We’ve been researching the history of the Dawkins family, and have discovered that your ancestors owned slaves in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. What have you got to say about that?”
I replied, “Your ancestors probably did too. It’s just that we happen to know who my ancestors were and perhaps we don’t know yours.”
He persisted by reeling off several of my forebears including, I think, Henry Dawkins (b 1698) and his father Colonel Richard Dawkins (d.o.b. unknown to me), giving gruesome (and indeed deplorable) figures about the numbers of slaves they owned, asking me whether I felt any guilt about it.
I replied by quoting Numbers 14:18 (from memory so – oh, calamity – I may not have been quite word-perfect), that charming little verse about the Lord “visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation”: a nice example, incidentally, of biblical morality.
When he persisted with his insinuations I made my somewhat peremptory excuses and left (I was in a hurry because I was about to go on stage in London to give a lecture and wanted to prepare for it).
I’d scarcely had time to re-open my lecture notes when he rang back: “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”
“You obviously need a genetics lesson,” I replied. Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that’s the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two).
Setting aside his scientific illiteracy and his frankly defamatory insinuation that I might condone slavery, the point about powers of two is interesting enough to warrant a digression. Following a line of reasoning spelled out in The Ancestor’s Tale, we can calculate that Adam Lusher and I (and you and I and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all) share most of our ancestors and literally all our more distant ancestors. What is a little less obvious is that the ancestor we most recently share probably lived only a few centuries ago. Almost certainly we are all descended from slave owners (and indeed from slaves), if you go back far enough, and you probably don’t have to go back very far. It’s just that only a few of us are saddled with, to quote J B S Haldane, a historically labelled Y-chromosome. As it happens, my ancestry also boasts an unbroken line of six generations of Anglican clergymen, from the Rev William Smythies (b 1635) to his great great great grandson the Rev Edward Smythies (b 1818). I wonder if Adam thinks I’ve inherited a gene for piety too.
Our piercing investigative journalist then challenged me to deny that William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner, was a Christian. (So, presumably, were the slave-owners. Just about everyone in England was Christian at the time and Henry and Colonel Richard surely were.) This provoked me to give him yet another lecture, this time expounding Steven Pinker’s brilliant book, The Better Angels of our Nature, about how we are getting steadily gentler and more civilised as the generations go by, whether or not we are religious. Our changing moral values carry a strong statistical signal of the century and even the decade in which we live, but virtually no signal at all of whether we are religious.
His next volley was the suggestion that I should make financial reparation for the sins of my ancestors.
Reparation to whom? Should I make a pilgrimage to Jamaica and seek out the descendants of the slaves whom my ancestors wronged? But why the descendants of people who were oppressed by my ancestors 300 years ago rather than to people who are oppressed today? It’s that “sins of the fathers” fallacy all over again, taken a good couple of generations further than even Yahweh had in mind.
His parting shot (actually it was I who did the parting) was to suggest that Henry’s ill-gotten gains might have been used to purchase the English “estate”, a small fraction of which my family still owns. I told him that far from being an estate, it is a small working farm, struggling to make ends meet in a bad time for farming. I added that such wealth and land as the Dawkins family once owned was squandered in the nineteenth century by Colonel William Gregory Dawkins (not my direct ancestor, I’m happy to say) on futile lawsuits. Whatever I possess is hardly at all inherited from past centuries but earned by me in my own lifetime. I am happy to give to charity, and I do so in quite large quantities, but my choice of charity would not be influenced by whatever sins my seventeenth and eighteenth century ancestors committed. It was when he asked me exactly how many acres the modern small farm possesses that I told him to mind his own business and put the phone down on him for the second time.
I can’t help wondering at the quality of journalism which sees a scoop in attacking a man for what his five-greats grandfather did. Is there really nothing more current going on? Ah yes, of course, there is the little matter of our Ipsos MORI poll, published this week. Rather than grapple with that, far better to take no chances and distract readers with a story that’s a mere 300 years old.
Don’t buy the Telegraph on Sunday, but do look it up on the web and marvel at the depths to which a once-proud newspaper is willing to sink. That is unless – which I would like to think is quite probable – the Editor spikes the whole thing as a story that's three centuries past its Use By date.
