Letter: Growing doubts

News that scientists have discovered that Scots are now shorter, on average, than people in the south-east of England (your report, 9 April) compared with 200 years ago sounds questionable, to my mind. It may be that they have examined skeletons of people who died 200 years ago, or, perhaps, relied on measurements of men in military service at the time of the Napoleonic Wars as a yardstick by which to obtain measurements from that time.

I do not think there were mass measurements of the population made in 1811, however, so I would be interested to know the origin of their historical statistics.

Personally, I have always found the people in the other three cities in Scotland were markedly shorter than those in Edinburgh, who appear to be among the tallest in Britain.

Although I have seen the average height of people in Glasgow and Aberdeen, in particular, grow appreciably in the past 40 years, I wonder how Scottish the Scots and how English the English measured were. As South Africans form a large immigrant group in London and many of them are very tall, I wonder if that has skewed the figures.

There is a politically correct tendency to make anyone who lives in Scotland Scottish (JK Rowling and Gamu Nhengu come to mind). It would be interesting to know how they decided upon their sample groups.

Andrew HN Gray

Craiglea Drive

Edinburgh