Letter: Growing doubts
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.
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Hide AdAlthough 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