Dr's uncle named John

[Keith Livingstone Australia]

If it helps, my father's army passbooks from WW2 and Mau Mau period (1953) describe him as 5'11 and about 13st with brown hair or sandy hair and grey eyes. He was considered quite tall when growing up in post-war depression London(b 1918). Niall Livingstone (Young Bachuill!) is quite tall too, with similar features (hair, eyes)to my father. So the rangy look is a Livingstone feature, as is a very strong build with some; my great grandfather Neil McLean Livingstone was 5'9", 19stone, and competed successfully in strongman contests, and moved pianos by himself as a "pianoforte" importer in Edinburgh. Of interest, the recent book "The Year 1000" (Robert Lacey/Danny Danziger) talks about how well-fed Englishmen of that time were much bigger than urban mythology dictates. I quote from the first Chapter:"If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000, the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was-very much the size of anyone alive today. It is generally believed that we are taller than our ancestors, and that is certainly true when we compare our stature to the size of more recent generations. Malnourished and overcrowded, the inhabitants of Georgian or Victorian England could not match our health or physique at the end of the trwentieth century. But the bones that have been excavated from the graves of people buried in England in the years around 1000 tell a tale of strong and healthy folk-the Anglo-Saxons who had occupied the greater part of the British Isles since the departure of the Romans. Nine out of ten of them lived in a green and unpolluted countryside on a simple, wholesome diet that grew sturdy limbs-and very healthy teeth. It was during the centuries that followed the first millenium that overpopulation and overcrowding started to affect the stature and well-being of western Europeans. Excavations of later medieval sites reveal bodies that are already smaller than those discovered from the years around 1000..." They cite a reference that shows the modern English male average is 5'9" compared to the Saxon 5'8" and the Victorian average of 5'51/2" (werner, pg 108). Saxon women of the time were taller at 5'4" average than modern English women (average 5'3"). So in the beautiful seas and hills around Argyll (still "unpolluted" today) our ancestors would have grown as sturdy as genetics would allow. It is entirely possible that there were tallish people from the early 1800s so long as they had fresh water and good food, as they seemed to have.